More Good News For McCain
Lehman Brothers is about to file for bankruptcy and there’s a good chance the markets are going to tank across the board Monday.
Clearly this is good news for the McCain-Palin ticket. Voters will be looking for change from the shitty policy that got us to this place. Nobody represents change more than McCain, what with his extension and deepening of the Bush tax cuts, plus his delightful coyness about saying word one about new regulatory policy for the financial markets. ‘Surprise us, John!’, voters are certain to say when they go to the polls in November. ‘Don’t tell us anything about your plan to salvage this shit-spiralling economy … it’ll be waaaay more fun to find out how you’re gonna save us all in January!’
And at the very least, it won’t matter if Palin doesn’t know a lick about Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch, since neither are likely to exist for much longer anyway.
You know, things are getting so dicey right now, I’m starting to have second thoughts about even wanting Obama to win. What an absolute fetid pile of horseshit he would inherit–and be blamed for the whole stinking mess from day one.
Okay, what am I saying? We need what’s best for the country, not what’s best for Obama. If McCain wins, it’s Great Depression 2: The Depressioning.
Merrill Lynch already sold.
INDEX PRODUCTS
CONTRACT LAST NET CHGE
S&P 500 DEC08 1221.00 -3750
E-MINI SEP08 1219.75 -3750
E-MINI DEC08 1221.00 -3750
NSDQ100 DEC08 1735.50 A -4400
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Okay, so someone who knows more than dick-all about this stuff please explain to the financially illiterate (like me) what this actually means.
The fruits of George W. Hoover’s presidency are growing ripe! To continue this success, I urge you to vote for his grandfather, John S. Hoover! And for Vice-President, Carrie Nation!
What we need is an Old Deal for America …
It means lots of people’s 401K’s are going to shit, for one.
When times are this tough, you don’t want to change horses mid-tsunami. Vote President George W. Hoover S. McCain III for 4 More Years of Success (and Temperance)!
That’s why I told Wall Street thanks but no thanks on that leverage to nowhere.
Me said: “Okay, so someone who knows more than dick-all about this stuff please explain to the financially illiterate (like me) what this actually means.”
Dear Sen. McCain, welcome to the Sadly, No! discussion board, and congratulations on entering the Intertubes! Enjoy the ride!
Only fifteen Confederate dollars for each Federal Reserve dollar !
Woohoo !! My long term investment when I was eight years old is about to pay off, big time !!!
It means, if you’re on foodstamps, that you’re a lucky ducky who doesn’t have to worry about your 401k or other investments.
How soon before people start jumping out of windows?
Lucky ducky!
Not to blame the Clenis for all the world’s ills, but doesn’t this have something to do with Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall?
Let’s be realistic. Why would any republican care about the American economy I thought they all kept their own money in the Caymans. Why bother with what happens here unless, of course, there is more money in it for them.
Lesley said: How soon before people start jumping out of windows?
CEO/CFO and other corporate executives with taxpayer funded pensions and buyouts don’t jump out of windows even with their golden parachutes.
D Aristophanes said, September 15, 2008 at 4:20
It means lots of people’s 401K’s are going to shit, for one.
hey I don’t need my retirement account to shit for me, i’m going to shit myself and my job for an extra ten years. by then I’ll have bag glued to my side.
Clinton signed it, but all Democrats, including Biden voted against, according to what I just read somewhere.
But the Glass-Stegal act just opened to door to the real kicker. The Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.”
Yes, the Phil Gramm we all know and loathe.
To Me…It means a lot of people are losing moose-sized chunks of their savings. In fact, almost everyone with a 401K and/or IRA accounts are now poorer than they were recently, and will be poorer again soon than they are now.
That’s what happens when you have a part of the financial system – the regulatory part – that doesn’t do it’s job. The regulatory luddites thow away the rule book (“rules baaad!”), the system stops working and falls over, and everyone gets poorer.
Especially for people who only have modest sums in their accounts, who have only one house, or who don’t get to divert taxpayer’s money to pay themselves a per diem for living at home.
The Era of Big Government Is Over! Yay!!!
Aaack. Repealed Glass Stegal, it did.
Not to blame the Clenis for all the world’s ills, but doesn’t this have something to do with Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall?
Ah, yes, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (or GBLA [Ha!]), as in Phil Gramm, John McCain’s now unofficial adviser on matters economic.
This has got to kick the legs out from under a lot of people who always vote Republican.
Incontinentia Buttocks said,
September 15, 2008 at 4:28
Not to blame the Clenis for all the world’s ills, but doesn’t this have something to do with Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall?
There were a whole lot of rethugs in Congress calling shots back then. They were pretty proud of it, too.
Some of this Enron crap applies.
I do agree that repealing Glass-Steagall was bad news. None the less, the housing bubble grew ridiculously excessive under Bush/Cheney, with the typically lax Republican “let the free markets play (with the public’s implied monetary guarantee” mantra.
klyde said,
corporate executives with taxpayer funded pensions and buyouts don’t jump out of windows even with their golden parachutes.
Handy that. I guess we working schmucks who have lost income over the past ten years will be the ones leaping from windows.
I understand Greenspan has something to do with the housing bubble… trying to make the economy look good for 2004?
That’s why I told Wall Street thanks but no thanks on that leverage to nowhere.
And THAT’S why I’m voting Ambulatory Carnivorous Plant/J—!
How soon will this turn out to be Nancy Pelosi’s fault? Quick, tune into Sean Hannity to find out!
What does this mean? OK.
Banks are companies that invest money. They take your money (savings account, pension, what have you) and pool it with other peoples’ money in order to put it into places where they think they can make more money (housing loans, sales of bonds, stock). The idea is that by investing that money they can then get a return on the investment, which they pass on to you, the account holder, as interest. (And at the same time some of the money they’ve made comes from interest on loans, so somehow more money is magically appearing in the economy — it *works*, but you can understand why the Ron Paul crowd refuse to believe in it).
Lehman Bros was one of the biggest ones. And they put a lot of money into subprime loans.
Subprime loans are defaulted on, and all that interest they were expecting isn’t coming in, while all that money that they’d loaned out suddenly isn’t there anymore.
Banks *always* lend out more money than they have. A bank is a big institution; even when economic times are bad, investors assume that the bank will still be there tomorrow.
