I confess, I can't watch it.

I confess, I can't watch it. Meaning that my blood vessels will burst.

That Erin is a creepy mealy-mouthed wretch. Carry on...

Paulson hijacked the treasury. Watching video of TARP is like hitting rewind of 9/11

Why doesn't Hank just give the whole $700b to C. They need it just to crawl out on insolvency to temporarily marginally capitalized.

Wake me up when he gets around to announcing the Third Bank of the United States.

Sometimes, if you want to do something (lend!) you just have to do it yourself.

Google shares trade below $300 for first time since 2005

irreverent,
Don't forget the 'clean' coal in all our stockings

"Before we acted, we were at a tipping point."

Now that we've given out billions of dollars to millionaires, we're at a tipping point.

So we're not at tipping point anymore? Are we off the cliff?

2:30 pm pump only last for 10 mins?

"Banks - must - continue - lending."

Bartenders must continue serving, even when the regulars have all passed out in their own puke.

yagij,

Testerone poisoning. Dubya is fatally attracted to them; see Jim Gluckert/Gannon male model prostitute turned press corp in briefs.

I wonder if Paulson sees himself as the greek god Atlas?

During the war of the TITANS, ATLAS stormed Olympus and threatened the Gods. And as punishment for this war crime, ZEUS sentenced him to hold up the heavens and bear their weight on his shoulders forever.

Are you liberals happy now that bailouts are everywhere?

Doomster, is that you?

Anyhow Spermy is my new favorite CR commenter.

Buy pitchfork and cape manufacturers ...IMMEDIATELY!

ATLAS was very relieved when the laboring HERACLES came along offering to give him a hand in return for a little help with some Golden Apples from the HESPERIDES.

ATLAS nipped off to get the apples but wasn't inclined to resume his burden. "Here, hold this a minute while I scratch my back," said HERACLES. And ATLAS, not the brightest apple in the barrel, did so while HERACLES made a sharp exit.

The awful burden was made slightly easier for ATLAS to bear when PERSEUS came along and turned him to stone with the head of MEDUSA. He's now known as Mount Atlas.

Testerone poisoning. Dubya is fatally attracted to them; see Jim Gluckert/Gannon male model prostitute turned press corp in briefs. - rps

With all due respect, given the topic presented for our comments by our genial host; don't you agree "The Administration" regardless of occupant(s) is the perpetrator?

By that I mean whomsoever may occupy the Executive events dictate response. The next President will push for higher taxes. Shock, surprise. How will that be different from what we see now? "Honesty?" GMAFB. Degrees of dishonesty at best.

is the huge, unsustainable dollar rally which is resultant of $xyz hundred trillion in derivatives settlement really a cover for an engineered quick divestiture of dollar denominated asian assets?

payback or blackmail?

CSC, why camp?
After all, I have a perfectly nice house owned by Citibank, with junior subordination by Chase. As for food, we still produce a ton of it, and we will soon see ration books if things get real bad.

If I get nothing, they get nothing, and I will continue to live in my house.

Funny pieces of paper are going to be very funny in the long run.

Panic has set in Paulson, and now almost nothing will stop it until it burns out. A long slow crisis is preferable to a quick drop, right?
Stall, stall stallllll.

We get more Argentine by the day.

Someday this war's gonna end...

Paulson is incompetent. But he is a good liar.

Paulson is incompetent. But he is a good liar.

Given the parade of people through W's cabinet, I'd say that means he's doing the job he was hired to do.

The only really bad liar (Gonzalez) got fired for being a bad liar, not for being incompetent.

Spoke to an appraiser today that was asked to do a portfolio review for a small local bank. Wanted 500+ homes re-evaluated but the appraiser cannot use foreclosed homes in the valuation process. The problem is that 95% of all resales in that entire ZIP code were REO's. Bank was bolstering it's balance sheet so a 50-75K house would look like a 100-150K house to the Feds. The bank was on the FDIC watchlist....just fabulous...more trickery under the tarp.

I am detecting convulsive attempts to tag the trillion dollar bailouts designed by Republican White House and Republican Fed on.... liberals!!

LOL.

As I see it the Republicans starting with Reagan have been very liberal in the fiscal sense. Also Keynesian style central management of the economy has also been very popular under Republican presidents, albeit with rate cuts rather than taxes (to his credit Keynes warned about inflationary forms of stimulus and seemed to prefer the tax system).

Personally I was hoping the democratic party would embrace a more fiscally conservative position to differentiate themselves from our profligate financially irresponsible republican friends.

Alas, borrow, borrow, borrow, spend, spend, spend seems to be the only politically viable option in our system.

Maybe what we need is a fiscally conservative but more socially moderate/liberal party.

