Bear Stearns meltdown aftermath
Fascinating action in the world financial markets news today, in the wake of Bear Stearn's weekend meltdown. In the wake of the fear in Asian Markets earlier today, US markets responded with a yawn by today' US market closings.
By way of background, BTW, The Fed apparently put a rubber hose to the Bear Sterns Board of Directors over the weekend and convinced them that they should sell their company for pennies on the dollar. As we'll see, we'll wonder whether the BSC stockholders will go along with the FED plan to wipe out all stockholder equity.:
Here's the wrap-up for today's market trading activity:
Asian stocks took a big hit early today, while today's trading on the NYSE reveals that most NYSE traders yawned, gulped another few Prozac tablets, and accepted the fact that nanny government will avoid market forces, and enact "Happy Times." Yes.
The Dow finally finishes up a 20 points.
Gold, which went as high as $1030 last night, has now settled down to 104.30 at this very moment.
Bear Stearns executives now face the first of many predictable lawsuits.
People who are concerned about the current condition of the US economy should chime in here right now!
We predict that when the economy finally tanks, as it inevitably will, the pain will be much worse, than if the government ( and the Fed) had stood back and allowed out economy to fall into the situation now... rather than later.
Heads should roll in election 2008.
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13 comments:
Rudi Rudi Rudi
Yes indeed, heads should roll in 2008 - Republican heads all as they are the greedy self serving bastards that have created this economic melt down! How do you reconcile that with your own Elephantine proclivities?
Bush shills... e.g. Mr. Kudlow... are already on the air asking if President Bush will be strong enough "to resist Democrats prosperity-killing regulation" of the financial markets and banks.
Yes, with a straight face he said that. Before congratulating Bush for his "strong leadership on the economy" which "remains strong."
And the beat goes on....
It's tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum in congress even now, Ozboy.Demos & Repubs.
Cite for me one single significant change that your democRAT party has made during its 2004-07 congessional term.
I won't hold my breath.
I have to agree with Rudi. As much as I despise what the Republicans have done, it's hard to see any good coming from the Democrats.
That's what we do in America: Use the R's to get rid of the D's we hate, then when we get to hating the D's we use the R's to get rid of them. Would we could vote FOR something good for a change.
Rudi mentioned the DJIA finished up today. But the other indexes finished down. Maybe the plunge protection team has given up on the others and is focusing on the DJIA.
Here is some more gloom. I don't know what is propping up the market. Amazing.
Click Here
Really, somebody tell me where I'm wrong.
Well, my post about Republicans was in no way an endorsement for Democrats. It is just that the current collapsing economy is fueled by Republican greed and incompetence.
A good example locally of course is that little punk Godfrey who comes from a Democrat team but claims to be Republican. Regardless of which label he uses today, he is still incompetent and crooked.
A very large number of politicians of both parties need killin as far as I'm concerned. There are plenty of crooked bastards on both sides of the aisle. Very few elected officials come from the Integrity party anymore.
I assume Thomas Jefferson had this in mind when he advocated frequent revolutions. Something to the effect of democracy needing to be nourished by blood every generation in order to stay healthy.
So Republicans have ruined it, and the Dems have no clue...
Why identify with or support either?
Even most who consider themselves Libertarians have their collective heads up their ass.
It all starts with legalization...Drugs and ideas.
Legalize Cannabis and you will start to see the world's ills drop off the wayside like so much psoriatic sluff.
Sure you'll say we have so many larger problems than cannabis prohibition. I'd roundly disagree with you. The BIG LIE of Cannabis Prohibition has the world in the lying frame of mind. As long as we all accept a lie this big the rest of the governments work is easy.
People wake up and smell the reefer smoke...or better hit it deeply....LEGALIZE and the world will start to rebuild from the wreckage of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush...
Please
Just want to point out that the Dem Congress included economic stimuli in several bills that made a whole lot more sense than these refund checks... like extending unemployment benefits for several more months for the unemployed. Mr. Bush vetoed the bills containing them. On other occasions, the Republican minority in the senate filibustered bills containing them, and Dems did not have the sixty votes needed to break the filibusters.
While I would not argue that the Dems have not nearly been as active as economic populists as they should have been, I will also point out that it was Republican congresses that dismantled the New Deal era bills designed to prevent the kind of bank failures we now face... Glass-Stegall in particular. And Bush has made it clear, specifically, that he would veto any attempt to put regulations like those in Glass Stegall back into force. Sans a veto proof margin, there is not a whole lot a small minority congress can do, without bipartisan support, to overcome presidential vetoes.
This does not exonerate the Dems, particular in the Senate, like Mr. Schumer, who not only caved on a provision in the tax bill making hedge fund execs compensation taxable as income, instead of as capital gains, he fought for it. Sen. Obama caved on it too. Yes, the execs of the same hedge funds now going belly up and bringing banks like Bear Stearns down as a result. [Remember, the first to large hedge funds to fail were both Bear Stearns hedge funds.]
Only pointing out that when Dems attempted some economic measures that made some sense, like extending unemployment benefits, Bush vetoed the bills containing them and the Republican minority in both houses voted to sustain the vetoes.
So, yes, it makes a difference who is in the White House.
This E.J. Dionne column in today's NY Times pretty well sums up this Yellow Dog New Deal Democrat's take on recent events in the credit markets. The whole piece is well worth the reading, but here are some of the key graphs:
Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.
* * *
Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?
* * *
And here is how Dionne closes:
As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted of the era leading up to the Depression, "The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing."
But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary, and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.
In 1996, back when he was a Republican senator from Maine, William Cohen told me: "We have been saying for so long that government is the enemy. Government is the enemy until you need a friend."
So now the bailouts begin, and Wall Street usefully might feel a bit of gratitude, perhaps by being willing to have the wealthy foot some of the bill or to acknowledge that while its denizens were getting rich, a lot of Americans were losing jobs and health insurance. I'm waiting.
Republicans don't need women or prozak. They just need a mens room so they can go do the toe tap dance in the stall.
Did someone say toe tap? Where?
I thought that they all were on steroids, oh well whats the diff.
I think they're on glue
the senator next door in Idaho is a heck of a guy
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