Sunday, September 21, 2008

Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in

Hey... you hear that?

What is that? What's that sound?

Oh... right... the the disintegration of The Leveraged American Capitalist System.

Wow. I knew it'd be quick, but not that quick.

So we've got Fannie & Freddie a distant memory. Lehman, welp apparently the US Government doesn't like the Jews as much as they pretend.

And then flip-flopping back to bailing out AIG.

Anyone else? Seriously. Stuff is going down the shitter so fast & furious, it's hard to remember. Oh right... Bear Stearns got this party started.

So now we've got what amounts to a bailout of Capitalism itself. They are going to throw $1 trillion at this thing. I think they said it's only $700 Billion... but that doesn't count Fannie Mac, which is probably going to be a few hundred billion for the pair, at least.

Yeah, this bailout, as expected, doesn't keep a single person in their home or anything else (not that I am for such inanity), but is a straight up dumptrucking of cash right into the pockets of hundreds & thousands of multi-million & billionaires. That's it.

Bush team, Congress negotiate $700B bailout

The government must bail out the financial system "because if we don't, it will have a tremendous impact on American consumers, homeowners, taxpayers and the rest," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in San Francisco.

Yeah, "the rest". What the fuck is this, Gilligan's Island? The Rest, my ass. This thing is a huge printing press operation for the pure benefit of Paulson's chums.

I mean, this is AmeriKKKa, isn't Bad Stuff supposed to fail? Aren't bad ideas supposed to go down the crapper? We leveraged up at a rate untold in human history... aren't there supposed to be consequences?

Yeah, well don't worry, there will be. I think I've said this before, This fucker is Too Big For Any Organization On This Planet to save, even the US Government. The Cruel Irony of the siutation is we are doing EXACTLY what we told the fuckin Jap's NOT to do, when their property bubble dragged them into a mudpit, one they are essentially still in.

I guess I'll say it again, like I'm a fucking broken record here: This will be so much worse than we thought possible.

But all is no lost. Well, except for Randy Sebastian.

Renaissance Homes faces bankruptcy
by Jeff Manning and Ryan Frank, The Oregonian
Friday September 19, 2008, 9:32 PM


Sebastian promises his company will survive. Though he's learned to never again trust a market boom, he still believes in the Northwest and he still loves building homes.

Anyone else see the irony in this? He'll never trust a market boom again? OK, but he will STILL keep building homes.

Hey, RANDY: You might want to THINK for about 2 fucking seconds about building homes after The Biggest RE Bust Ever Recorded Since The Earth Was A Coalescing Gravity Well of Interplanetary Dust. See, it's a BUST. It's going to be about 63 trillion times harder than it was during the boom.

Renaissance Homes saw its new housing starts decline from 305 in 2006 to 198 the following year. Through June, the company was on pace to build just 32 homes in 2008.

Randy Sebastian, all I can say is that if the cross-armed homo-erotic flesh-eating AIDS doesn't get this motherfucker, his utter stupidity surely will. What a dumbass.

Wow, went through Forum Meadows today, yet another indicator that Valley builders should never set foot on Cent OR soil again, for fear of their financial lives. Forum Meadows, now that it's in receivership, is awash in For Sale signs that were not there just a few weeks ago.

Yeah, see when your in Chap 11, all the game-playing bullshit, like holding back 80% Dark Matter, is blown away cuz the banks want their fucking money. This fucker has TONS of shit for sale.

And ordinarily this is Exactly the Situation that would have me come running. Blood in the Water. But I ain't even thinking about buying. Not even close. 2 reasons.

First, we are still, even after the large price hit we've taken, WILDLY OVERPRICED. My God, I drive by places everyday, where I can see the owners are clueless about what is going on. These houses are 100% too high. Everywhere.

Shame on your cohorts, marge. They need to wake these people up, and simply refuse to take ridiculous listings. They are throwing their OWN MONEY AWAY, as well.

As usual, Cent OR is lagging as far behind as it is physically possible, while still being in the same country. We hit $396K medians one month, about 2 years back. We'll drop 60+% from there. Minimum.

Second reason I ain't buying: The STD's PUKED forth, primarily on the East side, are shitholes. Those things are crap-shit-shacks, and they will begin disintegrating over the next 3-5 years.

These things were barfed out in huge quantities by people who were looking for nothing else but to sell it to someone who had no intention of ever occupying these hovels, and get loaned money by banks who didn't care a wit about whether home buyers had income or not.

In short, the East side, and much of the North & South are littered with deteriorating crappers, that are JUST LIKE MOBILE HOMES: They will actually GO DOWN in value over time.

Mobile homes are like cars, they are worth the most while still on the dealer lot, they lose 15-20% of their value the day they are sold, and they lose about 20%/yr forever after. Sometimes they go NEGATIVE, as they have to be towed away, torched, or used as Army target practice to make way for yet another crap shack. That makes up most of what has been built here in the past 5 years.

Yeah, this is The Big One. It's a testament to the severity of the problem, that we're getting about a 98% reduction in the number of comments regarding Sarah Palin's titties.

Hey, I even came back for a short post! But I'm not sure I'm a good one for chronicling the Implosion of AmeriKKKa. Shit, I wanted to WARN people it was coming. I think they know. Well, mostly. Bend is the absolute last .000001% of the US population that is beer-bonging the Kool-Aid, and a LOT of people here still have their heads planted firmly up their asses.

But they are starting to think. They are starting to read beyond Cascade Business Buttbangers, whose Editor is shown here busting ass with some nunchucks:
The Incredible Hulce! Hi-ya!

Yeah, it is people like this that should serve as a guiding light to our economic problems.

But what the fuck is this?

Good Riddance

Well, Paul-doh is doing me a favor and pulling the plug on his BB2 plog.

It had gotten more and more frustrating to me. I didn't mind the language, or the buster bluster, or the right wing loonies...but I never knew who I was talking to. Constant shifting of names, or no names, or even identity theft.

It was like talking to a hall of mirrors. Pretty useless.

I wouldn't go near the BB3 blog if you pulled a gun on me.

So...that stuff is gone.

Good Riddance.

et tu, Dunc? I mean, damn. Not going near a blog unless you KNOW the identities? Really? I guess that's it for you then. This whole thing is pretty damned anonymousey.

Anyway, I promised myself I'd keep this short, hell I wasn't going to write these anymore, right? But it's hard to resist at least acknowledging that The Greatest World Power Ever is starting to economically disintegrate. And it IS DISINTEGRATING. We won't be out of this thing for 20 years. Don't think so? Look at the Japs.

And if you think NOW is bad? Fuck, it is going to get SO MUCH WORSE. They're trying to push that the losses will be capped at $1 trillion. Bullshit. These things ALWAYS go worse than anyone thought, because the losses are being instituted by a pack of incredible fucking liars. Remember the Iraq "War" was going to cost $80-100 billion? Yeah, that fucker will run us $1 trillion when all is said & done. Minimum.

This thing has a price tag today of a trillion. Expect several times that, maybe $5-10 trillion. Folks, $10 trillion is A LOT OF MONEY. That spells DEPRESSION for this country. I was never real confident of gov't stats, but if we even spend $1 trill on this thing, and we DO NOT go into a near-depression, you will be assured that they are 100% LIES.

We can't LOSE $1 trillion & NOT be in a severe recession, or near-depression. Not possible.

We are looking at Modern Unregulated Finances' 9/11. The S&L crisis was a lot of small planes running into low profile targets. Hundreds failed, mainly in the South. Texas has only recently recovered because of War-ge Bush.

Todays implosion is FAR more DIRE. We have fuel filled disasters hitting 150 story tall behemoths of finance. These fuckers have manufactured derivatives with a notional value many, MANY times the Worlds GDP. There won't be nearly the number of failures we had in the early 90's... there will be 9/11-style failures of the Largest Behemoths Ever.

This is only the beginning.

Whoops... just found this at The Oregonian! Hey! Maybe we're just making the Front Page Bigtime...

Bloggers speculate on developers' deaths in Bend

Bloggers in Bend speculated for weeks this summer about the deaths of three developers including Jay Audia, whose Edge Development Group purchased 38 acres out of foreclosure in January. Last week, the site was empty and still.

As mortgage defaults in Deschutes County soared to levels more often seen in the cratering markets of California, Arizona and Florida, a handful of bloggers raged at the greed that had spoiled their desert paradise, leaving it broke and broken.

Then three Bend developers died this summer, and the bloggers soon spun theories about what would drive men to such desperate measures. Or maybe, the bloggers wondered, the mob was involved. The city at the foot of Mount Bachelor had a bad case of the jitters.

At the end of a dizzying week -- crushing news for financial giants Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG amid grave concerns that Wall Street's woes are far from over -- the Bend case shows how easily the Internet can intensify anxiety in worrisome times.

"The Internet speeds up the process of everything," said Michael Rabby, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Portland. "People don't get the chance to reflect. And that aspect of it can really change everything. Because the Internet seems more democratic, people are trusting it more. Sometimes they should. Sometimes they shouldn't."

"Thrown under the bus"

The Bend bloggers who speculated on the developers' deaths did not respond to The Oregonian's requests for interviews. On the Internet, they identified themselves by screen names. Among their favorite targets was Bend's daily newspaper, The Bulletin, which the bloggers said merely carried water for the real-estate sharpies.

"They do not want you to hear any bad news about the RE market, and they are willing to manipulate local media to do it," wrote a blogger by the screen name IHateToBurstYourBubble.

The bloggers chewed over their worries with verbose essays land-mined with f-bombs and served up with many hints at sinister behavior. IHateToBurstYourBubble: "You will always be thrown under the bus in Bend, if it means someone can sell a house to someone, even if you are screwed in the process."

Blog posts led to links, which led to more blog posts that led to comments on other blog posts, on and on in a whisper campaign rendered loud and clear with the global megaphone of the Internet.

Still, it was all just talk until the deaths. At first, the bloggers were cheeky. Then they were scared. Then they pointed to accomplices: the mainstream media.

"Closures and Drug Busts and Suicides, Oh My!" ran a headline for a July 26 blog post. Two weeks later: "Bank Mob Hits Claim Lives of Bend Developers." A week after that: "Bend Media is Responsible for Bend Developer Suicide Crisis."

"People have started dying over real estate in Bend," someone named BilboBend wrote Aug. 10, "and you shouldn't just accept the word of the local media, who essentially won't even acknowledge that a death has even occurred."

The thing about conspiracy theories is that underneath the embroidery and the ravings, there can be a kernel of truth.

First, the undisputed facts: Douglas Sokol, 57, a Sisters developer, died June 24 after falling from a height. Lynn McDonald, 58, a former emergency-room physician who had invested in a huge development called The Shire, disappeared July 6 and was found the next day in the Deschutes River. Jay Audia, 48, of Bend, who had recently purchased a 38-acre tract out of foreclosure, shot himself in the head July 19 at his home.

None of their families could be reached for comment.

Investigating the deaths fell to Dr. Chris Hatlestad, Deschutes County's medical examiner. For Hatlestad, the Internet is there-be-dragons territory: "I don't do blogging."

So he wasn't aware of the energetic speculation about the three deaths at the blogs bendbubble2 and bendbubble3: "It's getting awfully strange," offered BilboBend. "Start combing the obits. Audia supposedly shot himself, a crime so easily done by someone else, a 2-year-old could have planned it. McDonald's story just doesn't add up at all."

The bloggers offered no evidence or witnesses for their theories of foul play.

Yet Hatlestad found Audia's death to be clearly a suicide. He called the cause of Sokol's death "undetermined" and said he probably would mark McDonald's the same way. Though he did not rule out suicide, Hatlestad said, there was not enough evidence, so he was perplexed when he learned of the bloggers' speculations.

"I don't know where the heck somebody would get that kind of information," he said. "In my experience and understanding of the world, which I don't claim to have any special privilege of, when times are tough and there's plenty of fear to go around, people will continue to add fuel to the fire."

A kernel of truth

Yet the bloggers' ruminations about a suicide cluster also had an element of truth: Studies as long ago as 1987 and as recent as the mid-1990s show that suicides do increase in troubled economic times.

Emile Durkheim, the 19th-century French thinker considered the father of sociology, concluded in his landmark study that people who fall the farthest in income during bad times develop a high risk for suicide.

Research since then, however, has revealed that no single factor "causes" suicide. Having a suddenly thinner wallet by itself does not drain the last of someone's hope. Other factors working alone or in combination -- alcohol and drug abuse, legal trouble, divorce and mental illness among them -- usually drive suicides.

In the past year, for example, at least five people elsewhere in the nation who worked in the real estate sector committed suicide. At first, the deaths defied explanation. But after the funerals, it turned out that, in each case, law enforcement was closing in.

Separately, a Lake Oswego real estate broker who specialized in lakefront properties apparently was struggling with the downturn and killed himself July 23. As in the Bend cases, there's no hint that authorities had been interested in his business dealings.

In Bend, even with the tough times, the medical examiner said he has not seen an uptick in suicides in Deschutes County. In fact, Lt. Kevin Dizney, head of the sheriff's detective division, said that aside from metal thefts, "I haven't seen the state of the economy having any direct effect on crime, period."

Hatlestad said he wouldn't rule out an increase in suicides, but, "suicide occurs as an impulsive act almost all the time. People have chronic ongoing stresses in a variety of flavors and sizes, and financial is a big one. At what point does somebody decide, this is too much? It's not often very predictable."

Filling information voids

The blogging phenomenon -- thousands more people "publishing" on the Internet -- does pressure news organizations to respond, but it's a tough call. In the wake of the three Bend deaths, the bloggers hammered The Bulletin for sitting on a huge story.

Not surprisingly, given the medium, the bloggers' theories about the deaths spread, prompting a small posting about The Shire and McDonald's death on The Wall Street Journal's Web site on Aug. 14. The Oregonian ran a column Aug. 18 mentioning the deaths in the context of suicide prevention.

The following week, The Bulletin published a column by Editor John Costa in which he wrote that the bloggers did stir up the talk in town. But when his reporters tracked down what had happened to the three developers, the bloggers' theories didn't hold water.

In an interview last week, Costa said, "I don't think there's anything unusual with people filling information voids. People will fill in a motivation that they can see and that conforms to their master narrative to what's going on in the country. In this day, what's different is that you can take that unfounded and speculative information, and you can spread it around the world.

"Then you have the next question. ... Even if it isn't true, if there's a general belief out there, what is the journalist's obligation? Do we chase the same mirage? It's a very legitimate question. I don't have an absolute answer."

Just so you know, Portlandians, this fucking town is Bank-Mob Run. These fuckers killed themselves for reasons probably VERY SIMILAR to why that Buena Vista contractor was arrested: This ain't CIVIL anymore. Ain't a misdemeanor to lose money around here anymore, it's CRIMINAL. Your ass will SERVE TIME. Either that, or they will find you & shoot you. Or throw you over Benham Falls.

You don't fucking kill yourself over money, you kill yourself over someone whacking your wife & kids, or the idea that your ass is going to JAIL. People are losing BILLIONS in this One-Horse Shithole & they aren't just going to go to the courthouse & file liens & shit to get their money. These fuckers KILL PEOPLE... or make them kill themselves.

Yeah, this is a real fucking paradise. Best NOT amble through town if you're behind on your mortgage payments. Or ever. You can get caught in the crossfire.

Yeah, our "theories don't hold water" cuz Costa is a RE cocksucker that doesn't want to get fucking shot. The theory that he is doing this for his innate LOVE of the RE industry, is about as valid as the idea that he is just one of the rabble, and will get his ass shot otherwise.

Folks, if you are getting close to a point where you are going to be in arrears on your rent or mortgage or business loan, you best do a fucking midnight run. Pack it up & go. Run Lola, RUN!

No one wants to see anyone else dying.

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Bewert said...

On the local front, the Juniper Ridge Management Board has been officially named and listed on the city website:

http://www.ci.bend.or.us/depts/urban_renewal_economic_development/juniper_ridge/juniper_ridge_management_board.html

I asked Patti Stell (the City Recorder) about a list of meeting dates, agendas, and minutes. Haven't heard anything back yet.

As for Hollern, he is a mover and shaker:

Michael P. Hollern has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Brooks Resources Corporation since 1970, and has served as President of Brooks Resources from 1983 to 1999 and Chief Executive Officer since 1999. Mr. Hollern served as President of Brooks-Scanlon, Inc. from 1970 until its sale to Diamond
International in June 1980. Mr. Hollern also serves on the boards of directors of several corporate, civic and charitable organizations.


Source: www.secinfo.com/dr643.5td.htm

But is there a softer side to him?

Most of the voices for gay and lesbian equality present arguments based on ethics. If those reasons alone don’t convince a listener, look to Mike Hollern, CEO of Brooks Resources in Bend, for another approach: an argument based on economics.

“This issue affects everything, even Oregon's economic situation,” he says. “To remain successful, a community needs to attract young, creative, dynamic people. And I’m not talking about just artists. Programmers, engineers, entrepreneurs...these are all creative fields, and they’re essential to a community’s growth. We know that young, bright people gravitate toward areas that are perceived as tolerant and open. So if our communities do not adopt principles and legislation demonstrating our tolerance of all
sexualities, we’ll be losing that influx of people. We’ll be economically disadvantaged compared
to places like Seattle, like Austin.”

Mr. Hollern has presented that point of view in many forums, from testifying on an equal rights amendment before the Bend City Council to accompanying Basic Rights Oregon to meetings with the Bend Bulletin. Whether he’s arguing for legislation that benefits his community’s economy or that guarantees fair treatment for all, Mike Hollern is a strong
voice for equality.


Source: http://www.wordsmithpdx.com/samples/PersonalNarrative_MikeHollern.pdf

Interesting dichotomy. I've yet to meet the guy, but probably will at some point.

Bewert said...

BULL today:

City services
Third shortfall in a year may force cuts in Bend

September 24, 2008 4:00 am

For the third time in less than a year, the city of Bend is facing a major budget shortfall....MORE

Just a few short weeks ago the CC authorized spending over $500K on lawyers and PR employees...along with the ProTerra mitigation giveaway.

Anonymous said...

Bruce has revealed his true colors today.

He is hugely impressed by Hollern's political expertise.

Bruce has accumulated huge knowledge of the shenanigans going on at city hall for the past 4-5 years. Yet he has refrained from filing a complaint to the State. By attending city meetings, getting to know all the players by first name, he is building himself up as a potential runner for office. By not filing the promised complaint, he is informing Hollern and co. that he is really on their side. He is a good boy. And can be trusted.

Bruce is a true liberal playing the diversity card (politically correct). He is not a man to be trusted.

Anonymous said...

BP,

The sad fact is that Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, & Cox are the FUCKING PROBLEM, at least all these folks ARE THE FUCKING problem, and the problem will never be fixed until they're removed.

Thus in some sense Mc-Cain is one of the few telling the truth.

OR-BOMB-EO intends to keep PAULSON 'on', which is more of the same.

I like any of the buzzards, but this is a 'hit-job' on mcCain to shut him up about COX, most people think that COX was ASLEEP at the fucking job, he's like the KATRINA guy, know experience.

BUSH put COX in the position of SEC regulation because he doesn't know what he's doing, and PAULSON was able to control him, thus MC-CAIN is right, the SEC needs somebody with teeth to fix wall-street.

Just yesterday PUSSY-HBM was calling for B-Tribe lynching, thus what is wrong with mcCain calling for the same of the Cox-Tribe??

The MOST DANGEROUS thing going on here is OR-BOMB-EO's instinct to blame NOBODY.

Anonymous said...

To the ASSHOLE here that says its 'chess' for Palin to keep her twat closed, and legs folded.

Let me JUST REMIND you KUNT that an election is a job interview that last 6-24 months.

In a fucking job interview it is NOT a strategy to not answer questions during the interview.

Palin is a fearful vindictive bitch, your NO different than the pussy's defending Obama.

All these candidates are shit eaters.

We have just had 7 years of Cheney refusing to talk to the press, except to tell people to go 'fuck themselves'. It would be refreshing to have someone in the whitehouse that can stand up to the press.

Lastly, and I repeat even FOX NEWS is PISSED that PALIN will not talk to THEM, if she'll NOT even go on Rush Limbaugh or O'Rielly, something is deeply wrong.

Anonymous said...

Bruce PUSSY only showed up here one year ago to date.

Bruce Pussy never set foot in city-hall prior to last fall. I know I always attend.

Bruce Pussy decided in the fall of last year to make JR his project.

Note that BP's position on JR was always an attack on KURATEK, which meant that HOLLERN would be back in control of the project.

It was KURATEK that took JR away from HOLLERN's control. The pussy was brought in to put HOLLERN back in control.

Liberals have ALWAYS been used in BEND to sell projects by the BOSS-HOGG NAZI's. The whole 'wise-use' project of NorthWest Crossing was SOLD by HOLLERN via high-desert museum at a cost of millions of dollars. HOLLERN called it 'Smart Growth", and he won, and the pussy's like HBM ate the shit up.

Since day-one here I have said that BP is an agent provacteur, note how he's always trying to get people to meet him?? Note how he personally contacted everyone to 'talk' with Anne Saxer of the big zero?? Why because HOLLERN wants him to 'out' all the bloggers.

BP just showed up to BEND from Utah last year.

Anonymous said...

I think three months ago here I told BP that if he SUCKED HOLLERN cock, that he could get himself elected to any position in this city.

He's doing it, all is going according to plan.

I love the BP theorem, "IF hollern loves queers, then maybe SDC deferral is not such a bad idea".

Who would have guessed that during the Bend demise that HOLLERN would reinvent himself as a fudge-packing liberal's best friend??

"Truth is stranger than fiction in Bend, Fiction has to make sense" - mark twain

Anonymous said...

CUNTS if you want to understand the 'crisis' here is a very good explanation.

'mark-to-market' about 20 cents on the dollar, which means we're at least $8Trillion in the hole.

***

An asset-backed security [ABS] is a type of tradable debt security that’s derived from a pool of underlying assets. We could be talking about a pool of mortgages, of automobile leases, or loans made to various borrowers. We’re using the example of residential mortgages, though the example is exactly the same for commercial mortgages, automobile leases or bank loans. Here’s how it works.
Anatomy of a Mortgage Loan

A mortgage company makes home loans in your county, as does your local bank branch. Then an investment bank comes along and buys the mortgages from the mortgage company and from the bank. It only wants to buy the mortgages made to prime borrowers who are paying 6% interest on their mortgages. Once it acquires those loans, the investment bank securitizes the mortgages, meaning it pools them into a tradable package it can sell to investors.

This particular pool is known as a "closed pool," meaning no more mortgages will be added, though some may leave the pool of the underlying borrowers pay back their mortgages early because they sold their homes, or refinanced them, or if underlying mortgages are in default and the "servicer" allows them to be removed from the pool. The only income coming into the closed pool results from the monthly interest and principal payments being made by the homeowners.

In our example - because all the mortgage loans were made to so-called "prime" borrowers with strong credit - you might have an investment grade (A+) security that pays 6%, because all the mortgage holders are paying 6% and the payments are being passed through to the investors. That’s it. There are very good, though not exact, methodologies to value this particular security, primarily because it is uniform in that all the mortgage payers are prime borrowers who all are paying 6%.

Asset-backed-securities become infinitely more complicated when they are sliced and diced into structured collateralized instruments. They generally fit into two main categories:

* Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which include all manner of residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities.
* And collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), which are pooled bank and investment-bank loan portfolios.

CDOs and CLOs are created from "closed-pool," asset-backed securities. They are collateralized by the underlying assets - hence the prefix - but they are also "structured."
In our example above, our asset-backed mortgage security was rated A+ and pays the investor who buys it 6%. If I want to create higher-yielding securities that I think I will be able to sell a lot more of, I will pool mortgages from subprime borrowers.

Because subprime borrowers are, by definition, higher-risk borrowers, the mortgage companies and banks charge them higher rates of interest to offset the greater risk that they represent. If I pool these mortgages, their ratings would be "junk" - or close to it - which will be a problem as I try and sell these securities to investors all around the world.

That’s where the magic of financial engineering, better known as structuring, comes into play. I can divide up the closed pool of subprime mortgages and structure the pool into layers, or tranches. What I’ll do is divide up the pool into multiple tranches, or slices. I’ll structure the cash flow payments from all the mortgages so that if the 1st or 2nd tranches run into trouble, I’ll take cash flow payments from the lower tranches to keep up with all the payments to the holders of the 1st and 2nd tranches.

For someone trying to peddle these asset-backed securities, this is a stroke of genius. In our example, since I’m now pretty much guaranteeing that the 1st and 2nd tranche security holders are going to get paid, maybe I can get the Big Three debt-rating companies - Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service (MCO) and Fitch Ratings Inc. - to give my 1st and 2nd tranche CDOs investment grade ratings. Maybe I can even buy insurance from a monoline insurer like AMBAC Financial Group Inc. (ABK) or MBIA Inc. (MBI), and get my top tranches a coveted "AAA" rating. Wow, I could sure sell a lot of this high-yielding stuff with an investment grade rating!

That’s just what happened. And they did sell a lot - a whole lot.
Those Troubling Tranches

As I said in Part II of this investigative series, CDOs - on an individual basis - are difficult to value. Indeed, "legend has it" that constructing the cash flow payments on the first theoretical 3-tranche CDO (the simplest type of CDO) took a Cray Inc. (CRAY) supercomputer 48 hours to calculate.

The problem starts here. There are so many of these tranched securities out in the marketplace - and on the balance sheets of banks, investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds and all manner of other unsuspecting investment entities worldwide - that when subprime borrowers began to default, it wasn’t long before the lower-tier tranches ran out of money to pay the so-called 1st- and 2nd-tier "AAA"-rated securities. The problem escalated quickly and almost all of these securities were downgraded. That’s not a surprise. Nor is it the whole story, for it leaves a key question unanswered.

What happened to the lowest-level tranches?

Those tranches were "ugly" to begin with because I started by pooling subprime mortgages (the high-risk borrowers). Then I made them "toxic" by "stripping out" their cash flow to support other tranches. This toxic waste was so bad, no one would ever rate it and only greedy hedge funds or crazy speculators would buy it for its high yield. Or, maybe, I think so much of my creation that I’ll keep this piece for myself, or maybe I’ll have to because no investor will ever buy it.

This kind of stuff is out there. There’s a lot of it. And only an act of God will bring these securities back from the depths where they now reside.
With their collateralized premise and structured nature, CDOs are very difficult to value - especially since no one trusts anyone else’s "internal valuation model." Since everyone is afraid of these securities because no one really knows what they’re actually worth, no one wants to buy them.
However, when an institution - such as a Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. (MER) - gets desperate enough to sell a portfolio of these securities at 22 cents on the dollar, then everyone else who has to "mark-to-market" their assets now has to value similar securities of their own at 22 cents on the dollar. That causes massive write-downs at banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. And as these companies write down assets and watch their losses escalate, they are forced to raise additional capital to meet regulatory requirements.
CDS - Controlled Dangerous (Financial) Substances

It’s a vicious cycle - one that’s eroding our faith in our banks, and worse, banks’ faith in other banks. As a result, banks have ceased lending to each other out of the fear that the next round of write-downs and losses may imperil some of the trading partner banks that they used to lend billions of dollars to every night.

