naked capitalism

Anonymous says:

If we implode we do a great deal of collateral damage.

That’s why I expect our foreign friends will help us through this even without a bailout bill.

After it’s over we may not be reserve currency any more, but that cannot be helped.

lrm21 says:

Ok the Thailand and Indonesia comparisons are just silly already.

We have our problems, we are going through a serious bubble burst, but come on. This is the most dominant industrial nation in the history of this solar system, I would say this quadrant of the galaxy.

Times are gonna suck but this idea that 7% unemployment or 10% or hell 15% is the end of the world is ridiculous.

The bottom line, it was a bad bill, there was no leadership, we have a lame duck president, we have a Treasury Secretary that has inspired zero confidence.

We have a congress with Democratic leadership that has failed to respond or deal with any crisis in the last 24 months And you know what we are still here. Americans have woken up that the world will not end and we do not need to run to our government nannies.

And yet the fear mongering continues. Your kids aren’t going to college, you cant buy a car.

You know what this is a good thing, Americans need to save and they need to start now.

This is the kicking and screaming of the power classes whose power is slipping and trying every trick in the book to maintain it.

Good banks will survive bad banks will fail. Private industry if they are allowed will step in.

Asset values will collapse to levels that private buyers will acquire them.

When the manafucturing industry was raped over the last 20 years with NAFTA, and China trades everyone said tough its the market.

Now that the Financial industry is being raped, they are threating to take the rest of America with them.

Well lets see. This is not the first time we have had bank failures and we have suffered but we have come out stronger and for the better.

Lune says:

lrm21-

We are most certainly not the most dominant nation in the history of the world (of the past 50 years, perhaps, but that’s it). Ancient Rome, the British Empire, and even China during the Middle Ages, were all exceedingly dominant in their days. They all shared one thing: every empire that ever lived was eventually superseded. Will America face the same fate? Of course. The more interesting question is will it face that fate in the next few years? The chances are getting higher each month (although they’re probably still less than 50/50).

Anonymous says:

Santelli video, gotta wonder how much longer they are going to let him on TV. 5.49 in

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=872162980

The rest is blaming congress for not passing anything…

Lodge says:

Naked Capitalism.
Alright we stopped it. Now we need to start posting alternatives or we will get the same bill all over again and this time we will not be able to stop it.
We need links or if your talented in economic policy start writing.
Brian Wells

Abbott_Of_Iona says:

Anonymous said…

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008 5:09 PM

“That’s why I expect our foreign friends will help”

Your friends are bankrupt.

All you have now is enemies.

Your friends have been on the same drug that now has you cold turkey.

LJR says:

Banana_Republic++ twice in one day!

Seems like a nice match with World Depression II.

At least some of the pigmen may lose weight over this. I predict low prices for used luxury cars.

Keep up the good work Yves. Appreciate both your insight and ability to incite.

Anonymous says:

FYI: Wachovia today closed at a share price of 1 cent.

Abbott_Of_Iona says:

To the tune of

“The Grand Old Duke of York”

Everybody sing along

The Grand Old Secretary Of the Treasury
He had 10,000 friends
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again

And when they were up they were up
And when they were down they were down

But when they were only have way up

They were neither up nor down

……………………..

Hank promised his friends victory.

He would put the final nail in American Democracy.

He told them the people were too stupid to realise that this robbery could take place.

And even if you told them to their face that it was a robbery they would be too frightened to change the way things are.

Hank has disappointed his friends.

Hank’s friends are angry.

Hank’s friends have lost money.

F**k Hank and f**k his friends.

Anonymous says:

Barclays COO beaten to death while trying to break up street fight: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1064453/Have-millionaire-Barclays-boss-beaten-death-breaking-fight-taxi-rank.html?ITO=1490.

Any banker who gets in the way of an experienced brawler is too stupid to live. I’m tired of bankers telling me they think of themselves as kind of dangerous in a fight. An experienced brawler who won’t think twice about gouging out our eye or tearing off your ear can sh*t-stomp a banker without breaking a sweat.

Anonymous says:

“You want your kid to go to college: save some, pay slightly higher interest rates, and watch as tuition stops increasing 10% a year.”

VERY OFF TOPIC:
20 years ago tuition at a private institution was around 7,000 / year…

Now? $20 – $40k / year…

Teacher’s salaries have NOT risen as fast as the price of tuition, nor have the monies given to visiting artists, as a matter of fact, in some casesthey’ve DECREASED.

Why? Because colleges knew that Banks would lend students money…Bye bye Fanny Mae, bye bye Freddie Mac.

dd says:

Let’s start a bailout bill. Here’s a start:
No Bailout without:
1. Re-instituting independent special prosecutor to investigate executive branch malfeasance and to insure bailout process is not simply another looting exercise;
2. Equity stake for shareholders on par with Buffet deal;
3. Price discovery mechanism for purchase of “bad debt”
and
4. Suspend the OTC derivatives/CDS until a full investigation determines the mechanisms and no bailout of this market until further study.

paddy says:

So is GS going to hoover up as much waste as it can and then sell it on to TARP or more likely (given the executive renumeration clauses) simply profit from TARP propping up “toxic assets” prices? Is this a sign that TARP/son of TARP is already working?

