First Law of Economics?

[Boracay]

I am not referring to the exotic accounting that seems so prevalent these days, rather to simple double entry book keeping.

I have not seen any reference to failure of book keeping in this crisis.

The money has not vanished. It has gone somewhere.

I want to know where.

[muskoka]

Wealth actually has vanished.

And there are serious accounting flaws - just look at banks tier 3 requirements and the whole controversy over 'mark to market'. They're allowed to to lend on the perceived value of their assets - as assets shrink, reserve ratios must be maintained and supply of credit shrinks.

For example: When your house is valued at $500k and you have a mortgage of $350K your NAV is $150K - when the market crashes and your home is now worth $350K your NAV is zero. The money representing your NAV vanished - it didn't shift into someone else's account. Pfft, gone in an electron blaze....

[Hud3]

Hello, folks.

Unless someone can convince me that this thread is somehow substantially related to boating, it's closed. We've let it run a bit, true, but we really would like to keep the discussions on CF boating related. That's not to say that the opinions offered up in this thread aren't interesting and very intelligently crafted--they are. They're just too off-topic.

There are a lot of sites that allow non-boating threads, and that policy ends up forcing those looking for boating-related topics to wade through thread after thread of off-topic "stuff". We're not totally purists on this, but we try to stick to our guns. Whoops, not guns, we don't like guns, either! We stick to our cannons.