Archive for the ‘Paulson’ tag
What’s Good for America is Good For GM
Is this the future of the Big Three?
David Brooks in today’s NYT suggests that bailing out the Big Three US car companies is a bad idea. While I have some doubts about his ideologically driven “creative destruction” thesis, the notion that some US Government Car Czar is going to be able to prevent these monoliths from going over the precipice is absurd. They are beyond recall in their current form. I come from the UK and back in the seventies we experimented with nationalizing the once glorious British car industry. British Leyland was the result and it was a national joke.
There are many well documented reasons that the Big Three can’t be saved; ranging from massive legacy costs, onerous union agreements, byzantine, slow moving management, being enslaved by short term stock prices, outmoded technology, and of course bad, boring cars. These companies as they are now are from another era. They are inherently dysfunctional, and need to go. Read the rest of this entry »
The Inherent Wisdom of Sheep
central casting
“I have no idea”, said one JP Morgan Chase economist today when asked by the New York Times why the Dow shot up over 550 points on the same day yet more recession indicators piled on. That seems to be the best response under the circumstances, but it belies a more serious problem. For years, we’ve been told to trust the market, to listen to the market. We were told that the market has an inherent wisdom.
The inherent wisdom of sheep more like.
Someone decided that the rally was due and bought. Someone else said “things are bottoming out”, and he told his mates. His mates told their mates, and they all got back in to earn some bucks with someone elses tired, downtrodden money. The herd mentality is not a signifier of great intelligence – quite the opposite. And this level of absurd, illogical, delusional volatility is a signal of worse to come. So please, for once and for all, let’s stop listening to the market – oh, and enough of those images of Wall Street traders watching the screens with panic and despair on their faces.
If I could earn a Euro for every time one of those…
Paulson – The Man With The Plan
Man With Plan
After nationalizing Fannie and Freddie, then letting Lehman Brothers die for no apparent reason, then bailing out AIG to the tune of $85 billion (now around $150 billion but who’s counting), Hank Paulson sat back to watch the credit markets unfreeze. But instead they just froze up some more.
Hank was totally bummed. “This job totally sucks”.
“The credit freeze just keeps on freezing”, he said to his posse of former Goldman Sachs hacks. “What the frick do I do?”
“You need one big plan”, said Neel Cash and Carry, “not just a whole bunch of little plans stuck together”. Hank nodded furiously. “Yes, yes, that’s right”. After scribbling a few notes on the back of a dry cleaning bill he looked up. “I’ve got it”. Read the rest of this entry »
