Basically, everyone knows that Benyamin, “The Craziest Motherf%$#er in the Middle East,” Netanyahu will win a snap election, so this is an attempt to push the election off to a later date.
I don’t think that it will work, and my prediction, that Kadima without Sharon will be a distant 3rd in the next elections, stands.
First, let’s note that under his proposed plan, Paulson can buy non-American, non-mortgage assets, which sounds an awful lot like some of this money will go to benefit UBS, where Phil “Mr. Congeniality” Gramm, sits on the board of directors……Funny that, huh?
Furthermore, the $700 billion quoted is low. The real reckoning of the cost of the plan is $1.8 Trillion:
Someone is getting a haircut, and it ain’t Wall Street executives.
Because when a company buries customer rights in a 2500 page manual, one can be reasonably assured that they are not customer friendly in their outlook.
We have a major truck bombing in Islamabad, with 53 dead.
Pakistan has never been a particularly stable place, but it appears to be getting worse.
Deep Thought
Any member of Congress who looks at the plan to give Hank unchecked power to transfer $700 billion from the Treasury to his friends’ companies and has any reaction other than ‘You’ve got to be f%#@ing kidding me’ does not deserve to hold office.
Krugman opposes the plan, at least in the form presented by Henry Paulson, though he is more receptive to Chris Dodd’s version, which requires equity from the firms rescued for buying their part of the big sh$#pile.
Sebastian Mallaby, who normally favors economics for the benefit of rich folk, hates the Paulson plan too.
Brad DeLong is of a similar mind to Krugman.
In The Nation, William Greider calls the Paulson plan a, “historic swindle.”
Dean Baker, as is his wont, gets into some fairly specific proposals in some depth, which which I agree.
Robert Reich is less specific, but he does add one specific proposal: allowing primary mortgages to be modified by a bankruptcy judge, with which I also agree.
As for me, I will merely note that Henry Paulson holds hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares on Goldman Sachs, and the idea that he get a blank check to work this is therefore nuts.
Just a thought watching him: He’s a really smart guy, but he is profoundly uncomfortable and awkward on television.
Republicans who are drooling morons get some coaching do the dance on TV, and folks like Krugman don’t.
It’s not fair how much this effects our discourse, but maybe we should set up some sort of liberal org to coach people to do the gasbag bit more convincingly.
Once again, the big story is the bailout, which I will not cover here, it gets its own posts, though I will be dealing with some of the market effects of the proposal, which can be viewed as positive, if you are an optimist, or negative, if you are me.
First, the US dollar took it’s biggest hit vs. the Euro in 7 years, because of concerns that this bailout will end up being so expensive that it will debase the currency, and as a result, crude oil climbed the most ever, more than $25/bbl before settling at the end of the day at $120.92/bbl, up $16.37.
You can view the price in oil as a belief among traders that the economy, and hence demand, will be recovering, or you can believe that traders think that this plan will push the dollar over the edge. I think that the contemporaneous fall of the dollar indicates the latter.
The increase in prices appears to be a part of a more general rebound in commodities, though retail gasoline continued its downward path, but gasoline tends to lag oil by a few weeks, as it is actually a manufactured final product, as opposed to a raw material.
In either case, it appears that The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is not taking a close look at oil trading as a result of the volatility today.
The Chicago Fed sees more signs of a recession, reporting a drop in economic activity.
Finally, it there are indications that investors are just beginning to see US treasuries the same way that they did during the Japanese meltdown…You know…the one that lasted fifteen years.
Honestly, if that happens to the US, it will be much worse, because we lack the safety net of Japan.
A study of satellite imagery, finding vacant houses by the absence of lights noted that ethnic cleansing was essentially complete by the time that the surge began, and is in fact a major reason for the reduction of ethnic violence. (see here and here)
“Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved,” Agnew’s team wrote in their report.
(emphasis mine)
Heck of a surge, Davie.
From the article The Real Reason for the Global Financial Crisis:
Go read the rest of the article too.
Let’s be clear, John Sidney McCain III has grown increasingly confused over the past few years, and he’s always been erratic, and his calling the chairman of the SEC the chairman of the FEC in a recent speech should give everyone cause for concern.
That’s what Sarah Palin is reported to have said about the end of the Democratic primary fight this year, among other bits of casual bigotry:
Besides insulting Obama with a Step-N’-Fetch-It, “darkie musical” swipe, people who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska’s Aboriginal people as “Arctic Arabs” – how efficient, lumping two apparently undesirable groups into one ugly description – as well as the more colourful “mukluks” along with the totally unimaginative “f**king Eskimo’s,” according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed for this article.
FWIW, this does not surprise me.
