OmegaMom

I think.

But I’m not sure.

Dayum, the man is giving me whiplash!

Oh, no, it’s not OmegaDad!  It’s President Obama.

I’ll admit–even though I don’t think the man is the Messiah, the Second Coming, The One, and all that, I was hoping that he’d sweep into office with a full-fledged economic plan ready to go on Day One.

He didn’t.  I frowned.

The days passed.  I frowned some more.

Then the stimulus package got batted back and forth.  Things got added.  Things got taken away.  And here it is, signed into law.  It’s not what I wanted, but then, I didn’t have to try to herd 465 cats to get it put together.

But the thing that really concerned me…what I really wanted to see…was what he was going to do about The Banks.  My idea of the full-fledged economic plan ready to go on Day One included some serious housecleaning, an in-depth look at the “Too Big To Fail” banks and the next tier up, even–possibly–a bank holiday or nationalization or something that indicated that, yes, he knew it was a big bad problem.

So he and Geithner were working on Son of TARP:  Bank Bailout Two.  All the financial types were on tenterhooks, wanting to know what was involved in it.  A whole series of rumors were floated, and each one got approval or shot down immediately, and then seemed to vanish.  The plan was to be unveiled on Monday…but then, Monday, word came that it was postponed until Tuesday.  Commenters on various financial blogs groaned; surely this meant that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE DOING!!!1!

I groaned, too; wiffling, waffling, lots of vagueness, postponements–ack!

In the meantime, a raft of economists and econobloggers and econoblog commenters were all saying WE NEED TO NATIONALIZE THE BANKS!!!  NOW!!!  None of the rumors floated about SOT had anything like that.  There was much moaning, groaning, and gnashing of teeth.  Weak!  They cried.  Wishy-washy!  OMG, he’s a failure already!  We’re circling the drain, and he’s fiddling around while Rome burns (or something like that).  We’re going to have a Lost Decade, just like Japan!  Or worse!

(Of course, they all acknowledged that nationalization would go over like a lead balloon.  And there hadn’t been any mention of such a thing in the mainstream media at all.  No articles saying it was a good idea, no articles saying it was a bad idea–just no mention.)

I moaned and groaned and gnashed, too.

But then…

Then, on Monday night, snippets of an interview of Obama to be aired on Tuesday’s Nightline started coming out.

In particular, Obama came right out and compared the current economic situation to…Japan and Sweden.  He pointed out that Japan kept pumping money into tottering banks, and the end result was The Lost Decade, an ongoing struggle to recuperate from a great crash in the early 1990s, which Japan still has not recovered from.  And then he pointed out that Sweden nationalized the banks and bounced back within years.  And then he sort of laughed and said that Sweden’s great advantage was that they had only five banks to deal with, and the U.S. has more, so obviously we can’t follow their path exactly.

But so far as I can tell, he didn’t say that the other choice was the right path, either.  And it’s the first time someone in the presidential administration has come right out and said something like this since the crisis began.  Out in the open.  Out there as a possibility.  Spoken by the president himself.  Like an imprimatur or something.

Then, on Tuesday, Geithner comes out with the much ballyhooed Son of TARP.  The thud was heard everywhere.  “That’s it?!  That’s all?!  That’s not a plan!  That’s an outline!” was the general response.  The market dropped.  The econobloggers and their commenters, and the financial writers all moaned and groaned some more.  More THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE DOING! hair tearing and shirt ripping occurred.  There was this one little item, though, that some folks seized on, the idea–written up in SOT–that the banks needed to be stress tested, so that everyone knew what the extent of the damage was.  But the moaners and groaners scoffed, saying “Get out the rubber stamps!  PASS!”

And then, on Wednesday, this little item showed up:  Bank Stress Test May Expand U.S. Regulators’ Role.  Lo and behold.  Obama had sent out the bank examiners the very next day.

And suddenly the word “nationalization” is showing up in all the mainstream media stories as a possibility.

And I am left with this impression that there is a distinct possibility that Mr. Pragmatism is crazy like a fox and has been orchestrating things so that within a few months, the nation as a whole will be on board with the idea of nationalization.

I’m not the only one; there’s a subgroup of the econoblog commenters who seem to feel the same way; and then there’s Andrew Sullivan and others at the Atlantic Monthly.

On the other hand, maybe he’s a complete noob who is going to flail around helplessly, tossing more hundreds of billions away without any oversight, just like the last administration.

Whiplash.  I’ll let you know in about a year, eh?