From the FT

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/07c04856-8d87-11dd-83d5-0000779fd18c.html

Goldman seeks to buy up to $50bn in assets

By Henny Sender in New York

Published: September 28 2008 23:08 | Last updated: September 28 2008 23:08

Goldman Sachs is seeking to acquire up to $50bn in assets from ailing US banks as part of its push into commercial banking, Goldman executives say.

Anonymous says:

dd, you’re thinking small.

Screw the banks. Inject the $700B directly into the economy. Every man, woman and child get $2,000. Those w/mortgages have to pay the mortgage company, those without get to spend it anyway they want. Either way, banks are funded and money is injected into the economy. Why waste $700B on those Wall St. bastards?

weinerdog43

DailyVus says:

was away living life today. got the news after 5:00pm -wow!
Lodge, The links on Rubini’s web site are always worth checking. He’ll have good ideas. He’s been reporting on this for a long time..

Did anyone cringe as I did at the photos of the smiling Democrats? It made me wonder what they were being set up for since the Bush summons of Obama to Washington failed to amount to anything.

Maxine Waters was on the radio this evening saying that as the Republican NO votes began to add up, the Democrats started voting NO.

Sounds like a game of chicken -nothing to do with the merits of the bill.

So my elation is short lived but the tension is at least a little relieved.

I’m so afraid that without leadership the message isn’t going to get through that, regardless of the urgency, and maybe because of it, turning over the management of the store to the people who’ve been extorting it and killed your family is an outrageous treasonous dangerous thing to do.

Anonymous says:

“Teacher’s salaries have NOT risen as fast as the price of tuition, nor have the monies given to visiting artists, as a matter of fact, in some cases they’ve DECREASED.”

Yves might look into the economics of higher education, but the whole thing is a scam whereby colleges grow exponentially, buy themselves pretty buildings and in many cases float the real work on cheap labor (grad students or adjuncts). Hence the administrations grow and grow and grow.

-The tuition grows as the administration grows. But the reality is that they’re selling a lie.-

1. There are a contracting number of technical and science jobs in this country. Those that remain have been given to temp visa foreigners.

2. There are a contracting number of jobs of all kinds that benefit from higher education.

3. If you’re innovative and bright the college will simply steal your ideas, market them to industry and kick your ass out the door with a worthless piece of paper. Hence the notion that universities are centers of technical innovation is correct in a sense (more innovative ways to generate money to hire more administrators)

4. The university exists for faculty and administrators only. Society
as a whole requires perhaps 1/5 the number of educated being produced. Hence universities are now parasites that have grown larger than the host.

5. The IVY elite LOVE this education scam because the IVY league limits the growth of new students. Hence as the population grows, the relative scarcity of IVY graduates increases.

(Yves is excluded from my superficial and intentionally inflammatory appraisal of IVY elitist pigs. He will be permitted into the compound after society crashes and burns).

bobmitchell says:

I took in a class in “High Performance Buildings” aka Green Buildings. We had a guest speaker from the university of Texas I’ll try and spare him by not saying the exact school.

He was in charge of new buildings. His first comment was that colleges stopped building because they needed the room a long time ago, now they build to put someones name on it.

Given that, he went onto discuss the various things that he had experimented with in the Green Building arena. He clearly had too much money to spend, and had to spend it.

He tested and tried to implement everything that he thought even might make a difference in the overall energy footprint of the building. He had statistics on solar panel efficiency back 20 years. He put solar panels on the north side of one building just to see what might happen, they did actually produce electricity. They were measuring the effect of having the roof being different colors, and textures. One of the buildings, the coolest one in my opinion, was a giant water colector that collected rain water from the roof-top gardens and then used that to moderate the temperature in the building.

Neat? In my opinion very. An efficient use of resources? Given his initial comments, no.

Completely off topic, can’t keep reading the newspeak that is coming out of the idiot box.

doc holiday says:

Anonymous @ 9:06,

Yah, I don't know, I'm making cookies.

Ok, let's start over:

You said: But if you take the SPX lower, doesn't it inflate your yield? Total yield here is (Earning+Dividend)/Price. Earning and Dividend changes less than Price, and so does Treasury yeild. As a result, when SPX drops, your calculation will show that SPX is even more overvalued than when it was at higher level. No?

>> Ok, I see what happened. I came up with the E/P as a yield and then added the div yield to that, and your saying add the cash dividend to the EPS… right?

I think we may be on the same page, but who can say?

bg says:

“It took no particular insight to see these warnings.”

Then why have I felt like an oddity being an uber bear for over a year? Why are so many ’smart’ people so surprised?