Credit Crunch

I read and hear a lot about the credit crunch these days. It seems like people want easy credit, forgiveness for not paying up, higher interest rate on their deposits, 20% yearly appreciation on their houses so that they can continue to tap it as an ATM - sounds a lot like my desire to get my paycheck for the rest of my life without having to work :).

Everyone loves easy money and better if it free - why not? I would take it if there are no consequences. I believe the phenomenon (asking for easy money) we are seeing is a consequence of some of the evils of modern day society - essentially living to satisfy someone else rather than your inner self, buying a house because you want to look good in front of others, thinking owning a home is a status symbol, driving expensive cars is a self confidence thing, the list goes on. I believe that this is all going to end soon in a bad way OR the other possibility is that United States becomes a poor country over the next 20 years or so. Where is the reward and value of savings - savings is for losers :), right?

My prediction is for the following sequence of events
- Bernanke will cut rates by 0.25 basis pts in Sept 07. May be another cut before the end of the year
- Markets recover a bit and hit 14K again by the end of the year
- Inflation starts heating up early 2008 forcing rate hikes
- Housing declines further, ATM resets are higher in 2008 causing foreclosures to soike up
- Benrnanke is a silent spectator to the mayhem as inflation forces him to keep rates steady
- Dollar appreciates, stock market tanks to 8K
- Democrats win the election, blame President Bush for the problem
- Markets continue to decline/steady for the next couple of years before starting to come back up in 2011/2012
- Housing back to the old days of 2.5% appreciation. Real estate agent is an old fashioned job and not a hot commodity anymore
- Zillow.com goes out of business in 2010
- Refin becomes the way to buy and sell homes
- Renting becomes the smart thing

Books Links

Here are links to a couple of good books

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Skinny Bitch

Monetizing free time

There have been instances (not in the recent past though) in the past where I had plenty of free time on weekends or in some cases weekday evenings. Looking back, it would have been nice if there was a way to monetize that time instead of wasting that time drinking beer or watching TV (not all the time, if I had the option I would have used it a few times). Some people would say there were always options blah blah blah and you wasted it. but ignoring those people for the time being, here are some unique requirements that I see for this idea to work
- The work needs to be stateless (I.e you don't take it back with you or think about it when you are done with unlike an office job) - a good example of such a job would be a cashier at a shop or working in someone's garden under instructions
- The work needs to be accompishable or your work needs to be effectively usable in small chunks of time (an hour being the minimum seems reasonable)
- Does not require a lot of planning or lead time to get in and work (i.e you should be able to get up at 8AM on a Sunday morning and decide that you want to work for 3 hours that afternoon)

I have not found any place (other than volunteer work) or website that would satisfy the above requirements

Would be cool if I could go to a website and view what is available near by in the next 8 hours and pick something