Sucking on a Lehman
Okay, the virus alarm was a false alarm (whew!). It seems to have been a hangover from the previous clean-out, a few registry entries that weren’t erased.
So now we’re onto bigger and better things: A Modest Proposition.
Let’s let the Republicans win the presidential election.
“Whoa!” I hear you saying. “What’s wrong with you, girl?!”
My theory was that whoever wins this election is going to get into office right as the financial shit is really hitting the fan. Now, I’m beginning to think that the financial shit is starting to hit the fan, and going to keep hitting the fan, and maybe the best thing to do is to cede the election, so the Republicans are stuck cleaning up the mess they made. Because I think whoever wins the election is going to be a one-term wonder, tarred with the brush of the financial mess, because whoever wins is going to have to clean up the mess. And cleaning it up is going to be ugly.
Right now, on Calculated Risk, they’re talking about rumors that Lehman Brothers (big investment firm, you know them, right?) may be going belly up, with a government-brokered takeover a la Bear Sterns to be announced tomorrow. And Standard and Poors just cut their outlook on Washington Mutual from “positive” or “neutral” to downright “negative”.
The government takeover (de-privatization?) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got the Wall Street markets to jump…for one day. This was huge…and it only got the market up for a day.
I’d love to see a dollar figure on all the financial company shenanigans of the past six months. The S&L bailout cost $500 billion. Thousands of savings and loans failed. So far, we’ve had only a few banks fail, but as some have pointed out, the dollar amount of the failures are far bigger per company.
So unless Obama or McCain are actually secret miracle workers, whichever one wins is going to have to work mighty damned hard to cope with the cleanup.
And in the meantime, we have Hurricane Ike flailing about on its way into the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve been watching the predicted five-day path for the past week, and it would be amusing to have an animation of the day-to-day (or even hour-to-hour) change in that predicted path. Well, amusing in a world-weary, hey, I’m up in Alaska, kind of way; I have friends and family scattered around the Gulf Coast and know that to all of them, this uncertainty must be wracking.
posted in Economy, Politics | 7 Comments
