J.P. Morgan Chase bought the assets for $1.9 billion.
To clarify, the “purchase” is not a purchase accounts, those still belong to the account holders. The purchase is of the banking operations, J.P. Morgan now manages the accounts, the banks, etc.
More signs of a recession, durable orders just dropped 4.5%, initial jobless rose by 32,000, to a 7 year high, and existing home sales fell by 2.2% in August.
Meanwhile, the dollar has fallen, largely on concerns about the bailout deal.
Meanwhile, banks are borrowing in excess of $110 billion a day, 39.36 billion from commercial banks, and $88.15 billion from investment banks.
Silly me. I figured that McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign was a completely empty gesture which would contribute nothing to any bailout deal.
I was wrong. John Sidney McCain III’s high profile involvement, and the White House meeting that his his campaign engineered, just had a deal blow up, because John McCain allied with conservative Republicans in the house to propose yet another tax cut.
About the only good things to come out of his involvement are a couple of bon mots from Democrats, the first from Christopher Dodd, who said that the entire affair sounded more like, “a rescue plan for John McCain than one for the financial system,” and the other from Barney Frank, “Senator McCain has said he had to interrupt his campaign and couldn’t do a debate because he had to come here to help us. God save us from such help. But in any case, there is no sign whatsoever that Senator McCain’s got any real role here, so he certainly ought to feel free to go back and debate.”
In the mean time, Boehner aHis Evil Minions&trade make it clear that this is just another exercise in dick swinging for purely partisan gains.
Lovely fellows, I’m glad that I have a daughter, so that I can forbid her to marry them.
Considering the fact that Bernie Sanders is actually a card carrying socialist, just called Larry Kudlow a socialist:
Larry, if I ask you that the government should intervene like every other industrialized country does and provide health care for all people, you’d say ‘oh no!’ And if I ask you to support government intervention so that we don’t have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the world, you’d say ‘oh no!’ But when Wall Street screws up because of their greed, you say, ‘oh yes, it’s a great idea!’
PWN3D!
Does Kudlow need someone to cut his meat for him or something?
I wouldn’t want him around a plastic butter knife.
From the Rich Pigs of America:
I think that Google® Adsense® got it right this time with my post calling bankers wankers:*
Back in December and January, when John McCain was spending money like…well…John McCain, every time I called him a sick, old man, adsense would serve one of his “Death Star” ads, but this time, when I posted something about whining bankers, and they served an ad for “My Name is Earl” and “The Office“, which seems most apropos.
Please note that this is not an inducement for my reader(s) to click on the ads, which is a violation of the Google® Adsense® terms of service.
*Hmmm….there is a rhyme there gotta try and make a rap of it.
It appears that Goldman Sachs is look at buying IndyMac, or at least parts of IndyMac, to build out a retail banking network.
Is it just me, or does this have “Epic Fail” written all over it?
So Nouri al Maliki said in an interview with al-Iraqiya:
MALIKI: Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they [the Bush administration] asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the domestic situation [in the US] so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date. Agreement has been reached on this issue. They are willing to respond positively because they, too, are facing a critical situation.
Impeach Cheney today.
Impeach Bush tomorrow.
To the tune of $2.5 billion to be distributed amongst 10,000 staff in New York, and a lot of former Lehman employees who are not part of this deal.*
Running the numbers, these folks will be getting ¼ of a million dollars each, despite that many of the folks are the ones who ran the company into the ground.
Not enough bullets.
*And any right thinking people.
Dmitry Vasilyev, a professor at Astrakhan State University, claims to have discovered Itil, the capital city of the Khazar kingdom, a Turkic nation that converted to Judaism around the 10th century CE.
Looks very interesting.
Heh
Dear [your name goes here]:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Yours Faithfully,
Minister of Treasury Paulson
It appears that he believes that his campaign the country needs him to go down to Washington so that he can inject politics into the matter.
He is also calling for a delay in the first debate, doubtless because with the financial crisis, there will have to be some questions asked on the economy, though Obama is having none of this, noting that multi-tasking and delegation are crucial skills for a president.
My theory is that he knows that no one is concerned about foreign policy right now, so he wants the foreign policy debate delayed until people will pay attention.
It’s also certain that the economy would come up in the debate, even with the ostensible focus on foreign policy, so he’s looking to cut and run.
Of course, it may just all be a ploy to distract people from Sarah Palin’s disasterous interview with Katie Couric……How the hell do you get owned in an interview by the mistress of softball questions anyway?
H/T This Modern World for the pic
Complete with Keith Olbermann
While I am not a strict monetarist by any means, I’m an engineer, not an economist, dammit,*, I think that the fact that central banks are continuing to shovel money out of helicopters upon the financial markets will eventually create some very real, and potentially severe inflation.
In any case, if the spreads between two year interest rate swaps and treasuries hitting a record, 166.38 basis points, is any indication, all this money is not doing much anyway, except possibly pushing the dollar lower.
It’s not not doing much with real estate either, with US existing home sales falling 2.2% in August, and mortgage applications falling 10.6% last week.
This may be why S&P just cut WaMu’s credit rating again.
In energy, oil was down a bit on report of decreased demand, and retail gasoline fell for the 7th straight day.
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
It appears that the Wall Street bankers, writing the SEC as the American Bankers Association, are objecting to an accounting rule that requires that assets be priced on their balance sheets at a realistic market value.
They find it inconvenient that assets that they won’t even try to sell, because they might get 15¢ on the dollar, which would make them technically insolvent.
Dudes, you are broke. You are not broke because of an accounting rule, you are broke because your so called assets on your so called balance sheets are about as popular as the idea of giving Dick Cheney a rim job.
The American Bankers Association, today’s wankers of the day.
We have US sources accusing Pakistani forces aiding the Taliban, and reports that the Pakistanis have shot down a US drone.
This is not moving in a positive direction.
Well it appears that the state of New York is moving toward regulating some credit default swaps as insurance.
This is actually important, since it has been known for 300 years that insurance is not just any sort of financial instrument.
Basically, when insurance policies are traded as securities, you get fraud. This was learned in bubbles in the British markets in the 1700s, and so insurance is allowed only for those who have the actual loss.
About a decade ago, New York State said that CDS were not insurance, and so they were not subject to insurance regulation, leading to the current orgy of fraud, speculation, and abuse.
That being said, this is too late, and we know this because SEC Chari Christopher Cox is calling for regulation too, and Cox is a Randroid free-marketeer, and as such, never calls for regulation until it is too late.