PROUDMONKEY

Samba & Blackouts

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:51:00 +0000

NSUC: Samba and Blackouts from USFA Inc. on Vimeo.

Keep Me In A Daydream

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:47:00 +0000

Stevie Wonder - Superstition (Soul Train)

The Fucking Moon, Over.

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:31:00 +0000

NEAT-O

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:41:00 +0000

This is today's chart of the 30 year. Ben Bernanke is tasting it. Ben Bernanke does not like the taste. The taste is no good. I can't find a chart of the 10 year but it would look very similar. The yield curve (the difference between the 2 year and 10 year) is now at record levels. Bernanke thinks he can keep rates low. The bond market is beginning to disagree.

Suffice it to say that there will be no real recovery until housing bottoms. Rising interest rates will be one of many housing headwinds.

When the bond market speaks, you'd better fucking listen. The bond market is shouting at you.

Tinkering With The Plumbing

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:13:00 +0000

Source:
Wall Street Journal
For Fed, Big Test Will Be When to Turn Off the Money Pump
By JON HILSENRATH

"We have a number of tools we can use to absorb [cash in the financial system] and raise interest rates when the time comes," Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said in a speech over the weekend.

One part of the Fed's strategy is that many of its programs were designed to run off naturally as the markets they are meant to assist improve. For example, its holdings of short-term commercial paper have declined to $250 billion from $350 billion in January as the private market has come back to life.

Programs like the Fed's commercial-paper-lending effort were designed to have unattractive terms as markets heal, giving investors an incentive to wean themselves off the central bank.

The central bank also could someday sell some of its longer-term holdings, such as Treasury bonds or mortgage-backed securities. The act would pull cash out of the financial system and push up interest rates in those markets, which could help the Fed temper growth if the economy begins to overheat. It also could lend its holdings of long-term securities to private investors and take cash in return -- something known as a "reverse repo" -- which would pull cash out of the financial system.

It has other approaches for both draining cash from the financial system and pushing up interest rates as needed. It pays banks interest on the cash they keep on reserve at the central bank. The Fed could push up those rates -- now near zero -- when the time is right. That would give banks a disincentive to lend the money in other ways.

You And Us

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Citi Never Sleeps

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:34:00 +0000

Determination Of Viability Summary - GM

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:04:00 +0000

The Loan and Security Agreement of December 31, 2008 between the General Motors Corporation and the United States Department of the Treasury (“LSA”) laid out conditions that needed to be met by March 31, including the approval of Labor Modifications, VEBA Modifications, and the commencement of a Bond Exchange (all as defined in the LSA). As of the date of this memo, the above steps have not been completed, nor are they expected to be completed by March 31. As a result, General Motors has not satisfied the terms of its loan agreement. Additionally, after substantial effort and review, the President’s Designee¹ has concluded that the GM plan, in its current form, is not viable and will need to be restructured substantially while GM operates under an amendment to the existing LSA.

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And, what is the appropriate compensation for running General Motors into the ground (losing $82 billion in 4 years) and costing the taxpayer tens of billions of dollars? Well, Rick Wagoner walks away with a $20 million pension.

It is this kind of fucking crap that continues to do significant structural damage to sentiment and confidence.

Oh No, There Goes Tokyo

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:52:00 +0000

If Central Bankers Are to Succeed, Positive Inflation Must Return.

The threat of deflationary downward spiral is enough to give any central banker nightmares. When a trend of falling prices for wages, goods and services gets locked in long enough, the result can be economic disaster.

Deflation is especially scary because the system is designed to have an inflationary bias. There are always new workers coming in, new jobs to be created, new investments to be made, new taxes to levy and so on. The wheels of the capitalist system are greased by a positive price trend as wages and earnings slowly rise.

With deflation, all that gets thrown into reverse. The pain is especially intense for economies that need to steadily add jobs and investment just to avoid popular discontent. (If the labor pool is growing, then a lack of growth means unemployment is rising too.)

