a 'little' financial bombshell ...

  .. hope it doesn't spoil your day ...

    .. like two 'little' A-bombs once did for so many hapless 'collaterals'

Sorry - but not too sorry, for mentioning the war (WW2), here's a possible reason why even that was not so simple ... but to provide a tiny bit of 'closure' here, recall that most of the A-bomb victims really were civilian. If the normative 'wo/men in the Japanese street' could possibly be ascribed any 'collective guilt,' it could only be because they 'allowed' themselves to be propagandised - just like our own sheople allow themselves to be propagandised today, over the 2003->now Nuremberg-class aggression against Iraq by B, B & H, say (murder for oil). Or possibly worse, the 60+ bloody years' long slaughter of the now sadly dispossessed therefore ex-legal owners of Palestine by Israel (murder for land & water). (When we talk of worse/worst, recall that the mainly US led invasion of Iraq may have led to the death of 1mio+, and the vicious Israeli genocide against the Palestinians has dispossessed an entire nation. Contrast to the screams over a single murder or brutal robbery in the so-called 'civilised West.') These US & Israeli war crimes cannot go unpunished - or we, as so-called moral humans are nothing more than barbaric rubbish. Not really sorry at all, for harping on these themes. Now something different, but also starting just after WW2:

February 27 - March 1, 2009
Obama and the System
The Economy and the Big Picture

  «In 1948 George Kennan, one of the chief architects of post-war US foreign policy, famously stated the chief object of US policy in the post-war era: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity... ” US foreign policy during the last half of the 20th Century conforms closely to Kennan’s statement of that policy’s core object.»
[counterpunch/Felice Pace]

What Pace doesn't mention is that Kennan advised "The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts" to maintain that (unjust!) disparity, or later Nixon declaring the US bankrupt on August 15, 1971, and 'cleverly' substituting oil for gold; in one single (foul!) stroke setting the world up for perhaps the ultimate dual rip-off of a world reserve fiat currency 'backed' by oil.

What Pace also doesn't mention is the profligate 'printing' of that fiat currency of late, or the artificially low interest rate regimes - and then, there were/are the tax-cuts some lackeys keep screeching for (more often than not aimed at the already rich beyond avarice fat-cats, à la Bush2), and some evil treasurers implement, like Costello's halving of the CGT. Printing money, low interest rates, CGT tax-cuts all equal *asset bubbles!* - and that's what we got; as one of many bubbles, Aus house-prices doubled, starting pretty-well immediately after Costello's CGT cut.

Anyway and long story short, looks like we've got an economic collapse well underway (hardly news).

Some of you, dear readers, may know some of this, and how lots of working people have been marginalised - and terrified - by contracting and general out-sourcing, part-timing, casualisations, cheap labour imports, all of the sly (and filthy!) neo-liberal stuff - but you may still have been puzzled as to what's really going on. The cited counterpunch/Felice Pace article attempts to explain - some, but not all; nevertheless some of it is quite novel.