15 year old Calvin and Hobbes strip with almost clairvoyance on how we got into our current financial crisis.

benihana · 3 years

Jesus Christ people. I love Calvin and Hobbes - easily the best comic strip every penned. But this isn't clairvoyance, this is observations of the last fucking century. It's not like this shit is new to our generation.

sleepingorange · 3 years

is that a .bmp file?

ElGaucho56 · 3 years

Discussion about this two months ago.

[deleted] · 3 years

Now, i'm a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan, but can we please stop with the repost?

keramos · 3 years

It forgets the part where Calvin gets the local mums to make a rule forbidding kids from drinking anything but "lemonade" from certified outlets by giving them flowers ("borrowed" from each other's gardens) and showing them a school project outlining the moral dangers of orangeade.

smoooooov · 3 years

This hasn't been on the front page in like TWO WHOLE WEEKS! Sigh.

[deleted] · 3 years

Great, except the customer wouldn't have walked away. They would have bought the house or whatever anyway, regardless of ridiculously overvalued it was.

Okitaz · 3 years

Where is repostsgivemeaboner when you need him?!

Golfo · 3 years

I don't think you know what the word "clairvoyance" means.

[deleted] · 3 years

This is clearly a repost. I saw this like, what, 15 years ago? :-P

[deleted] · 3 years

Sounds more like the car companies and labor unions than the banks to me.

d64 · 3 years

This is a good strip, but besides the ending I don't think it fits too well. Bubbles do not form because there isn't any demand for something, in fact rather the opposite.

itsdeuce · 3 years

Yeah, not really clairvoyant.

otakucode · 3 years

This comic is missing a CRUCIAL piece.

It is missing Goldman Sachs holding a gun to Calvin's head and telling him that if he doesn't increase the rate at which his profit is increasing by 45% this year, he will strip Calvin of his lemonade stand, his clothes, his eyes, his legs, his hair, and his stuffed tiger. THAT would be a much more realistic picture. The CEOs are not raping their employees and customers because they necessarily find absurd, insane, and irrational expectations of profit growth are possible. They're mostly doing it because their company is public and Goldman Sachs owns enough shares to nearly bankrupt them (and destroy the value of all the executives, destroy their shareholders, etc) if they don't pursue absolutely unwise measures to gain temporary bursts of profit, while committing suicide in the long run (Goldman Sachs will move on when the company falls dead, leaving hundreds of thousands of damaged employees and customers in the wake, all blaming the company and the CEO).

[deleted] · 3 years

Except that in our case, Susie actually bought quite a lot of lemonade, and got pretty damn sick, before she went back and called Calvin's BS.

weez09 · 3 years

Maybe no one cares, but not too long ago I was reading an old Calvin and Hobbes comic book I had and found $40 hidden in the pages. It was a good day.

ADHDgamer · 3 years

Except that it didn't have anything to do with anyone being being clairvoyant at all. The generation I grew with grew up on Calvin and Hobbes as well. I would say that there is some strong irony that a comic strip I enjoyed when was 13 exposed me to something would be very important to me when I was twenty-eight.

alragusa · 3 years

I'm pretty sure if Suzy gets sick, and can prove it, Calvin will be sued up the ying yang.

TheDentite · 3 years

Amazing! This is just as topical as it was when we saw it last week, and the week before, and three days before that, and the month before that, etc etc...

fingertips · 3 years

Why doesn't anybody see that it it is not just executives but the Investors and EMPLOYEES who <em>DEMAND</em> these "exorbitant" wages/benefits/profits. The fact of the matter is nobody is hurt if you demand something. The fact of the matter is YOU HURT THE ECONOMY WHEN YOU ASK THE GOVERNMENT FOR THINGS.

1) Regulations 2) Tarrifs 3) Minimum wages 4) Union protection 5) Taxes

It is a persons right to demand a certain salary. Whether or not they are given that is based on somebodies willingness to pay that salary, and everybody had the RIGHT to pay and demand WHATEVER THEY WISH.

When Unions, Consumers, Executives, Monopolists, Entrepreneurs, or Financiers stand in line at the Government piggy bank wanting handouts they are hurting the economy, and in the long run, themselves.

