Archive for the ‘Economic Crisis’ tag
Treasury Runs Out Of Money To Give Away. Fed Rides In
paulson + bernanke
This is getting silly. Two days ago, Toxic assets were out. Then Treasury bailed out Citigroup’s…toxic assets. And now the Fed (they’re the ones who actually print all those T-bills) have taken over and pledged $800 billion to bail out all toxic securities built on consumer credit card debt. In one fell swoop that’s a bigger bailout than the one we haggled over during the campaign.
Crass incompetence is kind of quaint when we can chuckle about it in other parts of the world, but when it’s taking place here at home and hitting you hard in your pocketbook it’s not quite so funny. It only goes to show, you can only really judge the quality of government during a time of crisis.
By the time Obama rides in, we’ll be lucky to have an economy left at all.
The Fix is In – The Long and the Short Of Wall Street
Another bumper day on the Street. The Government bails out another basket case bank. Everything’s right with the world. Hurrah! Yet again, Wall Street proves it’s an utterly amoral, self-interested, club that has nothing whatsoever to do with you and me.
panic on wall street. or not.
Massive market volatility, huge gains on the basis of nothing, followed by huge losses and back to gains. Is there a pattern to all this? Not on the surface, at least. The press loves reasons, and tacks on some or other reason for that day’s movements. Recession indicators, new appointment at Treasury, another baby for Angelina and Brad.
But maybe something else is in play too, something mysterious, something very, very fishy.
Traders either go “long” hoping a stock will rise, or they go “short” on borrowed stock hoping the stock will drop and they get to keep the difference on the sale. Long traders and short traders are not in competition, but supposing they were, even in some unspoken way, in collusion. Wall Street traders aren’t known for their mild-mannered approach to business, so could be…
Transformative. This Week’s Word Du Jour.
Every week we’re presented with a new word du jour. This week it’s “Transformative”, as in, “wow, that election was way transformative.” The herd of sheep that used to be the Press have made it their own and now it’s everywhere, replacing such gems as “game-changer”, “meltdown”, and “bailout”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as happy as anyone that the GOP brats can no longer continue trying to drown the puppy that is the United States. But let’s not be too hasty about how “transformative” this election was. Perhaps a little trip down memory lane might help. Read the rest of this entry »
Obama’s First Press Conference. Uhh.
Not totally sure what that was all about.
17 Economic Kahunas stand behind the President-Elect, who tells us precisely nothing we don’t already know, except that things are really bad and that he’s going to get right on it as soon as he can. Was there a point to the whole shindig? Was he trying to show he was already governing? No, he kept reminding us that Bush was still in charge. Was he trying to be proactive from a policy standpoint? No, because he didn’t tell us anything concrete he planned to do. Was he showing that when it comes to governing, he’s still got training wheels? Yes.
I think it would have been far better just to have the meeting with the big shots, or maybe a series of meetings with smaller groups of them, rather than grandstand about what a great team he has, and then do nothing with it. It was slightly awkward, to be frank, and nebulous at best.
Most people in the press have been trying hard not to say the obvious – that the press conference was a silly waste of time.