We could call it the Anti-Neo-Con party.

Or the Regressive party.

Personally I was hoping the democratic party would embrace a more fiscally conservative position to differentiate themselves from our profligate financially irresponsible republican friends.

Balancing the budget was one of the top things on Nancy Pelosi's list when she took over as Speaker of the House. How things change...

Sperminator is a quick one-hand yank.

You know, maybe you should consider that Spermy doesn't appreciate his handle being used for vulgar sexual innuendo.

Panelists said the single most important thing to do is change bankruptcy law to allow judges to modify primary residences.
s_puttnick | 11.12.08 - 3:04 pm | #

Panelists are right. I've been saying that ever since the issue arose.

We'll get true price discovery (and a housing bottom) right away.

irreverent writes:
"those mortgage backed CDO's are going to be very hard to modify,..."

Well, they had better get started on the accounting, because they're going to have to deal with it eventually. Too bad it turns out that they did not keep good records. Have you heard the stories about foreclosures failing because the servicer could not produce the mortgage papers?

Not really ...just feed the poor to the rich. The poor are becoming more abundant every day. See cannibalisim thread earlier....it would be self correcting.

The proper way to fix this crisis is to SPEED UP THE FORECLOSURE AND PRICE BOTTOMING PROCESS!!!

Stop slowing it down!

Reduce NODS to foreclosure lag to merely 45-60 days. Create a "fast-track" process for people who mail in their keys.

Reward them if they mail in their keys, and the residence is not trashed by reducing their tax liabilities from housing related losses.

Reduce Bank's incentive to hold houses on their account: Raise taxes on bank owned properties, levy city/local maintenance fees, Do an escalating fee fine, if the property is not sold in 30, then 60, then 90 days.

Banks must instantly declare their bad assets and securities to the Fed, including all off-balance sheet crap; in a small window (like 90 days); In exchange, the fed will then capitalize them and allow them into some kind of guarentee program.

First time homebuyers need a lot more incentive, have the govt guarentee the first 10% of losses to first time homebuyers -- they may take it as a tax credit if they do have a loss when they sell.

Specify a maximum capital ratio the banks can have, before they're revoked of their bank status and no longer able to participate in any Fed programs, including FDIC.

These will make things crash and burn quickly, but also allow recovery quickly.

Instead, we get the opposite. We're sooo f*cked!

I just read through over 100 comments about Paulson's speech and virtually none of them took him seriously.

This is a serious credibility issue now.

Doesn't anybody at Treasury or the Federal Reserver realize that they're a complete laughingstock over the entire nation, if not the world? To the tune of perhaps 90% of the population?

That's staggering.

Maybe that's why Paulson was wearing green and orange.

"Maybe we need more, not less "dangerous" idealists in our political system."

More dangerous idealists like Alan Greenspan?

No, thanks.

We are over the Cliff grasping at branches saying how in the hell did this happen and who in the hell can we blame it on.

The Goverment(our Goverment in US)has never been suck-sess-ful in any business venture I have ever known of.

Paulson is treading water waiting until Jan. 21 if he doesn't LITERALLY turn into a blood sucking Vampire before then.

Most older US Taxpayers have Toxic minds about wasted years of misused tax dollars, and are mad as hell.

Broward Horne writes:
...This is a serious credibility issue now.

Broward Horne | Homepage | 11.12.08 - 3:22 pm

Jokes aside, what exactly are our officials going to do knowing their citizens have no confidence in their actions and no faith in their words?

If Dubya passed a FDR-like "Gold Seizure" law, would people honestly believe the law as it was written or start squirrel digs all over the place?

Tip of the Day:

When fortifying your windows with plywood, be sure to leave murder holes so that your defenses will not be blinded and impotent.

Ah hahaha
Nomination for comment of the day.

Right - blaming the Republicans who did the greatest damage would just be wrong.

For what it's worth as somebody who's probably a bit more conservative than the average CR minion, I think the Republicans far and away deserve the most blame as far as political figures go.

But how can you blame them for all the bubbles in other countries financed by foreign capital?

Did US politicians really cause the incredible real estate bubbles in Europe or the stock bubbles all around the world?

Or is some more elemental force at work here?

virtualco: NYSE breadth is running 18:1 negative. Hard to engineer a rally against that kind of pressure.

Send lawyers, guns, and money:
Not unless they disguised the glod siezure as some sort of give-away-athon, like they do when they're trying to catch felons or child molesters.

Excellent! Megan's law; now applied to goldbugs.

You can now check online to see if a previously arrested or confessed goldbug lives next door.

Give that list to robbers, thieves and the underworld.

Gold will drop so fat it won't even be funny.

GE says feds will guarantee new GE Capital debt

I feel sick.