This is why deflation is not an acceptable phenomenon. The longer deflation persists, the greater the risk of its long-lasting destructive effects. And so, in Bernanke and Co.’s battle against deflationary pressure, the stakes get a little higher with each passing day.

If the stakes get high enough, we could see some REALLY crazy shit go down.

The Fed Has Not Gone Crazy Yet.

BY now you've probably seen the monetary chart that looks like a hockey stick, showing the huge quantity of reserves the Fed has pumped into the system. You’ve also heard about the multi-trillion-dollar expansion in the Fed's balance sheet, and everyone by now has heard about the big government stimulus plans.

But, when it comes to inflation-producing efforts, everything so far is just a warm-up.

The big fear is that America winds up like Japan, so let’s use a Japanese analogy: the classic monster movie.

Picture deflation as a 200-foot-tall monster. Mothra, maybe. Except instead of attacking cities, this Mothra is laying waste to whole chunks of the U.S. economy.

What the Fed has done so far is equivalent to standard military response, albeit on a large scale. They’ve called in the tanks and the fighter planes. They’ve sent the bombers in to drop napalm on Mothra’s head. Next up for the Fed is the multi-trillion-dollar TALF lending facility. If that doesn’t work, they will have run out of options... except for one.

They can call in Godzilla.

If Mothra represents deflation, then Godzilla, by way of our little analogy, represents real inflation... stomping, screeching, fire-spewing, melt-your-eyeballs inflation.

If the Fed and Treasury were to truly go crazy and raise Godzilla up from the deep, what would that look like? Here are a few possibilities:

* The government could announce a massive payroll tax holiday, at a cost that would blow everyone's mind, that would not have to be paid back.
* The government could announce a one-fell-swoop effort to pay off tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of underwater mortgages.
* The Federal Reserve could hit the banks with a draconian holding tax – sort of like the vigorish a loan shark charges except in reverse. Every day that goes by where bank ABC hasn’t lent out the $100 million in its reserves, a $50,000 holding penalty is assessed. Or something to that effect.
* The Fed and Treasury could just say “You know what, screw it. We’re gonna write y’all some checks. Every American citizen age 18 or over with a social security number gets $10,000 – look for that in the mail.”

Why haven’t we seen anything like this already? Because, again, the above options are the equivalent of calling in Godzilla. Could Godzilla kick Mothra’s butt? Oh, most certainly. The problem is, after Mothra is dead you’ve got the little matter of dealing with Godzilla.

In The Land Of The Blind...

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000

...The one eyed man is Key?

By MARY KISSEL - editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Kohn Key, New Zealand's prime minister, says You Can't Spend Your Way Out of the Crisis.

"We don't tell New Zealanders we can stop the global recession, because we can't," says Prime Minister John Key, leaning forward in his armchair at his office in the Beehive, the executive wing of New Zealand's parliament. "What we do tell them is we can use this time to transform the economy to make us stronger so that when the world starts growing again we can be running faster than other countries we compete with."

That idea, growing a nation out of recession by improving productivity, puts Mr. Key and his conservative National Party at odds with Washington, Tokyo and Canberra. Those capitals are rolling out trillions of dollars in stimulus packages with taxpayers' money to try to prop up growth. That's "risky," Mr. Key says. "You've saddled future generations with an enormous amount of debt that then they have to repay," he explains. "There is actually a limit to what governments can do."

Mr. Key's program focuses first on personal income tax cuts, which, given that the new top rate as of April 1 will be 38%, are still high, especially when compared to Hong Kong and Singapore. "We just think it's good tax policy to lower and flatten your tax curve," he says. "People will move in labor markets and they look at their after-tax incomes."

Much of Mr. Key's reform agenda hinges on his belief that he has to prepare his country to compete in the global economy. "The world, whether we like it or not, will become more and more borderless," he says. That means Wellington is planted firmly behind free trade. "The sooner Doha is completed," Mr. Key says, referring to stalled global trade talks, "the better from our point of view."

