but i thought you might be taking pity on me for how horribly I’m doing in the brackets… I think I’m even losing to YOU now!!

Baseball, like the theater or news or even golf courses are businesses at their heart. We enjoy the game played by men through our own rose covered glasses as a child’s views it.

Baseball will not be recession proof as neither will be your family’s church or school. Now I really want to let you personally understand this. The economy is really not that complicated. In the simplest view, the last 30 years it was dominated by the Finance Industry—-(Wall Street/LaSalle Street types), in 1982 they represented 18% of the profits in US’s GDP. In 2007 they represented 41% of the profits in the US GDP. In this realm the finance people made about the same compensation on average as any other industry in the US 98-106 with 100% being the mean average) between 1946-1982. In 2007 they made 181% against the mean. So powerful they took over our society where the best minds went there to create virtual ways of making money.

Okay in that time frame they created a market place through political influence and power where they compounded a layer of financial products meaning—-bets [credit contracts or you promise to pay on the use of money], bonds [they promise to pay on the use of this money] and then credit swaps [insurance contracts based on someone’s ratings] to --the cumulative value of all the bets, bonds, and swaps added up much greater than all the money that was actually available in the world.

So let us say someone owns a casino they sell chips and you pay a dollar for a chip and go to play. When you return they cash in your chips. The house knows the math and knows 100 customers will lose 60% of the chips to the house so that is good.

Now let us say they take that knowledge and take credit to buy chips figuring that those with credit will lose at the same rate. So now as long as they don’t give credit out to more than 10% of their customers they will always be able to pay those cashing in. That is called reserves.

But let us say instead of chips staying at a dollar that value changes each minute and now the house starts lending chips at higher rates and multiples to the point where they sold those original chips 35 times. But they say that the chips are more valuable….so instead of cashing them in people in the casino thought the chips were more valuable than the original cash.

Now instead of cash people were using chips to pay for food, drinks and their rooms and the house took that because they could resell those chips for promises 20 times the original price.

Now side games have cropped up….crap games not run by the house as the house is more interested in maintaining a non cash chip business and so to insure that the game will pay out chips to winners of craps or roulette some guy insures to the players that they will receive the chips from this side game. The thing is they just take ten chips for $100 worth of chips for this insurance and then they go and use the chips to rent the penthouse.

Then suddenly some beats the side games and goes to get their chips and the side game does not have the money so he goes to his insurance guy and he says—-he has no reserves. Now people start to see in all these side games and house games what they thought was $100 per chip was actually less. Now as people start going to the original house to cash in their chips the original house starts calling in those promises for those who they gave the chips saying we need your cash now.

To raise cash those guys who lent their chips to other players especially those who created side games to pony up and pay them cash value for their chip promises. Those side games close down since they can’t cover their bets anymore. They then start devaluing their remaining chips for cash as the house will not take chips for room and food, suddenly everyone in the room realizes that they can’t keep their credit promises or that they value of their chips won’t buy anything.

Trouble is that a lot of the actual money was already taken and spent by the smart guys who owned the house and the side games.