While I have very little in the way of first hand recollections of bigotry in Alaska, (I actually have fond memories of living there, I left there just before I turned 7 in 1969), my mother occasionally related a story about her brush with movie making, specifically a movie called Joniko and the Kush Ta Ta, which was a fairly standard wilderness adventure, where a kid has to travel a great distance in a boat to get help for an injured man, and faces an Tlingit* equivalent of a demon known as the Kush Ta Ta (or maybe it’s his imagination) along the way.
In any case, the child actor playing Joniko, Tony Tucker Williams, broke his arm, and they needed a stunt double, and somehow or other my mother got a call, there were only about 400K people in the state at the time, so it was a small place, from a local working for the production, asking if she knew of a “breed” about 12 years old or so who could work as a stunt double, as the “full bloods” weren’t photogenic.
These attitudes are not, or at least were not, that common in the late 1960s, and I don’t imagine that the oil wealth entering the state has helped, if the House of Saud is any example.
*Don’t call a Tlingit an Eskimo, it would be viewed in the same manner as someone calling a Spaniard a Frenchman, which is to say not well at all.
The shirt is courtesy of Sarah Palin John McCain’s VP Pick Sucks:
Note that I have no financial interest in the T-shirt.
Matt Stoller, of Open Left, got the following missive from an unnamed Congressman:
Paulsen and congressional Republicans, or the few that will actually vote for this (most will be unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies), have said that there can’t be any “add ons,” or addition provisions. F$#@ that. I don’t really want to trigger a world wide depression (that’s not hyperbole, that’s a distinct possibility), but I’m not voting for a blank check for $700 billion for those mother f$#@ers.
Nancy said she wanted to include the second “stimulus” package that the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans have blocked. I don’t want to trade a $700 billion dollar giveaway to the most unsympathetic human beings on the planet for a few f$#@ing bridges. I want reforms of the industry, and I want it to be as punitive as possible.
Henry Waxman has suggested corporate government reforms, including CEO compensation, as the price for this. Some members have publicly suggested allowing modification of mortgages in bankruptcy, and the House Judiciary Committee staff is also very interested in that. That’s a real possibility.
We may strip out all the gives to industry in the predatory mortgage lending bill that the House passed last November, which hasn’t budged in the Senate, and include that in the bill. There are other ideas on the table but they are going to be tough to work out before next week.
I also find myself drawn to provisions that would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling. That is now required of consumers filing bankruptcy to make sure they feel properly humiliated for being head over heels in debt, although most lost control of their finances because of a serious illness in the family. That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me.
I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them.
That only took a two week recount.
He beat Sarah Palin’s bitch, Lt. Governor Sean Parnell in a closely fought race, and due to his ethics problems, the race becomes more likely to become a Democratic pickup in November.
Well, it appears that the American House fetish and the lobbying of predatory realtors is getting results, as the House Financial Services Committee has approved the markup of H.R. 6694, which re-institutes the insane downpayment assistance program, in which sellers make a payment to non-profits, plus a “service charge”, and the non profits “gift” this to a potential home buyer, so that they can qualify for a FHA loan.
Typical scenario: a home owner has a buyer who has no downpayment for a $100K house, so the home seller “donates” $6000 to to a “non-profit” group, which takes a $500 fee, and “gifts” the remainder to the home buyer, so the home buyer now buys the house at $106,000, which the FHA recognizes as 5% down, and so qualifies for a loan.
Of course, the buyer has still put no money down, and they owe more on the mortgate, and the statistics show a much higher default rate.
It does not put people in houses. It creates a default/foreclosure timebomb.
Japan has delayed the start of its F-X fighter competition, intended to look for a replacement for its 1960s vintage F-4EJ aircraft.
It appears that they want a full technical packet for the F-22, which is still forbidden to export under US law, in the hope that they can purchase that aircraft.
Give it up, we’re just not that into you.
Condoleeza Rice has negotiated agreements with the UK and Australia to allow for smoother transfers of defense technologies between the nations, as ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) can be a rather ponderous apparatus.
After repeated delays in the State Department supplying information regarding the impact of these treaties on existing statute, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has decided to defer consideration of the compacts until after Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are out of office.
Payback is a bitch, bitch.
The Astute, lead ship in a new class of British SSNs, has had its entry into service delayed by some months as a result of problems in test, so sea trials have been delayed.
The system is currently about 47% over budget, but this number is expected to increase.
Some things are the same the world over.
BA038 crashed when it lost power on descent on January 17 of this year, and it appears now that the problem was caused by ice accumulation in the fuel system impeding fuel flow.
It flew over Siberia at relatively high altitudes and low fuel flows, and so ice accumulated, and when the throttle was added during descent, ice broke loose, and plugged the fuel lines.
If it wasn’t a one in a million thing, it was close.
It’s an interesting read.
Case in point: Northrop Grumman’s Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR) promotional video, it’s a drop in AESA replacement for the F-16’s APG-68.
I just love the lightning bolts.