Gibson files for chapter 11

How in the world is the guy still hanging on? At least it's only for another year...

No shit. The EXACT same thing that caused (well, one of them) the Mortgage Crisis. Package, resell, package, resale, package, resale. Crazy that there are suckers that will buy stuff without knowing what they're buying.

I wonder how this affects Gibson's mandolin making. Dave Harvey and his team are making some of the best mandolins since the Loyd Loar era nearly 100 years ago. It would be horrible for that to end. Yes... I'm a mandolin geek. Talk about expensive hobbies...

Not very surprising to me given the relationship we allow between the financial class and the political class. Banks are the biggest welfare recipients this nation has ever seen. I remember listening to an interview with a bunch of bankers at a Manhattan bar right in the middle of the economic collapse (which they caused, broadly speaking). These dudes were snide little shits whining about how the citizenry was stupid and ungrateful for what they (the bankers) do for the world. This was literally right in the middle of them getting a check for a gazillion dollars from all of us because they tanked the economy with their fraudulent practices. It was wild hearing these entitled-frat-boys working at daddy’s frat-bro’s firm snickering to one another.

Chicks aren’t free Mark?

Fractional Reserve Banking can be good thing with proper governance, one of the big things that in the past kept the system stable was that banks were banks, brokerages were brokerages and insurance companies were insurance companies, as the system was deregulated and there was cross pollination and the real value of the reserve funds was diluted.
One major factor for the argument for banking regulation and other financial ventures is that at the end of the day it is us the tax paying public underwrite the insurance of banking and are the ones who pay to pick up the pieces when it falls apart because somebody gamed the system!
The other fun part of all this is that we are the money that moves the giant shell game that fuels these funds. The cash that s big institutional investors, that’s our pensions, 401k’s etc!

The scary part is to big to fail is real scary and we have done nothing about it! If Wells Fargo was not a huge financial institution with all of the organized scams we would tear them apart for racketeering , but that would nose dive the economy,

Except that without the greed of the customer base, they never would have sold a single thing.  Bankers made more due to selling more, and the consumer wanted free money just as much as the bankers did.

Everyone loves to place blame on certain people, it's an easy way for people to categorize the world around themselves, but it's disingenuous to think the "bankers did it" without seeing that they only provided a service to those who demanded it, regardless of the ethics of it all. 

The truth is that it was politics that started it but everyone wanted a piece of the low rates, which were essentially easy money.

Bill Clinton removed the pieces of the bills that required separation of investments(Glass-Steagall), and put forth legislation that required banks to make a certain percentage of their loans to lower-income people that wouldn't normally be eligible for loans (1995 Community reinvestment act), also pressured HUD into buying up large amounts of subprime loans, and forced regulators to hold bank expansions until they complied with subprime lending as well.  Banks would sell back to FannyMae/FreddieMac and the Fed kept cutting rates to keep the "warm and fuzzy" period going as long as possible before the inevitable crash due to inflation.  

The Fed had to start raising rates to slow the inflation, but that strained the 30+ million subprime loan payers and the house of cards would collapse when coupled with Dubya and his finance guys ignoring all the red flags for 8 years and you have a housing/banking crisis in the making.

It will be interesting to see who owes Gibson $$ and how old that dept is, this could get real ugly and if they get back to basics who pays what for Gibson’s buying spree. Will somebody else think they can do it better?

There's talk that Bonamassa might buy Gibson.. But that might just be unfounded rumor.

1. Virtually none of the $1.5 trillion of the cratering subprime mortgages in 2008 were backed by Fannie or Freddie. 
2. Nobody forced four of the five too big to fail banks to leverage at 30-1 ratios.
3. They leveraged at those levels due to an unregulated  banking system, which conducted an enormous amount of trading activity in the OTC derivatives market, which grew rapidly in the decade up to the 2008 financial crisis reaching over US$650 trillion in contracts traded. AIG-an insurance company- insured a lot of those contracts that they eventually couldn't cover when the true nature of how reckless the big banks were came to roost. Bye bye "free market sophisticated bankers who need to be left alone to spin gold out of nothing", hello "we love government bailouts". These guys hate government regulation, all the while knowing that whatever they do to fuck up, government will save them.

Whenever these kind of threads pop up, I am reminded of a scene from Chinatown where Evelyn Mulwray turns to Jake who wants Evelyn to "let the police handle this" - regarding her powerful and corrupt father- says, "He owns the police". Just so, Wall Street owns our government.

Care to elaborate on that point?  Not being snarky here but that's contrary to a lot of what I've read.  By late 2008 Fannie/Freddie owned or backed upwards of $300 Billion in bad debt (subprime mortgages).