FFXIAH Linkshell Ni

yeah, in my dreams my wife and I are taking a leisurely ride outside the electric fence line of our montana buffalo ranch on horseback... watching the farm hands do all the menial labor... somehow I need to win ted turner's ranch in a game of poker or something and just move in... win the lottery...idk something so I can spend days hunting elk with mosin and flavin then we can just have PARKER and the other farm hands clean the elk and skin them and fashion things out of the leather.... make elk jerky... all this sort of thing.

I want to be so rich I don't even have to reload my rifle! PARKER!!! /throws empty rifle at PARKER

Gimme a new gun this ones dirty!...
of course we will need at least one PARKER just to shove in the dirt and work over whenever we are feeling mean... of course the entire staff would have names I had given them that they don't like...

Fly out to the Fuente plantation when I start running low on cigars.... maybe out to maine for lobster season... fly to Italy to pick up some pizza... I'm sure I could find many many places to go too while PARKER and the other farm hands handle all the day to day operations at the ranch....

PARKER!!! fuel the jet! I need to pop over to ireland to pick up some more whiskey. Big old boeing 777 with long horn bull horns painted on the nose...

stupid rich! more money than bill gates...never wear the same clothes twice.... call obama up on the phone every once in a while and yell get back to work!! just to keep him on his toes. go buy mogadishu because I get sick of hearing about it on the news.... turn it into a giant factory that makes bogadishu... everyone would have a genuine mogadishu bogadishu on their mantle...

hunt criminals for sport on my own private island "most dangerous game" style...

so rich I forget I own things like cruise ships... so PARKER can say "but boss, you already have four of them" when i tell him to go buy a new one. Then I slap him and say "them are OLD! go buy me a NEW ONE!!!" ...then kidnap leonard dicaprio, tie him to the railing and crash that sombish into an iceberg!!!

so in case you were sleeping under a rock the last dozen years, here is what happened... americans were living joyfully in the throws of excess, credit card debt swelled like Mount Vesuvius as we all tried to keep up with the joneses and nobody cared because home prices were skyrocketing and if you got in too deep you could just refinance your home loan... and everyone wants the american dream of owning a home and banks and lending institutions lowered the requirements for getting a loan and suddenly everyone had a home even if they couldn't afford it. But that didn't matter because even if they defaulted the banks could sell the homes at a profit.

but here in lies the rub. Yes, home prices always rise eventually, so it would of been a good investment for the banks BUT everyone defaulted all at once, so there was a sudden glut in the market of available homes and too few people to buy them.

So the banks had too much money tied up in homes they couldn't sell at any price so they couldn't lend any more money and in some cases they couldn't pay their bills on time.

So then the music stopped and everyone raced for the chairs.. everyone that had huge credit card debt racked up but were too slow to refi got stuck paying it off the old fashioned way... grueling sacrifice.

So now since the joneses weren't spending themselves into oblivion there wasn't anyone to keep up with and so nobody else did either...

And they couldn't if they wanted too. Since banks had no money to lend they lowered the available credit on everyone's credit cards.

So essentially everyone is overdrawn on their credit, their home values slipped downward a bit, their tax bills on their property went up. Prices for everyday items like food and gas shot up and now everyone is struggling to pay off the berserk amount of debt they racked up to try to get back below their credit limits while also struggling to pay for the higher prices of almost everything else in a weak economy where banks can't lend money....

Right, and that is why the economy is recovering so slowly.

We bailed out the banks, which was good if you were an investor, we bailed out the automotive companies, which was good if you were an investor, and we pumped a bunch of money into wall street, which is good if you are an investor.

So all the economic indicators are positive.... so why isn't Johnny Punchclock running out to spend like a fiend and buy a whole bunch of stuff he can't afford?

Well, because he can't afford to. He never could really but before there was an illusion that it didn't matter because he could just refinance his home to pay off the debt.

All our cash is going to pay higher and higher bills. We can't refinance our way out of debt. Wages stagnated as the job market went south. So we are all forced to live at our means...below our means actually because we still have to pay off all our debts.

But don't loose faith. People are stupid and as soon as we have a little wiggle room in our available credit lines we will all run out like idiots buying things we can't afford. It will just take a while.

Amen.

In this modern telling Doctor Nikolce is strung out and slowly starving to death in the bowels of a decaying city... He offers his soul to any god or devil which can provide him with some sort of sustenance so that he might live... suddenly, on this deserted street, a five dollar bill blows down the sidewalk to his feet... but no deity ever appears to claim the prize of his soul...

Doctor Nikolce then blows his literal windfall on a massive burrito at Taco Tantos... his strength renewed he then sets out to fulfill his destiny...

who was his mysterious benefactor? when will his soul be claimed? how much time does he have left? did he damn his soul for all eternity for a burrito!?