The reason all of this was able to happen is because of GOVERNMENT. The FINANCIAL world wouldn't be as risky if they didn't know first hand that GOVERNMENT was going to "bail them out" like they have repeatedly done from the collapse of the PESO and SOUTH EAST ASIA.

government is SUBSIDIZING the risks the FINANCIAL WORLD took at the expenses of ALL TAXPAYERS, corporations and individuals alike.

Watch PBS's the crash.

Thistleknot · 3 years

anyone notice this is old reddit news.

romcabrera · 3 years

BMP ??????????????

jayesanctus · 3 years

Old shit is old. Swear its been posted.

[deleted] · 3 years

Consider a rename on the title. shivers

sriramgopalan · 3 years

Some parts are missing - like how the government kept rates low and pumped so much loose cash into the system that $15.00 for a glass of lemonade not only started looking reasonable but also created a bubble in lemonade.

People started thinking if they didn't buy at $15 it would be $20 tomorrow, might as well buy now.

And to make that happen, lenders came up with crazy lending schemes.

And so on.

[deleted] · 3 years

OLD.

ExitWound · 3 years

Not again :(

5r4r3r2r1r · 3 years

C&H is always amusing ... and often reflects our culture in disturbingly accurate ways, but this is NOT how we got into the financial crisis. To do that the conversation would be more like:

SUSIE: I'd like some lemonade, but I can't afford it, how about loaning me the money.

CALVIN: It's a dollar a glass. How much allowance do you get?

SUSIE: I get 10 cents a week. I'll pay you back as I'm able.

CALVIN: Sorry, but you're a bad risk. Can't do it.

MOM: Calvin, either you give Susie a glass of lemonade, or I'll put you out of business.

CALVIN: But, Mom, she can't afford it.

MOM: Doesn't matter, I'll guarantee it for you, now do what I say or else.

RANDOM KID: You greedy jerk ... it's all your fault that none of us have lemonade now and you expect your Mom to pay for all of this?

secretchimp · 3 years

I think we could repost this comic three times a month and nobody would notice.

drebeck · 3 years

Would have been clairvoyant if... she actually bought the $15 lemonade on credit thanks to government making lemonade ownership a national right & the lemonade got re-appraised for $20, then she borrowed against that, and then she finds out the lemonade tastes like shit and refuses to pay her loan...meanwhile Opus Penguin previously bought the $20 loan (and many others). Congress subsidizes Opus' losses while allowing the girl to walk away from the lemonade scott-free, offering a plan to re-inflate the price of shitty lemonade that Bill the Cat had wanted to buy all along (he actually likes shitty lemonade), but he can't afford it because the price is still too high and now so is his tax bill.

PlatonicPimp · 3 years

Look, everyone and their damnbrother predicted this crisis. It's not that hard. Anyone with half a brain knew that this kind of thing was going to happen eventually and repeatedly. It's an unfortunate side effect of the peciluar capitalism the west is using this last century or so. Noone knew when, or exactly how, and most people just hoped it wasn't soon. besides, there were economic crisis going on during Calvin and Hobbes' run. He was probably just describing those.

VoodooIdol · 3 years

HAH! I've been reading through my complete Calvin & Hobbes collection the past few months and read this one a few weeks ago and thought the same thing.

Jenkin · 3 years

that's.... not quite how we got into the crisis. Pretty funny though.

homeworld · 3 years

Bill Watterson's clairvoyance was how to get a 15 year old comic strip to constantly be on the reddit front page.

Feyn-man · 3 years

First off, that title doesn't make sense for reasons that others here have pointed out.

Secondly, the many complex causes of the current financial crisis cannot be reduced to a cutesy 12-box cartoon strip.

camalittle · 3 years

Read P.J. O'Rourke's piece in today's Financial Times. Someone we all know of predicted this over two centuries ago.

[deleted] · 3 years

This really isn't that special. A donkey can see this shit doesn't work.

What's a much more interesting matter is WHY it happened despite being so blatantly stupid.

waya1 · 3 years

I been here a while and I thought the Comic was great!

snotrokit · 3 years

Calvin and Hobbes is always relevant.

radient · 3 years

I know, great strip. This is like the third time it's been on the front page in the past 2 months though, and that snowman compilation was on the front page twice. Does anyone even pay attention anymore?

[deleted] · 3 years

Not sure what this has to do with debt backed securities.

lookingiswrong · 3 years

It's also hilarious.

officemonkey · 3 years

Lemon Socialism.

hwkns · 3 years

Miss you Bill.

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