World Financial Crisis & US Elections

I've not blogged for a while due to being very busy at work during the day and singing in every spare minute out of work, in preparation for my big audition in november. 

The other thing i've become preoccupied with lately is the global financial crisis! I was thinking, if my dad were here today he'd be pretty shocked to hear that the bank Bradford & Bingley had been nationalised. I think he'd have had good reason to worry too. We luckily moved the money we had in there 6 months ago when we first heard that there were troubles ahead. For the past week we've had bloomberg TV on in the evenings in our house, charting the progress of the bail out measures being fought out in the US senate & congress. Before a few months ago, i'd never been in to watching the stock market and I couldn't have told you what the position of the NASDAQ or what the S&P 500 represented but today I could probably give you a fairly good explaination. I've taken it as an opportunity to try to understand these things. It's quite a

 worrying time for the world. Non of my friends or collegues seem at all worried but in effect if banks keep failing and they don't get bailed out and if people start losing their savings then people will lose faith in the banking system and start taking out their money & hiding it under their matresses and before you know it there will be a snowball effect and lord knows the effects it will have on the world economies. 

I've also become very interested in the whole US election build up. I've discovered twitter trends and there is a brilliant site called flaptor where you can type in any words you want and find out what the world of twitterers are saying about those subjects. Of course with a vast number of twitterers in america, the top issues of the week/month tend to be the ones the americans are talking and of course the election is right up there!  I'm astounded at the difference in American politics and british, well, not that astounded really as we are talking about Americans. They are so much bigger (personality wise) and it's unbelieveable that the likes of Sarah Palin (who seems like a total moron) can get this close to the most powerful position in the world. I'm very concerned at the prospect of McCain & Palin having any power at all... what kind of a world would that be! I'm shocked that the polls are so close but it's all very entertaining. I'm even

 thinking of having my own debate night party next time they have an election debate night. The american public are all tuning in to these public debates and many are partaking in this game where whenever the candidates mention any of the key issues listed on their bingo cards they can tick them off or even do a drinking game version and drink a shot when their word is mentioned. The day after these debates there are always lots of hungover americans online... See below, an example of one of the Sarah Palin cards you can use... I think we should adopt this in the UK for priministers question time. A drinking game might just get more people involved in politics hehehe.

Anyway, must go... the secret policeman's ball is on tv and hey, we could all do with a laugh right now. Afterall, so many of us will be faced with increasing mortgage rates, massive decreases in housing prices, the possibility of redundancy, the chance of losing our life savings and hey, christmas is around the corner hehehe. Ho humm!