Today I:

• Kibbitzed over the dotter’s shoulder while she played Farm Mania.
• Spent about an hour “helping” her do gymnastics.
• Snuggled with her while she read GrannyJ’s latest letter (a few weeks after we received it).
• Helped her type an answering letter.
• Played Farm Mania myself.
• Spent too much time reading Twitters.
• Got ridiculously defensive when boss asked if he and coworker could help with the website revamp.  Why?!  Partly because I’m trying to get rid of years’ worth of accreted code schmutz and I don’t want to have to explain each and every step, partly because I’m trying to develop a “style” using the stylesheet and I need to write it down before passing it on, partly because…?
• Reveled in daylight when I was driving the dotter to school–we’re gaining five-and-a-half minutes each day, woot!
• Tried very hard to keep away from depressing here-comes-the-Depression websites.
• Read the memo from school about What To Do If The Volcano Blows.  (Yes!  We got an official memo about it!)
• Spent all day in my pajamas–driving the dotter to school, working six hours, helping with homework, playing, hanging out, eating dinner–and didn’t feel guilty about it, though did make sure not to turn on the video when we had a Skype meeting at work.
• Dipped in and out of Godel, Escher, Bach, which I am enjoying immensely, even though it’s–at the same time–immensely slow going.
• Suppressed any sneaky moments of gloom-n-doom.
• Determined that Wall Street is sorely in need of a good overall PR person, or else a bunch of sadly lacking common sense.
• Tried to figure out if I agree with the various incarnations of the stimulus plan or not.
• Felt amazed, astounded, and somewhat affirmed and proud that the dotter’s recital of friend S.’s tendency to peek at her math work at school and copy it ended up with, “That’s bad.  She’s not learning it.”
• Felt equally amazed, and very happy, that the dotter said about her latest assigned book from school, “I want to keep reading–it’s like TV in your head!”

I am finding that simply getting out of the house each day, and doing a little bit of exercise, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of commiseratin’ commentary from my readers, has helped keep the blues to a minimum for the past few days.  Fingers crossed that this continues!

First, as requested by some of my commenters, a picture of the oh-so-cute itty-bitty Silkie eggs:

Of course, you can’t really tell how itty-bitty and cute they are; it’s the two light ones up top, and they are about half (or less) the size of the others.  We’re getting about one Silkie egg a day, and still four of the other girls’ eggs daily.

This actually has something to do with my title.  We are, it seems, right on the cutting edge of popular culture.  Once again, we have dipped into the Ur, the Jungian gestalt of the United States, by having chickens.

There is a “Chicken Underground” in Madison, Wisconsin.  There are urban coop-ists in New York City.  The website BackyardChickens.com logs 6 million page views per month and has more than 18,000 members in its forums.

Whocoodanode?

Of course, this is not cheap.  One thinks of chickens as cheap and easy, but, alas, they are not.  One can compare our coops and the dotter’s egg money similarly to, say, the U.S. agriculture system.  The government subsidizes the infrastructure (OmegaMom and OmegaDad purchase and build the coop).  The government subsidizes the ongoing process (OmegaDad visits the local feed store once every month to buy chicken feed and fluff).  In return, the farmer (that would be OmegaDotter) takes care of the livestock (with help from the gummint–a constant reminder to go out and check the chickens twice daily), cleans the coops (with intense help from the gummint), sells the eggs to neighbors, the government (Chez OmegaMom) and government-sponsored entities (that would be people like OmegaDad’s coworkers, who trade frozen fresh-caught halibut or salmon for a few dozen eggs).  In the end, everyone is happy and well-fed.

Right?

Anyway, to get a glimpse of this new underworld of chicken lovers, read up on “The Craze for Urban Chickens“.  I’m sure that it will be spreading even further, as people decide that keeping chickens and growing gardens helps in this dismal economy.

In the meantime, OmegaMom and OmegaDad can rest assured that, once again, they have their fingers firmly on the pulse of America.

(ETA:  This is just too cool.  You click and drag the big box of bars over the stripes to the left.  Do it slowly.  What do you see?  I just had to share it as quickly as possible!)

So a few days ago, I was majorly bummed that the Hanna Andersson clothes on sale were all sold out.

And Lizard (an old internet buddy of mine, whose dotter E. is six months younger than OmegaDotter) commented saying she lived near the HA outlet store and maybe we could work something out…

A few emails later, and now she is all set to do some vicarious shopping.

Booyah!  And woot!

Of course, this all assumes the dotter will like the dresses.  This is not guaranteed, which is why I was so hot-to-trot in regards to the sale prices.  I’m more than willing to experiment with the kiddo’s tastes when I’m spending $19, but not willing when it comes to a $50 price tag.