Bad assumption, ne?
So, they can’t meet their obligations: paying interest on bank accounts or writing the checks for the pensions.
So, they declare bankruptcy. Some of the money which had magically appeared in the economy now magically disappears — which means that the people who were expecting those pensions will find that the funds are gone, and they’re not going to get more than a fraction of what was in there.
Generally, the rule is, the smaller a creditor you are, the further toward the back of the line you are in bankruptcy proceedings.
This is one of the times trickle-down economics works — the fuckups at the top hit the little guys.
Okay, so someone who knows more than dick-all about this stuff please explain to the financially illiterate (like me) what this actually means.
As a non-practicing economist (graduate degree in it, work in computers instead), let me say this: it means that the same forces, more or less out-of-control in our current non- or de-regulated environment, that created the housing bubble are now working, equally out-of-control, in the opposite direction (what analysts so politely call a “correction”).
That would be bad enough on its own, but not particularly exciting or worrisome (“business cycle” and all). The problem now is that we really don’t have any of the usual available options to fix this. Can the government incur some short-term debts via deficit spending? Not bloody likely when we already have a $9 trillion dollar national debt and (if we’re lucky) a $500 billion deficit. Can the Fed reduce interest rates? Maybe, depending on how bad it thinks inflation is (and it appears to be getting worse); even if it did, in the current climate, it would be roughly as effective as pushing on a string.
So, people have less money to spend and invest, so there is less demand, which means even more people have less money to spend and invest, etc. This is, potentially, never-ending until we reach the economic equivalent of absolute zero. The last time things we this bad, we wound up in the Great Depression, which was basically ended by gearing up the economy for WWII (which is why some think FDR either encouraged war, or at least intentionally ignored the warning signs). Unfortunately for the 21st-century American Empire, we are already spending carloads of money on foreign wars; we will run out of money and/or warm bodies for cannon fodder before that approach will work this time out.
That leaves us in a not-very-pretty predicament. It is going to be ugly and unpleasant for lots of people. As you (Me) said in the first comment, whoever is elected is going to inherit an enormous pile of very smelly shit and not have much in the way of shovels. If Obama is elected, he will no doubt get most of the blame for a situation he inherited but did not create; if McPalin is elected, we will have lots more “whiny” “mental recession” speeches to listen to, with no attempt to shovel the shit at all.
Fundamentally, then, this election comes down to electing someone who may (or may not) be able to somehow at least muddle through and come out on in a not-so-bad place, or electing the same bunch of assclowns who got us here, and who are willing — even happy — to lead us into the Apocalypse so they can all be Raptured.
Rock and a hard place, anyone?
But there pictures of Governor Palin with a gun! Maybe if I’m lucky she’ll shoot me.
What I hope for on Nov. 4, 2008
I loved that video going around where Sean Hannity got called out by an author:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/sean-hannity-meltdown?w=1
Hope the link works.
Hannity was screaming “The economy is fine!”
Wonderful timing.
Actually, you know what? Given the current climate on the right, I’m half-expecting the next meme about the banking crisis to be: “Blame the Jews”.
Try this one:
Wish Hannity would share with us where his 401K money is invested, so we could all feel as secure about the economy.
How soon before people start jumping out of windows?
Don’t think it will be that bad, but I think we are all up for a long-ish recession, with all the shit that comes along with that. IMHO, it all spins out from this dumb idea that the prices of houses can go up by 5%+ every year and there be no reaction. There was always going to be a price and it really surprises me that no-one realized this. Everything spins out from this…..
Off topic, but We Are Nihilists:
Yes, we’re mere nihilists, while TBogg is the head of a demonic conservative ridicule machine. I am so frickin’ jealous right now.
Yes, we’re mere nihilists, while TBogg is the head of a demonic conservative ridicule machine. I am so frickin’ jealous right now.
I feel nothing.
“Blame the Jews”
As liberal fascists, we are obliged to blame the benighted white males, as they are analogous to Jews for our purposes.
We are paleo-absurdo-nihilists, if you want to be technical.
lobbey: “. . . . it really surprises me that no-one realized this.”
Who could have imagined? Terrorists and airplanes? No oversight or regulation resulting in irresponsible investment and speculation? It was beyond the power of mere mortals to foresee.
This calls for The Big Lebowski:
TBogg is the head of a demonic conservative ridicule machine
That’s all very well, but you cannot sing it to the tune of “Aerosol Gray Machine”.
we are obliged to blame the benighted white males
I blame you Libs, with your non-stop talking down the economy.
I blame you Libs, with your non-stop talking down the economy.
War on Tinkerbelle.
Also, it was my understanding that S,N! was affiliated to the Tyrant King Porn Dragon. That must count for something.
German nihilists, which means Sadly, No! was in The Big Lebowski.
the nihilists at Sadly No! to TBogg’s demonic conservative ridicule-machine are on an endless quest to destroy their enemies with a venomous brew of hate and intolerance.
poop jokes are a venomous brew of hate and intolerance? Who knew?
You Kantian nihilists won’t fool me.
Why?
You kant.
War on Tinkerbelle.
Just in: Green Lantern resigns from his position as head of the US Treasury, citing “lack of support”.
poop jokes are a venomous brew of hate and intolerance?
Keeps the shit moat filled.
Tonight WereBear is fast and I am slow.
But I got my first endorsement!
venomous brew of hate and intolerance
This is a direct reference to Mikey and his single malts.
What’s brown and sticky?
A stick.
What’s brown and sits on a piano bench?
The Jew Mahler.
Thank you, thank you. Try the Wienerschnitzel.
But I got my first endorsement!
I’m praying for the Ambulatory Carnivorous Plant to die!
By gum!
It’s a great time to be poor. The fall to the bottom is so short I won’t break any bones.
It means lots of people’s 401K’s are going to shit, for one
Holy crap, I’ve only been paying into mine for a year now, and it’s gone to shit already.
I miss the idea of old timey pension plans.
