"Brazier added: "Businesses whose outlook on life depends on the Anglo-US view will misunderstand what's going on because the world is changing.""

Now that a most accurate choice of words, methinks. :-) .... although to misunderstand debt as credit and to sell it on fellow rogues without prior and proper warning of most probable likely default is more than likely not a misunderstanding but rather a, if not criminal, then unethical act.

But that will hardly worry them and it doesn't appear to have warranted any punitive action from authority/regulation/peers, which makes it one law for them and another law for them ...which of course makes for an interesting playing field with rules one makes up as they are needed....... although some would say there really are no rules.

After all the stock market hasn't even realised that banks are still giving mortgages to the homeless, and the general population actually thinks something has been done by lawmakers to fix the interest rate resets to 20%.

So no, the world won't end for a few months yet, not until everyone realises that talking about how bad this is all is doesn't actually fix anything. You actually have to do some stuff too.

Talking about funny interest rates - a friend of mine had a mortgage (which thankfully he's successfully refinanced) that said that even if he made all his payments for 30 years, because the interest rates were so high he would still owe over 30K after his last payment was made. Not only that, but if he couldn't pay that 30K within a relatively short space of time, he would lose his home to foreclosure.

I wonder how many other subprime timebombs like this one are out there.

Well the Xerox boss is behind the times.....if you work for a company dealing with retail you'll probably already find budgets being squeezed. Ours certainly are being.