Just so everyone knows, I am still keeping track of the Ongoing Saga of the Global Financial Meltdown.  I note that (a) Bush is saying that Paulson’s blank check for another $350 billion is not going to be spent in this administration thankyewverramuch (thus pushing it off onto Obama’s watch), (b) today’s news is that GM is not going to get a bailout (but that could change at the drop of a hat), (c) Goldman Sachs has a research note out that says that GDP could shrink (that would be decline) by up to 7.8% this quarter, (d) and recent photos of Obama show that his touch-o-grey has expanded rather rapidly in my opinion.  I have asked my boss to send me a copy of my resume (I only have an extremely out-of-date hard copy from my files) so I can update it and have it on hand; there is no specific news to warrant this, aside from the fact that the state I work for is currently $700 million in the hole.  However, everywhere I turn on the ‘nets, I hear from this person or that person that they know someone (or a spouse or parent or offspring) who has been laid off.

The “lice incident” was not.  The school nurse moaned to me about how that class has driven her nuts because a few parents are paranoid about lice; the dotter’s reportage was garbled, thank heavens (she had said that Nurse Lady had found cocoons in her hair!!!!! ACK!).

The award was for creative writing and art.  No surprise there!

Obama had a press conference today which served to indicate a few things:  1) He is not president yet, which he reiterated three times to my counting; 2) he takes the economy issue very, very seriously; 3) Paul Volcker was standing to his left and was shown during almost the entire press conference, so that’s an indicator of the type of economic advisor he’s going to tap; 4) he’s not going to discuss his security briefings; and 5) the new White House dawg will need to be hypoallergenic.

Some fun stuff:

• Election cartograms, very kewl.
• Behind the scenes on the campaign trail, also very kewl.  Read all seven chapters.
• The Obama team is quite hip to the Internet:  Here’s the set of Creative Commons pics of election night; the team also had “Change.Gov” ready to go.  Remember, he plans to have a cabinet-level Chief Information Technology Officer to advise him.

I had other stuff to post, but can’t remember it.

Off to do some NyQuil.  Drugs are good.

I watched Obama’s half-hour TV ad.

Then I bop online, and find people who were moved to tears.

I wasn’t.

I was irritated.

We saw families “down on their luck”…but not really down.  I’ve got to say, if my husband’s job were cut to one week out of every two, and I were laid off, why on earth would we be going out to eat?  Equally to the point:  why on earth would Obama’s campaign film a family in such straits doing such a thing??

Then there’s the fact that…um…look, I know they were playing to the moderate white vote, but my overwhelming feeling in this ad was…it was very white.  I suppose it wasn’t PC enough for me, har.

Then Obama says he voted for the bailout and is hoping to Do More.  Aaarrgghhh!  Right now I feel like the financial gurus are busy pulling cards out from under one side of a tottering house of cards to shore up a different side.  What we need is for the U.S.–and all the other countries who joined us on the drunken binge of borrowing and spending over the past ten years (dear lord, I am using Dubya’s very own phrase, just shoot me now)–should stop trying to get banks to loan and people to borrow, and start encouraging savings and investment in real goods.

Over the past six months, at an increasing tempo, the U.S. has flung fictional money this way and that, to the tune of:

• $700 Billion – The bailout bill; U.S. Treasury to purchase toxic mortgages and other non-performing assets from financial institutions.
• $50 Billion – To guarantee principal in money market mutual funds.
• $10 Billion+ – Treasury purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in September.
• $144 Billion – In additional MBS purchases by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.  (With a limit of $850 billion…whoop-de-do).
• $85 Billion – AIG bridge loan giving the Fed a 79.9% controlling stake in the firm.
• $87 Billion – Repayments to JP Morgan for providing financing to underpin trades with the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers.
• $200 Billion – $100 billion capital infusion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the Treasury.
• $300 Billion – Provided to the FHA to refinance failing mortgages into new, reduced principal loans with a federal guarantee as part of the housing bill.
• $4 Billion – Provided to local communities to purchase and repair abandoned homes due to foreclosure.
• $29 Billion – Financing for JPM’s takeover of Bear Sterns. The Fed takes $30 billion in non-performing assets as collateral.  (Goodness only knows how much those “assets” are worth now.)
• $200 Billion – Currently outstanding loans to banks through the Fed’s Term Auction Facility.
• $150 Billion - Stimulus checks.  Remember those?
• Not to mention a whole slew of additional multi-billion-dollar chunks o’ change being handed out to GM and foreign countries…

Just where is all this money going to come from??  A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there…That’s almost two trillion dollars.  And now they’re talking about another $50 billion to guarantee up to 3 million mortgages where the mortgage-holders are underwater (more than a month late).