Soren Kierkegaard’s Hippopotamus Oatmeal
Ingredients:
1 hippopotamus, benignly swirled
1 slips of yew
4 pints clotted cream, painstakingly jellied
3 pinches whale stomach, merely herbed
1 jar butter
5 tablespoons sage
Sacrifice a nearby muskdeer or a creature of similar size. Discard remains furtively. Separate hippopotamus skull from lung. Mock lung. Use a food processor to mix the clotted cream with the slips of yew. Stuff the resulting goo into the hippopotamus. Whisk the whale stomach, butter, and the sage perversely. Heap everything together. Abandon for 42 minutes. Serves 4 golden individuals with rare stomachs.
Well, if you’re only paying into it for a year, I hope that means you are far from retirement and have a chance to recoup.
People planning to retire in a year of two? Let me just say I would be glad to donate a pitchfork and a torch.
True, WB, but it’s still scary.
Heck yes, it’s scary. The last few threads, we’ve all sounded like a bunch of nihilists!
If there’s one thing worse than the collapse of another US financial institution, it’s the universal jubilation with which this collapse has been greeted by the left-wing bloggosphere.
I cn hz job now?
That was sincere good wishes your timeline is such you can recover, ODS.
I agree that Obama is inheriting an unholy mess, but such mayhem is also a great time for sweeping reforms that cannot be attempted when times are less desperate.
We should all send some good karma towards FDR, where ever he is, because without his action after the Great Depression, we would be looking at that kind of scenario, again.
tomorrow is bargain hunter’s day at the stock market.
i’m going to sell penis short, and buy long foreplay.
poop drops on a broad front, time to clean up!
It’s really unfair how they expect the black guy to clean up after the white guys leave the whole place in a mess.
“the universal jubilation with which this collapse has been greeted by the left-wing bloggosphere.”
It’s the perfect time to celebrate; as nihilists, we can cheer the ruin and collapse on general principles; as dirty fucking pinko commie loving hippies, we can be happy at this blow to the capitalist pig corporate state and as liberal fascists, we can blame the white male, which is the Jew of being central to my point, again.
Those white males are always drinking my beer. Urp.
such mayhem is also a great time for sweeping reforms that cannot be attempted when times are less desperate.
Bear in mind that the right wing have also read The Shock Doctrine, and will have their own set of sweeping reforms that they will promote as a radical but necessary cure for the crisis. “There is no alternative”, as Margaret Thatcher was wont to say. Some might even suspect them of engineering crises in the first place.
Those white males are always drinking my beer.
I know how you feel. Just today, a white male smoked the last of my weed. Rotten sonsabitches, all of ’em.
“People planning to retire in a year of two?”
You can thank your lucky trailer home that Nancy Pelosi stopped George Bush investing your Social Security in mortgage-backed securities in 2005.
…That’s what Hannity can blame on Pelosi. If Lehman brothers and Merrill Lynch had received the huge cash infusion of your retirement benefits back in 2005, they could have staved off collapse.
Until at least Wednesday next week. Thursday even.
My 79 year old staunch Republican step-father lost $10K when his broker sold him Fannie Mae stock two weeks before they were taken over. He asserts that this outcome could not possibly have been foreseen.
My wingnut coworkers, meanwhile, continue to insist that the takeovers were meaningless since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “effectively government owned anyway” so the Feds just “formalized” the relationship and no money was lost.
These people would destroy everything they have rather than change their minds. How fucked up is that?
Quick! We can only save ourselves by privatizing Social Security and giving those future $trillions$ to Wall Street to invest prudently!!! Hurry!!!
Smells less & less like the GOP will be able to keep “The Wall Street Flying Circus” solvent all the way through early November. Yeah, I bet little Johnny McCrash is just ecstatic right now.
You do know that the US is already in a recession & that the current stats are totally jerry-rigged to hide that, right? They use airy-fairy crap like hedonics to artificially plump up the “+” side & shove inconvenient little things like fuel & food off the balance-sheet to shrink the “-” side, so all that “we’re not OFFICIALLY in a recession” talk in the financial rags isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
So no, this won’t lead TO a recession – it’ll either make the current one nastier or spawn a flat-out depression … one that no diddling of numbers can possibly hide. As for anticipating a drop in rent, well, don’t hold your breath. Oil is unreasonably low now, but I think that’s about to change due to that wacky supply-&-demand thingy. Which won’t exactly lead to big rent relief.
The “Great” Depression was accompanied by massive deflation – the next one will likely include stagflation. Shorter (if everyone’s lucky) but a lot more hurtful. Better have a four-leaf-clover handy, because if it lasts for any signifigant length of time, stagflation is deadly. It’s what made prices double in less than a year back in the mid-70s, in synergy with the Oil Crisis – & that was a relatively mild case of the disease.
The Dirty 30s also had the silver lining of big heaps of domestically owned industrial infrastructure sitting there mothballed, ready & waiting for the recovery to spring back into action … this time that just isn’t so – it’s been largely sold off &/or shipped overseas. Get that vegetable plot going now if you haven’t already: it’ll come in handy.
Wow – who’s the chump who bought Lehman Bros.?
Oh. B of A. That’s SO not good.
Hot tip?
Tin-cup-&-pencil futures FTW!
Although I’m not religious I’m beginning to believe the end times may be upon us. The end of everything we’ve ever held near and dear.
No, Dick,
those people would rather destroy everything EVERYONE has rather than change their minds.
George McCain and John Bush could come into some people’s homes with a firehose spraying pigshit and lipstick all over their furniture and they’d still hate Barack Obama.
Fortunately, those aren’t the people Obama needs to reach. The people he needs to reach are the ones who were okay when the pigshit-lipstick spray down came out of a regular garden hose, but draw the line at the move to industrial-grade equipment.
He asserts that this outcome could not possibly have been foreseen.
Headlines for 18 months “Looming Mortgage Crisis! Threatening Mortgage Crisis! Impending Mortgage Crisis!”
Broker last week: “Hey, listen sir, I can set you up real nice with great price on Fannie Mortgage Crisis stock. Lemme tell you, it’s, uh, ‘Sarah Palin’ of the market right now, if you know what I mean.”
Staunch Republican: “Hell yeah! What could go wrong?”
Jim – BofA is buying Merrill … Lehmann Bros. is going tits up it looks like.
It doesn’t stop with economics, neither.