Not anymore.

It would be bad enough if that were the only problem facing the securities market. On top of these overly engineered structured securities I’ve just discussed, we also have credit default swaps with an estimated notional value of $62 trillion out in the marketplace. A credit default swap [CDS] is a financial derivative that’s akin to an insurance policy that a debt holder can use to hedge against the default by a debtor corporation, or a sovereign entity. But a CDS can also be used to speculate.

In Part II of our investigation, which ran Monday, I explained how problematic credit default swap pricing is and how the indexes against which the value of these swaps are determined are tradable themselves as speculative instruments and how the whole complex is driving the financial system into an abyss. That’s essentially what led to the collapse of the otherwise healthy insurance giant, American International Group Inc. (AIG). [For the latest news on AIG, check out this related story]

Unfortunately, I don’t see the U.S. Treasury Department’s much-needed rescue plan being effective without actually addressing the problems facing both the CDO and the CDS markets. The Treasury Department’s initiative will create more problems than they attempt to solve and will eventually saddle taxpayers with so much debt that they risk sinking the dollar, and worse, the U.S. government’s investment grade rating. That would be calamitous. [For the latest news on the federal government’s banking-system bailout plan, check out this related story.]

Thursday, in an addendum to this piece, I will outline a proposal that I’m calling the Money Morning Plan because it potentially heralds a new dawn in the credit crisis, addressing the problems from the bottom up, and not from the top down. Although this plan is straightforward and elegant in its simplicity, we still opted to present it as a separate story in order to provide you with the focus, the detail and the explanations we feel this strategy merits.

If the Treasury Department wants to immediately triage the gushing wounds that are bleeding our banks and financial system dry of readily available credit by purchasing and warehousing illiquid assets with taxpayer money, it won’t be long before the U.S. financial system begins to hemorrhage somewhere else.

The free market caused these problems under the noses of undistinguished regulators.

The free market - with the oversight of good governance practices mandated by effective regulators, who should not be empowered to kill entrepreneurial capitalism - will once again rise to the occasion and prove America’s robustness and indefatigable spirit.

Anonymous said...

BP how do you rationalize worshiping HOLLERN is the major PUG funder in the region, and then also worshiping Obama?

HOLLERN is a BUSH man. Given that most pug's are faggots it does surprise any of us that HOLLERN loves queers & lesbos, but who doesn't??

Get with the program BP, if your going to HO for HOLLERN, then beat the drum for McCain and be consistent.


Of course the beauty of HOLLERN's 40+ year company town rule of BEND is that he owns both sides of the debate the so called left&right. He has always used the 'liberal bullshit' to sell right wing fascist socialist business ventures , like 100% SDC deferral for boss-hoggs that want to build 100's of mega apartment complexes all over Bend in the next few years.

Anonymous said...

Mike Hollern, CEO of Brooks Resources in Bend, for another approach: an argument based on economics.

"Bend is a town of non-real people, with non-real children, and non-real jobs" - Mike Hollern

We spent months last year trying to decode what HOLLERN might have meant by this statement. For the most part like any BUSH-NAZI what can be inferred is that ALL Bend life is expendable, as its non-real.

But this is the company-town that HOLLERN built, why is calling his own fruit 'non-real'?? Does he know something we don't??

Anonymous said...

KKKUNTS - pugs

CUNTS - jim rogers type indy's

PUSSY's - dems

*

Personally I would prefer that we all here were just CUNT's, the pussy is nauseating, and we don't have any kkunts here, marge is marginal.

Anonymous said...

The Pussy's 'complaint', was always like his Capstone-Butt-Plug sales effort.

He never intended to file a complaint, because there is no complaint.

City-Hall has a choice,

1.) Buy lots of capstone butt-plugs from rep pussy.

2.) Give the pussy an elected orifice.

If 1 or 2 are not done, then the pussy will continue to threaten to file a complaint.

Who fucking gives a shit, if somone wanted to file a complaint, they could it to the governor by email today, and it be done. The problem is even lk-no-negro ( lk-oswego ) doesn't allow the press in executive session, almost all the towns in OREGON are breaking the open meeting laws. So fucking what? This shit has been going on forever.

PUSSY comes from UTAH last year, and is amazed how biz is done in ORYGUN, always been this way.

Anonymous said...

The Wall Street Journal

Sept. 24, 2008

Existing-home sales resumed falling in August and prices took a record drop, but inventories decreased sharply. Home resales dropped to a 4.91 million annual rate, a 2.2% decrease from July's revised 5.02 million annual pace, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. The median home price was $203,100 in August, down 9.5% from $224,400 in August 2007. The median price in July this year was $210,300. The 9.5% drop was a record, the NAR said.

tim said...

Interesting to watch Buffett.

For years he's been bemoaning the size of the derivatives and swaps markets. How many annual letters in a row told of his disgust in unwinding the General Re positions he got with the company when he bought it?

So he's now basically won the waiting game by having a large cash position as the derivatives hit the fan.

Goldman goes from Investment Bank to regulated bank holding company, and Buffett immediately sees that that means Goldman is undervalued in its new guise.

He's basically telegraphed his game plan for a decade to match the current situation. And all his big competitors (like AIG) were busy playing their own games, unwilling or uninterested to play the game they knew he was playing.

Buffett wins again.

LavaBear said...

>>>Buffet wins again


Did you see the terms he received:

"Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway is buying $5 billion of perpetual preferred shares that pay a dividend of 10 percent, Goldman said in a statement yesterday. The securities can be repurchased by Goldman at any time on condition it pays a 10 percent premium. Berkshire is also getting warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock at $115 apiece, 8 percent less than Goldman's closing share price of $125.05 in New York yesterday." - Bloomberg

Frickin 10% divided for perpetual prefered shares with a 10% discount on buyback and warrants for almost a 10% discount. Holy smokes. Goldman is pretty much paying Buffett for some decent advertising.

Anonymous said...

Buffett wins again.

*

Maybe, also he could be throwing good money into a shit-hole.

Goldman Sachs, would be BearStearns, if it weren't for Paulson.

If this FBI probe gets to the bottom, who knows where it will go.

BUFFET is already up to his ass in lawsuits and criminal investigation.

What about the call by OBAMA to have BUFFET be on the BAILOUT board? Now that BUFFET is a BIG OWNER of GS, its a total fucking conflict of interest.

The BAILOUT is buffet's interest, he may be smart, and his newsletters may be full of funny shit for years, but he is still in the same boat as wall-street.

BUFFET is using the crisis to get a lot of people to take their money and put into BRK.A during the crisis. The banks aren't safe, the money-market ain't safe, real-estate, ... the myth here is that BRK.A(B) is the only safe haven during the crisis.

Me humble opinion is the ONLY safe place is YUAN & EURO.

It would be interesting to see how much BRK-B that Jim Rogers is buying.

Everybody knew that derviatives were 'financial weapons' the press saying that BUFFET saw something, jeebus xmas, LA-ROUCHE was saying this SHIT in the 1970's, that derivatives would bring the US down.

Anonymous said...

The Pussy say's "SDC deferral may not be a bad idea, if HOLLERN loves faggots, teddy-bears, and small minded people". ...

On that note, lets talk about GREAT fucking faggots.

Abe Lincoln, the father of the PUG party, a faggot.

NERO, Caligula of ROME famous fucking faggots who slaughtered millions.

J Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 50 years, a fucking faggot, a killer, and died in office getting a blow job by his male secretary of 40 years.

Hitler, Goebbles, almost all of HITLERS inner circle were faggots.

Karl Rove faggot, almost everyone that BUSH shared a room with during college was a faggot. FACT.

Seymour Hersh has written extensively that the CIA crushed the testical's of children in Iraq to get confessions from parents. Sexual mutilation during the BUSH years not seen since the HITLER years when HITLER used dogs to rape men & women, just for fun.

HOLLERN loves faggots says BP, and thus HOLLERN MUST be a good guy.

The above is just a small list of great faggots.

Look at cheney's daughter a lesbo, and complete fucking bitch from hell running all finance in IRAQ under coalition.

Why is Karl Rove such an evil machevellian?? Could it be that being hurt while young, makes these adults seek evil in their adult years??

Why did Jay Edgar Hoover spend years in the FBI maintaining a list of who was COMMIE & GAY?? Just to find boyfriends??

In Summary PUSSY, just because the person is a FAGGOT doesn't mean they sleep with a teddy-bear or bambi deer like you.

Anonymous said...

BUFFET is using the crisis to get a lot of people to take their money and put into BRK.A during the crisis. The banks aren't safe, the money-market ain't safe, real-estate, ... the myth here is that BRK.A(B) is the only safe haven during the crisis.

*

Watch NOT what BUFFET says, but what he does, my bet right now he's doing insider sales of BRK.x.

Anonymous said...

BUFFET is trying to send a signal, that now is the 'time' to buy Bank Stocks, and all the coat-tailer's will follow, but here are the fucking facts. ...

*

I think you’re going to have to be more like Warren Buffett than Peter Lynch in your approach to investing for the foreseeable future – that is, wait until they are truly giving stocks away with the odds stacked in your favor before committing capital to this market. Patience is a virtue.
Now that Buffet’s ‘invested’ $5 billion in Goldman, now what? Is it time to buy?
-

My answer is pretty straightforward. If you can get in on the greatest brand in all of finance at a guaranteed 10% annual return with warrants that give you full upside exposure to the common stock with essentially no downside exposure to the common stock…then, yes, by all means, get to work buying some preferred shares from Goldman.

But unless you’re actually Warren Buffett and you actually have the ability to negotiate terms like the above…then I’d suggest not buying the broader market or many individual stocks. Heck, I even happened to have put my toe in the water in some Goldman Sachs common myself last week…and while I’m happy Warren’s got warrants that align his profit-seeking self-interest with mine in many ways, I’m sure not going to delude myself into pretending he’s stepped in and is buying the market.

He’s not. And he’s the best.

If you keep your capital dry — whether you’ve got the tens of billions that Buffett does or if you’ve got tens of thousands like most Americans do — you’re going to get the opportunity to poach as the vicious cycles now gripping our economy force prices lower.

Don’t buy common stocks yet. Warren isn’t.

Anonymous said...

A Google search for “Hillary Clinton bitch” turns up 1.1 million matches. “Sarah Palin bitch” turns up 322,000—but she hasn’t been in the public eye nearly as long as Clinton, so that’s a pretty good start for a rookie. Palin also trails Clinton on a Google search for “c**t,” but it shouldn’t be long before she catches up.

Some feminists blame this epic use of epithets on a culture that encourages violence against women. This violence, they say, manifests in character defamation and brutal sexual fantasies about Clinton and Palin, fantasies that are voraciously consumed and shared via the Internet. American women won the right to vote 88 years ago, but when it comes to campaigns for high office, America is at least as sexist as ever. And it’s not just men who are taking potshots at the women candidates. It’s other women, too.

Consider a brief sampling of some recent Internet postings about Palin:

From Salon.com columnist Cintra Wilson (yes, a woman): “A hyperconservative, f**kable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a 'sexy librarian' costume—as a vice president?” “She is their [Repubicans’] hardcore pornographic centerfold spread,” and “Republican blow-up doll.”

From Facebook: “The mentally retarded baby which Sarah Palin touts as her own is in fact the bastard child of her slut daughter Bristol Palin.”

From the Jezebel blog (also on Palin): “Obama was an organizer in his 20s and moved onto the Senate. SHE was popping out kids just like her daughter is now, hey!” Another from the same place: “This bitch infuriates me too. I can barely hold it in, I talk about it to anyone that will listen. I HATE HER.”

Anonymous said...

If you keep your capital dry — whether you’ve got the tens of billions that Buffett does or if you’ve got tens of thousands like most Americans do — you’re going to get the opportunity to poach as the vicious cycles now gripping our economy force prices lower.

Don’t buy common stocks yet. Warren isn’t.

*

Let's call the last the quote of the day.

Bewert said...

Hey, Buster, that gay stuff from Hollern surprised me, too. That's why I posted it.

Yep, I've only been here since March 2005. Get over it. And I started going to CC meetings because it was starting to look like the JR fiasco had a real chance to bankrupt this city. I would like to live in a place with money for cops and fixing potholes. And it still looks like it might bankrupt us. I've bitched privately and publicly about it to all CC members, John Russell, etc. Other than publicizing the actual costs and liabilities, what else can I do.

I'm still torn over the complaint. One says file it you idiot! The other says that since a friend of most of the councilors, a fellow Dem, runs the Ethics Commission, it just might not go anywhere. Which would legitimize their actions into the future.

PS The governor is a Dem, too. The rules are clear, and require multiple paper copies to be sent in. The state pretty much doesn't give a shit about Bend--just look at ODOT's reaction to the begging of the council on selling JR land.

And now let's listen to Paulson and Bernanke do some begging of their own on CSPAN2 and CSPAN3. It's just starting...

Anonymous said...

Marge,

We have 1 week left in the month... how's the stats looking?

(sorry to bring up Bend Real estate on this political blog.. it won't happen again)

Anonymous said...

Palin really ia a brutal bitch.

https://secure.defenders.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=c406_090308palinwolf&JServSessionIdr001=7mpnnnsae1.app23a

Bewert said...

That writeup on the financial system is excellent. One thing I would add is to note that CDS's (which may be as high as $75 trillion outstanding, more than the entire world's GDP)are completely unregulated due to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA), supported by both the Clinton administration and by the Republican-controlled congress.

This needs to be repealed and regulation forced upon the marketplace. Why? From testimony before the Senate just a little over three years ago:

Overall Evaluation of the CFMA
The Federal Reserve Board believes that the CFMA has unquestionably been a successful piece of legislation. Most important, as recommended by the President's Working Group on Financial Markets in its 1999 report, it excluded transactions between institutions and other eligible counterparties in over-the-counter financial derivatives and foreign currency from regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA). As the Working Group argued, regulation of such transactions under the CEA was unnecessary to achieve the act's principal objectives of deterring market manipulation and protecting investors. Such transactions are not readily susceptible to manipulation and eligible counterparties can and should be expected to protect themselves against fraud and counterparty credit losses. Exclusion of these transactions resolved long-standing concerns that a court might find that the CEA applied to these transactions, thereby making them legally unenforceable. At the same time, the CFMA modernized the regulation of U.S. futures exchanges, replacing a one-size-fits-all approach to regulation with an approach that recognizes that the regulatory regime necessary and appropriate to achieve the objectives of the CEA depends on the nature of the underlying assets traded and the capabilities of market participants. Together, these provisions of the CFMA have made our financial system and our economy more flexible and resilient by facilitating the transfer and dispersion of risk. Consequently, the Board believes that major amendments to the regulatory framework established by the CFMA are unnecessary and unwise.


Which today is obviously totally fucking false.

It's time to let some of the most speculative players meltdown and regulate the remainder much more stringently.

Bewert said...

Source for that testimony: http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2005/20050908/default.htm

Other stuff on the CFMA:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000

www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/051908Leopold.shtml

http://www.cftc.gov/stellent/groups/public/@lrrulesandstatutoryauthority/documents/file/ogchr5660.pdf

Anonymous said...

"Consider a brief sampling of some recent Internet postings about Palin:

From Salon.com columnist Cintra Wilson (yes, a woman): “A hyperconservative, f**kable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a 'sexy librarian' costume—as a vice president?” “She is their [Repubicans’] hardcore pornographic centerfold spread,” and “Republican blow-up doll.”

From Facebook: “The mentally retarded baby which Sarah Palin touts as her own is in fact the bastard child of her slut daughter Bristol Palin.”

From the Jezebel blog (also on Palin): “Obama was an organizer in his 20s and moved onto the Senate. SHE was popping out kids just like her daughter is now, hey!” Another from the same place: “This bitch infuriates me too. I can barely hold it in, I talk about it to anyone that will listen. I HATE HER.”

===

LOL.

She is a bitch. No matter what the fucking Republican trolls on this site think.

I hate her too! And all the fucking Repug pukes as well.

Bewert said...

PBS Newshour interview on TARP with Krugman and others, including llan Meltzer, professor of political economy and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the [right wing] American Enterprise Institute.:

JEFFREY BROWN: Allan Meltzer, same question. Â Is this a good idea?

ALLAN MELTZER, Carnegie Mellon University: It's a terrible idea. It's undemocratic. It's bad economic policy, and it's bad social policy. And it has a very little chance of solving the problem in a meaningful way...

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, flesh that out a bit. Is it that we are not in a crisis? Or is it that government intervention of this kind is not the right answer?

ALLAN MELTZER: Well, I've listened to governments tell me for 40 years that there was a crisis and the world was going to fall apart if we didn't do this or that. But there have been a few cases where they weren't able to do that.

One was the commercial paper crisis in 1970. There have been several others. The world did not fall apart. Last week, we had Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. Within three days, most of the assets were sold.

We had AIG turn down three offers to buy the company because they thought they would get a better deal from the government. It turned out they didn't get the better deal from the government. Now the stockholders suddenly woke up and said -- the major stockholders said, "We'd like to buy the company."

Well, that's what I think we need to do. We need to get the government's hand out of this, and let's see whether we can't get a market solution.

The market people caused this problem. They ought to be the ones that pay the cost of having it cleaned up.

ALLAN MELTZER: Yes. I don't want to join a debate about different ways of picking the public's pocket. I think, if they're going to do something -- and I don't think that we really need to do anything. I've heard these stories over and over for 40 years. You know, maybe there will be a crisis.

But despite all the talk, Main Street is not doing so badly. And the fact is that they've been predicting disaster since January. It hasn't happened.

And if they're going to do something, then what they ought to do is make loans, which the financial institutions have to repay with interest. And if you think -- that's an idea which the Chileans have used in a bigger crisis than this for them in 1982, and it worked for them.

People paid back the loans. They weren't allowed to pay dividends until they repaid the loans. They weren't allowed to take bonuses until they repaid the loans. I think that's the way -- if we're going to do this, then that's the way we should do it.


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/bailouttalk_09-23.html

Anonymous said...

Marge,

We have 1 week left in the month... how's the stats looking?


I didn't want to interrupt all this crappy politico talk.
So far this month we have sold 74 SFR's at a median of $273k. Sales are close to August. Median down $4k.
Have fun boys, I am going to count my beans.

Bewert said...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26872907/

McCain Seeks To Delay Debate

NEW YORK - Republican John McCain said Wednesday he is directing his staff to work with Democrat Barack Obama's campaign and the presidential debate commission to delay Friday's debate because of the economic crisis.

In a statement, McCain said he will stop campaigning after addressing former President Clinton's Global Initiative session on Thursday and return to Washington to focus on the nation's financial problems.

The Republican presidential hopeful called Obama before he made the statement and told him he was going to suspend his campaign, according to a McCain senior adviser...


Putting a little more pressure on to get this TARP done right now?

Why not debate the issue for us voters right now, before bending us and our grandchildren over?

Bewert said...

Marge, how does YTD compare? NODs seem to have slowed a little this month--we're only at 1242 right now.

Read that whole MSNBC article, and you see:

According to the source, McCain wants to create a "political free zone" until a deal is reached on legislation for a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry.

McCain said he wants President Bush to convene a leadership meeting in Washington that would include him and Obama.


"Leadership." These guys are all moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic, looking for the best liferaft they can each find. Fuck Main St. Wall St. needs our help, NOW! I hope Obama slows him down some, but it's not looking good.

Anonymous said...

McCain Loses His Head




By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; Page A21

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."

This Story
McCain Loses His Head
A Bailout or a Bonanza?
Improving Paulson's Cure
A Lesson the Markets Ignored
Fat Cats First
A Hedge Fund Like No Other
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This Story
-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."


To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
==============================================

Bewert said...

Watching this train wreck, it strikes me that Treas Sec Paulson, the $500 million man, is like a fucking pit bull forcing this thing through with as little additional regulation and oversight as possible.

No lipstick, just a closely shaved dome, but the same one-note pitbull.

It's like the last ditch effort of BushCo to suck the rest of the money out of the government before Obama takes office.

Paulson just reaffirmed that he opposes a change in the BK law to let judges change mortgage terms, i.e. Main St. homeowner relief.

Have I said FUCK THAT enough over this. This thing is a fucking travesty.

Barney did loudly and combatively note that Fannie and Freddie were not subjected to updated regulation until shortly after the Dems took over in 2007.

Even the Pugs mostly are taking aim and firing away. Bush to "speak" tonight...

Another funny note: Paulson just said that he would make sure that the most experienced and knowledgable experts would be hired to value the assets the government would buy.

You know--the same guys that fucking blew it in the first place.

Quimby said...

>> Paulson just reaffirmed that he opposes a change in the BK law to let judges change mortgage terms, i.e. Main St. homeowner relief.

Bruce, you do agree that NOBODY should be getting ANY gubmint relief from this binge induced hangover, right?

Like I said yesterday, I was somewhat cheered up to see resistance from the Dems (Reid, et al), until I found out that they weren't resisting whether or not to give a bailout, just which fucking pigs get to feed at the trough!

Same shit....different day.

Bewert said...

Re: Bruce, you do agree that NOBODY should be getting ANY gubmint relief from this binge induced hangover, right?

Yep--like the Pug's keep claiming (until it costs their buds money) the market should sort it out.

It's incredibly contentious, watching the hearings. Dems and many Pugs asking biting questions and dissing the answers.

I think we should take a legislative amount of time to get anything done. Months...if not years. It seems that cash-flush private parties are more than willing, like Buffet, to step in at a market price.

So why fuck the rest of us?

Bewert said...

On the local/national mortgage/foreclosure crisis, I think it just has to be worked out. Allowing BK judges to adjust terms makes sense, if only to keep owners in homes they will take care of. The homes Paulson wants us to own...

The next biggies are credit cards, auto loans, and commercial RE.

But the bogeyman are those credit default swaps. They are totally unregulated made-up theoretical gaurantees against non-payment. On a $60-$75 trillion scale. Roughly equal to the entire world's GDP.

That needs to be shut down.

Quimby said...

>> Allowing BK judges to adjust terms makes sense

Are people not responsible for their actions?

Bewert said...

Re: Are people not responsible for their actions?

There seems to be some fraud in the payment amounts proffered.

Yes, you are responsible, but have you ever read the entire pile of docs at a closing?

If they can pay reasonable amounts, say equal to rents, why not let them. If not, yes, boot them. And take care of the place.

We have a huge overhang in housing right now. That's the big issue. Even if everything was perfect, there are far more units than occupants. The legacy of the boom.

Anonymous said...

POSTPONE the ELECTION, make BUSH&PAULSON prez forever, ... so says wall-street.

***

The Wall Street Journal

Sept. 24, 2008

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said he will "suspend" his campaign on Thursday, and asked to delay Friday night's debate against Democratic candidate Barack Obama, so he can return to Washington to deal with the financial crisis. Congress is currently considering a $700 billion bailout plan that is drawing increased scrutiny from lawmakers.

Anonymous said...

It's like the last ditch effort of BushCo to suck the rest of the money out of the government before Obama takes office.

*

He'll never leave office, under the 'emergency' he'll remain in power forever, and NOBODY will stop him, not even PELOSI.

Quimby said...

>> Yes, you are responsible, but have you ever read the entire pile of docs at a closing?

>> If they can pay reasonable amounts, say equal to rents, why not let them.


Have I read the docs that I sign when obligating myself to repayment of hundreds of thousands of dollars.....uhhh.....you're damn right I have! And I understand them too. If I didn't, I wouldn't sign them. I also wouldn't mess around with any ARMs either...but what does stupid 'ol Quimby know? I drive a POS car....I'm a LOSER in most Cali's eyes.

I don't invest in something I don't understand. I've been burned before....that's why I don't have a lot in stocks/bonds etc. It ALL looks like smoke/mirrors to me.

Regarding letting folks pay reasonable amounts: that should be left up to the counter-party who signed the agreement, not some government action forcing a change of terms. If you can't afford what you agreed and signed, then you can't afford it and should rightfully suffer the consequences of YOUR CHOICE TO TAKE ON RISK. That goes for homeowners AND banks/Wall Street.

NO BAILOUTS!

Quimby said...

>> We have a huge overhang in housing right now. That's the big issue. Even if everything was perfect, there are far more units than occupants. The legacy of the boom.

Yes Bruce, I agree. This bailout further manipulates the market into supporting inflated prices on RE assets. If the chips fell where they should, you could pick up a house for $120K vs. this smoke/mirrors $350K bubble bullshit pricing! It is simply perpetuating a delusion. :(

Anonymous said...

quim,

Your trying to get BP to take personal responsibility, you know he was forced to move to Bend, and buy a house.

Well the first part was true, but even BP, he had the 'breath', e.g. he passed the 'breath test', but still failed to get the loan, I mean noose.

Most folks here are renters, and thus are geni-asses.

Hell yes, NO BAILOUT, trouble is, that MTG is like 20% of the PROBLEM.

The problem is that 80% of the money-market ain't t-bills, and 80% of retirement 'investments' if marked-to-market, would evaporate, there is probably $10 TRILLION in assets that are going to dissapear if&when this SHIT gets marked to market.

It's been going on since the 1970's with derivatives, the paper just went from 10to1 1930's leverage, to today at 1,000 to 1. Thus we have a choice inject 10-20 TRILLION in cash to replace all the paper with T-NOTES, or let 80% of our net-worth as nation evaporate.

The MTG/HOUSING is just the straw that broke the camel's back, but by no means is MTG the reason that 80% of ALL paper is NOT worth 'accounted value'. The trouble is from 10+ years til now the accounting has been allowed to keep non-existent assets on the books.

Australia 'market-to-market' this summer, painful, but now they know where they are,

In many ways HOMER is right, like JAPAN in the 80's the USA will refuse to 'market-to-market' and force this 'crisis' to go on for decades.

At the very least in terms of status-quo, its better for those in power to keep what they have, rather than known they have nothing.

Most people in this country, could NEVER tolerate the truth, we're a nation of lies, and thus the truth MUST NEVER be told, e.g. we'll not 'mark-to-market' until total fucking collapse, and then CHINA or SINGAPORE will buy this country wholesale, and that will be the NEW 'market price'.

Anonymous said...

The problem today is that since 1998, the average US citizen has a negative savings rate, e.g. he don't invest.

Thus 99% of our investing comes from FOREIGNERS, today THEY HAVE NO CONFIDENCE.