Mr. Key chuckles when I ask him about the "Buy American" provision tucked into the Obama administration's stimulus package. The previous government's "Buy New Zealand" campaign got a "lukewarm" reception, he recalls. "There are so many component parts manufactured in different parts of the world, you're chasing your tail the whole time about where something's actually made."

18, 19 and 20 +2

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:09:00 +0000

Yesterday TeamBank of Kansas, Colorado National Bank of Colorado and FirstCity Bank of Georgia were seized by regulators. The deposits of TeamBank and Colorado National were transferred to acquiring banks but regulators were unable to find a buyer for FirstCity Bank.

In addition to the 20 banks now shut as a result of the financial crisis (read: stupidity), regulators placed the two largest corporate credit unions into conservatorship. U.S. Central Federal Credit Union of Kansas and Western Corporate Credit Union of California were seized.

Quantitative Eeeeeeeeeeeeasing

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:49:00 +0000

Release Date: March 18, 2009
For immediate release

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in January indicates that the economy continues to contract. Job losses, declining equity and housing wealth, and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending. Weaker sales prospects and difficulties in obtaining credit have led businesses to cut back on inventories and fixed investment. U.S. exports have slumped as a number of major trading partners have also fallen into recession. Although the near-term economic outlook is weak, the Committee anticipates that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, together with fiscal and monetary stimulus, will contribute to a gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth.

In light of increasing economic slack here and abroad, the Committee expects that inflation will remain subdued. Moreover, the Committee sees some risk that inflation could persist for a time below rates that best foster economic growth and price stability in the longer term.

In these circumstances, the Federal Reserve will employ all available tools to promote economic recovery and to preserve price stability. The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and anticipates that economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period. To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1.25 trillion this year, and to increase its purchases of agency debt this year by up to $100 billion to a total of up to $200 billion. Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months. The Federal Reserve has launched the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to facilitate the extension of credit to households and small businesses and anticipates that the range of eligible collateral for this facility is likely to be expanded to include other financial assets. The Committee will continue to carefully monitor the size and composition of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet in light of evolving financial and economic developments.

Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; Elizabeth A. Duke; Charles L. Evans; Donald L. Kohn; Jeffrey M. Lacker; Dennis P. Lockhart; Daniel K. Tarullo; Kevin M. Warsh; and Janet L. Yellen.

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One of the things that worries me about the Fed's ballooning balance sheet is this: at some point, the Fed will need to sell assets (treasuries, mbs, etc.), but who will be the buyers?

The Black Box Economy

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:26:00 +0000

By Stephen Mihm
The Boston Globe

Behind the recent bad news lurks a much deeper concern: The world economy is now being driven by a vast, secretive web of investments that might be out of anyone's control.

THE PAST YEAR has been a harrowing one for the world's financial markets, shaken by subprime crises, credit crunches, and other ills. Things have only gotten stranger in the past week, with stock prices swinging wildly in every major market - drastically down, then back up.

Last week the Federal Reserve announced the biggest cut in overnight lending rates in more than two decades. Congress, not to be outdone, is slapping together a massive deficit spending package aimed at giving the economy an emergency booster shot.

Despite the anxiety, nobody is stockpiling canned goods just yet. The prevailing assumption in today's economy is that recessions and bear markets come and go, and that things will work out in the end, much as they have since the Great Depression. That's because there's a collective confidence that the market is strong enough to correct itself, and that experts in charge of the financial system will understand how to mount a vigorous defense.

Should we be so confident this time? A handful of financial theorists and thinkers are now saying we shouldn't. The drumbeat of bad news over the past year, they say, is only a symptom of something new and unsettling - a deeper change in the financial system that may leave regulators, and even Congress, powerless when they try to wield their usual tools.

That something is the immense shadow economy of novel and poorly understood financial instruments created by hedge funds and investment banks over the past decade - a web of extraordinarily complex securities and wagers that has made the world's financial system so opaque and entangled that even many experts confess that they no longer understand how it works.

