turd?...fort?

so glad i'm long oil, europe and aussies over the weekend...

show me the money

the bailout is never gonna work because it does not hit at the cause. it helps a symptom, not the disease

Good news! All this intervention should mean another stock rally tomorrow much like Friday's rally. Woohoo!

/sarcasm

FRB: Speech, Greenspan--Consumer finance--April 8, 2005

OK. Yeah. fine.

wow, amhert, really akin to an SEC or pac-ten powerhouse there...

Yes, eight years after allowing GWB to enter the White House is a fine time to start thinking about risk.

If you don't think so, let Sarah Palin have a whack at fixing the economy.

that BOJ # is chump change. even dwarf remnant october 2008 citigroup is worth 6x the amount mentioned there.

Yahoo News headline: "World holds its breath as bank bailouts take shape"

(Yahoo! 404 - Page Not Found

So that explains why the world's face is turning purple? LOL

"gerald writes:
one of the UK papers says Brown will force the banks to lend."

So if you force banks to lend at gunpoint, what do you do when nobody wants to borrow? Pull the trigger? Money cannon?

We need a Drinking Game to play while listening to Gordon Brown's speech.

any thoughts?

We are getting ahead of ourselves. Will Paulson follow the Brits lead? Great change and much easier to implement rapidly. Plus it's simple enough that even I understand how it works. We'll see what the market says tomorrow.

Should have been the original plan. Whole lot of heading for the exits happening soon if the EU stabilizes before we do. I am a little suspicious with the Brits taking the lead. These guys have been our Mini Me for a very long time. Maybe THE City is seeing the opportunity to seize the title of financial capital of the world.

Good for the UK, I was starting to really worry about our cousins this coming winter.

mmmmmmmmmmmm

CR,

I have read your blog for a while, and I do find that you are very fair-minded in your negativity and your recognition of moves in the right direction.

These are serious moves in the proper direction. That, with the pain the equity markets have felt and the coming back to earth of the housing market.

I was curious as to your thoughts on this. It appears as if we'll have one or two fairly tough years and then hopefully move into a more responsible paradigm of lending, living, and financial responsibility.

My guess is that the latter half of 2010 looks to be the final cleanse/coming out of this. Your thoughts? Many thanks.

monta, Greylock?

Give the brits some credit, they punch above their weight on a lot of issues. Yes I'm a borderline Anglophile, but you have to admit that it's an advantage in this day and age having 2 different people as head of state and head of gov't. Many Americans want the Prez to be a symbol (that's why so many people loved Reagan, hated Clinton and were suckered by GWBush) but in the UK the PM is just the person who gets things done (or not, as the case may be). The founders didn't see a big threat from demagogues-- but Hamilton had no idea that 200 years later giant corporate-owned media conglomerates would be able to reach every little town in the USA. They were right to be disgusted by the tyranny of King George, just as we are right to be ticked off by the tyranny of our Prez George. We might have better governance if we got the symbolism out of politics altogether--let's make Jenna and Chelsea joint Queens, they can take it in turn to rule for 8 years...

oldtrader writes:
Deana,

I DID say two problems, and this plan MIGHT go a ways towards fixing one of 'em. It won't do a thing for an impending global recession, but it might "ease" the markets, at least a bit.

I mean no disrespect Sir.

I am most hopeful and prepared.

I am not fearful, just concerned or those whom are not prepared (some of my family - ugh).

During the 1990's, the last executives to have experienced the great depression retired. This is the first decade void of leaders with that experience and it resulted in unbridled risk taking on a stupendous scale. Just a coincidence?

Hank "Comrade" Paulson is not trying to save the world, just make money from his friends.

As far as I know Treasury's position on SWFs is that they be transparent. It is SWFs that feared being seen to take control. It's getting academic as they are saying they need to diversify, which is polite of them.

Steph_LA, people finally forgetting the last depression, I think that may explain the 70 year cycle between GD1 and [GD2?]. Isn't a Kondratief cycle supposed to be about that long?

No more stories from Grandpa about how "we had to save rocks in order to trade them for sticks, which we then traded for tar, etc."

No no no, instead it's the "New Economy" and "Ownership Society" and all that crap.

Funny, if you asked some people they might have thought we were heading to an age where nobody had to work, just buy stocks or real estate and live off the gains.

As for nobody working, we may get that yet!

The Brits have repeatedly blamed the credit crisis on a freezing of mortgage lending which if unfrozen would solve everything. So now they want the tax payers to lend to the taxpayers and this is their flash gordon solution they want all to follow. Doh! At the current rate of price falls in the UK the crisis in lending will be over by Christmas so they might now believe if they can spin this out for just another few months they will look pretty heroic amongst all the rubble they created in the first place. Meanwhile just about every man and his dog is falling into the same hole they are expecting to climb out of and they will be knocked so far down it is not funny. Maybe we dont need no conspiracies? We really are being led by morons.

butter writes:
We've been enjoying a Volcker dividend for the last 20 years; now its gone.