(and not just from Paulson's taste in clothes).

Doesn't anybody at the Treasury realize what they're doing?

I hope Greenspan lives long enough to be publicly flogged. He has direct responsibility for the tens of thousands being tossed out on the streets, without jobs and without prospects.

More dangerous idealists like Alan Greenspan?

If you look at Greenspan he actually seemed to manage the money supply in a very responsible manner early on in his career, then morphed into "Easy Al" later in his tenure.

Many others have made similar observations.

Sounds more like somebody capitulating to political pressure rather than somebody who's an idealist.

I think the pressure from Bush Senior's presidential loss (which he partly blamed Greenspan for) as well as the exciting prospect of those sleepovers at the White House caused him to give up what he thought was right for what he thought would make him popular.

sportsfan writes:
Panelists said the single most important thing to do is change bankruptcy law to allow judges to modify primary residences.
s_puttnick | 11.12.08 - 3:04 pm | #

Panelists are right. I've been saying that ever since the issue arose.

We'll get true price discovery (and a housing bottom) right away.
sportsfan | 11.12.08 - 3:11 pm | #

No, please. This is the best way to encourage defaults. Is that what you really want? Is it because you were foolhardy and now owe more than you can pay? Again, why must I pay for your silliness. I am more than willing to farm my land and defend against any that would try to take from me if the whole system goes down but I am not ready to reward bad behavior. Let the irresponsible dolts starve or freeze in the streets. It is not the fault of people that lived within their means and we should not be expected to bail them out. I was driving an old Chevy while big spenders that now need mortgage resets were driving new BMWs. Let them live in the car for all I care.

s_puttnick,

stocks are going to be much cheaper in terms of hard assets.

The world has changed, and the new world will stun a lot of the republican fools who think the world will ever look the same.

As for the comments the Treasury is broke, empty, etc.

Bunk. All this takes is federal spending, and lots of it.

Which we shall see shortly.

Someday this war's gonna end...

Is it possible that they are now backtracking on the TARP program because the UST cant effectivley borrow 700B in the very short term??

B.R. I think you are right, and the Repbulicans in state governments that don't play ball with the new playbook are going to find that the renewal projects don't go to places that hate dems.

Reward the base- now meet the new base.

Someday this war's gonna end...

AllanM:
As for the comments the Treasury is broke, empty, etc.
Bunk. All this takes is federal spending, and lots of it.

Afraid not, man. This is one of the things about the world that changed recently. The US gvt doesn't have a black check for unlimited debt any more.

GOP destroyed the US economy and Kashkari is doing a last-minute raid to ensure the debt load left for Obama is going to be beyond imaging.

We all destroyed the economy. If you want to say that the Republicans destroyed it the most, I think you have a good case.

But the simple fact is that I and others were around sites like this one in 2005 and 2006 screaming about how we were destroying the financial system, but I didn't hear one party or another screaming that we need to stop it too.

Just a handful of people that were called crazy fringe lunatics.

BR, we have the printing press, and we will use it.

Damn the foreign holders of US debt, they are already under the bus and just don't know it.

Most of the folks here who think they are safe and smart just don't know how screwed they really are.

This is a fascinating time to be watching the financial system wither and die by the minute.

Confidence is totally shot, and now we have to do that adjustment to a much lower level of economic activity.

But the feds will stimulate to prevent total collapse, and accomplish most of their wet dreams of infrastructure.

Just hope you don't like a lot of imported stuff- the prices will soon be fantastic.

Someday this war's gonna end...

yagij writes:
Another Academic Question: What would you call a "Warring States Period" in America? A Civil War or something more poetic or dramatic?

Academically, it'd be an "interdynastic interregnum" or "lacuna of rule". It will probably find its own name or names as a period.

Duarte, you don't have to declare BK. Just consult with a lawyer about the particulars of your situation, get some good advice, and sleep well.

Oh, that's not bad, just down a little over 400.

That's the new "moderate down".

I guess people have sen that ResCap bonds imploded today on the Hanktator's decision.

"It's as easy as... G-M-A-C."

GE Capital can issue up to $139 billion of government guaranteed debts, the unit of General Electric said in a statement. The program will be effective on or before Nov. 14.

"This will allow us to source our debt competitively,” the company said.

TARP AS BUSINESS MODEL! YES!

ac,

Did US politicians really cause the incredible real estate bubbles in Europe or the stock bubbles all around the world?

Or is some more elemental force at work here?

Yes, securitization! No other country had securitization even remotely approaching U.S. levels. This was pure greed and in essence fraud!

Note this paragraph from that that MUST read piece posted yesterday:

The End by Michael Lewis

The End Of Wall Streets Boom - News Markets - Portfolio.com

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?” ...