(shudder) Man, I never even thought about it that way. That’s fucking horrifying.
it’s demonstrably clear that folks from top bloggers like Markos Moulitsas and Andrew Sullivan to the nihilists at Sadly No! to TBogg’s demonic conservative ridicule-machine are on an endless quest to destroy their enemies with a venomous brew of hate and intolerance.
Oh, no. The quest definitely has an end.
BTW, that putzenjammer is a real freaking piece of work. He claims to be “a pro-victory Associate Professor of Political Science teaching in Southern California.”
IIRC, he teaches at a community college. Now, I think community colleges serve an important role in our educational system. Hell, my wife’s a tenured prof at a community college.
But let’s get real. This isn’t grad school-level stuff he’s teaching. It ain’t even 300-level undergraduate stuff.
And judging by his ill-informed belligerence, those few students who walked into his entry-level courses with some interest and enthusiasm for poli-sci very likely end up with a sour taste for the field in pretty short order.
A couple of the folks at LG&M tore him a new asshole several months back. It was funny to see. He may even show up here.
There’s just something in a wingnut that loves to be kicked.
David Crane, senior policy adviser to McCain/Palin, president of Quadripoint Strategies, lobbyist for Bank of America.
The fed go chop our dollar.
Lesley said,
September 15, 2008 at 5:41
Although I’m not religious I’m beginning to believe the end times may be upon us. The end of everything we’ve ever held near and dear.
The fcukers can’t say we didn’t warn them. But did they listen?
“we’re not OFFICIALLY in a recession”
We’re never in a recession. There’s a nice trick you can play with the lagging indicators;
1) The first two quarters of the recession, you say we’re not officially in a recession, because it hasn’t been two quarters yet.
2) The day after the second negative quarters finishes, you say “The recession began six months ago, that’s old news. Right now, we’re in the recovery phase.”
3) repeat ad infinitum.
I know people say that Palin shouldn’t be a focus, since she’s not the target, but since she’s essentially the reason people like McCain, it’s only fair to think of her as deserving some of the fire, too. I am not sure how much blame, if any, can be given to McCain, and Palin’s certainly not at fault, since she was banning library books when this stuff was getting started. But while we can’t blame them, we can certainly take issue with the fact they probably can’t provide any solutions, either. Palin doesn’t seem to know what entitlements are, so it’s unlikely, to say the least, she has even the slightest idea of what she’s talking about when it comes to financial regulation. McCain’s not much better, I imagine (and Biden and Obama, to be fair, aren’t experts, as some conservative will gladly point out, but at least they’ll show some interest in fixing the problem).
Why not make this the focus of the campaign? Obama and his advisers should spend the next week or two formulating a very basic outline of what they think the problems are and what some solutions might be. They can acknowledge that it’s a work in progress and will change as conditions change, but the benefit here is that since it will be broad, it’s easier to translate into language most people will understand. Make this a huge event, in a swing state like Michigan or Ohio, or possibly North Carolina or Indiana or Pennsylvania, with the press told well in advance that it will be big and important, but not told what it’s about. Add a little mystery to get some suspense building. And then, once the plans are announced, they should saturate the airwaves with clips of McCain’s comments that “Economics is not something…” along with some criticism of Palin. Use the great line, “It’s not that John McCain doesn’t care, it’s that John McCain doesn’t get it.” Then say that we can’t trust people like this during times like these. And after these commercials start airing, have Obama and Biden talk about nothing else for the next week or two, or longer, if it goes well. Send the surrogates around with some key talking points, so they will reinforce what people here in the news.
I realize that this is one of many pieces of advice that I’ve given to the Obama campaign, but this seems like a golden opportunity to shift the race in a way so that it will never be shifted back. The election is in six or seven weeks. If we kill them on this issue, I don’t see how they recover.
BTW, that putzenjammer is a real freaking piece of work. He claims to be “a pro-victory Associate Professor of Political Science teaching in Southern California.”
Oh God, it’s that guy.
It’s worth noting that the actual rates for both joblessness and inelastic-demand price inflation are staggering – both make the oil supply shock look like a clerical error. The number of people who can honestly believe the economy is strong – and the number of people for whom the inter-recession period was anything but a long, slow decline – has been shrinking so rapidly that even if there’s a constituency for McCain’s garbage now there won’t be in 2012.
The sole consolation we can take out of McCain winning (if he somehow does and we all manage to survive) is that history treats Al Smith a lot better than the 1928 election did.
David Crane, senior policy adviser to McCain/Palin,
That is simply not possible. McCain no longer associates with lobbyists. He has promised to reform the entire lobby-ridden Washington culture, brining a new broom and a hard rain to wash the streets clean. We know this because he has told us so, and McCain is if nothing else a man of integrity and honesty, as we know because he has frequently told us so.
He claims to be “a pro-victory Associate Professor of Political Science teaching in Southern California.”
I may not be keeping my trolls straight, but might that he be a she?
Anyway it showed up once at my worthless blog. Tenacious in the face of no readers.
Look, yes the President received a memo, I believe it was entitled “Banking Crisis Determined To Strike In United States,” but it was just a historical document. No one could have anticipated that they would have used financial instruments as weapons.
The Republican’s goal, all along, was to destroy the very concept of objective reality, so no one could think clearly, and so no one could tell just how full of shit they were.
We, at least, still have the capacity to think clearly.
A gnawing sense of unease does dog their steps. That’s why they are so short-tempered and miserable.
And yes, I am full of rage. I want to drag every ill-gotten dollar back out of their pockets somehow; the graft, the theft, the cons.
But I got up at the butt-crack of dawn and must get some sleep.
Good night, and good luck.
funny story about places like merrill lynch and jp morgan and so on. there are those who keep a pretty good amount of money in them–what might seem to some in some parts of the country to be a ton, but to those on the coasts is just kind of life savings.
it tends to be more than 100k per account. and if these banks go under, those people will be fucked. hard. whomever they may happen to be.
good times. would the last one to fuck this country over please turn off the lights on the way out?
Smells less & less like the GOP will be able to keep “The Wall Street Flying Circus” solvent all the way through early November.
That’s why Bush has ordered the military to blow up every hut and cave they can find in Waziristan despite the precarious state of Pakistan’s government.