Word is Volkeris traveling - two day China trip IIRC.

Then to Europe?

This may end well?

"bush/paulson/republican/small government"

Please don't use bush, paulson or republican in the same sentence as small government.

Hey at least gay people can't marry and I have a dresser full of ammo.

FUCK

"Fair Economist writes:
Further, if the control is not extensive and combined with aggressive and thorough vetting of the books the banks will probably continue to make bad loans and add even more cost to taxpayers."

The books? What books?

Oh you mean those books, over there in the corner? Pandora's books?

OK you're new here so lemme give you the short version: don't open those books. Once you do you'll be sorry you did and you won't be able to undo the damage.

Jim "Bush can't play well with others".

Quote of the year.

Nor can he [Bush] run with scissors.

(now there is a visual).

good night gerald

"We're supposed to be professionals!"

As others have pointed out, this plan delays the inevitable. House prices have AT LEAST another 20% to fall. The capital infusion only delays insolvency (ignoring that fractional reserve banking borrowing short and lending long is by definition insolvent). Why do we want to extend the recession/depression? What am I missing?

well look @ it this way:

the english taxpayer finally gets to own a piece of the City of London.

sorta

Next time you see a Wall Street Bankster in his yacht sipping wine with the Misses, please thank him. Thank him for the opportunity to spend decades making payments to the IRS for his millions or billions.

This is what happens when you spend too much time reading CR:

http://www.buymydump.com/images/buymydump04.jpg

This is what a commenter on the buymydump site has to say:

"Joseph Spencer
New York, United States
1:06pm on Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Plug that into Babelfish and translate it, you idiotic foreigners."

Maybe we should censor the internet? Just a little?

"What am I missing?"

Exit, I think that one is right up Tanta's alley.

This is kinda funny (if anything can be regarded as funny at this point) --Krugman with his "Wrong Way Paulson?

Think "Wrong Way Bailey" when you read this one:

HaloScan.com - Comments

Helm...lol

So anybody listening to the grand announcement by the Brits?

I'm listening to Santa Ana winds trying to rip my freaking roof off. Is the announcement streaming anywhere?

CSC, as they said on those old Boost Mobile ads: "Way you at, chickenhead?"

SoCal?

Yeah...the OC. I keep hearing things slam around in the yard. I think the chiase just launched.

Markets, if not an expression of aspirations implicit in human nature, are supposedly indispensable to any happy human prospect. Free market ideology has it that markets are the most efficient delivery system for goods; that competition will drive innovation and flexibility; that consumer-led demand will ensure that people get what they want (within their means); and that waged labour will incentivize hard work and thus produce growth. This fabular conception advises the most rudimentary assumptions of policymakers (who then go on to violate their own assumptions in practise) and a great majority of the intelligentsia. And, within its own terms, it has a certain allure. It is not obviously utopian, and doesn't assume basic human goodness. In fact, it states quite bluntly that what humans had often considered the main source of evil, the accumulation of wealth, was the progenerator of unprecedented good. Adam Smith thus famously argued: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages." Moreover, in the context in which the classical liberal economists were writing, it made a great deal of sense. The absence of that context makes any attempt to apply such precepts to today's reality absurd.

For, we are hardly living in an economy characterised overwhelmingly by small producers, responding to consumer-led demand in a largely anarchic, unplanned, and highly competitive fashion, in which the main impediment to growth is the appropriative practises of largely parasitic feudal remnants. We are familiar with a high degree of capital concentration and centralisation, with systemic pressures toward price-fixing, the concealment of vital knowledge, the suppression of competitors, lobbying against potentially ruinous innovations, bribery, and so on. We are long inured to an economy based on the production and shaping of demand by corporations, in the form of advertising, and in which consumer-led demand is increasingly marginal to economic growth. We are used to planned obsolescence and to corporations transferring massive externalities to people in their capacity as workers, consumers and residents. And we are more than acquainted with the way that the purveyors of killer products, from pollutants to carcinogens, act covertly to seduce us into seeing their cause as one of freedom and enlightenment versus ignorance, censorship and nannying regulation. Of course, one would like to think that by appealing to the self-interest of the capitalist class, we could ultimately get what we want. (This would vindicate over a century of reformist socialism). And we would like to think that our tastes and preferences are ultimately registered and transmitted through price signals, though anyone who has worked in the music industry can tell you that the next sensation has already been decided on two years in advance (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but not enough of an exaggeration to vitiate the point that it is often the corporation's productive activities that dictate our tastes rather than the other way around). Enlightened self-interest is, however, no longer a plausible alibi - we just know too much. And, as a matter of fact, bourgeois ideology often tells us bluntly that the alibi is a fraud - as when game theorists concocted the "prisoners' dilemma" and proved that social solidarity of some sort could be far more effective in delivering a net good than a narrowly conceived self-interest.