The $700M figure is to bail-out the foriegners. FUCK the US citizens.

We don't need the US penal colony inhabitants, what TEAM-BUSH needs is YUAN & EUROS coming in every day.

Of course foreign investment has MORE to do with the fact that BUSH is an asshole, than the actual confidence factor.

It's all a case of the perfect storm, the MTG & BUSH-ASSHOLE broke the US camels back.

Anonymous said...

If the chips fell where they should, you could pick up a house for $120K

*

The BEND RE will still fall to $120k, the $700M to wall-street is just to bring back the fun.

That's why PAULSON doesn't want to 'lock' pay, can you imagine that $700M not going to $10M/yr salarys for team-bush post election????

Bewert said...

Re: uhhh.....you're damn right I have!

You are one of a very small class. Unfortunately.

Re: Mark to market

That is the issue du jour. No one wants to take the first step, even though Merrill just did a 22 cents on the dollar.

It's going to be a bloodbath no matter what. The real question is do we keep pumping taxpayer money in trying to delay it, or do we just take the fucking hit and get it over with.

Of course, I don't have millions in bonuses and options that rely on not taking the hit.

I thought I heard the chimp speaking just now, but when I went out to see, it was McCain. Hmmm...

I say we take the Australia option.

Anonymous said...

bruce said...
Marge, how does YTD compare? NODs seem to have slowed a little this month--we're only at 1242 right now.

2006 Sept. MTD sold 104 @$377
2007 Sept.MTD sold 89 @ $320k median
2008 Sept. MTD sold 74 @$273k
YTD 822 Sold Bend only SFR's @ $300k median.
For the entire County and all types of residential 1748 sold. But the NOD's include lots also.

Bewert said...

I'm sorry, but the chimp is embarassing as an American...

"I'm against government intervention...but these are not normal circumstances..."

This huge ongoing bailout simply has to be stopped by a general scream from constituents.

Call Walden and yell loudly: 202-225-6730

Call Gordo and scream NO: 202.224.3753

Let them die. What was that quote from three years ago, in testimony on how well the regulation system is working? Here:

...eligible counterparties can and should be expected to protect themselves against fraud and counterparty credit losses.

Exactly. The rest is here: http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/2005/20050908/default.htm

Call and scream loudly.

Anonymous said...

I thought I heard the chimp speaking just now, but when I went out to see, it was McCain. Hmmm...

I say we take the Australia option.

*

The rest of the world can do this because 'marking their US assets to market' is only a small percentage of their GDP.

In our case 'marking out assets to market' wipes out our entire GDP, and thus the crisis.

Face it folks its the Russia collapse and it here now, and nothing is going to fix it, team-bush played stupid, and everyone prior was in denial, the bill collector is now at the front door.

The 'bail-out' is only a last ditch attempt for insiders to get paid, and exit, especially the 'lawyers'.

Can we also make a promise that NOT a nickel of the $700M goes to lawyers???

What does this mean?? Money Market gone, retirements public & private - GONE.

War's GONE. HYPER-INFLATION here!!!

Anonymous said...

Let them die. What was that quote from three years ago, in testimony on how well the regulation system is working? Here:

*

Sorry BP, but what your saying is let PERS die, let AARP die, let every pensioner in the US over 60 die.

Trouble is its not going to happen, one more instance where the US oldsters will FUCK the youngsters, but this time your kids and grand-kids are slaves forever.

Certainly its agreeable that those who played high-risk eat it, but the problem is that means ALL mutual funds, and investments in general. Almost all bonds, ... its endless the 'RICH' would get hit very hard, and they're the ones that OWN the politicians.

The very best we can hope for is a rich mans civil war where the rich all kill each other in order to secure a piece of this $700M.

Anonymous said...


1 pm prez gw-bush endorses bailout
2:46 p.m.: John McCain pronounces Bush's bailout proposal dead.


Bailing Out of the Bailout
Wash-Post
By Dana Milbank
Thursday, September 25, 2008

Congressional leaders assembled yesterday on the West Front of the Capitol for the "First Nail Ceremony" to start work on the viewing platform for the Jan. 20th presidential inauguration. While they had the hammer out, they should have nailed a sign to the Capitol door: "Help Wanted."

As the nation plunges into economic crisis, Washington imploded into a leadership vacuum yesterday.

1:17 p.m.: President Bush schedules a prime-time address to the nation to sell his Wall Street bailout package.

2:15 p.m.: Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a lead negotiator, announces progress in talks on the package.

2:30 p.m.: Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testify to House in support of the plan.

2:46 p.m.: John McCain pronounces Bush's bailout proposal dead.

Is anybody in charge here?

Not the president, evidently. He's so unpopular that Democrats who favor a bailout plan urged him not to speak about it in public. "Frankly, I don't think that will help us pass the bill," Frank told reporters.

Not the vice president, either. After Dick Cheney appeared before House Republicans on Tuesday night to sell them on the proposal, lawmakers emerged howling about the "enslavement" of taxpayers and the "confiscation" of taxpayer money, and they likened the vice president's sales job to that of a used-car salesman or a shady Realtor.

And certainly not the Treasury secretary, whom lawmakers on both sides berated for a second consecutive day yesterday. "We may be looking at national bankruptcy and the road to socialism," Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) said after hearing from Paulson yesterday morning.

The presidential candidates, as the leaders of their parties, could bring recalcitrant lawmakers on board. And they have a powerful incentive: The crisis, if left unchecked, will almost surely make a mess of the first term of either John McCain or Barack Obama by leaving the country in a deep recession, or worse. But instead of proposals, they've offered platitudes.

McCain, meeting with business big shots in New York yesterday, took the bold stand that the bailout package should "be in the best interest of the people of this country." Further, the brave candidate proposed that the proposal should have "transparency, accountability, CEO responsibility." But don't corner him with specifics.

Bewert said...

Re: The very best we can hope for is a rich mans civil war where the rich all kill each other in order to secure a piece of this $700M.

Now that's fucking dark.

We should try to get our local pensions, PERS, etc. to cough up numbers of their exposure. I haven't seen that much yet, other then Lehman being "less than 1/4 of 1 percent". It would be very helpful right now.

Bewert said...

I still think it's the Pugs/BushCo's last swipe at the national asset base, in order to keep Obama from doing anything that could possibly help the middle class.

All we have to do is scream for two more weeks. And it's passed on to a new adminisration.

You really think the financial collapse of the entire world is going to happen in the next two weeks? Like Henry and Ben cry?

Yeah, right.

Call our local senator and rep. Numbers above. Call enough and they have to listen. Especially since they are both in an election year.

Here, via cut and paste:
Call Walden and yell loudly: 202-225-6730

Call Gordo and scream NO: 202.224.3753

Ask them why they are giving Wall St. $700 billion or more while local countys are fighting for pothole-filling scraps.

Repeatedly.

Anonymous said...

Yes.

Call now!!

Call everybody. Now!!

Operators are standing by.

Call your City Cousilors.

PS and put in a good word for Pussy's ButtPlugs while your at it.


What a dumbfuck...

Anonymous said...

George Soros speaks out about what a fucking idiot PAULSON is, ...

***

Paulson cannot be allowed a blank cheque

By George Soros

Published: September 24 2008 20:28 | Last updated: September 24 2008 20:28

Hank Paulson’s $700bn rescue package has run into difficulty on Capitol Hill. Rightly so: it was ill-conceived. Congress would be abdicating its responsibility if it gave the Treasury secretary a blank cheque. The bill submitted to Congress even had language in it that would exempt the secretary’s decisions from review by any court or administrative agency – the ultimate fulfillment of the Bush administration’s dream of a unitary executive.

Mr Paulson’s record does not inspire the confidence necessary to give him discretion over $700bn. His actions last week brought on the crisis that makes rescue necessary. On Monday he allowed Lehman Brothers to fail and refused to make government funds available to save AIG. By Tuesday he had to reverse himself and provide an $85bn loan to AIG on punitive terms. The demise of Lehman disrupted the commercial paper market. A large money market fund “broke the buck” and investment banks that relied on the commercial paper market had difficulty financing their operations. By Thursday a run on money market funds was in full swing and we came as close to a meltdown as at any time since the 1930s. Mr Paulson reversed again and proposed a systemic rescue.

Mr Paulson had got a blank cheque from Congress once before. That was to deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His solution landed the housing market in the worst of all worlds: their managements knew that if the blank cheques were filled out they would lose their jobs, so they retrenched and made mortgages more expensive and less available. Within a few weeks the market forced Mr Paulson’s hand and he had to take them over.

Mr Paulson’s proposal to purchase distressed mortgage-related securities poses a classic problem of asymmetric information. The securities are hard to value but the sellers know more about them than the buyer: in any auction process the Treasury would end up with the dregs. The proposal is also rife with latent conflict of interest issues. Unless the Treasury overpays for the securities, the scheme would not bring relief. But if the scheme is used to bail out insolvent banks, what will the taxpayers get in return?

Barack Obama has outlined four conditions that ought to be imposed: an upside for the taxpayers as well as a downside; a bipartisan board to oversee the process; help for the homeowners as well as the holders of the mortgages; and some limits on the compensation of those who benefit from taxpayers’ money. These are the right principles. They could be applied more effectively by capitalising the institutions that are burdened by distressed securities directly rather than by relieving them of the distressed securities.

The injection of government funds would be much less problematic if it were applied to the equity rather than the balance sheet. $700bn in preferred stock with warrants may be sufficient to make up the hole created by the bursting of the housing bubble. By contrast, the addition of $700bn on the demand side of an $11,000bn market may not be sufficient to arrest the decline of housing prices.

Something also needs to be done on the supply side. To prevent housing prices from overshooting on the downside, the number of foreclosures has to be kept to a minimum. The terms of mortgages need to be adjusted to the homeowners’ ability to pay.

The rescue package leaves this task undone. Making the necessary modifications is a delicate task rendered more difficult by the fact that many mortgages have been sliced up and repackaged in the form of collateralised debt obligations. The holders of the various slices have conflicting interests. It would take too long to work out the conflicts to include a mortgage modification scheme in the rescue package. The package can, however, prepare the ground by modifying bankruptcy law as it relates to principal residences.

Now that the crisis has been unleashed a large-scale rescue package is probably indispensable to bring it under control. Rebuilding the depleted balance sheets of the banking system is the right way to go. Not every bank deserves to be saved, but the experts at the Federal Reserve, with proper supervision, can be counted on to make the right judgments. Managements that are reluctant to accept the consequences of past mistakes could be penalised by depriving them of the Fed’s credit facilities. Making government funds available should also encourage the private sector to participate in recapitalising the banking sector and bringing the financial crisis to a close.

The writer is chairman of Soros Fund Management

Anonymous said...

We should try to get our local pensions, PERS, etc. to cough up numbers of their exposure. I haven't seen that much yet, other then Lehman being "less than 1/4 of 1 percent". It would be very helpful right now.

*


Here's a good estimate for you BP, if you own money-market, bonds, a pension, .. your fucked, the safe bet right-now is 80% is not really there, across the board, trouble is by the time all the lawyers go through it all it will be 10 cents on the dollar.

Safety?? I was telling people TWO fucking years ago to put their money in EUROS.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Quimby...NO BAILOUTS!!!
the fact that they want the decisions that are made to be nonreviewable..are you fucking kidding me?

Dottiebug

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

the financial collapse of the entire world is going to happen in the next two weeks?

The last time the American Public was whipped into such a fear-fueled frenzy was..... oh yes, The Iraq "War".

How did that turn out? WMD's?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Notice that the higher the FEVER PITCH of FEAR regarding the COLLAPSE of this country, the higher the stock market goes. Why? Of course, this thing will stick BILLIONS into the pockets of Wall Streeters.

Look at Katrina: Any FRANTIC FEAR-FUELED Government MANDATE to SOLVE A CRISIS has turned into a MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR MONEY GRAB.

BushCo: "If we don't act NOW, THE WORLD WILL END!" This is the third time we have had to endure this line of bullshit. It costs us billions, and everytime there are HUNDREDS of BILLIONS in no-bid contracts to OSAMA.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

WaMu back to $2. Get YO MUNEE OUT!

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Conversely, Fannie up 362% in last 5 trading days. Fredie has beaten that handily, up 727% in 5 days.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

U.S. New-Home Sales Fell in August to 17-Year Low

Lennar Corp., the second-largest U.S. homebuilder, this week reported its sixth straight quarterly loss and said the government must take measures to boost home prices that are down by nearly a fifth from their 2006 peaks.

``Consensus is building that falling home prices are not only detrimental to the economy at large, but in order to repair our failing financial system we will have to stop the decline,'' Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller said.

Stricter lending regulations and tumbling home prices make it harder for Americans to tap home equity for extra cash. Consumer spending in the third quarter will probably be the weakest since 1991, according to economists surveyed earlier this month.


Awesome. This housing builder CEO thinks that BRINGING BACK THE BUBBLE will solve our housing problem. Good call.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

If the chips fell where they should, you could pick up a house for $120K vs. this smoke/mirrors $350K bubble bullshit pricing! It is simply perpetuating a delusion. :(

Amen, brother.

Anonymous said...

Ultimate 'golden parachute' for all bush crony's.

Are you a BUSH crony? Then support the bailout cuz you'll probably get a nickel.

Are you a pussy?

Note that OR-BOMB-EO has already said there will be "NO CARGO" coming, we know that folks like BP are cargo-cultists, and OR-BOMB-EO was going be bringing all kinds of good shit in cargo-containers to all DEM's. A few days ago OR-BOMB-EO said "With this bailout, there will be no cargo".

So $700Billion goes to the SAME people that put BUSH-TRIBE into office in the first place.

This is actually quite brilliant, what it says is that for any constituency that enables a party, that the party will enrich that constituency.

Not that even $1 trillion is that much money, hell its still only 10% of our debt.

What the Pug's have done here is prove that ANY OUTGOING PARTY, can HAND $1 TRILLION to anybody they wish!!!!

This is fucking outstanding.

BUSH proved the exec can do any fucking thing.

But now BUSH has proved that you can grab as much money for you 'own people' as you wish, and everybody will go along.

Again, its not that big of a deal in terms of US DEBT, it will never be paid anyhow. Hell the known cost to date of the IRAQ-WAR is/was $2 Trillion.

So what's another $1 trillion?? Nada, nothing, ...

Either way ma&pa pensioner is fucked.

Wall street is fucked, the buzzards are going to be fighting over this $700B for months. If the PUG's get this prize before the election, then you know at least $100B will got towards getting MC-CAIN elected.

Which means MORE CARGO for the pug's....

You pussy's just ain't going to get no cargo, until learn to steal at the highest levels.

Bush has accomplished shit that was un-heard of, accountable to nobody, un-impeachable for any offense.

Day light robbery of $1 trillion, with 100% support of both party's.

Who is this pin-ball wizard, what makes him so good??


HL-MENCKEN said that "ALL elections are an advance auction of stolen goods".

This election will be the biggest heist in HISTORY. NOBODY goes into politics without personal wealth in mind. The sky is now the limit, anything is possible.

All car loans, home-loans, ... all that stupid debt wiped out, and paid off, and your ok, the US is a debtor nation, and we must wipe out all the debt ( or worthless assets ), so we can continue to be what we are.

Did you save your money, take out no debt, play by them old-fashion rules?? Then you be fucked.

Rob, Steal, Cheat, loot, borrow, and lose it all, its the American way, and you'll always get taken care of.

Given that ALL of our money now comes from FOREIGNERS and they're sick of this shit, and have NO CONFIDENCE in any of the US ruling class. This is what to watch.

It's easy to FUCK the US citizen, that's been done forever. This world-cop thing is an attempt to fuck the world, but the world ain't playing, and at this point in time, the USA has NOTHING the world wants.

Quimby said...

>> Did you save your money, take out no debt, play by them old-fashion rules?? Then you be fucked.

Yes, and I am livid. I get punished for educating myself, taking extremely conservative positions and taking the "lack of returns" downsides of those choices, only to realize that I bet the wrong way. In fact, it would have been smarter for me to just play along like every other dumbfuck in the nation who DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE INVESTING IN, except they're told 24/7 to invest here by Chuck Schwab, et al.

I am the sucker. The kid on the sidelines.

Quimby said...

Yes, Quimby is bitching and feeling sorry for himself. Move along....nothing to see here. :)

LavaBear said...

Whoa...I got my inner "Bruce" on today and called both Senators and every Oregon rep we got. I fat fingered one of the numbers and the lady that answered seemed exhausted. Her first question was "You looking for the Senators office?". She has had hundreds of calls in the last two days.

I told each office that I was 100% for the frickin bailout if they could tell me how they were going to pay for it besides putting it on the Credit Card and then taking out some more of the Treasury HELOC cash from China. Only Defazio's intern got it.

Bewert said...

LB-damn! If the wrong number has had hundreds of calls, imagine what the real number is getting.

Let them know that no fucking way are you going to vote for anyone that bails out millionaires with your money and puts the foxes BACK in charge of the henhouse.

Both Gordo and Walden are up for re-election in 40 days or so, so beat the shit out of their staffs. Gordo is in the fight of his life. Demand transparency, accountability, and regulation of credit default swaps (they won't know what the hell you are talking about, but it needs to be brought into the public process) by repealing the never debated Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Tell them that just over two short years ago Fed testimony on this act that prevents ANY regulation of default credit swaps, a market of nothing but paper promises that has exploded to $70 trillion or so since 2000, MUST BE REGULATED.

Just how fucking dumb can you be by not putting rules on a market that is larger than the entire production (you know, real stuff) GDP of the entire world?

Call early, call often, email, even fax is you want. Slow this TRAP (Taxpayer Anal Rape Program) down until after the election. The world isn't going to end tomorrow.

If there really wasn't any money around, the market wouldn't be up hundreds of points, ya know.

Bewert said...

Damn, forgot to finish this: just over two short years ago Fed testimony indicated that "...eligible counterparties can and should be expected to protect themselves against fraud and counterparty credit losses."

So why are we all of a sudden bailing them out?

CDO's (sliced and diced mortgages, auto loans, even credit card debts) backed by CDS's (credit default swaps, one party pays another so that in the case of default the second party pays the debt, BUT NOT REALLY, as is obivious now) simply must be regulated. And if the market is going to do it like we have been told over and over and over again, the fucking idiots that made those bets need to pay.

When even considering bailing these assholes out, remember this from less than two years ago:

It's a Wall Street bonus bonanza

NEW YORK — Executives at Wall Street's top financial firms will probably remember this holiday season with particular fondness, as soaring profits cascade down to traders and bankers in the form of multimillion-dollar bonuses.
This year, four of the top five brokerage houses have posted record earnings, paced by Goldman Sachs, where income jumped 68% over 2005.

Even Morgan Stanley, where an ugly internal putsch resulted in the ouster of an autocratic CEO last year, bounced back smartly in 2006, announcing a 51% rise in earnings Tuesday.

Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. also set records for revenue and earnings.

As a reward for Goldman's blockbuster performance, CEO Lloyd Blankfein received a staggering bonus of $53.4 million this week, the largest ever granted to a Wall Street CEO.

Joining Blankfein in the bonus stratosphere is Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, who got $40.2 million last week.


Lehman CEO Richard Fuld got a seemingly modest $10.9 million bonus earlier this month. But don't shed any tears for him: Fuld also received a 10-year stock payout worth $186 million.

All told, this year's bonus pool for Wall Street executives hit $23.9 billion, the New York State Comptroller's office estimates. That's a 17% jump from last year's bonus pool of $20.5 billion, and it works out to an average bonus of $137,580 for every person employed in the financial services industry.

But few will receive bonus checks for the average amount. Instead, the top executives at these firms and their most successful traders will get bonuses north of $10 million each, while the underperformers and support staff will receive far less than the average.

Such is life in the fast lane of the financial sector, where salaries are dwarfed by the bonanzas reaped each December. "The salaries on Wall Street are generally very small," says Alan Johnson of Johnson Associates, who advises financial firms on compensation matters. He says someone who makes only $150,000 to $200,000 in salary might get a $9.8 million bonus.


These are the folks we are bailing out.

Remember that.

Anonymous said...

Rocky Mt. News:

If Winston Churchill could leave London in December 1941 and travel to America to address a joint session of Congress even as British troops in the Far East were reeling under Japanese attacks, somehow we think John McCain can make his way down to Oxford, Miss., for a debate Friday evening without imperiling the future of America. In this case, Barack Obama is right.

Anonymous said...

Ron Paul's opinion on the bailout:
Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,



Ron Paul

Anonymous said...

NEW YORK — Executives at Wall Street's top financial firms will probably remember this holiday season with particular fondness, as soaring profits cascade down to traders and bankers in the form of multimillion-dollar bonuses.

*

If the bailout passes there will be at least $100 Billion in campaign contributions floating around.

The bailouts are always those where EVERYBODY gets a ton of candy.

Bewert said...

Ron Paul: I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.


Some idiot anonymouse said about this "What a dumbfuck..."

Those people (you) we are both urging you to overwhelm with negative contacts are the very people they are hoping return them to their places of comfort in a few weeks. They will listen to masses of voters.

They have to.

Call Walden and yell loudly about repealing the CFMA, and say we must regulate the largest individual market in the world: 202-225-6730

Call Gordo and scream NO fucking blank check to folks who have received tens of millions in bonuses the last few years: 202.224.3753

And even Wyden, just to tell him to tell the Wall St. Ho's to fuck off: (202) 224-5244

Bewert said...

CNBC announced WaMu sold to JP Morgan Chase by force of the FDIC.

Bewert said...

JPMorgan to Acquire Washington Mutual's Deposits

Anonymous said...

off topic: PacNW real estate:

Seattle home sales plummet 41% from a year ago
Drop much steeper than national trend

In Seattle, sales declined more than 41 percent versus a year ago. While in Portland, sales plunged more than 34 percent.

It's taking around 120 days to sell a home in Portland and about 145 days in Seattle, said Bob Christian, chief operating officer of Century 21 North Homes Realty in Seattle.

"Most times in a balanced market, we experience (sales) times of around 90 days," he said.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/380463_homesales25.html

Anonymous said...

So everybody here is AGAINST the bail-out right?

Yet, we're TOLD that the bail-out is about BUSH-OBAMA, its the DEM's and BUSH that want the bailout.

The PUGS don't want the bail-out.

The DEMs love the bailout cuz they know its $700M of PORK for everyone.

BUSH of course don't give a fuck, just wants to say he tried to do something, before he gets the blame for BK'ing USA.

My point is how does the pussy rationalize this? We ALL being against the bailout means we're ALL right-wingers??

The problem I see is the bailout just fucking SUCKS, and is welfare for the rich.

FUCK BUSH-OBMAMA.

Anonymous said...

It's taking around 120 days to sell a home in Portland

*

Yeh, if the house is listed for -50% of the high,

tim said...

Washington Mutual is the biggest bank failure in history.

Bewert said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bewert said...

RE: So everybody here is AGAINST the bail-out right?

Yet, we're TOLD that the bail-out is about BUSH-OBAMA, its the DEM's and BUSH that want the bailout.

...

You sure no Pug's have lined up?

Ignore Shelby, he is one of 50, one of the very safest one to yell loudly.

This is a fucking mess, but nothing that the Pug's marketplace cannot solve, with some well deserved pain.

So let's let the marketplace rule. With transparecy that is regulated and actually enforced.

Bewert said...

Actually, call Shelby and push him on.

Bewert said...

Re: The PUGS don't want the bail-out.

Remind me again, what was your first clue?

Other than Bush's speech last night.

The Natives Are Restless said...

To all you pussy Cali fucking SC fucks. GO BEAVS

Anonymous said...

"Washington Mutual is the biggest bank failure in history."

i know it is the biggest in u.s.a. history but is it really the unqualified biggest? i sort of recall some giant ones in japan years ago.

Anonymous said...

The PUGS don't want the bail-out.

*

BUSH ain't a PUG, he's a DEM, don't you know?

Its the OR-BOMB-EO/BUSH bailout.

The pugs like Shelby and Ron Paul are against the bailout.

The DEM's love this shit, $700B, just applying standard tip rates, that's $140B for lawyers and politicians.

Anonymous said...

Washington Mutual is the biggest bank failure in history.

*

"WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED??"

Another FUCKING slow moving train wreck.

I mean we were talking about how fucked WAMU was with their MTG's 2+ years ago.

WAMU was writing MTG's to dog's, Bend's Dead, and folks with a breath.

Anonymous said...

McCain talks shit about the BAILOUT and then went to DC to fix it, and really fucked up the meeting.

Of course OR-BOMB-EO just sat there like a good nigger giving BUSH a hand-job, OR-BOMB-EO never met a plantation owner he didn't like.

The theater just keeps getting better.

McCain is really the maverick, he's making OR-BOMB-EO appear to be MORE BUSH THAN BUSH.

While McCain distances himself from BUSH.

If this FUCKING BAILOUT in any form passes, the DEM's will get blamed, and the Pug's will then have a cleaver to hit the DEM's with in 30 days, and call it the DUMBEST FUCKING DEM GIVEAWAY in HISTORY.

All this shit can wait until Jan 2009.

Next monday is a Jewish holiday, and the word on the street is the bailout has to be done by then, otherwise the Israelis are pulling their money out of the US market.

Anonymous said...

It ain't just Shelby BP, its the powerful Pug's, that don't want the fucking BAILOUT. BUSH wants it, like he wanted the IRAQ war. Dem's want it cuz, if the precedent that $700B can be done for wall-street, then we're going to be seeing DEM crisis daily, and $1Trillion here and there might add up to be real money.

***

“We’re in a serious economic crisis,” Mr. Bush told reporters as the meeting began shortly before 4 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, adding, “My hope is we can reach an agreement very shortly.”

But once the doors closed, the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.

Anonymous said...

The House Republicans’ revolt shocked Democrats; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said later that he was under the impression that Mr. Boehner had been a strong advocate for moving forward with the Paulson plan.

*

BUSH is despised by his own party.

The DEM's are now willing to call BUSH one of their own.

The Pug's are playing chess, and sitting up a DEM trap.

Anonymous said...

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. —Thomas Jefferson, 1802

China Asks Local Lenders Not To Lend To U.S. Banks


HONG KONG -- Chinese regulators have asked domestic banks to stop lending to U.S. financial institutions in the interbank money markets to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported Thursday. The China Banking Regulatory Commission's ban on interbank lending of all currencies applied to U.S. banks, but not to lenders from other countries, the report added, citing a source.

Copyright © 2008 MarketWatch, Inc.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

The DEM's are now willing to call BUSH one of their own.

I know... what is this, Bizzaro World?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

I trust everyone heeded my WaMu Abandonment Cries?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Lib's are for a Wall St Executive Pork Barrel Bonanza, and the RePugs are balking.