“it tends to be more than 100k per account. and if these banks go under, those people will be…”
Yeah… and the average GOP member will be down to his last seven houses.
also, jeffrey goldberg, he of the “my source, an auto mechanic who claims to have fellated sadaam, tells me there are WMD”, has the temerity to question my wife’s professionalism?
what a piece of work that guy is.
no max, that’s bullshit. there are plenty of us in LA and NYC who are wealthy by most standards but not rich rich, and who are plentifully democrats, who will be fucked by ML if it goes down, or JP Morgan. don’t make such easy assumptions about that. that’s my kids college fund. that’s my retirement. that’s what ML going down means to someone like me.
D. Aristophanes said,
September 15, 2008 at 5:45
Jim – BofA is buying Merrill … Lehmann Bros. is going tits up it looks like.
Don’t forget AIG. Here’s my first rant at Donald “Things today just aren’t that bad” Luskin today:
~
No one could have anticipated that they would have used financial instruments as weapons.
To compound the problem, they were structured investment vehicles. Intelligence analysts picked up no previous indications that they were so well organized, nor that they would drive themselves into Wall Street.
Whew, I was worried there for a second.
I realize that this is one of many pieces of advice that I’ve given to the Obama campaign…
Well, lucky for you that he hangs out here for several hours every Sunday night at about this time.
(And yes, J-, the idiot in question is the guy with the horse. Nice pickup.)
(RB, I really want to use that phrase some time – Tenacious in the face of no readers. So apt, in so many ways.)
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©,
Want to hear something very funny. As it happens, our pal Luskin is an unpaid adviser to the McCain campaign. I guess McCain felt he wasn’t saying enough nonsense and decided to up his daily total by a factor of 1,000.
Well then, I guess I picked the right moment.
Your personal site, BTW, is excellent.
Do you have money invested with ML, or in ML?
Robert, I agree with you. The relative effects of the financial crisis are hardest on the smaller players. The bigwigs at the heart of the GOP – the John McCains, with nine figure net worths, the ones who got George Bush tax cuts as opposed to $300 checks – those guys will be down to their last seven houses.
The rest of us will be down to the last cardboard box.
Brian J, he did ‘fess up…12 paragraphs into his “everything is great” screed.
Full disclosure: I’m an adviser to John McCain’s campaign, though as far as I know, the senator has never taken one word of my advice. He’s been sounding a little pessimistic on the economy of late, too. And to be fair, he isn’t immune to the Depression-exaggeration virus, either.
After reading that, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
The Lehman CEO got a $45M bonus last year. Now his company is bankrupt. Shareholders are wiped out.
Will the CEO return some his bouns? Bwa-hahahhahaha!
This is, what it is guys:
Heads I win, tails you lose!
two questions –
how may more intitutions have to colapse before we have ‘soylent green’?
and how may after that before I am in the ‘soylent green’?
Sean Hannity is a fucking idiot.
RB, I really want to use that phrase some time
You may feel free to use anything I have ever written, and I wish you twice the good fortune it has brought me.
Somehow, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that part.
ML is my bank, though they in turn farm out their banking. to jp morgan. who are going down this week as well, if roubini is right. and he’s pretty much always right.
we don’t do investments, ever. mutual funds that are liquid at most. that whole game is rigged for the house IMHO.
The world may never know.
RG, I must admit, I am confused. You’re saying that you do regular banking with ML? If so, why are you worried, unless you have deposits over $100,000?
Also, when did NR say that JP Morgan was going under? I don’t have a tenth of the economic sense that he does, but if that financial firm is being touted as one that could save others besides Bear Sterns up until yesterday, does it really make sense to think it’s going under?
would the last one to fuck this country over please turn off the lights on the way out?
Leaving a couple bucks towards bus fare on the nightstand would be a nice gesture, too.
Soylent Orange just has to be tastier.
I really want to know exactly who got all this fucking money, and when do we put their heads on pikes up and down Wall St?
I’m going to start sounding like a geezer as I piss and moan about the good ol days, when we had a Department of Justice and a Securities and Exchange Commission.
Christ. Once again, I have the old Glenn Miller tune “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee” running through my head. This happens whenever the specter of repeating the Great Depression realistically rears its ugly head. I just think, “Yup, that was a time when the very idea of another cup of coffee was enough to people excited.” Not to mention pie.
Yes, thank you Grover fucking Norquist and pals for bringing back good old American values. Like riding the rails, destitute and hopeless.
“to get people excited.”
Oh he’s just an excitable boy…
It’s no coincidence that this is happening with a Democratic congress.
The Democrats sneak in a minimum wage hike, and then the economy tanks across the board. Not a coincidence at all.
This is either a staged downfall to try and defeat John McCain, or proof that Democrat policies will lead to the biggest depression in history.
Obama and the Democrats appear to be paving the way or a takeover by either the communists or the Islamofascists. They undermine our economy, and allow for those forces of evil to effectively take over our nation. That’s why Obama opposes offshore drilling, because it would weaken the position of Islamofascism.
This has nothing to do with anything, but I just like the sound of it and wanted to share:
He’s not your grandfather’s John McCain anymore.
today my wife has featured on WMD, Newsbusters, Michelle malkin, fox news, the nypost, american digest “aware of all interent traditions”, LGF and gatewaypundit. there should be a word for this–hitting the rightfecta? nailing a triple fuckwitcow?
seriously. seriously.
Gary,
you got it all wrong. This banking collapse is because we allowed the ghey to marry.
Here’s how it goes:
1. Two Gheys get married.
2. They move in together in Ghey#1’s house and put Ghey#2’s house on the market.
3. The market gets flooded with ghey houses for sale.
4. Housing market collapses.Supply and Demand.
5. Economic collapse
Simple economics 101!
Here’s hoping you and your wife come through all right, RG.
But G-d help you if your countertops are granite…
robert, wow small world. I personally found out about this from McArdle. You should add her to the list.
I guess competition does work as well as I thought it did, because the wingnuts are definitely trying to outdo each other, providing the world with a cross between hysterical and idiotic commentary. I am not sure exactly sure who is in the lead here, as you’ve had some strong entries from the “Palin has dealt with Russia” crowd and pretty any words uttered by Sean Hannity, but you have definitely given us a strong entry.
