Credit card companies resurrecting charged-off debts??? omg, THIS IS WEIRD!!!

1:36 PM 2/2/11

Oh my god. Someone came up with a brilliant, yet horrible idea. I am reading this news article. Is this really true???

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20110201,0,639051.column

Here is what happened.

If you used a credit card (or borrowed any kind of money at all) and failed to pay it back, then, after a while, the people who lent you the money will just cross it off their books. They just say 'Okay, that was a loss. It sucks to be us. We gave money to that person as a free gift and we'll never see it again. Goodbye.' So they count that money as lost and gone forever. The books are closed on that lost money. There is something called the 'statute of limitations,' but I don't know what that phrase means. I just vaguely know that it means 'Once the money is lost, it's gone and you have to get over it and you can't go trying to collect it anymore.'

Now, apparently, somebody had the idea to say, 'Hey, let's go looking for that old, old, dead, crossed-off, charged-off money again, even though it was counted as a loss a long time ago.'

That's weird and unthinkable. It's a brilliant, yet horrible, idea.

It's going to do something really, really bad, but I can't explain why.

That means that ALL old losses are meaningless, and they never meant anything back then, either. Losses aren't losses anymore. Maybe NOTHING counts as a loss anymore. Maybe there is no such thing as a 'loss' in the business world at all. The very concept of 'loss' has been destroyed.

The losses of money that happened back then DIDN'T MEAN ANYTHING BACK THEN, because, in the future, they were going to reappear as money that might possibly be collected again. So all losses happening RIGHT NOW might possibly no longer be losses in the future, too. The concept of 'loss' can no longer be trusted. We mistakenly believed it was a real loss back then, and we were sad about all that money we lost, and it hurt, but it turns out, yay! the money might come back! It was never really lost! Therefore all losses aren't really losses and we can all be happy about everything! I feel irrationally exuberant again!

This is really, really, really weird. I *KNOW* that this is going to have bad consequences. We have just fallen into a parallel universe of bizarre bookkeeping.

This is so weird, that I can't even explain what the consequences will be. I KNOW THIS WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES.

But if credit card companies can go looking for old, written-off debts from long ago, then it would only seem fair (fair? ha ha!) that so could we! If the states owed us money for our bonds, then we should be able to force them to pay it back to us now. What about all that gold that was taken from the people back in the 1930s or whenever it was that gold was confiscated? We wrote that off as a loss long ago, but now, suddenly, I feel like bringing that up again! I want my gold back! What about our old gold and silver certificates from decades ago, what if we demand that they be paid back to us in gold and silver now? What about all the countries that lost gold when the USA defaulted on gold again in the 1970s?

Also, another idea is, if losses aren't really losses, then maybe profits aren't really profits. But that's not new to me. I already knew that profits weren't really profits, after reading lots and lots of stuff that convinced me that our financial system is so distorted now that it's meaningless. 'False profits' (as in prophets).

Losses aren't really losses! Yay losses!

My brain cells get fried when I try to imagine the bookkeeping that would explain how you lost money in the past and it was crossed off and now suddenly you have it back again. How exactly would the bookkeepers go about doing that? I actually learned how to do bookkeeping, so I am able to imagine the specifics. Somebody has to create an 'account' out of thin air and re-claim that this person 'borrowed money' from them. It's now appearing in their... what's it called? Accounts receivable... as an ASSET. Yay! We have assets again!!! oh my god... Companies that don't have assets SUDDENLY HAVE ASSETS AGAIN. THIS IS WEIRD!

Money that you EXPECT to get from somebody is an 'asset.' It means that your company is allowed to continue to exist. If you have some assets, it means you're not bankrupt. If you DON'T have any assets, then your company might be called bankrupt and you might have to shut it down. If the credit card companies were desperate enough to come up with this brilliant, yet horrible, idea, that means THEY ARE PROBABLY ALREADY BANKRUPT. Our credit card companies didn't have any assets and they had to use their imagination to make some new assets for themselves somehow. Again, the idea is brilliant but terrible, and very, very weird.

Will they succeed in collecting that old money? Hahahahaha. A tiny bit of it, maybe. Maybe this won't be as bad as it seems. A few people will pay it. I don't think this will last for long. It might give them a tiny fraction of the money that they try to collect.

But what does it matter if you ACTUALLY COLLECT the money from these people? You have new assets in your ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE! You EXPECT to collect that money. That's all we need, expectation! You don't have to REALLY collect anything. Just let them go longer and longer and longer, expecting the money that never arrives, so that they can remain in business, and maybe someday, the business climate will get better again, if we can only stay open a little bit longer. hahahahahaha. Too big to fail.

This is weird. I think I just fried a few more brain cells, because I tried to answer a difficult question of 'Isn't there something in bookkeeping that measures the percentage of how much money you expect to receive?' I remember there is some kind of calculation you use, every year, to estimate how much money you expect you will lose from uncollectible accounts. I tried to think about it, but I couldn't. That's just weird.

Well, I don't have much more time to write, because I have to work.

Perhaps I could quit working if I would only just collect all the money the IRS took from me all these years to pay for the wars in foreign countries, the wars I was opposed to.