What the hell?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Bend Aug Unemployment: 6.8%

Aug 2007: 4.6%

We'll be back to The Bad Old Days (double digits) by Feb.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

WaMu's failure is 8X larger than the previous record bank failure, Continental Ill, way back in 1984.

Got Bubble?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Building chill means more Bend budget cuts

And that slowdown in building is hurting the city of Bend's budget.

"We didn't expect as much of a drop in the development services fees, which has been 50 percent" below projections for the first quarter of the fiscal year that started July 1, said city spokesman Justin Finestone.

That translates to $1 million less than projected for the first quarter of this budget year, money that was expected to come from builders applying for building and inspection permits.


We have got some sharp minds in City Hall, folks. THIRD TIME they have been 100% SURPRISED by a drop in housing-related revenue. $1 mill short... and they didn't see it coming.

Unbelievable.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Wall St is in for a beating this morning. Some of the pre-market prices are in implosion-land...

Even Wells Fargo, which has been making hay at WaMu's expense, is down hard this AM.

My IRA's are in for a beating, but I say "Let 'er go down HARD!" I hate this bailout.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

U.S. Stock Futures Slide as Rescue Plan Stalls; WaMu Tumbles

Marc Faber, managing director of Marc Faber Ltd. in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg Television the U.S. government's rescue package may require as much as $5 trillion, seven times the amount Paulson has requested.

This is closer to the truth.

My Original, Ultra-Doomsday, Civilization-Ender $10 TRILLION estimate is starting to look downright possible!

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

What I find INCREDIBLE is the ridiculous assertion that REFLATING the housing bubble is the only way out of this thing. I've heard this from several RE wonks, including Lennar's CEO.

There is NO WAY out of this. Housing must return to AFFORDABILITY NORMS for housing to emerge from it's funk, but if housing DOES GO to historical norms, this implosion will get worse.

There is every indication that home prices will NOT stop at historical norms, and will cut right through those prices like BUTT-UH, and go to very undervalued ranges AND STAY THERE, for many, MANY moons.

Again, this thing will get SO MUCH WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT POSSIBLE... it will become IRRATIONALLY BAD. We'll be in depression, or a near-depression era for the US economy.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Whew, BushCo really calmed my jangled nerves with his ad-libbed speech.

"Ummmmmm, problem big. We need do something Now. End Communication."

Anonymous said...

"My IRA's are in for a beating, but I say "Let 'er go down HARD!" I hate this bailout"

+++

Me too. I am getting hosed big time.

But the crash needs to happen, without the $1T bailout (and then all the Dem sucking at the gov't teat that will follow).

BKs all around.

Anonymous said...

The DEM's are now willing to call BUSH one of their own.

I know... what is this, Bizzaro World?


*


Yes. Life is upside down.

BP is channeling Newt.

And I always that that BP was more a Barney Frank kinda guy. You know, Pussys and Fags always flame together.

Bizzaro World...

Anonymous said...

"We've been listening to the American people, and the American people have told us that they don't want to foot the bill," Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Illinois, said.


The Pussy demanded to be heard.

The Pussy has been heard in WashDC.

The Pussy is a closet gay-man, and Pug from Utah Mormonville.

But the Pussy was an outted kept-man and Pussy.

I am confused. Pussy was a Libruhl, welfare statist sucking the rich milk from Momma's Gov't teat.

Now Pussy is a conservative Pug. And a Pussy Libruhl. Is the Pussy BOTH?

Does the Pussy have a twat and a penis? Two organs in one?

The Pussy is a strange one indeed...

Anonymous said...

Let's be HONEST here, the last two weeks has been a SETUP.

1.) The closing of 'shorts' was a bear-trap, that created a two-day rise, that BUSH could say indicated 'plan' support.

2.) The 'plan' had so many fucking 'poison pills' is had no fucking chance.

3.) The Dem's are NOW support the most un-popular prez in history, not a good sign.

4.) McCain's campaign is imploding the street is full of rumors of dementia & Alzheimer, and Palin is looking worse by the day.

5.) Greenberg sold 50% of AIG yesterday, at the PEAK of the bail-out HOPE.

6.) While BUSH admits emergency, nobody still admits recession has been with us for 1-1/2 years.

7.) US cash is no longer accepted in Europe, and Asia is advising 'investors' to avoid US.

The 'bail-out' is setup, and most likely will be done by OR-BOMB-EO. The charade over the past week was an attempt to raise the market so that Wealth Jew's could sell out, orchestrated by Paulson & Bernanke.

Sometime during the spring of 2009, under prez OR-BOMB-EO there will be a +$1Trillion bail-out.

There will be no 'CARGO' for the pussy, OR-BOMB-EO has made that clear, no fix for social-security, and no health-care.

The 'FIX' is in OR-BOMB-EO will be the only candidate. McCain was sold PALIN, and she'll destroy his candidacy. Note all the pic's in the whitehouse show Lieberman always be McCain, it could still happen. McCain wants this BAD, but the fix is IN, and McCain is PISSED.

OR-BOMB-EO is quite happy, its a shoe-in for him now, so he thinks.

Back seen McCain is working with Shelby & Boehner to derail the bail-out and make it something acceptable to real 'conservatives'. OR-BOMB-EO has now surgically attached himself to BUSH. The OREO transformation is complete OR-BOMB-EO is now BUSH in a black-pussy's body.

The thing to watch now is McCain, what will he do?? In desperation. I concur if I were him, I would declare 'campaign over', the fix is in whats the point, when BUSH is working privately with OR-BOMB-EO?

So PUG banking leaders and McCain will work to fuck Paulson/Cox/Bernanke&Bush.

Danger right now is that all these folks against the bail-out are RIGHT, it will not help to print $1-10TRILLION in paper and had a blank-check to PAULSON, it will do nothing to IMPROVE foreign confidence.

The USA is going to implode like Russia, we'll probably lose lots of our colonys, as we can't afford to have US bases in 92 countrys. Our money is worthless, we have made the US dollar insolvent, and once that happens all you can do is KILL the federal-reserve and issue a new currency based on gold or some hard asset, and then confidence will return.

Today you have BUSH&OR-BOMB-EO, & Lieberman as the only supporters of the FED-RESERVE.

The US repug party under bush has killed itself, a new party will come out the 'anti bail-out party'. The 'cargo cult' people that just want stolen cargo will starve and form the 'pussy xmas party'.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

5.) Greenberg sold 50% of AIG yesterday, at the PEAK of the bail-out HOPE.

Greenberg Sells 40 Million AIG Shares, Cutting Stake in Insurer


Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Maurice ``Hank'' Greenberg, the former chief executive officer of American International Group Inc., sold off 40 million shares of the insurer for about $125.9 million after the stock tumbled more than 90 percent this year.

Starr International Co., a firm run by Greenberg, sold 35 million AIG shares at $3.06 each, Starr said yesterday in a filing. Greenberg, 83, sold 5 million shares for about $3.77 apiece. He still controls more than 10 percent of the company.

Greenberg is selling shares ``for liquidity,'' according to another regulatory filing. Greenberg and companies he runs owned about 11 percent of AIG, the largest block, before the sales.


Wow, that is BRUTAL. AIG has 2.69BB shares outstanding. How the mighty have fallen... $70/sh down to $3.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

And you thought WaMu was big? AIG has 3X the assets WaMu has...

Anonymous said...

The Pussy is a closet gay-man, and Pug from Utah Mormonville.

*


I have always thought that 90% of the time, the pussy just makes lib's look bad.

Note there are lib's & dem's, con's, & pug's.

There are very few real lib's on this board, perhaps TT&BUSTER.

The pussy talks like a dem, but in his desire for 'cargo' he support's BUSH, just like OR-BOMB-EO, shit $1 TRILLION or more debt under BUSH, he is the CARGO KING, thus the pussy loves him.

We the so called 'indys' say that the DEM&PUG party be the same, today you can't tell the diff between BUSH and OR-BOMB-EO, they both want to BK the USA.

The PUSSY claims to 24/7 support the DEM party, yet he says stupid shit that makes DEM's look bad. The pussy is very conservative financially, unless its your money. The pussy is a liberal with your money, and a conservative with his money.

The pussy says 'call' your POLY-TICK-IAN but its not clear what the pussy wants us to say. The poly's are getting lots of calls, but our leaders know that the public are idiots. So the POL's are going to do that which enriches themselves.

The pussy's demand to call the poly's is like the 'complaint',

At this point we just need a POLY that's telling the truth to the American people. Today that sadly only appears to be Ron Paul,... and a few right-wing hard-ass senate pug republicans, who know the bail-out is BUSH-SHIT.

Where we're at now is that OR-BOMB-EM is now 24/7 making BUSH-SHIT his diet, this is NOT going to go well if he win's it means that in the next election the DEM's will get blamed for the BUSH-DEPRESSION.

The bail-out only helps the rich, the bail-out because it devalues the dollar essentially hurts main-street.

Support of the bail-out is support of NY banking. OR-BOMB-EO knows where the money and power is, but he can give a shit about this country. McCain essentially really cares, but he's senile, and saddled with an IDIOT VPmilf.

This whole election was a setup by Karl Rove, and team BUSH is going to be collecting $$$ from this bail-out forever.

Anonymous said...

'BRUTAL'??

AIG?

All these powerful Jewish bankers have used the short-sale squeeze, and bail-out promise to temporarily sell.

What to see BRUTAL wait until xmas and look at Bend, Oregon.

Anonymous said...

BP, there was good one last night when PALIN met KISSINGER,

She told him she had never met a Jew before, then her husband reminded her that she had met Lieberman, then she smiled and said "I know two Jews".

The pug's love her, her story is of simplicity. The dem's despise her, but she's not their light-weight why not embrace her?

McCain is the one to watch!! What will he do in desperation?? He's not ready for the debates, or the prez, and neither is Palin.

Look back at all the PUG candidates this term, all joke's.

Rove knew that they couldn't get the white-house this election all along, McCain is pissed with this kind of attitude.

McCain has largely been absent from the Senate for two years, he has no respect from his peers, and thus can't make deals, and they know he has rats chance of being prez.

There is still time to DITCH palin, and taken in Lieberman, if you start seeing Lieberman talking about his own 'bailout plan' then you know something is going to happen, as Lieberman is 10X smarter than McCain, and most likely will be our next AIPAC prez.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Central Oregon is no exception as many find financing much harder to secure

By Jeff McDonald / The Bulletin
Published: September 26. 2008 4:00AM PST

When Bend entrepreneurs Jeff Coffey and his partner Mark Miller went looking for financing to start their new home health care support business, one bank told them it wouldn’t be a problem.

That was in June.

Five weeks later, the bank employees came back with a different answer.

“They said, ‘We pass,’” said Coffey, 35, co-founder of Care Navigators LLC.

Five other banks also declined the $350,000 loan to the partners, who were able to start their business by negotiating a home equity line of credit, said Coffey, who has founded and sold three other companies prior to co-founding Care Navigators.

“I was dumbfounded as were the employees of those banks,” Coffey said. “Every employee that we met with said this was the tightest plan we’ve seen, but we still weren’t able to get it done at the end of the day.”

Tightening credit markets are affecting all aspects of Central Oregon’s economy — from consumers getting a car loan to entrepreneurs starting a new business or small businesses trying to expand, economic development officials say.

The credit markets have reached a “steady crescendo” in the last week as banks lend less to try to build up reserves to offset losses in the real estate markets, said Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon.

“We’re working with quite a number of businesses that are trying to either extend a line of credit or get a new loan, and are getting turned down,” Lee said. “Tight credit markets definitely aren’t the road to economic recovery, but it’s not all bad news. There are still a number of banks doing business lending.”

Banks are being more cautious, basing their criteria upon the company’s ability to repay the loan rather than basing their eligibility on credit scores or other criteria, said Robin Freeman, president and CEO of Prineville Bancorp, parent company of Community First Bank.

“I think because growth has slowed for a number of banks, there might be more selectivity in what’s going on,” Freeman said.

Credit markets have tightened the past 30 days as lending institutions have cut back on their advances — the amount they lend above the wholesale value of the vehicle, said Alan Page, sales manager of Larry’s RV in Bend.

Someone with excellent credit, who wants to purchase an RV, can still get fully funded, but someone with low to medium credit might need to put extra money down, Page said.

“We’re all hopeful things will calm down,” Page said. “I hope there is some pent-up demand for next spring and summer that will make up for some of the business that we missed out on this year.”

Banks also have tightened loan-to-value lending requirements for the auto industry, making it harder for people with negative equity on their used SUVs and trucks — meaning they owe more than the vehicles are worth at trade-in — to trade them in for a new vehicle, said Mark Reddick, general sales manager at Robberson Ford-Lincoln-Mercury-Mazda in Bend and Prineville,

“We’re not seeing the effect on the middle-of-the-road guy,” Reddick said. “We’re seeing the effect on the guys who jumped into the wrong vehicle — the used pickup with low gas mileage. It’s harder to get out of it because they have depreciating values.”

In the furniture and appliance arenas, tighter lending requirements have not affected two businesses in Bend.

“We haven’t seen any (financing) denials,” said Justin Shaffer, store manager at Standard TV & Appliance. “We’re seeing as many approvals as before. But fewer people are applying — that’s a given.”

The loss of home equity for homeowners has negatively affected sales at Aasland’s Fine Furniture more than a lack of financing available for prospective buyers, said Jim Aasland, co-owner.

“People don’t have the credit available to them that they used to,” Aasland said. “They can’t get refinancing done on their homes. The money’s just not available to them.”

Aasland is hopeful that an economic recovery will bring back consumer confidence.

“We’ve definitely downsized and cut back on stock,” he said. “Our volume is down considerably. Like a lot of people, we’re treading water trying to wait this thing out.”

tim said...

Right now Bush and Democrats want the bailout, so it'll probably happen. I don't understand how these Republican Houses members are stopping anything.

Anonymous said...

Homer,

Another one to watch is GoldmanSachs, BUFFET said he would NOT have bought the +$5Billion in GS assets ( stock preferred ), had he NOT known the bail-out was a done-deal.

Not so fucking clear now, BUFFET just got fucked by the PAULSON big, all this is a setup, to get some 'good money' while its still available.

In November when the 'shorts' return, that's when shit will really go to hell. People will be getting their 3-qtr reports in Oct, by turkey day the stock market should be back down below 7500,

Lastly, AIG down 90% ? So fucking what GREENBERG still got more today by selling on the street than he would have got at auction, this stuff is worth less than ten cents on the dollar.

All the BIG GUYS are now taking out ALL their money from the stock-market and buying t-bills, or euro-notes, and waiting for the bail-out, then they'll buy whats left of the neutron bail-out bomb.

Of course it will not come back in Greenbergs lifetime.

tim said...

>>Central Oregon is no exception as many find financing much harder to secure

The end of the doctrine of Central Oregon exceptionalism?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Read between the lines on this BULL piece: People are completely unable to deal with REAL LIFE (aka NO CREDIT).

Waiting for NEXT SPRING'S "PENT UP DEMAND". Uh huh.

Home refi's were the engine of Cent OR growth for 10 years, NOTHING ELSE. We are 100% reliant on rsing home prices. 100% TOTAL & UTTER COLLAPSE without it.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

The end of the doctrine of Central Oregon exceptionalism?

Exactly. The title indicates SURPRISE. You wouldn't find that sort of title wording anywhere else.

Anonymous said...

Right now Bush and Democrats want the bailout, so it'll probably happen. I don't understand how these Republican Houses members are stopping anything.


*

I agree tim, now EXPLAIN, how is that OR-BOMB-EO/SHRUB could want to give all our money to rich NY bankers??

What the fuck?

This is stoooopid, this doesn't hel main-street, only bush-street, and OR-BOMB-EO's election.

OR-BOMB-EO has gotten MORE money for this election from NY bankers than McCain.

Eventually folks will figure out what happen and HATE OR-BOMB-EO. Then OR-BOMB-EO will be the MOST HATED US prez in history.

Why doesn't at the very least the DEM's force a 'solution' that fixes the problem? Rather than a band-aid to hide the worthless asset problem.

Anonymous said...

Right now Bush and Democrats want the bailout, so it'll probably happen. I don't understand how these Republican Houses members are stopping anything.

*

The Dem's ( the ones with brains ), don't want to be seen embracing BUSH, when his own PUG's are running from him.

You said it TT, so tell us "WHY DOES the PUSSY's want the bail-out??" I know why OR-BOMB-EO wants it, cuz he knows if he gets it passed, wall-street will give him a free-ride to his second-term, but what does it do for the rep's?? Main-Street HATES this fucking bail-out, anybody that votes YES will have fucked his poly-career. BUSH is OUT, OR-BOMB-EO will get the worlds biggest golden-parachute, but what's it got for the 'cargo cult' party??

Anonymous said...

I don't understand how these Republican Houses members are stopping anything.

*

Almost ALL the pug's on the house banking committee are against the paulson bailout.

For the first time in 7 yrs, pugs are starting to think & act like conservatives. BUSH was always like CLINTON.

911, patriot-act, ... BUSH got his way by his party, now they're saying FUCK-YOU, you can't get us anymore cargo, we're going to do this are way.

The DEM's & PUG's will fight over who gets to be the recipient of the $700BILLION, of COURSE the DEM's love this idea, its a budget bigger than most country's, he who controls this new bailout agency will be one of the most powerful people in the world, a new government agency is like a gold-rush, DEM's love this shit.

BUT WHO IS GOING TO PAY THE BILL?

This bail-out is FORCING PUG leadership that we HAVE NOT SEEN in 7 years, and BUSH is NOT the leader.

Anonymous said...

OR-BOMB-EO is putting all his chips on the BUSH plan, not a good idea.

He'll be portrayed as MORE BUSH than BUSH.

The ultimate OREO.

Why don't we just put some black lipstick on BUSH, and make him prez for life??

tim said...

>>Read between the lines on this BULL piece: People are completely unable to deal with REAL LIFE (aka NO CREDIT).

Ain't that the truth. Kids get credit cards during orientation at college! When most of them are not working or hardly working, and piling up student loan debt and car debt.

They don't even know how to THINK in a cash world.

>>Main-Street HATES this fucking bail-out, anybody that votes YES will have fucked his poly-career.

Main street hates it except for the easily-scared contingent that defers to Wall Street brains like Paulson. The ONLY decent anti-bailout coverage I'm seeing is from the world of bloggers. I don't even KNOW what most of these anti-bailout House Republicans are thinking or saying, because the press is barely covering them. All we hear is Paulson, Bernanke, Bush, Obama, and Pelosi. I'm not seeing good coverage of what McCain is SAYING if he's indeed against the bailout.

Notice the press is not giving us words or ideas about what should be done. Just panicky talk about credit seizing up and banks going down and houses being foreclosed--things that the bailout will hardly affect.

Anonymous said...

>>Read between the lines on this BULL piece: People are completely unable to deal with REAL LIFE (aka NO CREDIT).
*

Imagine a world where you don't get shit until you have saved the money?

That means almost all biz that we know of will be gone.

The USA has built a huge non-sustainable ponzi-scheme, and currently the foreign investor is/was the greatest-fool, and he has now said NO-MORE.

The US citizen was max'd out ten years ago, and thus negative savings.

Today, and soon is the day of reckoning that we all knew was coming.

A day that you only buy a car, home, or food; IF YOU HAVE THE CASH.

WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED??

SO FUCKING WHAT?? IT JUST MEANS THAT BANKERS NO LONGER GET 20% ( credit card interest ).

Anonymous said...

The Wall Street Journal
8:40AM PST
Sept. 26, 2008

McCain said he will participate in the debate scheduled for tonight and resume all campaign activities. He cited "significant progress toward a bipartisan" agreement in the financial-rescue talks.

tim said...

>>The US citizen was max'd out ten years ago, and thus negative savings.

Remember when we were told, "yes, but that negative savings rate doesn't mean anything, because people are now savvy enough to grow their wealth in their mortgaged house"?

Anonymous said...

The ONLY decent anti-bailout coverage I'm seeing is from the world of bloggers. I don't even KNOW what most of these anti-bailout House Republicans are thinking or saying, because the press is barely covering them. All we hear is Paulson, Bernanke, Bush, Obama, and Pelosi. I'm not seeing good coverage of what McCain is SAYING if he's indeed against the bailout.

*

You watch TV, I guess that's the problem. I have to be honest, You have to 'google' "Ron Paul", and then find similar to find the thread.

There are probably 1/2 the pug's who are dead set against.

McCain waffles daily who knows what he thinks, like the senate says, he hasn't voted for six months, nor attended the senate for two years. He's a known, un-known.

What's MOST strange is that the DEM's did nothing the past 2yrs of PELOSI to stop the BUSH train-wreck, and are now giving him his cake with frosting.

The pug's are mad as hell.

TV is ad dollars, you know that TT, and TV knows that the bail-out will trickle-down to them. Thus they'll sell the bail-out.

Trouble is the DEM's don't want to be seen being the ONLY party supporting BUSH, and that's where it stands today.

The PUG's running from BUSH, and DEM's embracing BUSH, "WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED"???

Anonymous said...

Remember when we were told, "yes, but that negative savings rate doesn't mean anything, because people are now savvy enough to grow their wealth in their mortgaged house"?

*

Yes, and now their 'home' is a negative appreciating asset.

The trouble is that 'we were told' ( I suspect that means you TV watchers ), is no excuse for being stupid.

The essence of the bail-out is that stupid works! Thus this is why the DEM's are in FULL SUPPORT!!!

Being poor, begging, being insolvent, having a negative net-worth has never in human history been a 'good thing'.

This whole debate is going to flip, very soon, its all run on HOT PR&MARKETING AIR, and when those checks quit going out, boy is this debate going to flip.

Anonymous said...

The debate tonight should be interesting.

It's supposed to be on international.

Nobody in politics has wanted for forty years or more to talk about negative things.

All of RAYGUN & SHRUB were pollyanna. Life is good, Bend is the best place, at the best time in human history, ...

Today NOBODY is telling the truth, well PAULSON demaning $1T for unspecified use is NOT truth, its just theft.

BUSH is fucked, demented, lost, and senile, much like McCain.

I really cannot think of a single fucking leader in the USA that is capable of truth.

Ron Paul is treated by the TV media as a 'conspiracy wacko', so he don't count, Jim Rogers insults the press.

Did you see how PALIN melted down with a strong woman? ( COURIC ), Can you imagine how CLINTON could have mind-fucked PALIN?

The people WHO OWN this country, and OWN our poly-tick-ians, are grasping at straws, GOOD MEN & WOMEN WILL NOT WHORE THEMSELVES.

HBM brought up last week about DeFazio of Eugene run'n prez, hell he'll not even run us-senate, cuz he don't want to HO to NY bankers.

So today the US national political machine is composed of the best pol's that taxpayer money can buy provided by NY.

What did BUSH do? Patriot Act, that allowed Credit-Card snooping that brought down Spitzer, a guy went after NY crooks.

People who read here like QUIMBY, want to know whats going on?? It's quite old, but its in "Oswald Sprenglers", two volume set called "decline of the west", all mercantile civilizations for the last 2,000 years have gone down exactly this way,

Anonymous said...

Chinese are buying YEN and selling US-DOLLAR's, who would have guessed??

***

Yen Heads for Biggest Weekly Gain Since May on Bailout Clash
Bloomberg - 1 hour ago
By Ye Xie and Bo Nielsen Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The yen rose against the dollar and headed for its biggest weekly gain since May as US lawmakers disagreed over a financial rescue and Washington Mutual Inc. became the nation's biggest bank to collapse.
Dollar Slides Against Yen On Weakened GDP Data Wall Street Journal
Yen gains as US bank bailout stalls MarketWatch

Anonymous said...

TT,

Barney Frank (DEM) run's banking, and he has Pelosi's support.

Pelosi, wants to be prez or something down the line, and wants to show that here speaker job did something BIG.

Most pug's don't support the bail-out, and BUSH has to do something, and then if it goes wrong, he can say the DEM's fucked it up.

The Pug's don't want to do nothing, as everybody knows only time heals wounds.

The most sad thing here is Pelosi, who should have impeached BUSH 2 yrs ago, but didn't have the balls.

Then at the 11th hour PELOSI gives BUSH all he wants, this isn't going to look good to anyone.

The main PUG leaders for banking are refusing to even meet with BUSH, that's how bad this thing is.

Sure the TV shows paulson, pelosi, frank, bush, ... cuz they have something to sell.

The pissed off pug's have nothing to sell, and thus there is no news.

It's clear that nobody wants to talk about what really went wrong, and like I always write here, it goes back to Barlett & Steele "America, What went wrong", back in 1988. That's how far back this insolvency planning goes, actually farther.

There has been ton's of wake-up calls.

A month ago I said that there is ONLY ONE PARTY, and its here today, the BUSH-OBAMA-BAILOUT party.

The pug's are sidelined ( the real pugs ), the DEM's will do whatever OREO says.

More of the same, the same people that have been destroying this kleptocracy, are still in power, and still running it back into a third world penal colony.

The USA was a young rich nation, today your seeing the wealth being sucked out, Perot talked of the sucking sound.

I think for the most part OUR elected, are like McCain two weeks ago "Economy is Sound", most of the elected are so fucking rich, that they will never feel any pain, for them life is sound, they'll never know hunger, or inability to pay for health care.

So fewer people will vote, soon only 10% of the public will vote, but who will care?

The USA is a Hamiltonian Government ruled by 'interest', its been that since day one. The 'interest' today wants $1 Trillion dollar's.

What will they want tomorrow? Under OREO? My guess has always been a giant war that will pack all the niggers off from the urban jungles of the USA to anywhere but here. So far my hunches have been correct.

There is NO way in hell with two terms of OREO that we'll not see a HUGE fucking war, especially with AIPAC BIDEN running foreign affairs.

Anonymous said...

I love this 'worrys', worry for whom, reduced usage of burning fossil fuels is the best thing we could do.

Ah look at this shit, oil goes down cuz no bail-out pork for wall-street which means less growth, and less fuel consumption.

Where can an old crocodile go cry in this town??

A slow down in Bend, and the world, would be good for everyone.

***

Oil prices slip on fresh demand worries
CNNMoney.com - 32 minutes ago
Crude futures fall as uncertainty about the proposed $700 billion bailout plan and the collapse of Washington Mutual resurrect economic concerns.

Anonymous said...

BUSH is going to bail the banks out, right? So why during the last 9 days were all these people stuffing their cash in the mattress at home? What do they know??

***

Withdrawals by customers ultimately sank WaMu: OTS
MarketWatch - 55 minutes ago
By Meena Thiruvengadam , , ) customers withdrew $16.7 billion in cash from the thrift in the past nine days, a huge outflow that led to the largest bank failure in US history, the institution's regulator said Friday.

Anonymous said...