Please, do tell, how in the world does a minimum wage hike, which barely affects most workers, relate to a credit crisis and shitty real estate investments?
It’s no coincidence that this is happening with a Democratic congress.
But the 2001 recession was Clinton’s fault, right?
If you were any more full of shit McCain would have a school built over you.
ps: the minimum wage hike passed in Montana with over 70% of the vote. It’s only even remotely controversial on the Wall Street Journal editorial page – your fellow Republicans have long since abandoned your violent antipathy for the basic idea of charity.
The Commerce Department today revised gross domestic product upward last month, saying the broad measure of the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent for the second quarter, up from an initial estimate of 1.9 percent. But some economic analysts have accused the Bush Administration of “massaging the numbers”.
As we all know, this Administration does NOT “massage” economic numbers. It hangs them by the wrists from a water pipe in a fetid basement, puts a ball-gag in their mouth, clamps battery cables to their nipples and butt-fucks them with the business end of a claw hammer.
Apparently this new GDP estimate was based in part on a calculation that financial sector profits grew by nearly 25% for the quarter. In the words of one Merrill-Lynch economic analyst, “Are you fucking kidding me?!”
Shorter D.A.:
“Watching people lose their livelihoods is always fun as long as it causes a Rethug to lose. Wheeeeee!!
Stalin, in attempting to do something like this with the second Soviet census, earned the ire of historians across the political spectrum; in fact, this cavalier attitude towards facts when dealing with statistics is a fundamental plank of the Tories’ historiography on the man.
Bush’s cronies doing it are never-say-die idealists; like Reagan, in unplugging the clocks and setting the time to 9 AM, they have rendered it Morning in America with their outside-the-box optimism.
This is why I lament that we lack a revolutionary left. We, the ones who call these fuckers liars and try to remove them permanently from office, are no longer a less extreme variant on the practical attitude – that is, setting these cranks’ headquarters on fire and parading from Wall Street to the Battery with their heads on pikes.
This is either a staged downfall to try and defeat John McCain, or proof that Democrat policies will lead to the biggest depression in history.
In other words, it’s either proof that their policies are unsound, or else proof that they are SO sound that they can actually control the rise and fall of the market like omniscient puppetmasters.
Sweet.
“Watching people lose their livelihoods is always fun as long as it causes a Rethug to lose. Wheeeeee!!
If you would stop projecting for a moment, your Fecal Majesty, nobody’s fucking celebrating.
RG – the wingnuts are just upset because they think your wife’s camera stole their authoritarian god-head’s soul. They’ll forget all about this as soon as another shiny hate-object appears to distract them.
This is either a staged downfall to try and defeat John McCain, or proof that Democrat policies will lead to the biggest depression in history.
Proof that the stupid just gets stupider. You think it can’t but watch. It will get worse and before you know it, worse again.
robert green: Who’s your wife and why’s she being dogpiled? I think I’m missing something.
(I’m not trying to sound like I’m calling you out – it’s 100% identical to what the reichbloggers do when someone in authority commands them to hate someone or something, so I’m sure it’s actually happening – but I’m confused.)
given that jill was illustrating a jeffrey goldberg piece, i had a chance to go drop a “goldberg got a pony” over at mcardle’s site. good times.
sorry to hijack this thread, it’s just…been quite a day. my wife’s website has had over 30,000 visitors today. she’s received “cunt” and “bitch” e-mails from the mouthbreathers. you know, basic fascists. the kind of people who hate artistic expression that questions Dear Leader.
sorry, alec.
pdnpulse.com for details. her name is jill greenberg.
Now, now. It’s all a matter of what you want to call “the financial sector”, now isn’t it? I mean, if they’re losing money, they can’t be in the financial sector, can they? Hell no. They’re in the anti-financial sector. See, the actual financial sector, the guys making the money, sure did grow 25%. Hell, that’s lowballing it. Woulda been more, too, if folks hadn’t caught on to the whole “contracts in Iraq” thing…
Oy.
I seem to remember Reagan performing a miracle of employment back in the day. The unemployment numbers looked great all of a sudden. Then you’d check it out and realize that for the first time, they were counting the military as “employed” rather than as outside the scope. Hoo-hoo!! Instant 500k added to the rolls, just to make Carter look bad.
Fucktards have been doing that shit forever.
I missed that entire context when I went to your site, but if that’s the case, robert, I am sorry that’s happening to her.
Here it seems to be. To be completely fair, I think the one that captured him in what looks like the Wicked Witch of the West’s O face is better, but it’s a good photo.
Jim Kunstler:
I like that meme.
And Robert G: got to love it when failed pornographers turn into vindictive, aggressive pseudo-moral scolds.
So much for that whole “all you have to do is work hard, play by the rules, accept personal responsibility, blah blah fucking blah” line of crap that we’ve been fed by the pustule-ridden Republicans for the last God-knows-how-long.
Like lots of people, I’m in my late 50s, no degree, worked since I was 13 (OK, it was only babysitting then, but still), did without a lot of potentially fun stuff to save enough to put my son through college so he didn’t start out life crushed under debt, put money away, gave to charity, and on and on. For what? So some flabby mofo in a shiny suit can live out the rest of his leprous life sitting on a beach somewhere while I nose around in the gutter for cigarette ends and steal the cat’s milk?
Who’s got the key to the pitchfork and torch locker?
I know it doesn’t help a lot, but she should probably imagine the kind of person who sends a stranger an email calling her a cunt before she takes any of it seriously. It’s like having a child call you the dirtiest name she or he can think of – kind of pathetic.
I’d call the police before it becomes a big issue, just to establish that something’s going on and have help close by if necessary – they stalked a child, they’d think nothing of trying to screw with you.
As the top post of FDL notes, the problem now is that selling of Lehman means putting a price on Big Shitpile. That has a knock-on. If the financials would rather have a price put on Big Shitpile than save Lehman, it suggests that they’d rather lose their arms and legs than their heads. That’s the choice here.
Apparently Asian markets are not taking the Lehman news well. Those that are open are down 2%-4%. “Investors are excising any trace of risk in their portfolios,” according to Reuters. I presume this is an investment community euphemism for feverishly gnawing their own legs off to escape the trap.
The financial cable channels could be popcorn worthy in the morning.