Unlike the building blocks of the conventional economy - factories and firms, widgets and workers, stocks and bonds - these new financial arrangements are difficult to value, much less analyze. The money caught up in this web is now many times larger than the world's gross domestic product, and much of it exists outside the purview of regulators.

Some of these new-generation investments have been in the news, such as the securities implicated in the mortgage crisis that is still shaking the housing market. Others, involving auto loans, credit card debt, and corporate debt, are lurking in the shadows.

The scale and complexity of these new investments means that they don't just defy traditional economic rules, they may change the rules. So much of the world's capital is now tied up in this shadow economy that the traditional tools for fixing an economic downturn - moves that have averted serious disasters in the recent past - may not work as expected.

In tell-all books, financial blogs, and small-circulation newsletters, a handful of insiders have begun to sound the alarm, warning that governments and top bankers may simply no longer understand the financial system well enough to do anything about it.

"Central banks have only two tools," says Satyajit Das, author of "Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives," who has emerged as a voice of concern. "They can cut interest rates or they can regulate banks. But these are very old-fashioned tools, and are completely inadequate to the problems now confronting them."

Since the last financial crisis that genuinely threatened the fabric of our society, the Great Depression, the United States has built a system of regulatory checks and balances that has, for the most part, worked. The system has worked because the new regulations enforced some semblance of transparency. Companies abide by an extensive set of rules and file information on their profits, losses, and assets.

Obviously, there are limits to transparency: Without withholding some information from public view, it would be hard for companies to take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace. But a modicum of transparency can go a long way, enabling both regulators and investors to make informed decisions. The advantages of the system are many; the costs of even a single case of nontransparency, as with Enron, can be high.

But when the mortgage crisis broke last summer, it opened a window on something else: The existence of a huge wilderness of investments in the financial sector that are nearly impossible to track or measure, and which operate out of the view of both investors and regulators. It emerged that investment banks, hedge funds, and other financial players had issued, bought, and sold hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of esoteric securities backed in part by other securities, which in turn were backed by payments on high-risk mortgages.

When borrowers began defaulting on their loans, two things happened. One, banks, pension funds, and other institutional investors began revealing that they owned huge quantities of these unusual new securities, called collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. The banks began writing them off, causing the massive losses that have buffeted the country's best-known financial companies. And two, without a market for these securities, brokers stopped wanting to issue risky mortgages to new home buyers. Home values began their plunge.

In other words, a staggeringly complex financial instrument that most Americans had never heard of, and which many financial writers still don't fully understand, became in a matter of months the most important influence on home values in America. That's not how the economy is supposed to work - or at least that's not what they teach students in Economics 101.

The reason this had been happening totally out of sight is not difficult to understand. Banks of all stripes chafe against the restraints that federal and state regulators place on their ability to make money. By cleverly exploiting regulatory loopholes, investment banks created new types of high-risk investments that did not appear on their balance sheets. Safe from the prying eyes of regulators, they allowed banks to dodge the requirement that they keep a certain amount of money in reserve. These reserves are a crucial safety net, but also began to seem like a drag to financiers, money that was just sitting on the sidelines.

"A lot of financial innovation is designed to get around regulation," says Richard Sylla, professor of economics and financial history at NYU's Stern School of Business. "The goal is to make more money, and you can make more money if you don't have to keep capital to back up your investments."

The hiding places for these financial instruments are called conduits. They go by various names - the SIV, or structured investment vehicle, is one that's been in the news a great deal the past few months. These conduits and the various esoteric investments they harbor constitute what Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond mutual fund, called a "Frankensteinian levered body of shadow banks" in his January newsletter.

"Our modern shadow banking system," Gross writes, "craftily dodges the reserve requirements of traditional institutions and promotes a chain letter, pyramid scheme of leverage, based in many cases on no reserve cushion whatsoever."

