Toxic assets.

They /have/ gone sour. No-one wants them.

Correct.

If our government had brought in the corerect regulatory regime, and taken note of the computer simulation that predicted this whole thing, then there'd have been no crisis, or much less of one. Taxpayers elected the clowns who rule us, so I guess the bill has to come back to them.

Heard once that there'd never been a labour government who lost power without leaving the country in a financial mess, so it's the lesson not learned yet again from history.

I didn't vote for them. Can I have my money back ;-)

Has there ever been /any/ government that have not left a mess?

In message , Tiddy Ogg writes

Whilst the previous Tory government left the country in a period of unprecedented steady growth. Based of course on an unregulated City and a banking system which was turning investment into speculation.

As for computer simulation, the mathematical wizards who thought they had a formula/model which could evaluate and control the risk involved were no less to blame for the disaster.

Of course for the last ten years anyone who cared to look at what was happening in financial markets and who troubled themselves with a little financial history would have concluded that the largest credit bubble in history had been running for more than a decade and was now entering its blowoff phase.

Sadly we had Gordon Brown as Chancellor and he not only failed to notice a blindingly obvious peaking of the long credit cycle, but deluded himself into believing he'd repealed the business cycle too.

You promote an incompetent like that to the helm of the country and you're pretty soon going to get what you deserve.

FoFP