Oh, snap. Robert, I saw something about that on mefi the other day. I didn’t get any farther than checking out her site, though, so I didn’t get the whole story.
She’s quite good.
Sorry the nutters are swarming.
Maybe treadmill-cats will make it all better.
Once bitten, twice shy – there’s been more than one crisis in the Asian markets over major banks collapsing, and the Big One happened when the large banks on which Japanese (and then-increasingly Asian Tiger more generally) industry relied were encouraged by the LDP government to hand out zero- (or effectively zero-) interest loans to risky developing sectors.
As a result, the Asian markets are a little hyperactive in terms of short-term reaction to finance problems, but when there’s a general trend you can usually rely on it being right. They’re not going to be going through something like the Asian financial crisis again.
Here’s a good line for Obama (seein’ as how we’re offering ’em up now):
The Repbublican candidate is complaining that I want to raise the taxes of the very, very wealthy by a couple percentage points so we can get our out-of-control budget back on track.
Well, that’s pretty funny.
Look, the Republican-led free-for-all in the financial markets has cut a lot of people’s wealth in half, or even more!
Maybe if the Republicans hadn’t destroyed everybody’s portfolio, they’d have a leg to stand on when it comes to moaning about redistributing income! If they hate redistributing income so much, maybe they shouldn’t have spent the last eight years redistributing the wealth of this country into the trash can!
Republicans are “the party that wrecked America.”
Works for me. It’s simple, sweet and true. Somebody tell Obama’s marketing director.
Robert, so sorry your wife is still enduring cheeto-spew in that comment thread. Maybe somebody should shut it down, the comments I mean since they seem to be on repeat ad nauseum now.
The one saving grace is that we can post there without being banned.
I happen to prefer goats.
(Not sexually, of course, which is why I’ll never fit in at the Santorum ranch, but . . .)
Who’s got the key to the pitchfork and torch locker?
Slather ’em in organic honey and throw ’em on a nest of fire ants. Perhaps not quite as satisfying, but far more eco-friendly.
BTW – Mr. Green? I hope Jill doesn’t mind, but her portrait of Count McCrabula just became the wallpaper on my laptop.
alec – considering that the IMF forcibly shuttered most of the Tiger’s bad lenders and basically shut down their developing bubble sectors, yeah, I’d say there’s probably not going to be another Asian crisis.
No love from me for the IMF, and they threw out a lot of babies with the bathwater in dealing with the ’97 crisis, but the US has never had its house cleaned systemically the way the Asian countries did … hence, the sound of our economy flushing down the toilet.
Oh, fine, MaineMan (she said, pouting and huffing herself onto the sofa). But the heads on pikes thing is still on, right?
CatStaff —
Heads on pikes are always good. I mean, it’s like the purest form of folk art.
her portrait of Count McCrabula just became the wallpaper on my laptop.
You’re a braver man than me. I’d be afraid of it leaping out in the dark and strangling me in my sleep.
Btw, has the insurance corporation that guarantees investments up to $100,000 gone broke yet? Or does youse guys have such a beast in the US of A.
yes lesley, it’s called the FDIC, and it is of course the taxpayer. and i’m pretty sure bigshitpile will be calling at our door soon enough.
You all are delusional
For one thing, Obama is not ready to lead, and if we have a Demorat-induced crisis, then we need a real leader.
Obama just doesn’t have what it takes to deal with these big problems. He’s not smart enough for the job.
I may have been technically wrong in this specific case, to downplay the warnings about widespread financial over-exposure to bad risks; but I was nevertheless right in principal to downplay the warnings, because the people they were coming from were anti-American and negatively-inclined anyway, and would they have issued similar warnings whatever the situation.
I cn hz Atlantic blog now plz?
—————————————-
And if I happened to be a McCain strategist, I would even now be pumping out the faxes with the following bullet-points:
(1) This is a time of peril and uncertainty, requiring a steady hand on the wheel, and no time to take risks with untried economic policies.
(2) The situation requires a radical change. Change we can believe in, from a maverick outsider.
(3) The Democrats’ insistence on scoring petty political points and exploiting individual tragedies is an example of tasteless shroud-waving at its worst.
The Globe and Mail is covering the financial crisis
U.S. financial system in throes of historic shakeup, banks step in
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080914.wlehmanwrap09143/BNStory/Business/home
Gary Ruppert, I kicked your ass in bed five hours ago. You’re much too young to be up this late. You’ll be too tired for kindergarten tomorrow. GET YOUR ASS TO BED NOW.
I have a feeling it’s going to be hard to joke about the economy much longer.
Says a guy voting for President who thinks Iran is in league with al Qaeda. (Although it makes about as much sense as Baathist Iraq being in league with al Qaeda.) Not to mention the VP who can’t even identify her own party’s policies.
Says a guy voting for (a) someone who has never seen a crisis that cannot be resolved by murder and (b) someone whose idea of leadership is to appoint underlings based on friendship and fire them based on a lack of ~=HUGZZ=~.
So your answers are: a mix of nepotic posterboy and kept man who legacied his way into the Forces and killed more Americans than Vietnamese (not counting civilians) and who knuckled under to history’s least popular President with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for defiance on torture, which he had made a signature issue; and a sportscaster whose sole meaningful victories consist of destroying wolves, censoring books she had never read, and hounding a relative’s ex close to suicide.
It figures you think the Great Flood was caused by Democrats, you retarded twink. Fuck right along.
Google Gary Rupert. Brad’s unifying theory of Gary Ruppert is number four on the list.
At the end of the day, Herr Ruppert, you will never succeed in rewriting history. No credible economist or historian accepts the ludicrous party line on the Reagan debt balloon that your mouth-breathing screed is no doubt a debased grandchild of – it is universally agreed that the massive expansion in debt in the 80s was a result of Reagan – acting either out of bad faith or earnest idiocy – cutting economically insignificant marginal tax rates and ramping up spending as if it were going out of style.
No matter how loyally Sean Hannity – whose two-bit lying ass you will die unfit to rim – plugs away for the GOP, history remains written and the truth remains the same. No, Gary, you’re not going to convince anyone that the relationship between Bush’s literally insane economic behavior is a coincidence, nor are you going to convince anyone that the Democratic minority in US history’s most stridently partisan congress got the ball of this economic crisis rolling. You’re not just lying but lying pointlessly and embarassingly, and history will judge you and the man-children you worship the way it judged Harding and his cronies.