The mortgage-driven securities that have been making headlines are but the tip of a much larger iceberg. Far larger categories of investment have sprung up, with just as much secrecy, and even less clarity into who holds them and how much they are truly worth.

Many of these began as conventional instruments of finance. For instance, derivatives - the broad category of investments whose value is somehow based on other assets, whether a stock, commodity, debt, or currency - have been traded for more than a century as a form of insurance, helping stabilize otherwise volatile markets.

But today, increasingly, a new generation of derivatives doesn't trade on markets at all. These so-called over-the-counter derivatives are highly customized agreements struck in private between two parties. No one else necessarily knows about such investments because they exist off the books, and don't show up in the reports or balance sheets of the parties who signed them.

As the derivatives business has grown more complex, it has also ballooned in scale. Broadly speaking, Das - author of a leading textbook on derivatives and complex securities - estimates that investors worldwide hold more than $500 trillion worth of derivatives. This number now dwarfs the global GDP, which tops out around $60 trillion.

Essentially unregulated and all but invisible, over-the-counter derivatives comprise a huge web of bets, touching every sector of the world economy, that entangles a massive amount of money. If they start to look shaky - or if investors need to start selling them to cover other losses - that value could vanish, with catastrophic results to the owner and unpredictable effects on financial markets.

Derivatives can ripple through the market and link players that might not otherwise be connected. With some types of new investments, that fusion takes place within the security itself.

For instance, some financial instruments are built of two or more different types of assets, linking together sectors of the economy that aren't supposed to move in tandem. In the name of transferring risk - and in the interest of creating an appealing new product to sell to aggressive investors seeking higher returns - a bank could create a CDO, for instance, that packaged subprime mortgages together with corporate bonds. An economist would expect those to move independently, but thanks to a large - and unseen - investment in such a linked package, problems with one could drive down the other. A bad apple can ruin an entire barrel of fruit.

Again, it's not as though anyone necessarily knows the composition of these structured securities. Nor do they know who has invested in them, thanks to the fact that they have not, until recently, counted as conventional assets subject to the normal rules of accounting. And because they don't trade on open markets, their values are essentially guesses, calculated by computer algorithms.

Das disparages much of this as the product of bankers creating "complexity for the sake of complexity," trying to wow their clients by inventing more sophisticated-seeming investments. "Financial innovation is a magical catch phrase," he explains. "It's very sophisticated and chi-chi."

"Investment bankers want to make them more complex, so that they won't be copied, and so that their clients won't understand them," he says. "When they ask whether they're paying the right amount, they won't know."

But when reality comes home to roost, things can get ugly pretty quickly: If an investor is forced to sell a CDO, the onetime price realized on the open market may bear no relationship to the theoretical value generated by a computer formula. That means that everyone holding CDOs can no longer sleep well at night: the same thing can happen to them.

These risks are magnified, as they were during the stock bubble of the 1920s, by the fact that many of these assets are owned by investors who borrowed money to make the investments in the first place. When a market shock like the subprime crisis hits, it can send tremors through the system with incredible speed.

If the contagion spreads, the conventional wisdom holds that the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world can step into the breach caused when consumers and investors start to lose their confidence. But what happens when all these complicated financial arrangements and instruments start to unravel? The market for one product alone - the credit default swap, or CDS - dwarfs this country's economy. The Fed has an uphill battle, made harder by the fact that it is grappling, to a large extent, with unseen forces.

In theory, additional regulation may help with this. The Financial Accounting Standards Board, which establishes corporate accounting procedures and guidelines, took a first step in that direction this past November, ordering investment banks and anyone else holding complicated securities to assign market values to so-called Level 3 assets - a fancy name for assets for which there is no prevailing market price. This meant assigning a market value to all those CDOs.

Banks promptly began writing down tens of billions of dollars of assets, and their investors are still trying to sort through the results. It's still too early to tell whether or not the effort will work, or whether the "market prices" that get reported are anything more than figments of in-house accountants' imaginations. For his part, Das is skeptical. "It will help that people will know the poison they're drinking," he says. "Whether it will help stabilize the system is another question."