It's NOW official, its OR-BOMB-EO's-BAIL-OUT, and note it was those NASTY pugs all along that were fighting that nice fucking PAULSON, those MEAN FUCKING PUG's!

OR-BOMB-EO loved the PAULSON terms, but not them pug's they don't known who owns Wash-DC, but OREO he know who owns DC.


***

Obama sees progress toward bailout deal
Fri Sep 26, 2008 11:43am EDT


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Friday that talks between lawmakers and the White House over a proposed $700 billion financial bailout were yielding progress and a deal is possible.

"I am optimistic that we can get something done. I think there is real progress being made, this morning and last night," the Democratic candidate said, a day after talks at the White House on the proposal broke down in acrimony.

Obama said that since the White House meeting, he has been speaking by phone with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, some top Democrats as well as several Republicans.

He said what seemed to be helping break the logjam was that Paulson has agreed to consider including some of the proposals offered by House of Representatives Republicans in a "menu of options."

"I think it was very important for the working group that had been in place before the White House meeting to reboot, I think somebody phrased it, and to sit down and continue to work," Obama told reporters.

"One of the things that I suggested yesterday was once the House Republicans identified some of their concerns and alternative proposals that they wanted considered ... to have Secretary Paulson figure out whether those items should be listed in a menu of options that are available to him for the rescue package," he said.

Obama spoke to reporters on his plane just prior to heading to Mississippi for the first of three debates he is holding with his Republican rival John McCain.

Anonymous said...

Current street rumor is this bail-out has to be done by Monday, as that starts a long Jewish Holiday.

The Jews sold out on the short-squeeze, and when the bail-out gets announced that will be the next INCREASE in stock market, where all insider Jewish investors will sell.

Then the stock-market will slowly sink towards depression levels.

The final bail-out will only provide $1 increments to banks, under pug terms, the cap is $700M, but only at a dollar at a time, with all spending documented. Thus there will be an announcement of a 'bail-out', but it will do nothing, but we knew that all along, this has always been a 'confidence scam'.

The fact is its too late, nothing about of PR can bring back confidence in BEND-OR, on wash-dc.

Turn off the lights when you leave.

Anonymous said...

Withdrawals by customers ultimately sank WaMu:...customers withdrew $16.7 billion in cash from the thrift in the past nine days, a huge outflow that led to the largest bank failure in US history, the institution's regulator said Friday.

*

Bank runs do happen, and can happen.

Today there is $45B left in the FDIC fund. At least here the regulators were watching, and as soon as reserves got low at WAMU they shut it town,

When banks start falling like dominoes then BUSH will declare a bank-holiday.

We're lucky on this one the reserves weren't needed. Today everybody want's deposits so it was easy to 'sell' wamu for its deposits ( those that are left ).

As the fun progresses there will be less banks with deposits, and nobody will want them which means more bank closings, and more tap on the FDIC, which will be zero within a year.

The BAILOUT debate today is like the kid with his finger at the dike, but there are 100's and 1,000's of leaks, and very few are MTG related.

OR-BOMB-EO is calling the bailout a MTG-RESCUE today, what bullshit, it does nothing for MTG.

This whole bail-out just provides solvency to support foreign withdrawl's through spring 2009.

Anonymous said...

Where we stand today.

1.) The homeowner owns a negative net-worth home.

2.) The citizen has a negative net-worth.

3.) The foreigner wants his money back NOW.

4.) You just lost your job.

Marge, is right, booze, bullets, beans, ... its a damn good time to think survival for the next 5-10 years.

Anonymous said...

This week HOMER talked about the de-leveraging of the AmeriKKKan system.

Let's review our tutorial here.

During the great depression shit was leveraged 10X, and guess how much all went down? 90% ...

Today with all our 'financial instruments' leveraging is 1,000X, or more.

Thus you can expect SHIT to go down 99.99%

This is why you see AIG, WAMU, F&F, ... getting the DOT-COM crush, because they have NO assets. Golden Parachutes long ago consumed the real liquidity, most of today wall-street firms OWN toxic paper, and worthless IOU's.

This is what is so important about Bartlette&Steele's "America what went wrong", from the 1980's, it was IOU's. Junk Bond buy out firms like KKR, bought companys, took the pension cash, and replaced it with IOU's, and then used the CASH, to buy another company. They kept doing this over&over until they became the largest junk-bond outfit in the world.

It didn't end in the 80's, it went on for another 20 years, today in essence all 'assets' on the books are IOU's, worth about as much as the paper&ink value of these IOU's.

It was a good party while it lasted, but NOBODY can say they didn't see it coming.

Sure you can BUY at the bottom, but do you really want to be living in the USA at the bottom? In the 30's most Amerikkans were still 'self reliant', today we're a nation of parasites.

It's not going to be pretty.

Expect martial-law, and much worse.

Anonymous said...

In the 30's most Amerikkans were still 'self reliant', today we're a nation of parasites.

It's not going to be pretty.

Expect martial-law, and much worse


Be self reliant ! Or get self reliant. Or starve...

Where is your food coming from without that job? Gas? Heat? How will you pay your rent?

Cash and Stash are KING. Just don't let anyone know you have it or they will be lined up at your place looking for handouts.

tim said...

>>You watch TV, I guess that's the problem.

Actually, I don't. I haven't seen any TV in weeks. I have seen some of the International CNBC they show at night at cnbc.com.

I'm talking about what you see at the news sites on the web.

As usual, you can find what you want if you go looking, but it sure ain't being served up.

tim said...

Marge,

How are those September house sales looking?

Anonymous said...

This is FUNNY, its now legal to NOT call yourself a REPUGLICAN on the BALLOT, 'GOP' is now politically correct, the party of that grand old faggot abe lincoln, who would walk five miles to see his boyfriend. BUSH is PUG, Cain is GOP, I get it!! NOT

***

Judge: Rossi will be listed as GOP (not Republican) on ballot
Seattle Times - 1 hour ago
A King County Superior Court judge says Dino Rossi can identify himself on the November ballot as preferring the "GOP Party" instead of "Republican.

Anonymous said...

sarah palin swimsuit competition--for real

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qQKdHxeMkk

Anonymous said...

Newt Gingrich is back from the dead and running the SHOW!!! It just keeps getting better

The way stands right now is that the PUG's get main-street, and DEM's wall-street, leave it to the DEM's to know where the easy stolen money is to be found, ...

. So I was interested to read this in the Politico just this morning:


If you didn't know any better, you'd think [House Republicans] were taking marching orders from Speaker-in-Exile Newt Gingrich. For the past week or so, he's been urging Congressional Republicans and John McCain to reject the $700 billion bailout and label it the "Bush-Obama" plan -- tying the Democratic nominee to the most toxic Republican since, well, Gingrich himself.

Opposing the plan would also open up a world of political possibilities for Republicans still tepid about backing Senator Maverick, he's argued.

If the GOP blocks the bailout, "I think you will see the emergence overnight of a 'McCain Reform Wing of the Republican Party' and you'll see House and Senate members siding with McCain by overwhelming margins and then you'll be in a very different political environment," he told ABC a few days ago.

A few days ago? It seems pretty clear that Gingrich was sketching out to ABC his desired scenario and then whispering in some ears up on Capitol Hill. Nothing wrong with that. Just interesting that a man who left politics in disgrace and drove his political bus over a cliff on the matter of the Clinton impeachment -- and who probably today has an approval rating of no higher than 32% or so -- still carries such weight.

Anonymous said...

Given that the BUSH-OBAMA team of two party's is now ONE. Then the McCain/Palin ticket is now a third party? Or is it a second? Given that BUSH-OBAMA have converged??

How far has OBAMA gone to the right in six months?? So far that he now to the right of BUSH on most issues.

***

McCain-Palin: A Third Party

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 26, 2008

Is the McCain-Palin rhetoric signaling a reformed Republican Party or a new third party? Let's take a look at history:

The Democratic Party evolved from the states' rights, strict constitutionalist, anti-wealth Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s. It is the oldest party in the U.S., yet has clearly drifted way from some of its earlier beliefs. It was the most prominent party until the Civil War. The Republican Party was a Johnnie-come-lately anti-slavery party founded in 1854, but really came into power with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. It is our second oldest party. Since then the two-party system has dominated American politics. But both sure look a little different today.

Third parties emerge from time to time and their ideas are usually absorbed by either major party. Ross Perot made it big-time in 1992. He had many sensible suggestions about dealing with the federal budget and the economy but, in the end, he seemed a little too squirrelly for the average voter and dropped off the radar screen.

We Americans unfortunately tend to focus more on style rather than substance - "cool" is in; "lame" is out - a byproduct of our celebrity-obsessed culture. Considering our current market disruptions, Perot was quite prescient in his belief that government's power to intervene in the market should be expanded and that, generally, government should have a larger role in business; actions that Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Secretary are doing right now on an ad hoc basis. Both parties would be wise to revisit some of Perot's better ideas.

Perot - like McCain - is a Maverick, but couldn't fit all his ideas into any existing party. McCain was just enough of a Republican to keep the label. Joe Lieberman had to change to an Independent because his support for the hated George Bush on the Iraq war was tantamount to heresy. McCain's 2008 campaign slowly became more mainstream Republican, endorsing such positions as offshore oil drilling, yet he isn't trusted as a loyalist.

With the addition of Palin to the ticket, he has reinforced his reputation as a maverick and, frankly, I think the game has changed. Palin's husband, Todd, had been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party and she did address their state convention this year by video, noting that, "I've always said that competition is so good, and that applies to political parties as well."

One cannot deny at times McCain and Palin competed with, and shared the same enemies - Alaskan Republicans Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young come to mind. Before being tapped by McCain, Palin resigned a regulatory position she had, because a fellow commission member, the chair of the Republican Party, had misused his position to promote the Republican Party while in this state job. He subsequently resigned after being found guilty. After she got into office, she started going after corrupt legislators with four of them being sent to prison and six more indicted. No friend of Republicans was she. As one Republican from California said, "It was somewhat of an old boy's club...She defeated it."

McCain wants to reinforce his maverick roots by portraying himself and Palin as the real reformers and agents of change - not Barak Obama. They have a point. They have talked the talk and walked the walk as reformers. Obama's record is one of accommodation of the aging Democratic leadership, rather than taking them on with new ideas. It would be to Obama's credit, as leader of his party, if he pressures the Democratic Congress to take action to resolve the ongoing financial crisis, rather than discreetly letting the string run out, and then blame the Bush administration - just to win the election.

There is somewhat of a parallel with Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America promising eight "reforms" to change governmental operations as practiced by the Democratic majority for most of the 20{+t}{+h} century. Agree with Gingrich or not, these ideas could just as easily been the platform of a third party candidate. It simply wasn't necessary since these were mainstream conservative ideas. And Gingrich was always a Republican's Republican - at least then.

On the other hand, both McCain and Palin have a record of bucking the Republican establishment. Regardless of what the traditional media and Democrats are saying now, Chris Matthews, MSNBC, said it best with, "The press loves McCain. We're his base." Or Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, who quipped," I think every last one of them (reporters) would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could." Salon reported that even Ralph Nader had a connection with McCain that went "back to the era when he displayed real maverick tendencies in joisting with corporate interests...as well as his strong support for campaign reform." And, of course, he sounds like a populist with his record of opposition to pork barrel spending, and an enemy of the religious right, when he expressed skepticism about the "role of the agents of intolerance" among the Christian right during the 2000 campaign.

McCain certainly moved to the right on some issues to get the nomination, just as Hillary Clinton moved to the right after she thought she had the nomination sewed up - and the Obama Nation went ballistic when Obama switched positions on Iraq - his campaign's defining issue - and on wiretapping, gun control, the death penalty etc. and moved to the right.

But McCain hasn't lost that hothead maverick streak as was evidenced by his recent emotional attacks on what he calls the cozy relationship between Washington regulators and Wall Street bankers. "We're going to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed," McCain said, and that he would go after the greedy CEO's of financial institutions. Republicans just don't talk that way. Populists do. This was exactly Palin's sentiment when she went after the good old boy Republicans in Alaska.

These two are really a long shot to win the election, but if they do, it will be because the swing voters will see them as something different - not Republicans or Democrats.

Anonymous said...

Bush-Obama Part is Wall Street, its about BIG MONEY.

McCain-Palin is now about Main-Street, little people, populism. It's the base of McCain.

Note its the elitists that hate PALIN, but honestly nowhere does it say in the constitution that you can't be a dumb red-neck to hold office. Politicians were supposed to be of the people, and non elitists.

Trouble of course is all money comes from Wall Street to feed politics, thus McCain/Palin could be the party of no money, which in the USA means loser.

For now BUSH-OBAMA is the power, is the money, and are the winners.

Gingrich is right, who would have guessed six months ago that BUSH&OBAMA would have converged??

Well since day-one, having called him OR-BOMB-EO, it was always clear to me that OBAMA was just BUSH in black lipstick from head to toe.

They're both pussy's, well even BP would be an elitist if he was 'KEPT' be wall-street.

Populism always gets killed by corporate power, but its fun to watch, and McCain knows his base. Obama hasn't too much longer before the progressives figure out he's gone to the right of BUSH. Already the UNIONS are against the bail-out.

Anonymous said...

If the GOP blocks the bailout, "I think you will see the emergence overnight of a 'McCain Reform Wing of the Republican Party' and you'll see House and Senate members siding with McCain by overwhelming margins and then you'll be in a very different political environment," he told ABC a few days ago.

*

This is the troubling point, but quite brilliant, as OR-BOMB-EO has done everything he can to cozy up with BUSH and appear 'PRESIDENTIAL'. Team-Gingrich of course HATES DUMBYA way more than Obama.

If Gingrich&Shelby can prevent the bailout they'll be heroes in the world of the working-man, and finally there will be a difference between McSame & OR-BOMB-EO.

I think there is a damn good chance, given the outrage across the country over the bailout, and the fact that BUSH has played ALL his crisis cards. ( 911,patriot-act,... )

Gingrich has been awful quiet since 1992, and like GODZILLA he has awoken. McSame is a chameleon, and will jump at the chance to call himself GOP, and point out that the REPUG's are just like the BUSH-OREO's.

A good shakeup for all, wall-street has been running the US politics for 40+ years with stolen money, and now its gone. Back to the basics, a new source of revenue will need to be found to finance politics.

A great depression is coming, and GINGRICH could very well be that great HITLER type fascist in the right place at the right time to bring all the discontent to an apex.

Lastly, wall-street sort of held on to finance, but with computers every where, and hell even CHENEY has moved all of HALLIBURTON to dubai, wall street is dead, and will become a ghost town, like Bend-OR.

Bewert said...

Really, really long shot. If Palin gets out in public any more they're done. I haven't seen the Couric interview, just heard it was awful.
Here's a clip:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/25/palin-talks-russia-with-k_n_129318.html

To think this idiot would be one step away from the presidency, and the guy is a 4-time cancer survivor that is 72 years old and refuses to release his medical records is downright alarming.

Anonymous said...

I predict within a week we'll be hearing from BUCHANAN who will be talking of JEWS destroying WALL-STREET, ... and then wanting a bailout.

It's going to get very ugly, never been a better time to be a Nazi in AmeriKKKKa.

In some ways the bail-out will be worse if its passes, because it will create the collective anger that BUCHANAN needs. Gingrich wins either way, a 3rd party is BORN, and yes, the face may very well be PALIN in 2012, against HRC.

OR-BOMB-EO may or my not win, but one thing CLEAR, OR-BOMB-EO will be a one TERM CARTER type prez, and nobody is disputing that.

The word today is that the prez is a 'poison chalice' this is what the bailout is about, no matters who wins, is fucked, and will go down as the guy who started GREAT DEPRESSION 2.

Anonymous said...

To think this idiot would be one step away from the presidency, and the guy is a 4-time cancer survivor that is 72 years old and refuses to release his medical records is downright alarming.

*

BP, there you go again on this 'smart' thing, smart, or clever, ... has never meant shit in the USA.

Couric is an elitist, and the elitists were in contempt of PALIN cuz she just did 'talking points', HOLY FUCKING SHIT PUSSY.

YOUR ONLY TALKING POINTS, since when is being talking-point 24/7 wrong??? cuz if it is then look in the mirror.

Some folk say that DUMBYA is dumb, but the fact is his IQ ( airforce res pilot ) was higher than Kerry's, BUSH ain't dumb, and neither is PALIN, hell shes got a degree in journalism, thus shes trained, she knows media.

It's ALL populism, I'm not going to watch your stream, but I read the entire COURIC interview, and what PALIN did is always talk 'health-care' talking points, jeebus xmas BP, that's YOU,

Put lipstick on BP, and he would be a lifesize PALIN doll, highly fuckable.

Anonymous said...

BP,

Last week was the quot of the Week by ex prez Bill Clinton.

Ya remember what ol bill said BP??

"Don't under estimate PALIN, she has a natural gift for Politics" - Bill Clinton

Elitists, and intellectual may 'cringe', but the stay-at-homes mom's desperate for health-care will say 'bless the lord'. Nothing you see is an accident BP, all is orchestrated.

Palin doesn't do well when interviewed by intelligent women, but that don't matter, cuz we she's interviewed by men she wins. She had old Kissinger running cum down his leg. This is what its all about, political power is old boy, and PALIN has what it takes, intellectual women? They can be school marms.

Sure HRC could rip PALIN to shit on policy and foreign facts, so fucking what, we're in a depression, this election is about what's important, and that is food, shelter & health-care for children, and PALIN get's it!!!

Like TT says, PALIN-McSAME are playing chess, and everyone else checkers.

POPULISM is in, BUSH-OBAMA is being ran by ROVE, but McSAME is being ran by Gingrich, and TODAY is the hour of GINGRICH, main-street is livid, ...

Anonymous said...

Sure HRC could rip PALIN to shit on policy and foreign facts, so fucking what, we're in a depression, this election is about what's important, and that is food, shelter & health-care for children, and PALIN get's it!!!

*

This is why you have women like MARGE who will vote for PALIN.

I love it, Couric trys to get technical and Palin talks about 'health-care' talking points, and it drives the fucking DEM's NUTS!!!

Today we have BUSH-OBAMA selling bailouts for the richest people in the world, and PALIN talking about health-care for down's baby's, ... am I the only one that see's the hypocrisy?? OR-BOMB-EO needs to do something quick, or he's going to lose the progressive base.

Anonymous said...

It just got very hard to get GOLD for your own hiding, ...

It's getting very interesting, expect BUSH to announce no private ownership of the metal, ...

***

Gold Hoarders Cause Mint Stoppage
Washington Post - 1 hour ago
The US Mint has temporarily halted sales of its American Buffalo 24-carat gold coins because "inventories have been depleted," the Mint said.

Anonymous said...

Put lipstick on BP, and he would be a lifesize PALIN doll, highly fuckable.

*

Can we BP, can we? Its' friday night, nothing else going on?

Anonymous said...

Long read, but it goes back to gold being gone today, ... go back to 1971, when Nixon took us off gold, and that was when the DOLLAR started falling, the past 30+ years, today US economy is in shambles. Note the 'populists' want to dissolve the FED, and put congress in charge of printing money, and put it back on gold. Who would have guessed??

***

He Foresaw the End of an Era
By John Cassidy
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means
by George Soros

PublicAffairs, 162 pp.,$22.95

George Soros has been an active investor for more than half a century. In the mid-1980s, when I started writing about Wall Street, he was already a leading hedge fund manager. Not many people understood hedge funds back then, but for those in the know Soros's Quantum Fund, which he founded in 1973, was the model: year after year, it had achieved returns in excess of the broader market. After weathering the 1987 stock market crash, Quantum, since 1989 under the day-to-day management of Stanley Druckenmiller, racked up more big gains, culminating in a huge bet against the pound sterling in 1992, which reportedly netted more than a billion dollars. (Soros has never publicly confirmed the exact figure. The British newspapers put it at $1.1 billion.)

Thereafter, Soros spent an increasing amount of his time on philanthropic activities throughout the world, including many laudable efforts to promote the spread of democracy in his native Eastern Europe. (He was born in Budapest in 1930.) After 2001, he also involved himself in domestic politics. A vocal critic of the Bush administration, in the run-up to the 2004 election he donated considerable sums to MoveOn.org, the liberal Internet organization. More recently, he and his family have contributed to Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

But Soros remains first and foremost a speculator. In 2007, after the subprime crisis erupted, he returned, at the age of seventy-seven, to directing Quantum's investments, with results suggesting he hadn't lost his touch. Alpha magazine, a glossy publication that covers hedge funds, estimates that he made $2.9 billion in 2007, placing him second on its list of mega-speculators, behind only John Paulson, of Paulson & Co., who raked in an even more astonishing $3.7 billion.

At the start of this year, Soros, convinced (correctly) that the financial crisis was far from over, adopted a bearish investment strategy, which he describes thus: "short US and European stocks, US ten-year government bonds, and the US dollar; long Chinese, Indian, and Gulf States stocks and non-US currencies." Initially, some of these positions didn't pay off. Between January and March, US bonds rallied and Indian stocks tumbled, wiping out gains in other parts of Quantum's portfolio. Just how Soros has fared in the past few months of market turmoil may be known only to investors in Quantum, but it would be foolhardy to bet against him.

Forbes magazine recently estimated Soros's net worth at $9 billion. For all his worldly success, though, he still has an unfulfilled ambition: to be taken seriously not just as a financial practitioner but also as a theoretician. In 1987, Simon and Schuster published his first book, The Alchemy of Finance, in which he revisited some of his investments and expounded his theory of "reflexivity," which claims that major market movements, such as the recent rise in commodity prices, sometimes take on lives of their own, entrapping investors in illusions and imparting a fundamental instability to the economic system.

The book proved popular with other investors. Paul Tudor Jones II writes: "When I enter the inevitable losing streak that befalls every investor, I pick up The Alchemy and revisit Mr. Soros's campaigns." But many professional economists, who tend to take a more sanguine view of financial markets, dismissed it out of hand. Writing in The New Republic, MIT's Robert Solow, one of the most respected macroeconomists of the twentieth century, doubted that Soros understood "simultaneous" equations, i.e., systems of equations that involve more than one dependent variable. (For those unfamiliar with economics, this was a bit like accusing a carpenter of not knowing how to use a chisel.)

Solow had a point—he usually does. Soros's presentation of his ideas was a bit garbled. The suspicion lingers, however, that his principal offense was challenging professional economists on their own ground. Now he is at it again—in a much shorter and more digestible book entitled The New Paradigm for Financial Markets—and this time around he and his pet theory cannot be so easily dismissed. Since the publication of The Alchemy of Finance, the global economy has witnessed a long and geographically dispersed series of boom-and-bust cycles, the latest of which is currently ravaging the US economy. While episodes such as these would be perfectly recognizable to Victorian economists such as John Stuart Mill or Alfred Marshall, who referred to them as "trade cycles," they defy modern orthodoxy, which depicts the economy in general, and financial markets in particular, as effective, stable, and self-correcting mechanisms.

As of mid-September, the credit crunch was showing no sign of letting up, indeed it was getting more severe. One big Wall Street investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt; another, Merrill Lynch, averted a similar fate by merging with a big commercial bank, Bank of America; AIG, the biggest insurance company in the country, got into such a perilous state that the Federal Reserve, fearful its collapse would bring down a number of other financial institutions, agreed to lend the firm $85 billion, while acquiring 80 percent ownership of the company. Finally, amid signs that despite the AIG bailout the markets were on the verge of a complete breakdown, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson unveiled a plan for the federal government to buy from the banks up to $700 billion in distressed mortgage securities.

It hardly needs saying that these events were without precedent in postwar history, although students of the Great Depression, such as Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, saw much that was frighteningly familiar. And yet, despite all this, the economists who promulgated the reassuring orthodoxy about financial markets and force-fed it to generations of graduate students have been notably quiet about what went wrong with their theories.

Soros doesn't have all the answers, not by any means. But unlike some of the professors who dismissed him as an overremunerated gadfly, he has something to say. (In recent years, it should be noted, a number of theorists, some rallying under the banner of "behavioral finance," have created more realistic models in which financial markets can depart from economic fundamentals, speculation can be destabilizing, and boom-and-bust cycles can persist. Until very recently, however, these new theories had little or no impact on economic policymaking.[*])

Financial markets perform two essential roles in the economy: (1) they take money from those with no immediate use for it, such as people saving for retirement and the hereditary rich, and put it into the hands of firms and entrepreneurial individuals with productive investment ideas but a shortage of cash to finance them; (2) they allow individuals and institutions to reapportion risk to those more willing to bear it. If Wall Street didn't exist, another method of allocating savings and risks would have to be found. One alternative is diktat, but the history of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries amply demonstrated the difficulties involved in centralizing economic decisions.

The great advantage of a market system is that it draws on information from throughout the economy and translates it into public signals—prices—that investors and firms can react to. Earlier this year, investors woke up to the fact that Detroit had ignored the threat of dwindling oil stocks and had bet its future on gas-guzzling SUVs: the stock prices of American car companies plummeted, making it much more expensive for them to sell equity in their corporations. Toyota and Honda, which had invested heavily in smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, have seen their stocks hold up much better, enabling them to raise funds cheaply. Nobody planned it, but in this instance the market rewarded foresight and innovation.

For financial markets to allocate resources to their most productive uses on an ongoing basis, the price signals they send must be the right ones day after day after day. Is this a realistic goal? A typical investor following the Dow's gyrations on CNBC or Yahoo Finance might be tempted to say no, but then the typical investor doesn't have the benefit of an economics Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

The benign view of markets owes much to three Chicago economists: Milton Friedman, Eugene Fama, and Robert Lucas. Although best known for his work on monetary theory and his enthusiastic espousal of capitalism, early in his career Friedman had played a key part in developing the "efficient markets hypothesis," which, together with its younger sibling the "rational expectation hypothesis"—see below—provided the intellectual underpinning for more than two decades of financial deregulation. Briefly put, the efficient markets hypothesis states that prices of stocks, bonds, and other speculative assets necessarily reflect everything that is known about economic fundamentals, such as inflation, exports, and corporate profitability. The proof proceeds by contradiction. Suppose stock prices have risen above levels justified by the fundamentals. Then clever speculators, such as Soros, will step in and sell them, thereby restoring prices to their proper levels. If stocks fall below their fundamental value, speculators will step in and buy them.

Friedman actually formulated the efficient markets hypothesis in an analysis of currencies. It was Fama, one of his students, who applied it to the stock market and pointed out an interesting corollary: if stock prices already reflect everything that is known and knowable, then investors can't hope to outperform the market using trading strategies based on publicly available information. Rather than wasting time and effort trying to pick individual stocks, they would be well advised to place their savings in a broadly diversified mutual fund that tracks the daily movement of the market. Largely thanks to Fama and his followers, so-called index funds today have a central part in many Americans' retirement planning.

