Friday, October 10, 2008

SAR #8284

The music has stopped!


Tiptoe Past the Ballots: Paulson, in a sudden fit of bashfulness, says "We expect it will be several weeks before our first (TARP) purchase." Most likely right after breakfast on Wednesday, November 5th.

Long Term Investment: GM's market cap in the 1920's was $48 billion in today's dollars. Today it is $3.5 billion.

Score Card: From their highs: S&P is down 36%, Dow is down 40%, Russel 2000 is down 47% , and the NASDAQ is down 67% from its 2001 high. Does this elevator stop at Ladies Lingerie?

Gobbleization: International trade moves on letters of credit - to assure payment, to finance inventories while in transit, to fund the transit. Banks that will not lend each other money for more than overnight are not honoring other's letters of credit. No letters of credit, no international trade, no international economy, no globalization. After two weeks, empty shelves in WalMart. Empty refineries everywhere.

Trick or Treat: Great Britain is using its version of the Patriot Act anti-terrorism legislation to freeze all assets of Iceland's Landsbanki, including funds belonging to the Icelandic government. Not a neighborly thing to do.

Goldfinger: Russia seems to recognize that the US debt will either not be repaid, or be repaid with very inflated dollars. Thus they are considering selling their hydrocarbons for euros. Or gold.

Two From Column A: AIG is into Uncle Sam for a second helping, $38 billion this time.

Stake Through the Heart: Let's try logic one more time to end this 'energy independence" drivel. The US government's Energy Information Agency insists that opening the entire Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coasts to drilling "would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil production or prices before 2030."

House Warming : Satellite photos show that hundreds of houses in ethnicly Georgian villages in South Ossetia were destroyed in August, after Russian forces were in control of the area. The photos do not show who set the fires.

It Can't Can Happen Here : E-mails obtained by Yale Law School and the ACLU show that the Bush-Cheney administration ran a Guantánamo-style prison in the US for several years, holding US citizens and US resident aliens under horrific conditions. File this under News confirmation.

Fashion Accessory: Household safes have become this season's 'must have', for those who still have something to put in them. The perfect givt for those who used to have everything.

Which Lies? We all know Bush & Company lied their way into the Iraq war. Most of us believe it was for the oil. But what if it was not, what if the hidden agenda was in pursuit of the End of Days nonsense, not oil?

Down Slope: The panic in the market has left logic behind in a rush to capitulate, to get out at any cost, to run and hide. But the market meltdown is a symptom, not a cause. Nor was the collapse of sub-prime, Alt-A and liar-loan mortgages a cause, they too are symptoms. It is the Time of the Peaks - peak oil, peak greed, peak climate change, peak everything. The economic philosophy of ever expanding growth has peaked and our economy is dissolving.

Spend to Save? Electric cars are claimed to cost about 7 cents a mile for electricity and battery costs. At that rate, driving a $35,000 electric car may be cheaper in the long run than that $20,000 dealer special.

Going Out of Business Sale: Bush's Bureau of Land Management has ignored federal law in order to expedite commercial development of oil shale in the West before Junior joins history. The BLM admits is skipped some provisions of the law, but maintains the public will have years to protest and comment after the fact.

Hypothesis: Sara Palin is sufficient reason to vote against John McCain; Iraq, the economy, torture and GWB are sufficient reasons to vote against any Republican.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you translate the "Which Lies?" article into English. I tried to make sense of it, but it hurt my brain.

*Maybe the regular readers of Asia Online have contented themselves using what seems to be some type of pidgin English that is principally composed of an idiosyncratic, quasi-neo-marxist vocabulary. Or, perhaps, the article was written in code, in which case, I would concede that it admirably accomplished its goal of indecipherability.

HoosierDaddy said...

My suspicion about the TARP plan is we'll get equity injections sometime about October 31st (happy days are here again! The markets are up!) and then do the toxic asset purchases sometime after Nov 4, I don't think I'm alone in believing all 700 Billion will tied up in underwater illiquid assets by Inauguration day.