It would be ideal if the financial markets became a bit less opaque and intelligible before that happens. That would be the job of regulators, but Das isn't sure that regulators have the intellectual horsepower to figure out what they need to do. "If you're bright and you can make $5 million a year on Wall Street," he asks, "why would you settle for making 50K as a regulator?"

And in any case, transparency isn't really what the denizens of Wall Street want, Das observes. "The regulators keep espousing things like clarity and transparency, but it's in the investment bankers' interest to keep things opaque." Das pauses for a moment.

"It's like a butcher. He doesn't want the buyer to know what goes into making the sausage." He chuckles, noting that it's the same with financiers. "That's what they're all about and always have been."

Stephen Mihm is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Georgia and the author of "A Nation of Counterfeiters."

Bank Bust Friday Continues

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:01:00 +0000

"Fail Is Our Middle Name"

Glenwood, IL based Heritage Bank became the 16th casualty of 2009. The FDIC estimated that the failure would cost the federal deposit insurance fund $42.6 million.

Not So Secure - Security Savings Bank

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:55:00 +0000

Nevada's Security Savings Bank was closed by regulators Friday, making it the 15th bank failure of 2009. The FDIC estimated the bank failure will cost its deposit insurance fund $59.1 million.

Dow Theory 50% Principal

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:50:00 +0000

The DJ Industrials Average closed below its November 20th low, thereby confirming the prior breakdown of the Transportation Average. Both averages closed to new lows, with the Dow closing below the halfway level (50%) of the 1982 - 2007 great bull market. If the market is a scale, it has now tipped and the path of least resistance is down. Get out. Raise cash. It will likely take many years, but at some point in the future the great unwinding will set the stage for a new great bull market where fortunes will be made.

Regulators Seize #14

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:41:00 +0000

Federal regulators shut Silver Falls Bank in Oregon, making it the 14th closure this year and 8th in February, the most in a single month since 1993. Citizens Bank will assume the deposits of Silver Falls. This failure will cost the FDIC approximately $50 million.

Looks Like Rain

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:47:00 +0000

The median value of a U.S. home in 2000 was $119,600. It peaked at $221,900 in 2006. Historically, home prices have risen annually in line with CPI. If they had followed the long-term trend, they would have increased by 17% to $140,000. Instead, they skyrocketed by 86%. It is now 2009 and the median value should be $150,000 based on historical precedent. The median value at the end of 2008 was $180,100. Therefore, home prices are still 20% overvalued. Long-term averages are created by periods of overvaluation followed by periods of undervaluation. Prices need to fall 20% and could fall 30%.

Gotta go. The DVD box set of Flip This House just arrived.

#13

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:17:00 +0000

Happy BANK FAIL Friday. FDIC closed Pinnacle Bank of Oregon.

#10, #11 and #12

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:31:00 +0000

It's bank failure Friday, and three more get added to the list. So long Sherman County Bank of Nebraska. Take care, Riverside Bank of Florida. See you never again Corn Belt Bank of Illinois.

The Maxine Waters Trainwreck Experience

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:27:00 +0000

Maxine Waters: "Why do you do that?"

Ken Lewis: "I, I don't know what you're talking about."

Maxine Waters: "Do, do any of you understand what I'm talking about?"
(then later) "Why are they paying themselves fees on the money that we give them?"

How Maxine Waters is part of the Congressional Financial Services Committee is beyond me.

S&P 500/Gold Ratio

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Today, the S&P 500 closed at 833. Gold closed at $942.

All Aboard!

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:34:00 +0000

C Ya Alliance Bank

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:34:00 +0000

Alliance Bank of California joins the 2009 failboat.

So Long FirstBank Financial

noreply@blogger.com (proudmonkey) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:25:00 +0000

FirstBank of Georgia. A tragic loss.