Paradoxically, the capitalist economy is both a highly planned environment and a highly chaotic one. Significant resources are devoted to planning within corporations, and it can work due to a certain amount of predictability in, and manipulability of, demand. The demand for core goods such as bread is relatively stable, and inelastic. In contrast, the demand for iPods isn't so stable, and is liable to fall off if they don't come up with something better than the 120GB classic - hence, the need to shape demand, and to stage the introduction of better models in a process of planned obsolescence. But this substantial economic planning takes place in a context that is highly unstable, not to mention obviously undemocratic on account of the class relations embedded in production, and in a way that ensures large amounts of waste (hundreds of billions invested in PR, advertising, market research, lobbying etc). Overseeing this process is the state, whose enormous productive activities are equally planned, in a way that is slightly more democratic to the extent that it registers demands for social justice, and more stable to the extent that its access to knowledge is greater, its scope larger than any single corporation operating in its domain (this is true at least of advanced capitalist economies), and its functions insulated from the profit imperative. Planning is very much a part of the system, and it would be chaotic without it. And we now have a situation where right-wing newspapers like the Telegraph, who have hated the state precisely on account of its limited democratic potential, are carrying articles arguing for the nationalisation of the banks as a prudential response to the crisis. They want massive state planning, in other words.

So, it is no secret that planning is already with us, that substantial sectors of the economy that work quite efficiently are exempt from the profit motive, and that markets working in hypothetically good conditions produce largely negative social results. It is because of the fact that planning has been confined to individual units of capital, and conducted in the interests of a minority ruling class, that socialist planning has been proposed as a corrective. It involves, not the complete suppression of markets, but their active supercession. Markets are to be subordinated to imperatives arrived at democratically and implemented democratically. And because the limitations of representative democracy in the liberal capitalist state are obvious, because it can all too easily assume the regnant functions of capital (often simply by hiring capitalist managers and placing them in charge of recently nationalised institutions), socialist planning requires a different kind of polity. It has been called "workers' democracy" because it takes planning from the boardroom to the shop floor - elected workers' councils, deliberating under the advice of technical advisers who were previously subordinate to capital, take decisions in place of cabals of appointed executives and shareholders. Moreover, democratic organs built in each particular workplace are aggregated into local, regional and national structures, in which delegates are subject to instant recall. In such a scenario, there is a direct and continuous line of authority that exerts itself from the bottom up rather than the top down. For this reason, it has also been called 'direct democracy'. And because it aims to undermine the logic of 'scarcity' - so crucial to market economics - it is necessary to create such a superabundance of goods that some kinds of commodities would be treated more or less as if free, and thus delivered essentially as free services. This is quite distinct from the logic of a market economy in which goods are regularly destroyed or dumped in order to maintain the necessary scarcity of goods and ensure that they remain profitable to produce and sell.

Socialist planning is a remarkably simple idea, therefore. Its propositions do not depend on theoretical arcanum. It just happens to be the most radical extension of the democratic idea available. We now have a situation where we feel powerless, where a crisis driven by factors seemingly beyond our control, imposed on us as if by a natural force that we have yet to understand or master, threatens to destroy millions of livelihoods. We are the mercy of those whom we know don't share our interests. That could not be the case if the decisions about production, its character, conditions, and rate, were under our direct command. We would still face all kinds of problems, and conflicts, but we would do so as the rulers of our own society with the werewithal to manage it. But such an idea, though simple, has only been asserted in revolutionary conditions: in Russia and much of Europe during the interim after WWI, for example, as well as in France after 1936, in Chile after 1970, and Iran during 1978-9. It is impossible to imagine such a transformation, though simple and obviously just, taking place in a normal political situation. It is just as impossible to see it happening unless based on a powerful experience of solidarity and collective action. As a start, then, the experience of grassroots democracy would need to be routinised in workplaces across the country, in order to offset the pressures of competition, careerism and atomisation. Such is one of the many uses of trade unionism and rank-and-file organisation. The collective defense of jobs and living conditions against the inevitable attempts to force us to bear the costs of this crisis can be the basis for establishing such solidarity. Defying the logic of capital and the priorities of those who presently rule may be one crucial step in preparing us unruly natives for authentic self-government.

LENIN'S TOMB: A breviary on socialist planning

You mean "chaise"?

I'm in OC as well. Been dry as heck today, and the Santa Anas are giving me sinus difficulties.

My plumerias are not liking it.

Yeah, plumerias not liking the Santa Anas, whoocoodanode?

I'm in Costa Misery, BTW. The raccoons are making the rounds tonight - which is notable because they usually aren't. Back in the day I'da got a .22 and had some dinner arranged for tomorrow. But who knows what those things eat around here!

New thread new thread! Run!

Laughter in middle of stock market madness. Details below:

MarketWarnings: Laughter in middle of stock market madness

Life After Thirty: Humor | Global Financial Crisis