Should have got rid of that Jackass in the White House a long time back for incompetence. America is sick. the system is broke and that lunatic still has until the end of the year to do more surges or worse damage. I see Tony Blair has a 4 million dollar salary from JP Morgan . All of a sudden Poodle Blair is an expert on banking !!?? Perhaps they should ask our lunatic what should be done !!?? BTW he hopes to be EU President before too long. Who keeps promoting the inmates of the asylum and putting them in charge !!??
Less equity fuel = Investors pulled $44.8 billion from stock funds in January, according to the Investment Company Institute. That's the second-biggest outflow in a single month, after July 2002.
That's puny compared to Robert Rubin's 20 million dollar salary at ailing Citicorp !! Isn't that crazy ? Don't feel sorry for these large banks....
Can't say I've ever heard of him. There seems to have been a collective lemming like lunacy from Bush down. Bring back honesty and throw the crooks in jail for a long, long time !!!
Huh ? Former Treasury Secretary of the United States. He's the guy who saved us from the 1998 LTCM debacle. We could certainly use him right now.
Similiar situation of the 1929 crash imho and similiar faces but the basic same motivation of GREED is the cause. Well this may be the pre-shock of a seismic payoff. Hopefully the "house of cards" won't collapse but it may be a close run thing. The big boys will have adequately cushioned themselves for the duration. It's always the people at the bottom of the heap that will suffer most- soupkitchens etc looming on the horizon. This is usually the payoff for greed and incompetence at the top. Maybe a bigger dose of alchohol, drugs and the American dream bullshit will suffice. Lets hope so
This crash is a whole new creature. We are taking keynessian measures before the crash. This hasn't been tried to such a large extend before. But the experience in the 1970's and from places like Bolivia, Zimbawe, and Argentina... make it seem like it's not such a good idea. Bernanke's actions have only delayed and complicated things further.
You have no idea how Asia and other countries is going to rub the US's nose in it for all their previous remarks about Asian 'crony capitalism', corporate governence etc.You will never hear the last of this from Asia - they are still smarting over the US high handedness and assumed perfection of their system. http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2008/03/18/business/business_30068477.php US no longer champion of capitalism Thanong Khanthong says the Bear Stearns bail-out is clearly a case of 'do as we say, not as we do'Published on March 18, 2008 Remember what the US - or the International Monetary Fund - preached to Thailand and the rest of Asia during the 1997 financial crisis? They told us not to commit the "moral hazard" of bailing out the banks. No banks were too big to fail, they said. They advised us to close down weak financial institutions and open up the financial markets for foreign banks to buy out troubled Thai finance companies and banks. Let the markets take care of the problems, they said, suggesting we raise interest rates to defend the currency. They blamed the Thai crisis on crony capitalism and an absence of good governance. Strangely enough, the US is now doing precisely what it told others not to do, in observing the textbooks of capitalist economics. The collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest investment banking house in the US, illustrates how the authorities there have swallowed their own words in handling a crisis involving a financial institution. Both the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been working closely on the Bear Stearns bailout since last week, in order to prevent a systemic meltdown of US financial markets. They brought in JP Morgan to buy out Bear Stearns, which had been facing financial run. Its creditors no longer wanted to lend money to Bear Stearns. Moreover, they were demanding repayment of outstanding loans. Bear Stearns has huge exposure to mortgage-backed securities, which have turned sour following widespread defaults in the US housing market. JP Morgan agreed to buy Bear Stearns for US$236.2 million (Bt7.43 billion), or $2 a share. The deal fixed the value of Bear Stearns at roughly 1 per cent of what the Wall Street firm was worth only 16 days earlier. Coordinating the bailout, the Fed agreed to make JP Morgan's takeover risk-free by guaranteeing Bear Stearns's troubled mortgages and other assets worth about $30 billion. Without this incentive, JP Morgan would not have risked its capital to acquire Bear Stearns. It was a move unprecedented since the Great Depression that began in 1929. The Fed also cut its emergency lending rate to financial institutions from 3.5 per cent to 3.25 per cent, effective immediately, in a move to ease credit and liquidity in financial markets further. Today, the Fed is expected to take an even more drastic measure by cutting the Fed Funds rate another percentage point. It has also created a special lending facility through which big investment banks can obtain short-term loans from the Fed by pledging mortgage securities and other assets as collateral. So where are the lessons in hazardous morality? Where are the champions of market forces? It appears the US authorities were afraid of a vicious cycle. If the run on Bear Stearns had been allowed to continue, it could have dragged down all other Wall Street firms whose financial positions were under scrutiny. If these financial institutions had failed, their collapse could have destroyed the credit market and brought the US financial system to a grinding halt. Driven into a corner, the US authorities were forced to swallow their own words in order to save the US economy. The US can no longer claim to be the champion of global capitalism. The Nation
Exactly. We're in the early, early stages of a downturn....so just wait for those corporate profits to plunge, losses to build, and then the incredible number of layoffs to be announced. Then, we'll be close to a bottom.....but the bottom may last for much longer than one would expect.
I just hope its not a case of a "drowning" bank pulling the rest down with it. Maybe the rest should have refused them a helping hand and saved themslves. US capitalism is/was a cruel dog eat dog system. My guess is that Bird-brain and his pet bunny, I mean Benny will make a goulash of it.