I’d suggest that you go fuck yourself but I don’t think even you deserve you. Find a tree with a knot in it and buy a package of KY, you vile, pathetic little churl, and stop trying to play games with a reality that surpasses your understanding.
Okay, so someone who knows more than dick-all about this stuff please explain to the financially illiterate (like me) what this actually means.
Here’s a good source:
http://truthspace.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/credit-crunch-or-credit-collapse/
Man will you warn a man the next time you send him with a website about the 9/11 vaccine illuminati
yeah, I should have linked to this instead
http://www.safehaven.com/article-8972.htm
since that wordpress site merely copied it over. I didn’t notice the link right away.
oh crap, I can now see the new GOP slogan:
Sarah Palin: she will handle this bear market the way she handles the polar bear! Vote McCain-Palin’08, Tough on bears!
klyde said, “corporate executives with taxpayer funded pensions and buyouts don’t jump out of windows even with their golden parachutes.”
Handy that. I guess we working schmucks who have lost income over the past ten years will be the ones leaping from windows.
That’s why so many business high-rises have windows that don’t open — the Corp(se)-Execs don’t want to be cleaning little-people splatter off their golden parachutes, y’see.
Heads on pikes are always good. I mean, it’s like the purest form of folk art.
MaineMan, I would ask you to marry me, but it would upset my husband. Best laugh I’ve had all day, and I may have to work it up on a nice tasteful cross-stitch sampler!
The thing that is scaring the hell out of me is that with all the crap about Palin, with the economy in the shitter (and getting worse) and with it becoming more and more obvious that McCain is just a lying sack of dung that will do anything to win …… If you believe the numbers at fivethirtyeight.com it is looking like we might just get President McCain.
As I said so eloquently over at my blog that only my cats read … WTF
If only Sarah Palin could see Wall Street from her home in Alaska, then she would have enough expertise to fix this situation, just like she’s ready to solve Russia.
FDR, where are you when we need you???
No one expected FDR to be FDR, either. They were busy raising hell and demanding FDR do something. That ended up making FDR into FDR.
Of course, back then, FDR could draw upon a set of super-ultra-upper class wealthy elites who were sane enough to realize that it was in their interest to have a better, more developed, more stable nation that the population believed in and benefited from.
FDR’s programs might have been backed in some degree by the Socialist Party which advocated similar things; but many of his programs came directly out of the studies of rich-people-backed ‘think tanks’ and policy planning groups.
I’m not sure we have even a small minority of such rational ultra-rich anymore.
In other news: In today’s typically stupid and dishonest NYT column by Bill Kristol, Bill Kristol praises John McCain for picking the Sarah Palin as VP that Bill Kristol recommended to be picked in the first place thanks to his Weekly Standard cruise to Juneau in 2007.
You know why? Um, because both John McCain & Barack Obama are now outsider anti-establishment rebels, you know, BOTH of them. Because. You know. John McCain. Sarah Palin. What more’s he got to say until you b’leev him?
And that gutsy Sarah Palin upsets them danged collij proh-fessers!
This post would be funny if every word of it wasn’t true.
As Obama said in his acceptance speech (remember that?), “it’s time for them to own their fallure.”
“Republicans are “the party that wrecked America.”
McCain-Palin ’08: Because you can wreck a country in 8 years, but it takes 12 to kill it.
Robert, I’m more of a lurker here than a commenter, but I just want to say I’m a longtime admirer of Jill’s work. And being the object of a Malkin hissy fit is an honor.
The fact is, liberals, this is all your fault.
Jennifer,
My thoughts exactly.
Palin is on TV right now talking about the need for governmental regulations on Wall Street. Welcome to the Democratic party, Sarah.
Robert G….never posted here before but I thought what your partner did was brillliant and I sent out a link yesterday (in Aus) when I first saw the pictures on Kos. Sorry this has caused grief but her sentiment is appreciated.
Between that & reading in one of the links that “market dominance” now rests in the not-so-steady claw of JP Morgan & Chase, I see several miles of potholes ahead: Morgan isn’t any more sound than any of the rest, & sucking up a boatload of crappy paper won’t help.
We got chumped, big-time.
The suit-&-tie Zombies that’ve been on this bender have loved every second of it. Too many years huffing the fiscal crack-pipe of derivatives, too many veins caved in by hypos full of bogus credit terms, available to anyone with a pulse & a mailing address, & too many eagerly-snorted rails of uncut-flake bullshit “statistics” pulled out of some wonk’s butt – the whole toxic narcotic stew then making everyone kid themselves that The Magic Market Can Grow 4-EVAR … it hasn’t even begun to get seriously ugly – yet.
The REAL crack of economic doom would be if the credit-card companies put the screws on their outflow, or shut it off, due to a combination of banking fuckery & too many clients reneging on big debts … that is where they get all that lolly, after all … there’s just so damn much of the global economy running on plastic now, that that would be a real headshot. I don’t have a card or credit-card debt, but that will be totally academic if truly nasty shit like that went down – I’d say the market is still at about DefCon-2 or even (hopehopehopehope) DefCon-3 now.
Much hope it’ll avoid going ever deeper in the hole?
Sadly, Fuck No.
I’m going to start sounding like a geezer as I piss and moan about the good ol days, when we had a Department of Justice and a Securities and Exchange Commission.
I’m gonna sound like a nutcase when I tell my grandchildren that we used to fly in great machines like birds, and use small amulets to talk to each other over long distances.
“Okay, so someone who knows more than dick-all about this stuff please explain to the financially illiterate (like me) what this actually means.”
Here is the best layman’s explanation I’ve seen for the Big Shitpile*
http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true
The bills are due. The large financial institutions that invested too much money in The Big Shitpile are starting to collapse like the houses of cards they are.
*That is what Dr.Duncan Hunter, PHD calls the housing mess.
Emanuel and Mayer….spinning in their graves.
Thanks Dick….for ruining my fucking company. Go the fuck back to Greenwich and enjoy your Porsche, wine, and golf.