SAR #9097

The reaction is more important than the news.

Wish I'd Said... "Geithner Wrong, Crap Assets Correctly Priced, Say Harvard And Princeton Profs." They also let out the following secrets: Many banks are now insolvent, supporting markets for toxic assets is nothing but a way to give taxpayer money to the banks, most of the government and Fed's 'cures' do nothing but make the problem worse.

Asked and Answered: "Is Turkey the Key to a New Middle East Approach?" Yes.

Open Government: GOP Senators have threatened to derail confirmation of Obama nominees if the administration releases the Bush torture memos. Ah, government by blackmail. Wait till Cheney gets dragged into court...

Judgment: Again today the net is full of screams from folks who've just discovered that Geithner's PPIP is exactly what it seems: It is a straigt-forward gift of taxpayer money to banks and big investors. The banks are not "gaming" the system, it was designed to do exactly what it does. Geithner may be duplicitous, he is not incompetent. The object of the next few months is to remove as much money as possible from the 95+% who are the underclasses to the few, the rich, the rulers. Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers.

Depths, Acknowledged: An Israeli officer and three of his troops received a citation for refraining from hurting the innocent during clashes with Palestinians.

Revisionist History: Job losses over the 6 months ending with January 2009 have been revised upward from the initial figure by an average 35% - that's 126,000 jobs missed each month.

Picture, With Words: Here is a graph of the US credit bubble, showing that deleveraging has just begun. It is/was a Ponzi scheme, benefiting the Usual Suspects. The US is scrambling to get Europe and Asia to inflate their own currencies through massive 'stimulus' spending, in order to hide the simple truth - the US will eventually default on its debt.

Potholes: Last month auto sales fell 37% YoY. GM was down 45%, Ford 41% and so on. Auto sales in the UK plunged about 33% in March.

Damned infrastructure : Engineers report that over 1,800 US dams pose significant risk to human life, and that fixing them would cost about $10 billion. Another 2,000 will need repair in the very near future, brining the damned cost to nearly $50 billion. But can we afford this in addition to fixing the bridges and bailing out AIG?

Geopolitics: Mr. Putin announced that Transneft will complete the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to the Chinese border within a few weeks. Or as we used to say in the neighborhood, "Gotcha!"

Buddy Can You Spare a Dime Cup: Energy is the basis for our civilization and is the real measure of wealth. You can have all the pretty stacks of paper or piles of yellow metal, but if you haven't got energy - oil, coal, natural gas, or electricity - you are done for. The Dow was at its highest when oil was cheap near the turn of the millennium when the cash equivalent of the Dow would buy 650 barrels of oil. Today it'll bring you 150 barrels. Energy is real money.

Say "May I!": Gazprom says an EU-Ukraine plan to modernize gas pipelines is "unfeasible." Sort of an offer you can't decline.

Weakly Reader: Standard and Poor's says there's just simply not enough money. Bank losses will increase until they outdo those in the 1930's, and they banks will soon be forced to start dumping assets.

Mexico Oil Slide: Mexico's finance ministry expects crude oil exports to decline 18% percent in 2010, with production falling below 2.5 mbd, and exports falling to 1.125 mbd in 2010, Mexico's exports are already under the 1.370 mbd target for 2009.

Question of the day: Jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight against the government; what should I say the next time someone tells me the surge worked? All of our sound and fury in Iraq has merely led the country back to yesterday or the day before.

Do As I Say... Boston will require all 1,825 of its taxis to have hybrid engines by 2015, while there is no deadline to convert the city's own 3,300 cars, buses, and trucks to clean fuels.

Porn O'Graph: Don't need no stinking diet. It's not the government's debt that's out of whack.