Lucas, the third member of the Chicago triumvirate, was arguably more influential even than Friedman. In a series of ingenious papers published in the 1960s and 1970s, he and several colleagues extended the hyperrational methodology underpinning the efficient markets hypothesis to other parts of the economy, such as the job market, the output decisions of firms, and the formulation of economic policy. By the time they were done, Lucas et al. had invented a new way of doing macroeconomics, known as the rational expectations approach, which enshrined in higher mathematics the stabilizing properties of unfettered markets. You don't have to spend much time on Wall Street to recognize that expectations are what drive the markets. If investors anticipate good news, they buy; if they expect bad news, they sell.

Where, though, do these economic expectations come from? According to Lucas, they reflect a predefined, externally grounded, and commonly agreed upon reality. In his models, the economy's equations of motion are well defined and known to all—from Ph.D. economists at the University of Chicago to nurses and cab drivers. Utilizing this common knowledge, people form "rational expectations" of things like inflation and interest rates. They don't always get things right—a certain amount of randomness is allowed for—but they are precluded from making systematic errors. If in one period the economy gets out of sync, in the next period it jumps back to the "equilibrium" defined by the model.

Not content to create new models, Lucas also disparaged older theories that viewed financial capitalism more skeptically. Keynesianism wasn't merely wrong, he declared at one point: it was no longer intellectually respectable.

Soros had neither the inclination nor the technical ability to challenge the Chicago school's formal arguments. (In a charming passage, he reveals that he wasn't very good at math, and that he achieved poor grades at the London School of Economics, where he studied in the late 1940s.) What he does possess, however, is voluminous amounts of firsthand knowledge gained in the financial markets, together with a keen interest in formulating a theory on the basis of his observations. Academic criticism of The Alchemy of Finance didn't put him off that effort. "My conceptual framework remained something very important for me personally," he writes. "It guided me both in making money as a hedge fund manager and in spending it as a philanthropist: and it became an integral part of my identity."

Outside the idealized world of Lucas's theory, knowledge is imperfect, people stick to wrongheaded ideas, and there is no agreed version of how the economy works. In these circumstances, Soros rightly points out, economic expectations, even biased ones, can help to determine economic fundamentals. One way to grasp what Soros is getting at is to look at the diagram on this page, in which the arrows indicate the directions of causation. Soros doesn't refer to this diagram, which I drew up myself, but he spells out the relations it illustrates:

Reflexivity can be interpreted as a circularity, or two-way feedback loop, between the participants' views and the actual state of affairs. People base their decisions not on the actual situation that confronts them but on their perception or interpretation of that situation. Their decisions make an impact on the situation (the manipulative function), and changes in the situation are liable to change their perceptions (the cognitive function).

A simple hypothetical example—for which I also take responsibility—may help to illustrate what can happen in such a reflexive system.

Imagine that ABC Corp. makes profits of $W per share, pays dividends of $X a share, and is growing at Y percent per annum. If you assume that this rate of earnings growth will persist indefinitely, it is a matter of high school arithmetic to figure out what ABC Corp.'s stock is worth on a fundamental basis, an amount I will call $Z. In the world of the Chicago economists, well-informed investors bid the price up to $Z and stop there. If prices rise above that level, they step in and sell; if prices fall below $Z, they buy. All is rational: all is efficient.

Now imagine that a group of irrationally exuberant investors come to believe that ABC Corp.'s growth rate is about to accelerate to 2Y percent, and, as a result, they bid up its stock up $2Z and keep it there for a while. What happens next? One possibility is that ABC Corp. could issue more of its highly rated shares and use them to purchase a rival, DEF Corp., whose stock price has been lagging—hence presenting a relative bargain. Thanks to the magic of acquisition accounting, the mere act of ABC Corp. buying DEF Corp. would make it appear that its earnings per share were growing rapidly. Voilà, the inflated earnings expectations that drove up ABC Corp.'s stock would have turned out to be justified. Most likely, the stock would rise even further—for a while, anyway.

If the previous discussion seemed a bit abstract, don't lose heart. In the second half of his book, Soros applies his theoretical frame to events he has lived through, beginning with the conglomerates boom of the late 1960s and ending with today's credit crunch. Reflecting on the harsh reception afforded to his earlier book, he writes:

Many critics of reflexivity claimed that I was belaboring the obvious, namely that the participants' biased perceptions influence market prices. But the crux of reflexivity is not so obvious; it asserts that market prices can influence the fundamentals. The illusion that markets manage to be always right is caused by their ability to affect the fundamentals they are supposed to reflect. The change in the fundamentals may then reinforce the biased expectations in an initially self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating process.

Of course, such boom-bust sequences do not happen all the time. More often the prevailing bias corrects itself before it can affect the fundamentals. But the fact that [such sequences] can occur invalidates the theory of rational expectations. When they occur, boom-bust processes can take on historic significance. That is what happened in the Great Depression, and that is what is unfolding now, although it is taking a very different shape.

One of Soros's earliest professional coups was investing in fast-growing industrial conglomerates, such as Textron, LTV, and Teledyne, which during the early days of the Nixon administration used their inflated stocks to buy out a succession of other companies. Just as in the example of ABC Corp., simply combining a lower-rated company with a higher-rated one boosted reported earnings per share for the lower-rated company. Even though investors such as Soros knew full well that much of this growth was an accounting illusion, they continued to bid up the conglomerates' stocks, thereby keeping the game going.

In order for it to continue indefinitely, however, the acquirers had to target bigger and bigger companies. Eventually, the Reliance Group, Saul Steinberg's outfit, launched a takeover bid for the venerable Chemical Bank that generated an establishment backlash. Steinberg's bid failed, and investors began to question the reported earnings growth of Reliance and other conglomerates. Knowing that the jig was almost up, Soros sold out and moved on to the next boom-bust cycle, which, in his case, turned out to be in real estate investment trusts.

Breaking up the narrative, Soros provides a handy eight-stage guide to the typical boom-bust cycle, together with a series of stock charts to help readers spot one in the making. Turning to the current situation, he says that, in large part, the recent housing bubble in the United States fit the historic pattern, except that in this case reflexivity was centered on the real estate rather than the stock market. As house prices shot up between 2001 and 2005, credit standards deteriorated sharply. Rather than restricting their lending, mortgage financiers deluded themselves into believing that the collateral for the loans they were making would continue to rise in value. The very act of extending more and more credit, on easier and easier terms, kept demand for real estate buoyant, which, in turn, ensured that for several years the lenders' optimistic expectations were validated. It was only when borrowers who had taken out loans they couldn't afford started to default in large numbers that the housing bubble finally burst.

What distinguishes this process from earlier downturns, and what makes it so dangerous, is the historical and international economic situation in which it is taking place, Soros says. "Superimposed on the US housing bubble," he writes, "is a much larger boom-bust sequence which has finally reached its inflection, or crossover, point." The housing slump is following the normal historical pattern, he suggests,

but, in addition, it has also set in motion a flight from the dollar and unwinding of the other excesses introduced into the financial system by recent innovations. That is how the housing bubble and super-bubble are connected.

As described by Soros, the "super-bubble" developed over the past quarter-century and is the result of three underlying trends: globalization, credit expansion, and deregulation. By globalization, he means not just expansion of trade in goods and services, and the rise of China and India, but the US's emergence as the world's biggest debtor. In the past couple of years, he reminds us, the United States has been running a current account deficit of more than 6 percent of GDP—a level usually associated with a developing country about to suffer a foreign exchange crisis.

The US has been able to avoid that fate because of the dollar's status as the main international reserve currency, and because foreign governments, particularly the one in Beijing, have proved willing to purchase enormous quantities of Treasury bonds. "There was a symbiotic relationship between the United States, which was happy to consume more than it produced, and China and other Asian exporters, which were happy to produce more than they consumed," Soros notes. "The United States accumulated external debt: China and the others accumulated currency reserves."

The lending boom extended far beyond the housing market. Over the past generation, the overall expansion of the US economy has increasingly become an asset-driven phenomenon. In 1980, the total amount of credit market debt outstanding in the United States was roughly the same as the GDP: by 2007, it had risen to about 350 percent of GDP. The bundling of residential mortgages into widely traded securities—"securitization"—played a significant role in this transformation, but so did increased federal lending resulting from large-scale budget deficits, the securitization of credit card debt and auto loans, and an expansion in corporate debt issuance. Soros isn't the first to point out these trends, but his description of the changes he has witnessed since starting out on Wall Street is instructive, nonetheless. In the years after World War II, he points out:

The total amount of credit outstanding in relation to the size of the economy was much less than it is today, and the amounts that could be borrowed against different types of collateral were also much smaller. Mortgages required at least 20 percent down payment, and borrowing against stocks was subject to statutory margin requirements that restricted loans to 50 percent or less of the value of the collateral. Auto loans, which required down payment, have been largely replaced by leases, which do not. There were no credit cards and very little unsecured credit. Financial institutions represented only a small percentage of the capitalization of US stocks. Very few financial stocks were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Most banks were traded over the counter, and many of them traded only by appointment.

Until last summer, the US economy was awash in easy credit. In one way or another, the banking system played an important part in issuing many of these loans, which is hardly surprising since that is how banks make money. Rather than criticizing his fellow investors on Wall Street, who created many of the newfangled debt instruments—such as mortgage-backed securities and collateral debt obligations—that have now imploded, Soros puts the blame on the regulators and central bankers who aided and abetted the financiers' incendiary activities. Under the system of "self-regulation" adopted by American and European banking regulators, many big financial institutions, such as Citigroup, Barclays, and Union Bank of Switzerland, were allowed to rely on their internal risk-management systems. The only outside check on their activities came from commercial ratings agencies, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's, which depended on the banks' fees for business.

"I find this the most shocking abdication of responsibility on the part of the regulators," Soros writes.

If they could not calculate the risk, they should not have allowed the institutions under their supervision to undertake them. The risk models of the banks were based on the assumption that the system is stable. But, contrary to market fundamentalist beliefs, the stability of financial markets is not assured; it has to be actively maintained by the authorities. By relying on the risk calculations of the market participants, the regulators pulled up the anchor and unleashed a period of uncontrolled credit expansion.

As long as credit was flowing freely, the three elements of the "super-bubble" reinforced one another. Now that the housing bubble has burst and economic growth has slowed dramatically, reflexivity is working in the opposite direction: market fundamentals are influencing investor perceptions. The global capital market that enabled the US to finance a huge trade deficit has proved equally adept at transferring the subprime shock to other parts of the world: after rushing in to capture the high yields offered by US subprime securities, big European banks have been forced to write off almost as much money as their American brethren. (Taking the United States and Europe together, banks and other financial institutions have, so far, written off roughly $450 billion in subprime-related charges. Many institutions are sitting on losses that they haven't yet declared. Estimates of the total losses that will eventually result range from $1 trillion to $2 trillion.)

As nerves fray and values of collateral plummet, many big financial institutions are desperately trying to eliminate the debt showing on their balance sheets. Individually, this may make sense. When banks do this collectively, it deprives worthwhile capital projects of funding and risks deepening the economic downturn, which, in turn, could well lead to more loans going bad. As Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury secretary, recently noted in the Financial Times, this is but one of several vicious cycles operating simultaneously. Falling asset prices are forcing investors with heavy borrowings into distress sales, which is putting more downward pressure on prices. As GDP growth slows, firms are laying off workers. Higher unemployment leads households to cut back on their spending, which reduces economic growth. "Without active efforts to interfere with these mechanisms," Summers wrote in an article published on August 6, "there can be no basis for confidence that the American economy will recover even in the medium term."

Soros would surely agree with that statement. Finishing his manuscript earlier this year, he predicted that the economic slump would be prolonged, partly because problems in the financial system would make countercyclical policies—such as easing the money supply to stimulate investment—less effective than usual. During 2008, the Fed has cut short-term interest rates to 2 percent and established virtually unlimited borrowing lines to financial firms. Congress has voted through a refinancing scheme for many of the homeowners who fall behind on their mortgage payments.

In early September, in an effort to bring down mortgage rates and put an end to the housing slump, the Bush administration took the dramatic step of effectively nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant mortgage lenders that the government originally set up but which had for many years operated as private companies. The federal takeover added more than $5 trillion to the national debt, and, especially coming from a Republican administration, it represented a historic extension of public intervention in the American economy; the Treasury Department then, without congressional approval, granted itself warrants to buy up to 80 percent of AIG's stock. (One Republican senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, lambasted the move as socialism and called on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to resign.) Yet despite all these moves, rates on jumbo mortgage loans—the type many home buyers have to take out if they live in places like New York, Boston, and Washington—remain close to 8 percent. Not surprisingly, house prices in most major markets are still falling.

Where will it end? Viewed from Soros's perspective, the dramatic events of mid-September demonstrated how reflexivity was working on the downside, to devastating effect: the slumping real estate market had wreaked havoc on banks and other financial institutions, which had reacted by tightening lending standards, and cutting back on the amount of credit, particularly mortgage finance, that they were willing to extend to households and firms. Tighter credit conditions, in turn, were hurting the economy and putting further downward pressure on property prices, shattering hopes that the credit markets would stabilize of their own accord, and that troubled firms would be able to recapitalize their balance sheets.

Some sort of recovery was what Richard S. Fuld, Lehman's former chief executive, and his colleagues had been hoping for. From the fall of 2007 onward, the firm, which was founded in 1850, was struggling to survive. Rather than selling out to a bigger, sounder institution, its managers gambled that the credit markets would rebound, arresting the fall in value of tens of billions of dubious real estate assets festering on the firm's balance sheet. The turnaround never came. By the time that Lehman was prepared to give up its independence, in mid-September, it was facing a funding crisis, and there were no purchasers interested. (The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve didn't deem Lehman strategically important enough to save, so it went bust. AIG, on the other hand, was too big to be allowed to fail.)

History shows that ad hoc attempts to resolve banking crises seldom work. The only thing that puts an end to the downward spiral is government intervention on a grand scale, socializing the losses that have been incurred, and freeing up the surviving institutions to start lending again. With Hank Paulson's bailout plan, we have now reached that stage, where the taxpayer is called upon to rectify the bankers' mistakes. Although the plan comes with a $700 billion price tag, the eventual cost could be even larger. Some observers have compared what is happening now to the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, when the government set up the Resolution Trust Corporation to dispose of the assets of insolvent thrifts, but that was a relatively trivial exercise compared to what is ahead. A better analogy is the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s, where the government initially refused to recognize the scale of the problem, but ended up, after almost a decade of economic stagnation, having to spend vast sums of public money on recapitalizing the country's financial sector. Even then, the Japanese economy failed to resume its previous growth rates: after a few years of modest expansion, it has once again slipped into near-recession.

It is to be hoped that the Paulson plan has a more invigorating effect on the US economy, but despite the recent celebrations on Wall Street a happy outcome is far from guaranteed. Critics have questioned the timing, ethics, politics, and efficacy of the proposal. The Treasury secretary is seeking absolute freedom to enact the plan as he sees fit. Under his proposed legislation, "decisions by the secretary pursuant to the authority of this act are nonreviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency"—a position rejected by members of the Senate Banking Committee who questioned Paulson on September 23. (Writing in the Financial Times on September 25, Soros proposed an alternative rescue plan, also suggested by Senator Charles Schumer and others, of injecting public money directly into the banks, through government purchases of preferred stock.)

From an economic perspective, what matters is whether the Paulson plan, or one close to it, will work: Are the planned purchases of assets big enough to make a difference? What about all the other increasingly toxic assets that financial institutions have on their books, including roughly $950 billion of securities linked to risky "alt-A" mortgages; hundreds of billions of dollars in securitized auto loans and credit card debts; and countless dubious credits that were extended during the boom to commercial real estate developers and leveraged buyout firms? Would it have been cheaper and more effective for the government to have recapitalized the big banks by taking equity stakes in many of them?

Even if the Paulson plan, or some variation of it, restores some degree of normalcy to the credit markets, it is far from certain that a modest fall in mortgage rates and a greater willingness to lend on the part of financial institutions will be sufficient to break the self-reinforcing impetus toward recession that has taken hold in other parts of the economy. Much depends on what happens to the housing market and to the global economy, which, in providing a ready market for US exports—and in providing cash by buying US government bonds—has helped to prevent a much sharper downturn in output and employment.

One of Soros's points is that the behavior in markets he defines as reflexivity adds a fundamental indeterminacy to economic events, which makes prediction very tricky. Still, given his taste for the grand philosophical statement, he couldn't resist imparting a few thoughts about the future. Writing well before the latest dramatic developments, he said:

Eventually, the US government will have to use taxpayers' money to arrest the decline in house prices. Until it does, the decline will be self-reinforcing, with people walking away from homes in which they have negative equity and more and more financial institutions becoming insolvent, thus reinforcing both the recession and the flight from the dollar. The Bush administration and most economic forecasters do not understand that markets can be self-reinforcing on the downside as well as the upside. They are waiting for the housing market to find a bottom on its own, but it is further away than they think.

Soros wasn't all gloom and doom. He said rapid growth in the developing world, particularly China, would continue, and he brushed aside fears that the international banking system would collapse, as it did in the 1930s. After observing the pathologies the financial system had exhibited since the summer of 2007, he called for more regulation, including stricter limits on leverage, the amounts borrowed for investment. But Soros's main conclusion went beyond specific forecasts of policy recommendations. The period of history that the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ushered in had come to an end, he said:

So what does the end of an era really mean? I contend that it means the end of a long period of relative stability based on the United States as the dominant power and the dollar as the main international reserve currency. I foresee a period of political and financial instability, hopefully to be followed by the emergence of a new world order.

Since 1971, when the Nixon administration abandoned the dollar's link to gold, many commentators have predicted the demise of the American currency and an end to US economic hegemony, only to be proved wrong, or, at least, premature. Soros could well end up joining this group—he freely admits he has been too pessimistic on previous occasions. (A decade ago, he underestimated the global economy's ability to rebound from the Asian financial crisis.) If the Paulson bailout succeeds in excising from the US banking system the distressed mortgage securities that have caused so much trouble; if there is a recovery of confidence on Wall Street; if the housing market stabilizes; if the recent fall in the oil price is sustained—then the US economy and currency could yet display their Houdini-like qualities one more time. Conversely, Soros's reading of the financial omens has enriched him oftentimes before: betting against him now could be unwise.

—September 25, 2008

Anonymous said...

I love it, Couric trys to get technical and Palin talks about 'health-care' talking points, and it drives the fucking DEM's NUTS!!!


No, Palin didn't talk about health care. She said the words 'health care', but there was no talking about it. No ideas. No plan.

Nobody can WATCH that interview and say she is fit for office.

I'll admit I was scared last week when they were up in the polls, but luckilly it was the Dead Cat Bounce.

After seeing Palin in her TV interviews I'm confident she will completely tank in the debates. She's got nothing, and the more she talks the more the GOP ticket goes down in the polls.

McCain is a piece of work too.

"I'm going to washington to fix this shit and I'm not going to debate until it is done."

"Uh John, can you step aside? You are just fucking things up."

"Uh.... I'll debate because things are ALMOST fixed"

John, things aren't almost fixed and you look like an idiot. You admitted that you don't know shit about the economy and now it has been shown.

Anonymous said...

No, Palin didn't talk about health care. She said the words 'health care', but there was no talking about it. No ideas. No plan.

*

Plan, Idea's ... Your talking to the American public, do you want to bore them?

What Palin is doing reminds me of those subliminal messages they used to put in movies.

I'm NOT PROTECTING PALIN, I'm just reporting on the method to her madness, and I think its brilliant.

Couric asks about Plans & Ideas, and Palin drops 'talking points' about what US public cares about and needs. This is fucking brilliant.

Lastly, since YOU brought up the subject, and this could ONLY BE THE PUSSY OR HBM. Who the FUCK has an idea about health care or a plan?? I could write one, but its JUST LIKE FUCKING WALL-STREET.

IF&WHEN drug reps quit getting $500k/yr for rep'ing pharms, ... e.g. if we take the fucking PROFIT out of health-care, yes, .. no FUCKING POL is going to tell the truth.

If campaign MONEY $$$ is #1 from NY banks, its #2 from drug-companys.

Anonymous said...

McCain is a piece of work too.

"I'm going to washington to fix this shit and I'm not going to debate until it is done."

*

I'm not saying this is 'RIGHT or WRONG', but it got HIM on the news, it got him media, ...

I'll tell you RIGHT NOW what's going on, ... This is ALL cheap media, its QUITE obvious that McSame is out of money, note the complaint he just stayed on the camera, ... he never intended to 'fix' the bail-out, he went to DC because is where the cameras are, ... This is how you win elections, by staying in peoples faces, people vote by redundant messaging, ... the MORE people see his face and name, the more likely he'll win.

Anonymous said...

No, Palin didn't talk about health care. She said the words 'health care', but there was no talking about it. No ideas. No plan.


*

It's ALL the FUCKING MC-SAME....

BUSH talks about BAIL-OUT, but there is NO plan, or ideas, its just a hand-out of $700B to wall street.

OR-BOMB-EO talks about 'change' and 'hope' but there are no ideas or plans, ... Atlantic Monthly has been writing for months that progressives are going to be very disapointed about what president OR-BUSH-EO actually does when he wins.

Anonymous said...

OR-BUSH-EO

An OREO with a Bush-Cheney inside, I love it.

Anonymous said...

What distinguishes this process from earlier downturns, and what makes it so dangerous, is the historical and international economic situation in which it is taking place, Soros says. "Superimposed on the US housing bubble," he writes, "is a much larger boom-bust sequence which has finally reached its inflection, or crossover, point." The housing slump is following the normal historical pattern, he suggests,

but, in addition, it has also set in motion a flight from the dollar and unwinding of the other excesses introduced into the financial system by recent innovations. That is how the housing bubble and super-bubble are connected.

As described by Soros, the "super-bubble" developed over the past quarter-century and is the result of three underlying trends: globalization, credit expansion, and deregulation. By globalization, he means not just expansion of trade in goods and services, and the rise of China and India, but the US's emergence as the world's biggest debtor. In the past couple of years, he reminds us, the United States has been running a current account deficit of more than 6 percent of GDP—a level usually associated with a developing country about to suffer a foreign exchange crisis.

Anonymous said...

Couric asks about Plans & Ideas, and Palin drops 'talking points' about what US public cares about and needs. This is fucking brilliant.


It isn't. She had to go into an interview because the American people won't stand for it if she doesn't. She failed. Did you watch it? She didn't answer the questions, and instead just would randomly throw out the name of a talking point.

The thing is she couldn't even discuss the talking points. It's like she was fucking playing Pictionary.

"Uhhh. Health care!... Uhhh.... Maverick..... uh ... oh shit... i'm supposed to say CHANGE. CHANGE!!!!"

Sorry Sarah. Time is up. The answer was "Incompetent". see... it's a picture of you.

It's not brilliant. The GOP is shitting their pants every time she opens her mouth. They know she has to next week.

GOP is down in the polls, and they are going further.

Anonymous said...

So whose FAULT is it?? The fucker here that wants IDEA's & PLAN's??

Read Soros, he gets it 100%

But even SOROS was insulted by wall-street for telling the truth. Where are we today? Enforce regulation, and dissolve the FED.

***

Rather than criticizing his fellow investors on Wall Street, who created many of the newfangled debt instruments—such as mortgage-backed securities and collateral debt obligations—that have now imploded, Soros puts the blame on the regulators and central bankers who aided and abetted the financiers' incendiary activities. Under the system of "self-regulation" adopted by American and European banking regulators, many big financial institutions, such as Citigroup, Barclays, and Union Bank of Switzerland, were allowed to rely on their internal risk-management systems. The only outside check on their activities came from commercial ratings agencies, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's, which depended on the banks' fees for business.

"I find this the most shocking abdication of responsibility on the part of the regulators," Soros writes.

If they could not calculate the risk, they should not have allowed the institutions under their supervision to undertake them. The risk models of the banks were based on the assumption that the system is stable. But, contrary to market fundamentalist beliefs, the stability of financial markets is not assured; it has to be actively maintained by the authorities. By relying on the risk calculations of the market participants, the regulators pulled up the anchor and unleashed a period of uncontrolled credit expansion.

Anonymous said...

PAULSON can't, but the last Treasury-Sec seems capable of truth, ... What gives ??? Obviously he said SHIT that BUSH didn't want to hear.

***

Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury secretary, recently noted in the Financial Times, this is but one of several vicious cycles operating simultaneously. Falling asset prices are forcing investors with heavy borrowings into distress sales, which is putting more downward pressure on prices. As GDP growth slows, firms are laying off workers. Higher unemployment leads households to cut back on their spending, which reduces economic growth. "Without active efforts to interfere with these mechanisms," Summers wrote in an article published on August 6, "there can be no basis for confidence that the American economy will recover even in the medium term."

Anonymous said...

The FIRST BUSH/PAULSON/OBAMA bailout failed, why should the next $700B do any better? Why now MUST congress approve, they didn't in the past??

Spread the blame, all know that nothing can be done now, so now BUSH must spread the blame, and OR-BOMB-EO is more than willing to take the blame. Fucking Idiot.

***

In early September, in an effort to bring down mortgage rates and put an end to the housing slump, the Bush administration took the dramatic step of effectively nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant mortgage lenders that the government originally set up but which had for many years operated as private companies. The federal takeover added more than $5 trillion to the national debt, and, especially coming from a Republican administration, it represented a historic extension of public intervention in the American economy; the Treasury Department then, without congressional approval, granted itself warrants to buy up to 80 percent of AIG's stock. (One Republican senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, lambasted the move as socialism and called on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to resign.) Yet despite all these moves, rates on jumbo mortgage loans—the type many home buyers have to take out if they live in places like New York, Boston, and Washington—remain close to 8 percent. Not surprisingly, house prices in most major markets are still falling.

Anonymous said...

History shows that ad hoc attempts to resolve banking crises seldom work. The only thing that puts an end to the downward spiral is government intervention on a grand scale, socializing the losses that have been incurred, and freeing up the surviving institutions to start lending again. With Hank Paulson's bailout plan, we have now reached that stage, where the taxpayer is called upon to rectify the bankers' mistakes. Although the plan comes with a $700 billion price tag, the eventual cost could be even larger.

Anonymous said...

HEY BEND, This BUD is for YOU, ...

***

Eventually, the US government will have to use taxpayers' money to arrest the decline in house prices. Until it does, the decline will be self-reinforcing, with people walking away from homes in which they have negative equity and more and more financial institutions becoming insolvent, thus reinforcing both the recession and the flight from the dollar. The Bush administration and most economic forecasters do not understand that markets can be self-reinforcing on the downside as well as the upside. They are waiting for the housing market to find a bottom on its own, but it is further away than they think.

Anonymous said...

NEW WORLD ORDER??

