ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

Found via CR’s blog - but the main part is in images so i’ll just quote a bit from those, but really this is pretty fucking amazing:

Madoff [stated] that his investment advisory board was a fraud. [He] stated that he was “finished,” that he had “absolutely nothing,” that “it’s all just one big lie,” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.” … [He] also stated that he estimated the losses from this fraud to be at least approximately $50 billion.

That’s only one hedge fund, hopefully the other were more scrupulous, but considering how much fallout there’s been in the hedge-fund industry…

China’s stimulus plan comes on top of more than $4 trillion in government pledges around the world for bank bailouts, credit guarantees and fiscal spending to contain the damage from the worst financial turmoil since the 1930s Great Depression.

It pains me to trot out that old warhorse again but ‘a few trillion here, a few trillion there, now you’re talking about real money.’

Trillions of dollars shouldn’t even come up in polite conversation, but now it wont go away. Oh well, win big, fail big. Swish! 25% of the world’s economy, 25% of it’s fail. Oh well, as long as money is a made up concept, we can just make up some more of it to FIX EVERYTHING.

EVERYTHING!

The current predicament was not caused by insufficient government regulation and the risk of future disruptions will not be mitigated by increased government regulation. The mortgage market was already heavily regulated prior to the crisis, but had it been even more regulated and had the regulations severely crimped, rather than boosted, the abilities and desires of financial corporations to expand the supply of mortgage-related instruments, then the focal point of the boom would have shifted; however, bubbles would still have formed somewhere and these bubbles would subsequently have burst, leaving financial wreckage and major economic dislocations in their wake (the bust is always and everywhere a consequence of the preceding boom). The reason is that the boom was caused by the central bank fixing the price of short-term credit at an artificially low level for a prolonged period, thus encouraging trillions of dollars of investments and new business ventures that should never have seen the light of day. In effect, the central bank created an environment in which prudent lending practices were punished and reckless lending practices were rewarded.

And the Fed, through it’s control of the interest rate, is inherently socialist.

superpoop.com

 WSJ: Paulson to Tap Adviser to Run Rescue Program 

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is expected to tap Neel Kashkari, a key adviser on whom he has come to rely heavily during the financial crisis, to oversee Treasury’s $700 billion program to buy distressed assets from financial institutions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Kashkari, 35 years old, a Treasury assistant secretary for international affairs and a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker, is expected to be named interim head of Treasury’s new Office of Financial Stability as early as Monday.

Cronyism - Mr. Paulson was CEO of GS from 1999 to 2006 - from when the Dow hit 10,000 to when the subprime crisis started to make waves. Notice how Goldman Sachs has been conspicuously absent from the subprime woes that Paulson and Bernanke said weren’t any big deal. I don’t know if it really means anything, but why not tap Warren Buffet for this job. He could probably do it in a spare hour a day and get far better deals than these jokers that didn’t see a problem coming for the last year when respected economists have been predicting at least a trillion dollars in losses (who have since revised their opinions upwards to at least two trillion in losses).

Well, a ‘trillion dollars worth of wealth’ was wiped out in the stock market with a 5% drop last monday. It’s sitting at -4.7% (and that’s the smallest index drop, the Dow) with three and a half hours to go, and has been falling most of the day. I guess that’s another trillion dollars, “gone.” Where does that money go? I mean, someone is buying on the way down, and selling on the way up. Everyone is trying to, which of course is a butterfly effect. Some big players are booking profits from the selloff though, you can bet.

So if that was wiped out of US wealth, does that mean it’s gone to foreign interests?

Please make the click for fun with truth! Ever notice how little our government officials refer to us as ‘the people’ or ‘citizens’ and instead refer to the ‘taxpayer’ or ‘consumer’ (which are one and the same anyway).  

Among prominent conservatives who publicly assailed the administration’s proposal in recent days was former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But Mr. Gingrich said in a statement posted on his Web site Monday that he would “reluctantly and sadly” vote for the proposal if he were still in office.

“This bill is not the best proposal for solving the housing crisis. It is not even a good proposal for solving the crisis,” the statement said. “However, it is the only proposal Secretary [Henry] Paulson would support, and his support was essential in this setting.”

Paulson will do whatever the law that Congress passes says he will do, or they can investigate him and put him in jail. End of story. Congress is 1/3rd the law of the land (well, constitutionally. With Bush-interpreted laws, congress is 3/3rds his bitch). Paulson’s job is written into the law of the land, and can thus be modified at Congress’ will, pending executive approval or veto-override if congress is pissed enough, and then only overturned by the supreme court if it agrees to take the case. And if anyone doesn’t like that, they can kiss the founding fathers’ asses. They wrote the constitution and the separation of powers with exactly this kind of situation in mind, where the president is a corrupt war criminal bent on rogering the american people blind. They gave congress the power to tell the president to eff off if they think he’s a big enough fuckup. I think presiding over fallacious wars and doubling the national debt while robbing the poor to pay for the rich is proof enough of fuckuperry.  

Today’s drop represented roughly a 5.4% drop in the from-peak DOW average.  Couple more days like this and the Dow will be saying it’s Depression 2.0 time. Thankfully for some the market is bumpy, so it will take a while for these days to come about, and maybe they wont go that far, but life recently hasn’t been all that reassuring.

Do it here at CNBC.

 MBAs of the world weep, and head back to school.