What really happened to the economy.

The other day my gas run out and as usual i had to go get another one. I carried 3000/= just in case the prices had gone up but to my surprise gas was retailing at 4000/= shillings and i started wondering how we got here in the first place as a country and in fact the whole world.

The first time i had of an economic crisis was back in 2008 in a country called Iceland. I knew very little about Iceland except what i was hearing on CNN. On researching further i found out that the government of Iceland had privatized all national banks. In a five year period the banks borrowed heavily to the tune of 120 billion dollars which is ten times the size of the economy. The credit rating agencies said that this banks were OK and gave them AAA ratings. In 2008 the banks collapsed and so did the economy. They were riots all over the country that brought the country to its knees but this was just a dress rehearsal of things to come.

In September 15 2008 the same year Lehman brothers and A.I.G collapsed and the result was a global recession.

The funny thing is that this crisis was not the first time this had happened. After the great depression , America had 40 years of economic growth without a crisis because the industry was heavily regulated. After this America started a vigorous deregulation of the industry that made investment banks and banks extremely rich. By the late 1990's the financial industry had consolidated into a few financial firms to the point that if one collapsed it could threaten the global economy.

The next crisis came in the late 90's. The investment banks fueled a massive bubble in the internet stocks which crashed in 2001 popularly known as the  dot com bubble. They promoted internet companies they knew would fail. Beginning in the 1990's there was an explosion of extremely complex financial products called derivatives which made made the money markets unstable. After all was said and done the financial institutions came up with what was called a securitization food chain. You see in the old system the home buyer would pay the lender the mortgage and since mortgages took ages to pay lenders were careful.

Now in the new system lenders sold the loans to investment banks. The investment banks would combine the loans and call them collateralized debt obligations or CDOs which is a derivative. They then sold this CDOs to investors. The mortgage con was on. This were what were known as sub prime mortgages. This led to a massive increase in predatory lending. Borrowers were given loans they could not repay. This resulted in the real estate bubble, one of the biggest in history. A.I.G compounded the problem by selling a derivative called Credit Default Swaps. This means that investors insured against the CDOs they had invested in case they collapsed. The really crazy thing is that speculators could insure against this CDOs even if they didn't own them. This does not make insurance sense at all. Rating agencies saw nothing wrong with this practices and gave them AAA ratings.

In September when Lehman brothers and A.I.G collapsed they took the whole global financial system down with them. The Global economic crisis had just started. A crisis that started in America had finally caught up with everyone literally. Foreclosures in the US reached 6 million by early 2010. 50 million people globally have slided back into poverty and this was in 2010.

This financial crisis had an unforeseen domino effect that has finally caught up with me and in large part the country and hence the various strike threats from different quarters because they are all feeling the heat of the inflation and cannot see a way out.

But as always this is just my opinion. Na jee wewe.

SEA OF YELLOW BALLONS ON A MONDAY MORNING

I had just alighted from a matatu and thought to myself ohhh no another Monday. I walked through the usual route just reminiscing about the russian vodka that had turned me into a different  person during the weekend and the slight hangover i was having.

On reaching our office gate there were hundreds of youth holding balloons and wearing T-shirts with a kazi label. My mind went into overdrive because we have a youth employment initiative but i had not heard that we were giving out ballons and T-shirts. My hangover was now gone as i rushed to enter the building only to find our corridor full of balloons literally. I had to kick my way to the office and by now i was laughing. On reaching i inquired what was happening and my colleagues were at pains to explain what was happening.

There was a strange sound coming from the boardroom and went to see what was going on. On entering i meet with this muzungu whom i later came to know was Tazmany Arboleda from New york. He was inflating balloons using a machine as if the world was coming to an end. I asked one of the youths who were assisting him what was going on and he told me that they wanted to make people happy "tunabamba wasee." That did not make sense to me. I took a flyer that he had given me that had a website www.mondaymorning.info  On the website there were pictures of people with green balloons in japan and orange ones in india. Funny enough i still didnt get it. How could someone make all this effort to make people happy by giving them balloons.

I decided to get to my work but i was still puzzled. They went on for hours up until 10:00 am. During the prime time news i saw the story and still didn't get it.

The next day the daily nation had a story on the balloons and this is when i really got it. Its a very eccentric way of making people happy and even making them forget about the grenade attacks.

Tazmany Arboleda from New york had managed to make me laugh on a monday morning with a hangover. He had achieved his objective and had broken thousands of Nairobians monday morning routines by simply giving them balloons.

Kudos to this artist but that is just my opinion. 

THE CORAL PLAYER TORRENT CON

I recently downloaded a movie that i was very excited about. Once i downloaded it i didn't try to test it and went straight home very elated and eager. On playing it i was sooo disappointed that i didn't have the a software called coral player to play the movie and wondered how VLC was unable to play the movie.

First thing in the morning i went and Googled the coral player and it linked me to a website that was asking me to pay some dollars and my credit card information. i smelt a rat and continued to search for a free download but to no avail.

After two days of searching i came across an article that was telling people to avoid giving credit card information to a website that was claiming that once you pay you will get a download. It was just another con.

I must admit this was a very creative plot to steal credit card information from unsuspecting people including IT experts and hackers. I would just advice you to be very careful when giving information concerning credit card or bank information because this guys are very good and will wipe you out in an instant.
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But that is just my opinion.

What The Prime Minister Should Be Saying

Listening to the recent debate on the kazi kwa vijana funds saga, one could not help but hear that the politicians were saying the same thing using different words.

The prime minister says that the funds were ineligibly used and that the government should have paid for those expenses. MP Khwale says that the funds were misappropriated and people should take political responsibility. Some MPs say say the money was lost and people should go to jail. The difference between this statements is nothing.

The truth is that if you are given money to build a hospital and you go on holiday and drink all the money and come back with receipts and say that you can account for it and you deserved a holiday anyway is corruption.

So what the prime minister should be saying is that the officers responsible have been suspended and are being investigated and not staking his political career on some officers in his office.

But anyway that is just my opinion. Whats yours? 

Hello There

Hello world this is where ill be posting my opinions on technology issues,life and politics. Hope you all tune in and be educated and challenged.