So what does the end of an era really mean? I contend that it means the end of a long period of relative stability based on the United States as the dominant power and the dollar as the main international reserve currency. I foresee a period of political and financial instability, hopefully to be followed by the emergence of a new world order.

Bewert said...

Re: OR-BOMB-EO talks about 'change' and 'hope' but there are no ideas or plans

Someone hasn't been paying much attention.

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/

Hours and hours of reading various plans on over 20 different issues, if you care to look.

tim said...

>>I foresee a period of political and financial instability, hopefully to be followed by the emergence of a new world order.

http://www.zod2008.com/

tim said...

Peter Schiff on the bailout...

http://bubbletracking.blogspot.com/2008/09/peter-schiff-on-bailout.html

Bewert said...

Cafferty of CNN on Palin: "...pathetic..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc

The more the let her out of the box the worse it gets. It should be an interesting 40 days ahead.

Can't wait to see what kind of excuse they'll think about about not having the Palin/Biden debate.

Bewert said...

Re: Put lipstick on BP, and he would be a lifesize PALIN doll, highly fuckable.

Now that's the nicest insult I've ever recieved.

I'll be watching a debate...

Bewert said...

Re: Bush-Obama Part is Wall Street, its about BIG MONEY.

McCain-Palin is now about Main-Street, little people, populism. It's the base of McCain.


That's funny.

So tell me again, why has Obama outraised every politician ever with over $450 million total from over 2.5 million individuals, a far greater number of donors than McCain. Here go to opensecrets.org and compare the size of the average donation and tell me again how McCains base is the little people:

McCain

Obama

Did you note that be far the greatest number of donations to McCain is a maxed out $2300? Only little people can afford to give that much to a candidate, especially in this economy...

Anonymous said...

Tim,
I posted some stats at September 24, 2008 6:07 PM. Scroll up a bit.

Anonymous said...

It's ON gang-bang at BP's house, and BP's going to wear lipstick and dress up like Palin.

Bring lots of condom's, towels, and little tidy wipes.

BP's house, right next to BendBB's trailer at the park near Simpson & 14th.

Anonymous said...

It has arrived! Gold & Silver thieves. Marshall law is coming next!


=========
$2M theft at a Bend home in silver coins and gold bars
By Cindy Powers / The Bulletin
Published: September 27. 2008 4:00AM PST


Dakotah Leverett Yarborough, 43, left, has been charged with burglary and aggravated theft in connection with about $2 million in stolen coins, silver bars and jewelry taken from a northwest Bend home. Connie Sue Yarborough, 38, has been charged with aggravated theft.


Some of the stolen Items
• About 200 bars of silver, weighing 100 ounces each
• $300,000 worth of gold American Eagle coins
• More than 8,000 silver coins
• 10-carat diamond ring
• Platinum watch with 3.5 carats in diamonds
• 22-karat heavy gold necklace with opal and diamond pendant
• 18-karat gold necklace
• Pink tourmaline necklace
Estimated value: $2 million
Source: Bend Police reports and Deschutes County Circuit Court records
A recent theft of about $2 million in jewelry, gold and silver coins from a northwest Bend home led to charges against a Hawaii couple Wednesday, after an investigation that took Bend police to three states this week.

Dakotah Leverett Yarborough and Connie Sue Yarborough, of Hilo, Hawaii, have been charged with stealing thousands of coins, precious metal ingots and heirloom jewelry from Dakotah Yarborough’s 67-year-old former stepmother.

“He is very familiar with the family and has been at the house and, up to this point, he has been welcome at the house,” Bend Police Capt. Kevin Sawyer said.

Detectives have recovered 14 5-gallon buckets containing more than 8,800 silver coins and 80 100-ounce silver bars from Dakotah Yarborough’s rental car, according to court documents filed this week.

Two Bend police investigators who flew to the couple’s Hawaii home this week were searching the house and had recovered some stolen items Friday, Sawyer said.

The stolen coins and precious metals were stored in safes inside the woman’s Bend home and were accumulated over the past decade as a nest egg, said the victim’s son, Portland lawyer Joe Durkee.

“The jewelry, from what I understand, is very rare jewelry as far as quality and size that was handed down from her father,” Durkee said.

HHis mother felt confident the valuables were secure in her safes, Durkee said.

On the advice of Dakotah Yarborough — who police say works as a private detective specializing in electronic surveillance — Durkee said his mother changed the locks on her home and combinations to her safes in August.

Dakotah Yarborough, 43, was staying at his former stepmother’s home at the time, according to court documents.

In late August, Dakotah Yarborough asked if she would sell him a silver bar or one of her gold coins, which she reluctantly did, according to a report by Bend Police Detective John Lawrence.

Authorities were called to the Bend home Sept. 8 on a report that “assorted gold & silver bars, diamond watch, Krugerrands and jewelry” had been stolen over the weekend, according to the burglary report.

After multiple interviews and a clean polygraph test of the locksmith who changed the safe combinations, authorities focused in on Dakotah Yarborough.

In the week after the burglary, Dakotah Yarborough flew to Hawaii and back, and his wife came to Bend for a visit, then returned to Hawaii, Sawyer said.

When Dakotah Yarborough returned to Bend, investigators from nearly every police agency in Central Oregon watched him on the streets and from the air. They used a fixed-wing plane and a helicopter the family pitched in to pay for, Sawyer said.

Dakotah Yarborough switched cars and clothing often, but detectives put vehicle trackers on three of the cars he drove. He pulled frequent U-turns and repeatedly circled roundabouts, according to Lawrence’s report.

After buying a shovel and 5-gallon buckets with lids at Lowe’s and Home Depot, Yarborough went to a cinder pit on U.S. Forest Service land, worrying detectives that he might have plans to bury the loot, the report said.

“So we had people sitting on five or six places that we knew he frequented or might go,” Sawyer said. “We had people out in the forest, in (camouflage), in the woods watching.”

On Sept. 19, detectives followed Dakotah Yarborough from a northeast Bend home, driving a dusty blue Pontiac Grand Am with a trunk that was obviously weighed down, Sawyer said.

He said Dakotah Yarborough ditched the car for a time and changed shirts twice before police watched him back the Pontiac up to the door of a first-floor room at a northeast Bend hotel and a Redmond detective arrested him outside.

A search of the Pontiac’s trunk turned up the buckets of silver, which weighed more than 1,000 pounds.

The hunt for Connie Yarborough led police to a Days Inn in Redwood City, Calif., where they arrested her Wednesday, according to a report by Bend Police Detective Brian Kindel.

Connie Yarborough, 38, had a new laptop and $17,904 in cash, the report said.

A booking sheet from San Mateo County lists her as “unemployed.”

Dakotah Yarborough was held at the Deschutes County jail Friday on $500,000 bail. A grand jury has filed an indictment charging him with one count of first-degree burglary, six counts of aggravated theft and one count of unlawfully “recording a conversation where a safe combination was discussed ...”

Yarborough has three prior convictions for identity theft and one prior felony theft conviction, according to court records.

Local authorities have recovered a Cobray .9 mm machine gun and a silencer they have linked to Dakotah Yarborough, Sawyer said. They expect him to face charges of being a felon in possession of an automatic weapon.

He is scheduled to appear in Deschutes County Circuit Court on Monday.

Connie Yarborough was lodged at the MacGuire Correctional Facility in San Mateo County on $250,000 bail. She has been indicted in Deschutes County on one count of aggravated theft.

She will be extradited to Oregon, Sawyer said.

Joe Durkee said his mother has been shaken by the burglary and theft of her valuables, but the family hopes some good may come of it.

“While the family has suffered hopefully only just a theft, the big thing is that we hope the courts will take this guy off the streets because he and his wife are like Bonnie and Clyde,” Durkee said. “We hope the sacrifice that we unintentionally suffered will help others.”

Anonymous said...

It has arrived! Gold & Silver thieves. Marshall law is coming next!

*

BP's 'cargo' has arrived, now he'll never have to get a job.

God bless the DEM party, the party of early retirement.

Anonymous said...

Even the WASH-POST a pro-OR-BOMB-EO media outlet ... SAY's mcSAME for both. Only time will tell, I concur having watched the debate it was frustrating that the most crucial question of the day was not answered by either.

*** OR-CAIN-EO is the mcSAME

McCain as the Alpha Male

By David S. Broder
Sunday, September 28, 2008; Page B07

There were no knockout blows in the first presidential debate of the fall, but John McCain out-pointed Barack Obama often enough to encourage his followers that he can somehow overcome the odds and deny the Democrats the victory that has seemed to be in store for them.

It was a small thing, but I counted six times that Obama began a sentence with the words that McCain was "absolutely right" about a point he had made. No McCain sentences began with a similar acknowledgement of his opponent's wisdom, even though the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis far more than they disagreed.

That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator -- an impression reinforced by Obama's frequent glances in McCain's direction and McCain's studied indifference to his rival.

Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.

But it reinforced my impression that McCain was the more aggressive debater. He flung the adjectives that stick in a listener's mind, calling Obama "naive" and therefore "dangerous."

Given that most of the debate was on foreign policy and national security, supposedly McCain's strong subjects, the Obama camp is justified in thinking that their guy did not embarrass himself.

Obama made his point that the preoccupation with Iraq -- which McCain in effect confirmed -- had cost the United States in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is believed to have built his base of operations, and in the eyes of the world.

And while Obama continued to struggle to explain his original opposition to the "surge" strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus and championed by McCain, he did put his opponent on the defensive.

"John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007," he said. "You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003. And at the time, when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni, and you were wrong." All that, Obama said, counts against McCain as an arbiter of future security policy.

That was a clean hit, but there were few others from that direction. And McCain was loaded for bear on everything from Obama's history as a seeker of earmarks to his readiness for talks "without precondition" with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The biggest surprise was the shared diffidence on the topic du jour -- the Wall Street bailout plan. Neither candidate would give moderator Jim Lehrer a straight answer as to whether he supported the administration request for a $700 billion rescue effort.

They were even more evasive when Lehrer pressed them to say how they would adjust their ambitious plans to accommodate the budgetary effects of that massive government expenditure.

It was Never-Never Land, as Obama and McCain struggled to avoid the full implications of this economic policy calamity. McCain finally threw out the possibility of a freeze on all federal expenditures except defense, veterans' care and entitlements -- but Obama immediately objected, citing his eagerness to boost early childhood education.

Perhaps the next two debates will offer opportunities to pin these artful dodgers down on how they would operate under the burdens the Bush administration will leave behind. Otherwise, the voters may go to the polls with only the vaguest idea of the truly tough choices the next president will face.

The pre-debate polls showed a definite tilt toward Obama, keyed to the worsening climate. This debate probably did little to change that. It would behoove someone to start talking realistically about the difficulties that lie ahead. A little candor would do wonders for this race.

Anonymous said...

BP, is correct its quite clear that OR-BUSH-EO is the party to maximize 'cargo'.

Anonymous said...

The mcSAME diff, ..

OR-BOMB-EO will bomb so-america, africa, ... all the US colony's getting over taken by the chinese, .. and paki, afghan, ... wars everywhere,

mc$ain will continue to wage war in IRAQ forever, using scorched earth policy, the theory is that if you reduce ALL of IRAQ to glass ( molten sand ), then that will show the world who is boss.

So at the end of the day the choice is destroy the WHOLE world (OR-BOMB-EO), or IRAQ ( mc$ain ), that seems to be the only difference, a difference of tactic to control the world.

It may be cheaper using mc$ain tactic, as we can't afford to reduce the whole world to glass.

Either way its all about mutually assured suicide.

The good news is that if & when the US goes broke, the rest of the world can get some sleep.

Bewert said...

Re: Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.

Broder is an idiot. Anyone who has ever worked with dogs or other pack animals knows that the alpha is the one who looks directly at the others, not the one who is scared to look at the alpha. McCain looked scared to look at Obama, like an acquiescent dog scared to look the pack leader in the eye.

It was a tie as far as I'm concerned. The most interesting instant poll numbers were some that showed Obama way ahead among women viewers.

I can't wait for Palin/Biden. That should be funny,

Bewert said...

I've got to agree with other commenters here, though, that the bailout is a brilliant trap right out of the Rovian playbook.

Dems don't agree, more banks go down and they get blamed.

They agree, over the protests of the House Repubs who are insisting on a "market-oriented" agreement, and it's a giveaway wih no regulation and nothing for Main St., and they get owned for being such fools.

Brilliant. The last big theft from the US Treasury by the outgoing BushCo, and they won't get blamed for anything.

Bewert said...

House Repugs this afternoon:

"Wall St. must share in the cost of cleaning up this mess" "We must take care of the taxpayers money"

Great message, no matter how truthful.

Anonymous said...

I've got to agree with other commenters here, though, that the bailout is a brilliant trap right out of the Rovian playbook.

*

Certainly appears that way BP. This thing could have imploded 2 years ago. With ALL the mcCain theatrics its perfect.

That said, its well understood that this HOUR is Gingrich#2, that Rove is running BUSH, and possible consulting mc$ain, but ALL the PUG's that have 're-invented' themselves to the NEW & CLEANSED title of GOP is the new third party.

So we have ..

1.) Pug-Bush Rove
2.) Dem-OR-BUSH-EO Rove
3.) GOP-GINGRICH-GINGRICH


Nobody gives a FUCK about the prez, not going to be a fun job, what they want is the HOUSE BACK.

With 200 to 1 anti-bailout, who ever votes for the bailout is dead-meat, it can't pass without DEM's. If & when it passes, then the DEM's are fucked, even 'IF' OR-BUSH-EO wins, he'll be stuck with a PUG majority. Gingrich is the godfather.

I think its going to work. Rove must be terrified. Given that ROVE is a faggot, and enabler of 'kindler gentler BUSH'.

Gingrich, Shelby, ... are all take no prisoner's; and Buchanan will return to redeem AmeriKKKa.

The WHOLE fucking bail-out by Sunday/Monday, is because monday is a long jewish holiday, and everyone knows that Jews can't sell their stock after monday, so they got to announce the bail-out by monday AM, so all the Jews can have pending sell order triggers by Monday AM, and be done & out.

The US is fucked either way, and the DEM's will get blamed.

FUCKING BRILLIANT.

GOP ( note I didn't say pug ) is playing chess, and OR-BUSH-EO is playing with Rovian Doll's.

What will happen? Most likely PALIN will fuck up, mcCain will look like an idiot, there will be a bailout bill of some kind that passes, and whoever voted for it will get 'recalled'. OR-BUSH-EO wins, and becomes the 2nd most un-popular prez in US history, as he'll get the blame of could-a, should-a stopped the bailout.

The bailout will destroy the US dollar, and cause oil to go to $10/gal, and gold to $2,000 oz. OR-BUSH-EO will get blamed. By 2012 PALIN may be well versed in Gingrich-ian Philosophy, ... or Hell maybe Gingrich himself will do a Nixon and run.

Let's remember that the whole US financial implosion goes back to 1970's "Derivatives", thus all saw this coming, every thing you see happening is orchestrated.

Anonymous said...

Today the 'Banks' are sitting on $80 trillion in derivatives, and about $1 trillion in assets.

De-Leveraging, ... the $700B will not even get us to xmas.

The new $100k in partial towards $700B will be a bank-lobbyist full employment act. The US government will be hiring tens of thousands of lawyers and cpas to calc value.

What a fucking kluster-fuck.

Nobody gives a fucking SHIT who the next prez it, and basically Gingrich has it planned good. Get back the congress in 2008 for 'GOP', and then take back the prez in 2012, after blaming the Dem's for depression #2.

OR-BUSH-EO is now so fucking tied to BUSH, that nothing he can do will ever matter.

Anonymous said...

Last nights debate was really about who was more like BUSH, and Obama won.

tim said...

I thought they both sucked. Obama was like a lousy Bill Clinton and McCain was like a losuy Bob Dole. We're all the losers.

Anonymous said...

We're all the losers.

*

The AmeriKKKan public will get the prez they deserve.

The saddest thing is that both refused to answer mcLiars questions.

Anonymous said...

The following is from the UK financial-times, an ANTI-BUSH equiv of the wall-st urinal.

What's fascinating is that the 'REBELS' are at the gate to oppose the bail-out, and they ain't W,OREO,CAIN;

With over 200 to 1 of US citizens opposed to the WallSt bailout, the voice of the 'people' is now REBEL-pug's!!!!!!!!!!

Who would have guessed??? Personally I think this is going to play right into mc[able&]CAIN's hand, like it wasn't the chest match all along.

Rebels' revolt aims to save Republican party brand

By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington

Published: September 27 2008 03:00 | Last updated: September 27 2008 03:00

When Hank Paulson, the US Treasury secretary, first prepared to ask Congress to approve a $700bn rescue of Wall Street, he might have believed that his toughest sell would be to Democrats on Capitol Hill. But a revolt late on Thursday night among conservative Republicans staunchly opposed to the bail-out proved that it was the doubts of members of his own party that could torpedo the White House bid.

What ensued was a guessing game of just what was motivating a band of Republican legislators to turn against the White House in a moment of crisis.

For some Republicans, the decision to turn their backs on President George W. Bush and Mr Paulson was a play for their presidential candidate, John McCain. Democratic leaders had early on Thursday signalled that they had reached a bipartisan deal with the help of a few Republicans, stealing an opportunity from Mr McCain to come to the plan's rescue.

But for most of the rebel group, the decision to reject the programme had little to do with the presidential race.

"I don't think it has anything to do with McCain," said Bruce Josten, a senior lobbyist at the US Chamber of Commerce.

The move to reject it signalled a more fundamental belief that Mr Bush, whose record of spending has made it impossible for Republicans to claim fiscal responsibility, was about to take an irreparable step too far for a party already in tatters.

"They see themselves as rescuing the conservative brand, which has been pummelled in the last few years," says Vin Weber, a lobbyist and former conservative Republican member of Congress. "The ones I've talked to were not so much committed to defeating the plan as they were to planting a flag."

The revolt of dozens of seemingly leaderless Republicans exposed an outright challenge to the leadership of John Boehner, the House minority leader who is seen as more pragmatic than his counterparts and who had initially appeared to support a rescue plan.

The decision by conservatives such as Mike Pence of Indiana to lash out at the $700bn (€479bn, £381bn) proposal also appeared to reflect a philosophy articulated by Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker, that a party in the minority cannot win back the majority by being consensus-builders. Instead they must be bomb-throwers.

Their rally against the deal - however temporary - underlined a party in the House that has been in tatters since the departure of Tom DeLay, the former majority leader who acquired the nickname of "The Hammer" for his ability to bring Republicans together.

After years of going along with Mr Bush on issues they opposed, such as the education bill known as No Child Left Behind and a costly prescription drug benefit, the idea of supporting a $700bn rescue of Wall Street was too difficult to swallow.

"It all came home to roost in the 2006 elections when Republicans found they didn't have credibility on their core issues," Mr Weber says. "They need to regain their credibility."

But even Mr Weber, a conservative, believes his former colleagues are playing with fire.

"We're not going to become the majority by being blamed for the collapse of the economy," he says. Though some conservatives have said that supporting the bail-out would be akin to supporting a modern day New Deal, Mr Weber says their history is "precisely wrong".

"The massive expansion they fear will come if the economy collapses. This is precisely an effort to avoid large-scale expansion of the government," he says.

"If there is simply a cadre of Republicans that vote against to make a philosophical point, fine. I'm somewhat nervous about how far they are going to take their protest," he says.

But Grover Norquist, a staunch proponent of tax cuts who heads Americans for Tax Reform, said conservatives were simply wary of having taxpayers "foot the bill" for mistakes that originated in the Carter and Clinton administrations.

He says the Democratic presidents "forced banks" to make bad loans in order to get low-cost housing for some of their constituents.

Anonymous said...

Timmy is right, sure mcCain talked shit, but so did OR-BUSH-EO.

The expectations with mcCain doing is out were so fucking low, that he exceeded most. Now we can wait for SaBar[palin] next thurs, again we're told she'll not do well,... all she has to do is what Cain did last night, talk 'save the Jew' shit, did you note last night that Cain was all about saving the Jew from Iran????

Palin's going to play the same, and old BIDEN being an AIPAC loyalist what can he say?

Moderator: "So Mrs Palin how many Jews do you know?"

Palin: "Well I met Kissinger last night, and then Lieberman is always trying to get in my pants, does that count?? Cum to think about it so did Kiss, are all Jews horny devils?? He, He, He"

Moderator: "Well mr Biden do you know any Jews"

Biden: "I'm not going to be part of this inanity".

Conclusion, Palin wins!!!!

Biden being a sore loser, and the AmeriKKKan public knowing that 'inanity' means that Biden wanted to fuck Palin in the ass, and good christian women don't do that.

How in the fuck can OR-BUSH-EO pull himself out of do shit???

I mean last night, he could have said, with regards to the question of 'what do we lose with the bailout'.

He could have answered.

The people get health care.
The people get a fair deal.
The people get an honest government.

Then only then does WallSt get a fucking bailout. Did he say that?? NO?

He said, "goolly jeebus, if there is any scratch left after the bank lobby that brought me this far, I mean if they drop some coin, I'll be sure to give it to the children".

OR-BOMB-EO has made the transition to completion, he is now OR-BUSH-EO.

Anonymous said...

BP, Know thy enemy, better than he know himself.

*

Portman helped McCain prep for debate

By Howard WIlkinson • hwilkinson@enquirer.com • September 27, 2008

Former congressman Rob Portman, the Terrace Park Republican who was on John McCain's short list of possible running mates, debuted in a new role in the McCain campaign - playing the part of Barack Obama in the GOP presidential candidate's debate preparation.
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Portman is used to playing the parts of Democratic candidates for GOP candidates - he did the same thing for George W. Bush in one of his three debates with Al Gore in 2000 and played the part of Gore running mate Joseph Lieberman in Dick Cheney's debate practice sessions.

Four years later, he took on the role of John Edwards for Cheney in preperations for the vice presidential debate.

Between Tuesday and Friday, Portman shuttled among New York, Washington, D.C.; and Oxford, Miss., site of the Friday night debate for sessions with McCain.

CNN reported Friday night that Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer and former Clinton administration official, played the part of McCain in Obama's debate preparations.

Portman, who left his cabinet-level position in the Bush administration last year, has become something of a go-to-guy for Republicans preparing for debates. He first did it in 1996, when GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole asked him to play the part of Lama Alexander in a GOP presidential debate.

In 2000, Portman went to New York to play the part of HIllary Clinton when Republican Senate candidate Rick Lazio was preparing for a debate with her.

Anonymous said...

Well now we know you can't blame anyone. This might explain why BUSH 100% supports OR-BUSH-EO, he knows that he'll not be blamed. Cuz you know CAIN will blame da SHRUB.

*

Bush holds Washington blameless

Sunday, September 28, 2008


WASHINGTON - How did it happen, America's grave financial crisis? President Bush offered a bunch of explanations but held Washington completely blameless, painting a picture of a government standing innocently on the sidelines as the economy went off the rails.

Somehow, under Bush's scenario, the country wound up at the precipice of "a long and painful recession" at a time when, apparently, Congress, the White House, the regulators and the Fed were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Now that the economy has tanked, Bush says the federal government is responding with "decisive action."

Shouldn't the people in charge have been doing that before everything became such a mess? "Our entire economy is in danger," Bush said in an address to the nation Wednesday night.

Nowhere in his 13-minute speech did the president suggest that the people in Washington who are supposed to keep an eye on the economy missed a step, failed to raise alarms or hesitated to intervene. The guilty parties in Bush's script were overseas lenders flush with cash, American borrowers reaching for more than they could afford, easy credit terms, a banking system eager to cooperate and too much optimism about rising home values.

Bush spoke vaguely about investment banks that "found themselves saddled with" toxic assets and banks that "found themselves" with questionable balance sheets.

The economic collapse - well, it happened. "The gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt," Bush said, talking to the country as if he were an economics professor in a freshman course.

But now, there's plenty of action with federal takeovers and bailouts that have reshaped America's financial industry and left the concept of free enterprise in the dust. On Capitol Hill, key Republicans and Democrats reported agreement in principle Thursday on the outlines of a bailout package and prepared to show it to Bush for his endorsement of their changes to the plan.

Bush is a sharp-elbows politician, fiercely partisan and combative. The eight years of his presidency are filled with no-holds-barred, blame-game, finger-pointing attacks on Democrats. But not on Wednesday night. Not when Bush desperately needs Democratic votes to pass the $700 billion (that's with a b) plan to buy distressed assets from financial institutions to shore up the banking system and unlock the nation's severe credit crunch.

He could not risk offending Democrats because so many Republicans are balking at his proposal. Bush held his tongue and spoke instead of the spirit of bipartisan cooperation between Democrats and Republicans. He invited presidential rivals John McCain and Barack Obama to an extraordinary White House meeting with congressional leaders on Thursday to find a way forward.

Appearing before the nation Wednesday night, the president had a formidable challenge to persuade anxious Americans to swallow the bitter medicine of digging in their pockets to pay for a rescue package that could exceed the advertised costs and soar beyond $1 trillion. The painful truth is: No one knows how big the price tag will be.

Across the country, Americans are losing their homes or watching neighbors fall into mortgage foreclosure. Small businesses can't borrow money. But the answer from Washington is to bail out the titans on Wall Street, not the people on Main Street. Americans are anxious and angry, and the politicians know it.

Bush's argument is that rescuing the huge financial companies will preserve America's overall economy and help consumers and businesses get the credit they need. That is a tough sell.

Democrats demanded - and got - the administration's acceptance of limits on the pay of executives whose companies would be rescued. McCain has said he would fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is supposed to oversee Wall Street, but the White House has shot that down.

In his address, Bush said Americans "deserve clear answers" about how the whole crisis happened. But government accountability was not among them.

Borrowers and lenders? They got the presidential spotlight.

"Easy credit, combined with the faulty assumption that home values would continue to rise, led to excesses and bad decisions," Bush said.

"Many mortgage lenders approved loans for borrowers without carefully examining their ability to pay. Many borrowers took out loans larger than they could afford, assuming that they could sell or refinance their homes at a higher price later on."

But whose job is it to regulate the questionable lending? That would be the government. And Bush is in charge of it.

Bush came into office eight years ago complaining that he had inherited a recession. It was brief and mild.

When he delivered his speech Wednesday night, Bush had 118 days left before the next president is sworn in on Jan. 20.

When Bush leaves, his successor will inherit a problem of historic proportions.

Terence Hunt has covered the White House for The Associated Press since the Reagan presidency.

Anonymous said...

The following from the GUARDIAN in the UK, note this is a liberal rag, the FT is financial, but HATES BUSH, the GUARDIAN is quite like the SF-CHRON. Note that they too point out that OR-BUSH-EO is now 100% BUSH, and that RE-pugs are running from BUSH, ...

OR-BUSH-EO is ignoring the little people. This only begs to ASK, what would HRC-BITCH be saying right now had HE won??

***

When smalltown USA turned on 'Fraud Street'

Americans have watched with horror as financial chaos has spread across the country, choking the economy and threatening to plunge the country into recession. Last week they turned their anger on the administration as it battled to put together a rescue package. Report by Paul Harris in Pennsylvania, Ruth Sunderland and Heather Stewart

* Paul Harris in Pennsylvania, Ruth Sunderland and Heather Stewart
* The Observer,
* Sunday September 28 2008

Wall Street demonstrators

Demonstrators protest the proposed 700 USD billion Wall Street bail out at the bull stature near Bowling Green Park in the Financial District in New York. Photograph: Nicholas Roberts/AFP

It was the week that an angry Main Street finally fought back after a decade when the financial masters of Wall Street were seemingly invincible. As President George Bush looked straight into the television cameras last week and spelt out to the nation the economic peril facing America, the fury and fear were mounting in millions of homes.

'Without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic,' Bush warned. He sketched out a scenario of failing banks and plunging share prices which would savage retirement plans and put millions out of work. It was a terrifying scenario. Having waged two wars that are not yet over, Bush faced the final legacy of his tumultuous two-term period in office: the possible collapse of the American economy.

But the action he was calling for stuck in the throats of the American people. The administration's planned $700bn bail-out for the financial sector has outraged and appalled many on the country's Main Streets. It has led to anger on the left of American politics, shocked at such aid to wealthy bankers when the millions of families losing their homes get little direct help. At the same time many on the right have expressed equal disbelief, watching in amazement as the previously free-marketeer Bush suddenly embarked on the biggest government intervention since the Great Depression.

The US media have turned on Wall Street like a pack of wolves. 'Fraud Street,' screamed the banner scrolling beneath the concerned features of Fox Business Network's Liz Claman, who told viewers: 'You know what? I think the American public deserves some answers.' Time magazine declared that the nation's current troubles were 'the price of greed'. 'Blame greed,' echoed the Chicago Tribune

At the United Nations, an Australian reporter accosted the actor Michael Douglas during a press conference and demanded to know - with a straight face, mind you - whether he felt any responsibility for the crisis because he delivered the line 'greed is good' as the character Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street. 'Are you now saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?' the reporter asked.

'I'm not saying that,' a bemused Douglas replied. 'And my name is not Gordon. He's a character I played 20 years ago.'

The huge bail-out plan has also fundamentally changed the battlefield of the American election, which is just five weeks away from deciding who will be the next president. The sheer scale of the economic crisis, and the enormous sums of taxpayers' money demanded to sort it out, are the biggest game in town.

In the UK, the red mists of anger have been slower to appear but the frustration is emerging with millions of savers and shareholders in Bradford and Bingley recognising that it will become the latest high street bank to fall victim to the financial contagion that has its roots in sub-prime lending to poor American homebuyers. Gordon Brown, who had been in Washington conferring with Bush about the crisis, branded the past few years an 'age of irresponsibility' and demanded the banks stop behaving recklessly. Until recently, Brown and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, had been boasting that the past decade was an era of unprecedented prosperity and stability, and the Prime Minister's volte-face drew immediate accusations of hypocrisy from the Conservatives.

As the deadlock on Capitol Hill continued last week, it must have been painfully obvious to Brown that the consequences of failure would reverberate throughout the world financial system - and straight to the pockets of Britain's homeowners. The cost of interbank lending on the London money markets has shot up, as shocked investors feared more banks could be at risk of going bust. Mortgage rates in the UK quickly followed, leaving thousands of homeowners struggling to find affordable finance.

Here in Britain, analysts believe the impact of the financial crisis on the real economy has only just begun to bite. But to millions of Americans, it seems as though the doomsday picture is already upon them, especially in crucial battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, America's former manufacturing heartland.

These are people like Ken Karasek. The 47-year-old union organiser in the city of Wilkes-Barre has lived all his life among the hardscrabble towns of eastern Pennsylvania. He has seen factory after factory close and jobs move overseas. He feels that the economic crisis of the past year has merely brought the rest of America up to speed with what has happened in his home patch for the past three decades, and he is angry that the government has been so quick to bail out Wall Street with hundreds of billions. 'It disgusts me. I have seen huge plants close down all over this area. I have seen good union jobs go and get replaced by service jobs, like McDonalds or Wendy's. Now we give all this money to Wall Street just like that?' he protested.

The panic around the economy has infected the political system, upending traditional alliances, pushing Democrats closer to Bush's plan and Republicans further away. It has created ructions in the race between Barack Obama and John McCain, seeing a dangerous game of political brinksmanship that ended with McCain suspending his campaign and rushing back to Washington.

The events which led to that astonishing twist began at 8.30am on Wednesday. Obama had placed the call to McCain, reaching out with the idea that the two rival candidates could draft a common statement on the financial crisis gripping America. Such a move was far from altruistic. A Washington Post poll that morning showed Obama opening up a nine-point lead in the race. The poll was perhaps the strongest sign that voters were beginning to decisively break for the Democrats. By reaching out to McCain across party divides, Obama could stamp his ownership on the economic issue and also appear as a unifying president-in-waiting.

McCain finally returned the call at 2.30pm that afternoon. The two men agreed in principle to a joint statement and McCain mentioned he was thinking of returning to Washington to address the crisis. He also suggested suspending Friday night's first televised presidential debate. Obama, apparently, assumed McCain was not serious - but he misjudged his opponent. A few minutes later, McCain called a press conference, suspended his campaign and said he was heading back to the capital.

It was a high-stakes move, dictated by political needs of the moment. It showed leadership and his maverick streak that is always popular with swing voters, as McCain also struck a new populist tone, railing against the freewheeling excesses of the wealthy bankers who had caused the mess. But the plan had a huge risk, not least due to McCain's long record of supporting deregulation and his close ties to big business. Voters are unlikely to see McCain as a convincing populist. 'He has an uphill fight to persuade people that this is what he believes,' said Professor Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Instead of following his lead, the Democrats slammed McCain for interfering in something about which he knew nothing. He returned to Washington, leading a train of reporters in his wake, though he had no meaningful appointments scheduled there. Bush himself rescued McCain, inviting him and Obama to a White House meeting which caused gridlock in Washington as competing motorcades darted around the White House. As predicted, it also derailed the bail-out plan, producing only partisan rancour. At one stage a frustrated Bush said: 'If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down.' But even such frank language from the most powerful man in the world could not secure agreement.

Suddenly Republican politicians broke away from the plan, leaving only Democrats still willing to work on it. In an astonishing scene, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson walked into a room where top Democrats were meeting. He got down on one knee before Speaker Nancy Pelosi and begged Democrats not to 'blow up' the deal. Pelosi and other Democrats furiously told Paulson that they blamed Republicans for the mess. 'I know, I know,' Paulson replied.

By Friday the meetings had begun again, seeking to rescue some of the plan or come up with a better alternative. But by that time the huge Washington Mutual bank had failed overnight, the biggest such event in US history - though even such a momentous collapse was relegated to almost an afterthought on the morning TV news shows. Bush again appeared before the TV cameras, vowing that a bail-out plan would be passed but offering nothing concrete as to what or when. The political theatre took on a rare tinge of humour when Gawker, the Manhattan media gossip website, declared Paulson a 'hotty' after digging up an old photo of him standing bare-chested on a beach brandishing a large fish. 'Look at that chest,' Gawker gushed. 'The power of Paulson, indeed... Hank can bail us out any time.'

But in Wilkes-Barre, Ken Karasek and others at a rally for Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, were not interested in Hank the Hunk's manly musculature - they were just furious at being asked to pay for his extraordinary proposal.

Retired nurse Betty Daniels, wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words 'Jesus is my boss', was furious at the bail-out. 'I feel angry. People are losing their homes. They are barely making enough money to feed their families. I would like to see that money go to those people, not banks who just wasted it,' she said.

In an already distressed area such as Wilkes-Barre the impact of the economic crisis has been profound. Over the past year more businesses have closed and many homes have been lost as the mortgage crisis has reached out and cast people out of their houses.

When Biden took to the stage in front of the small crowd, he dished out lashings of angry politics which struck a chord with many of those present. Biden attacked Wall Street executives and a culture in Washington that had been too friendly to big business. 'The wealthy and the powerful have a seat at the table and everybody else is on the menu,' he said.

There were echoes of that populist mood in the UK, where the Archbishops of Canterbury and York intervened in the debate, describing City speculators as asset strippers and bank robbers. Only a few months ago the churchmen would have been ridiculed for their outbursts, but now there were even some in the Square Mile prepared to admit they have a point. Investment banker John Reynolds, chairman of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group (see right) said: 'It is easy to see how abusive market practices have developed, harder to see why they have been allowed to grow unchecked by regulators. To avoid repeating the mistakes we need regulators to be more interested in understanding markets and politicians to be less in awe of money and less influenced by the seemingly munificent gestures of large companies seeking to show that they aren't just greedy bastards - when in fact they are.'

The financial crisis has called into question a whole philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic: the so-called 'Anglo-Saxon model' of liberal capitalism which has dominated the US and the UK economies for 30 years, now with disastrous results.

Even Irwin Stelzer, Rupert Murdoch's economic adviser, and arch-defender of free markets, admitted: 'The day when that engine of capitalism, the financial market, will be allowed to operate more or less unimpeded by government, has passed.' Veteran investor George Soros has argued that we are suffering the after-effects of a 'super bubble' fuelled by decades of deregulation and hands-off economic management - and it is time for the political tide to turn.

The financial markets' extraordinary ascendancy can be traced back to the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher era of the 1980s. They slashed controls on markets and set finance free. In 1986, a whole series of rules and restraints were abolished in one fell swoop, the 'Big Bang'. For consumers up and down Britain, the liberation of the financial markets made it much easier to borrow. The days of queuing anxiously to see the bank manager, to persuade him to give the nod to a mortgage, or agree to an overdraft, were over. Owning shares was no longer the preserve of the wealthy few, sauntering to their brokers after lunch in a London club.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, exposing the shattered state of the centrally planned Soviet economy, defenders of market freedom felt vindicated. It was, said one darling of the free-marketeers, Francis Fukuyama, 'the end of history' because the Cold War was over and the power of the market had triumphed.

During his decade as Chancellor, from 1997, Gordon Brown worked hard to keep the City on side, boasting of its competitiveness, and nurturing it with 'light-touch' regulation. But with the crisis-hit banks now forced into pleading for charity from the state, many observers are arguing that the financial firms have surrendered their right to demand an easy ride. One stunned City veteran trying to absorb the magnitude of Paulson's plan said: 'We've just turned the clock back on 25 years of Neanderthal capitalism.'

Already, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are busily drawing up plans to tighten the rules on the level of assets banks must hold to secure their loans; and to ensure that financial regulators from different countries keep in closer contact. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a global summit in November to rebuild the whole world financial and monetary system from scratch, saying: 'The idea that markets are always right was a mad idea.'

Even if the Paulson plan is clinched without further delay, there is no hope of an imminent recovery either in the US or the UK. The pain for ordinary homeowners on Main Street USA is already being felt, and in Britain unemployment is rising quickly, and consumers are tightening their belts. Rosebys, the home furnishing chain, became the latest casualty in the retail sector on Friday, when it collapsed into administration, leaving its 2,000 staff uncertain about their future.

'Folks, it's not just finance,' Citigroup economist Steven Wieting warned the world. 'The recession bus left the station earlier this year.'

Anonymous said...

HOMER BITCH READ THE FOLLOWING CAREFULLY, FUCKING FASCINATING, ...

Again, buster says late saturday, read not US urinalism, but read dim foreign, as they tell the truth, ...

Treasury and the Federal Reserve are busily drawing up plans to tighten the rules on the level of assets banks must hold to secure their loans; and to ensure that financial regulators from different countries keep in closer contact. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a global summit in November to rebuild the whole world financial and monetary system from scratch, saying: 'The idea that markets are always right was a mad idea.'

Anonymous said...

So here we are the dawn of a new GLOBAL currency, a 'new world order' as all have predicted, the demise of the US police-state, ... Just like Russia in the 1980's overnight, ... collapsed.

Only the GOP pug's seem to care, for they truly fear that their daughters will fuck french men for for gas money.

OR-BUSH-EO?? I'm sure he see's what Rev Wright see's, just a case of 'chickens coming home to roost". Which is pure malcolm-x, and Farrakahn.

Anonymous said...

BUSH THREATENS PAULSON WITH A #16 DILDO.

I agree, paulson is one fucking slimey fucking cunt, and GoldmanSachs is morally equivalent to Halliburton, BUSH is letting Paulson do to the US what Cheney was allowed to do on behalf of Halliburton. The Moral? Bush will do anything for his boyfriends. The street rumor is Paulson has a very big dick, and BUSH likes dicks.


Fear peddling can't save Paulson plan


Paulson's bailout plan is in shambles. On Friday, House Republican Boehner of Ohio muttered an angry comment about not "getting rolled" by unnamed others at theWhite House meeting Thursday afternoon.

Republicans in the House have emerged as major opponents of the plan. True conservatives are inherently anti-interventionist, and the Paulson bailout epitomizes big government.

House Republicans appear to be sensitive to a potential backlash from voters about the size of the bailout package. The coming elections have led Republicans back to their anti-interventionist roots. Until recently, Republicans have all but discarded their watchdog role in the Bush-led run on bigger government. Now, with the election just days away, aligning themselves with a bailout authorized by the White House and Democrats may not make political sense.

Also noxious is the now-infamous Section 8 of the bailout plan, which grants Paulson unlimited and un-reviewable authority to spend the funds any way he so desires. Anyone suspicious of government conduct and motives has a reason to oppose the bailout based on the opague manner of applying the funds.

Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, a company in the center of the credit crisis who stands to see considerable federal assistance under the plan. Populist Republicans are leery of associating themselves with over-paid executives who most Americans blame for the scandal. (Far easier it is to associate the crisis with greedy CEOs than it is with our personal over-consumption and debt-ridden lifestyles.)

Out of that tension-filled room in the West Wing also emerged Richard Shelby--a critic of Paulson's package--who told waiting reporters that no deal had been reached, as he held up five pages of opinions against the plan he said were from leading economists. Shelby has done a great job--perhaps too good of one--in shredding the bailout plan. I don't know if Shelby is up for re-election this year, but his railing about the size and lack of accountability in the Paulson Plan sure makes it sound like he's on the campaign trail.

Adding still more to the dramatics was a back room appeal to Nancy Pelosi by Secretary Paulson not to savage his plan in front of the press. Emphatically, Paulson dropped to a knee to beg Pelosi, an act that might actually have saved the bailout from immediate extinction.

Paulson had spoken at length in testimony before Congressional committees earlier in the week, crackling about the need to get his bailout passed this week. So awkward was Paulson's appeal that Fed Chairman Bernanke seemed almost smooth. Both were convinced that the credit crisis would consume the economy if the bailout weren't passed, and passed now.

I guess most of the reaction to Paulson's plan reflects the basic distrust with which most of the public deals with a Wall Street insider, one affiliated with an unpopular White House. Many equivocate White House's management of previous crises with cronyism and inside dealings in the mold of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (see Real Time with Bill Maher video clip.) The bailout suggests that the private sector losses would be subsidized by the Treasury even as CEOs and other fat cats walk away with millions. Under the plan, bankers could theoretically sell their worst debt securities to the government, while keeping the best of what they have. This temptation makes the suggestion that Paulson's plan will pay for itself doubtful, and the notion that profits could emerge, ludicrous.

Even if the contagion effect does impact jobs--it already has, at least within the financial services industry--Paulson's plan assumes the best way to prevent a broader crisis is for him to save the banks. Ultimately it's been those same banks who've contributed to the crisis, through the failure of government to regulate their activities, coupled with a nod and a wink from the Congress and White House, that whatever made the investment banks more money was good for the economy. Trying to play regulator now, Paulson and the Treasury are compensating for what were clearly huge mistakes that gutted the regulatory environment.

While the GOP was in charge of Congress for the de-regulatory charge led by Phil Gramm, the Democrats clearly want to go along with the bailout. Senator Schumer of New York did throw a serious obstacle in the way by suggesting that a lower amount of money would suffice; Paulson and Bernanke appeared to be insistent on delivering a larger dose to reassure confidence in the markets.

It remains unknown just how much effect $700 billion could have in a credit crisis. Investor psychology does play a huge role in handling investment crises, so a big number could do more to help. The Fed has been addding liquidity--a euphanism for making money available--which doesn't mean that lenders will necessarily lend. As I said in my last article on OpEdNews, the interest rate at which banks lend banks has increased dramatically--would the addition of more capital change that? In an atmosphere of reckless borrowing, losing the second billion is probably easier than losing the first.

Presenting the bailout as a one-shot deal might convince newly re-minted conservatives that no more interventions might be needed. Also, if enhancing confidence is the goal, potential acquirers of debt need to know that sufficient government funds will be available to help mitigate their risk.

Another potential reason for urgency is the fact that Bush, Paulson, and Bernanke will be reduced to mere figureheads in 39 days or so, once a new administration is elected. Suspiciously, calls for urgency might be the last gasps of an administration losing its grip on power, one which will be unable to impact much of anything come November.

The timing of the bailout package suffers from nearness to the upcoming election. John McCain's supposed suspension of his campaign appears to have been little more than a publicity stunt as the Senator appears willing to go to the debates in Mississippi. McCain was in the infamous White House meeting, far down the table from Obama. McCain was said to have been unsupportive of the package.

McCain's not going along has been interpreted as an attempt to politicize the response to the crisis. McCain did bring a campaign staffer into the meeting, which was interpreted as a sign that not only was his campaign un-suspended (if it had ever been truly suspended), but that his reaction to the bailout package was a calculated part of his political campaign. McCain's may have been looking to disassociate with Bush and whatever his administration was trying to do, regardless of how vital the need to build consensus to resolve the crisis.

Obama appeared to have been supportive of the bailout, and his brief speech at the Mayflower Hotel near the White House (choosing not to speak before the White House pool reporters) was succinct, summarized the financial problems facing the country.

Ruling by fear

If American political candidates could be judged based on reason alone--exclusive of more emotional afflictions like how well voters identify with the candidate, or how patriotic they feel they are--Obama would seem the victor in dealing with the crisis. Yet we've seen in the past two Presidential elections the role that emotions play. Fear has been at the center of the last few federal elections--fear about terrorism largely contrived and diminishing in relevance as other issues like the economy grow in significance.

Fear about economic collapse is a card that chief players in the Administration have played. In a speech Wednesday, Bush talked about the possibility of financial panic in the event a bailout wasn't arranged.

Fear was the chief method by which Bush enticed Congress and the American people into attacking Iraq. I've gone on at length over the past two years on this blog about how the administration has been "calling wolf" from the watchtower. Americans have seemed highly susceptible to terror dogma, and more than willing to lay down their civil liberties at the slightest mention of the bad wolf Osama (never mind that at least two prominent Middle Eastern newspapers issued obituaries for bin Laden in December, 2001.)

Can the Bush administration play the fear card one more time, in this case to help protect the economy from a perceived threat? Funded through the CIA in the guerilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, al Qaeda and bin Laden are the creation of western intelligence agencies, just as the crisis we now face was produced from our own regulatory recklessness and cronyism between Washington insiders and the financial institutions. Despite the negligence of our own government in mismanaging both these threats--economic and terrorist--the reaction has seen the US launch two wars and spend over a trillion dollars so far. With the bailouts of Bear Stearns and Freddie/Fannie, alongside the massive AIG loan fest, the combined cost of resolving these manufactured and preventable crises could well exceed two trillion dollars.

Fears over what a credit crisis could do have convinced our politicians that something needs to be done. Yet when Congress is convinced they need to do something, we should hardly be relieved. With the pattern of gross mismanagement by our government in the recent past, the Washington consensus should now be seen as the threat it really is: an unabated trend towards increasing the size of government, restricting civil liberties, and transfering huge sums to private sector. Whether the funds flow to military contractors or banks doesn't alter the fundamental model of a larger and increasingly ineffective government.

Some have said that by spending the Treasury into bankruptcy, social programs that are at the heart of Democratic electoral popularity will fall on hard times. Unable to bribe the voter, this theory, called "starving the beast," supposes that the Democrats will lose their chief source of political strength: "social programs".

I don't know if the Republicans intend to bankrupt us, or whether or not they see some future political benefit in it, but becoming bankrupt we are. I've seen the signs myself, so I know, in the same way a junkie can pick out another junkie in a room no matter how straight they might appear. My conviction that we're heading for bankruptcy is more a feeling, knowing what I do about how much is going out to pay for our war machine and all the Medicare and other expenses. We simply won't be able to pay for both.

One major sign of impending failure is the amount of reserves set aside to pay for bank failure. Just last night, Washington Mutual had its deposits seized by federal regulators, and sold off to JPMorgan, the company who ended up buying Bear Stearns earlier this summer. Capital reserves at the FDIC, which is responsible for bailing out any failed banks, have fallen dramatically (Today I saw that Wachovia, another bank embroiled in mortgage-backed securities, is teetering.). I'd read that the IndyMac failure had drained one quarter of all funds available to that federal agency; WaMu , the largest bank to fail in American history, could easily drain most of what's left.

Should more bank failures occur, the FDIC would need to secure additional funding. These monies would come directly from Congress and be in addition to any bailouts enacted through the Treasury. In this regard the $700 billion might forestall even greater bailouts of failed banks. Or not. The credit default swaps and derivates market in the US is about $140 trillion (and dropping fast).

Martin Weiss explains what derivates are:
"Derivatives are essentially bets on interest rates, foreign currencies, stocks or specific events like the bankruptcy of a particular company. The interest rate-related bets are by far the biggest. But the bets on bankruptcies "" called credit default swaps "" are the fastest growing and the most volatile.
These derivatives were originally designed to help hedge investments reduce risk "" like insurance policies. But in practice, they've been increasingly used to leverage investments, increasing the risks of participants."

Weiss has criticized the bailout, along with Peter Schiff and a host of good economists who were ignored by Washington and the banks as derivatives trading expanded. These pillars of wisdon are entitled to an audience based on their previous predictions of a crisis ahead, so we should ignore them at our great peril. Not seeing the threat has led to the realization of fears. Politicians were basically being bribed with campaign donations from financial firms, who were seeing massive increases in profits created by the trading of credit defaults swaps and other derivatives. Like ostrichs, our representatives simply stuck their heads in the sand, pretended the problem didn't exist, and let it fester.

If Washington wasn't listening then, it probably isn't listening now. I suppose if we weren't having an election, the bailout would have long since been passed. But the Republicans have dusted off the old cloak of true fiscal conservatism, an inherently anti-Establishment role they played so well when they weren't in control of the Presidency. Perhaps they sense that they'll lose the White House, and understand the need to return to the role of spoiler, one that they played so well in the past by limiting the size of government--or at least trying. This reawakening might be what the nation needs to prevent ever more bailouts, which appear to be completely acceptable to the Democratic leadership, as long as they bring mortgage reform and benefits for mortgage-holders facing foreclosure. While I doubt that segment of the population is a good source of campaign donations, servicing them does give a more human face to the Democrats as they head into the Fall elections.

Both sides are politicizing any solution paths that could mitigate the credit crisis. The Washington consensus is simply to throw money at the problem. I hardly see Pelosi, who took impeachment off the table, as the person who can confront the White House or negotiate a more effective solution. Nor could the perennial sellouts on Iraq war funding--Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid--offer much resistance or negotiate from a position of strength, despite the fact the White House needs them badly in light of the House defections within the GOP.

At this point I have to support the efforts of Republicans to stop the bailout, largely on the grounds I don't think the proposal will work. I do think a constructive dialogue will need to take place, but in the current election climate, I think partisanship will hinder the effectiveness of any response. The lack of leadership is I think the product of eight years or more of extreme partisanship in Washington, typified by the dastardly deeds of a corrupt and malignant White House.

While neither Presidential candidate appears to offer an adequate response to the crisis, I do think Obama will be more willing to cross the aisle and work to resolve any crisis, should he be elected or before. McCain appears unwilling to work with Bush and his administration, which is a vital next step regardless of how flawed Paulson's plan is.

Anonymous said...

The credit default swaps and derivates market in the US is about $140 trillion (and dropping fast)

*

Well this statement is 1/2 true.

TOTAL derivatives are $80 Trillion, second 1/2 is true, they're dropping fast.

It's called de-leveraging.

There is NOT enough bail-out good will in the world to stop this leak.

Almost all banks will get totally wiped out.

Anonymous said...

The credit default swaps and derivates market in the US is about $140 trillion (and dropping fast)

*

Ok, I shouldn't have drank tonight. Yes, this is all true, derivatives are $80Trillion, and credit def swaps are $60 Trillion, and they're dropping fast. This represents most paper that world banks have.

The underlying hard assets is just a few trillion, thus we're talking at a minimum of 99% of all known wolrd-wide savings to see a 99% loss.

De-Leveraging, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Anonymous said...

Ron Paul was right, so say the GOP of Gingrich? Who would have guessed??

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Bush Conservatives Warm Up to Ron Paul
Wash Post
September 27, 2008 06:06 PM

Lew, now perhaps the red-state fascists realize how foolish they were to dismiss Ron, and not to give him the airtime they gave the invincibly ignorant McCain et al. Too late, guys. You have been wed to the GOP because of the war. And now you will have to suffer the socialism. This was inevitable. Ron told you so.

Okay, that was mean spirited. And it's not totally too late. Rise up against Bush and McCain. Refuse to support them. And to the liberals who don't want to see the bailout: Refuse to support Barack Goldman Sachs Obama. Let's make this the lowest voter turnout in living memory. That will send the message: We don't trust you, the political class, any more. You don't scare us with your crises, real and fabricated. We don't respect you. We don't think you wise or honest. And don't expect us to believe you when your lips are moving. I can hope, can't I?

Anonymous said...

Refuse to support Barack Goldman Sachs Obama.

*

Barack 'bush/goldman-sachs/paulson/oreo' Obama.

Boy this is getting fun to watch.

Well its true, GoldmanSachs 100% owns the OREO. Who would have guessed.

Lastly, Goldman will be major recipient of the bailout, who would have guessed?

Anonymous said...

Do not -- ever -- make the mistake of thinking those guys are dumb.

They are ending up with all the money, no?

"Dumb" has been the cover story ever since Shrub got in there, just like "mistakes in judgment" has been the cover story for every deliberate encroachment they have made on our Treasury -- funny how all those "mistakes" (in Iraq, the housing market, and on and on) have been worth billions to the Right People.

They're just taking the money. people. Simple as that. The rest is just a line of bullshit a 12 year-old wouldn't buy ..

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