Look.  My husband and I aren’t poor, but we’re not rich.  We’re not the best money managers around, but we managed to put a fair amount down on this house, pay off debt, purchase two cars outright, and keep up with our mortgage payments.  We won’t see that help.  And that makes me angry.  Yes, there are people who were bamboozled into bad mortgages at the last minute, but the majority of the folks who are in foreclosure used funky mortgages to buy more house than they could really afford based on teaser rates and the assumption that their houses could only appreciate in value.  They get help; my husband and I, who deliberately looked at houses where we could afford the payments on a plain vanilla fixed-rate 30-year mortgage (even though we’d have loved to get more house) won’t.

I think I was looking for more of a “Fireside Chat” approach.  Something with more substance, and something that came straight out and said “The next few years are not going to be easy.  We’re all going to have to tighten our belts.”  What we got was fluff, violins playing, and warm-hearted shots of Obama shaking hands, giving and getting hugs, and holding babies.

It didn’t move me to tears.  Or at least, not in the way that the ad writers wanted.  And I’m voting for the man.

Do you ever have those moments of total paranoia?  The kind where you’re sure everyone else has telepathy but you, and you just know they’re laughing at you and pitying you?  Or where you finally settle down to sleep for the night and then all the dogs in the neighborhood start barking, very loudly, for a long, long time, and you’re sure that Someone Is Out To Get You?

You don’t?

Oh.

It’s just me, then?

Oh.

Well, yeah, sure, I knew that all along; I was just joshin’ witya, y’know?

Ahem.

Anyway, one of my ongoing paranoiac sureties in life is that when I have a Great Idea, somehow or other I am really subconsciously broadcasting it nonstop over the Jungian undermind.  That’s why, when I started plotting a really way kewl science-fiction-y novel based on the idea of a previously unknown disease spreading like wildfire through the industrialized modern world, bringing it to its knees, six months later that very same novel came out and raced up to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.  And my idea for a totally useful and helpful device for the kitchen (which I can’t remember now), which showed up at our local fancy kitchen store six months later…

Well, now it’s time for yet another one of my ideas–my abso-damn-lutely fine ideas–to be stolen by someone else via that pesky Jungian overmind.  Or undermind.  Or whatever it is.

For years, I’ve had a fantasy of owning a store, a very specialized sort of store.  One with one large room separated into four bays.  Targets at one end.  A table or rack at the other end, laden with cheap old dishes, china, and crockery purchased at the local Goodwill or Salvation Army.  One with an entrance at which I would stand by the cash register, ready to take money and hand out safety goggles and industrial-strength earmuffs to deaden the noise and direct the customers to one of the four bays.  My customers would be able to pay me…oh, I dunno, say $20?…and then spend the next half-hour enthusiastically working off all their angst and fury by throwing the dishes as hard as they could at the target at the other end of their selected bay.

I thought it was a winner.

Well, so did Sarah Lavely.

Ooooooh!  I so know she’s just been dipping into that under/overmind, looking for the Right Idea, and my idea was floating around there and she found it and she stole it, dammit!

Grrrr.

One of these days…one of these days, I’ll actually use one of my very own ideas, and be rich, I tell you, rich!

Bwahahaha!

(OmegaMom shuffles off into the distance with an Igor-like crouch, rubbing her hands and cackling about how she’ll take care of those people who steal all her ideas, yes she will.)

But:  Have you looked at your 401(k) recently?  Or your gummint equivalent?

Mine has dropped 26.9% since the start of the year.  So far.

(OmegaDad’s, thank heavens, is actually up for the year, because I had him stash it in bonds ages ago.)

This is a picture of the past year on the Dow Jones Industrial Average:

See that steep drop-off over at the right?  That’s the past few weeks.  The Dow Jones has lost something like 20% in two weeks.

MSNBC is now showing some sort of figures purporting to be the FTSE (British stock exchange) and Nikkei (Japanese stock exchange) averages on the front page.  Though, since they’ve got the wrong figures, I haven’t the vaguest idea what the numbers are supposed to be in reality.  Anyway, this seems to be a Sign Of The Times, since normally those aren’t shown on the front page at all, but are buried deep in the business section.

Every morning I think, “Oh, it can’t get worse–surely today there will be a rally!”  And every morning, there’s yet another piece of hideous financial news–or BushCo gets on TV telling us things will be okay, really!–and the market dives again.

I just worry about people who are retired, or retiring soon, and what this is doing to them.

We haz it.

I watched the debate (of course) (sigh) (when did I decide to become a politics junkie?).  I thought that Biden came across better, but that’s because I’m on his side.  Palin’s constant reiteration of “maverick”, as though it were a magic charm, made me roll my eyes; her misunderstanding of what an “Achilles heel” is makes me worry about my dotter’s education here in Alaska; her co-opting of a series of Reagan’s catchphrases, including “There you go again, Joe!” was noticeable; and the last I heard, it was the mess on Wall Street that is impacting Main Street.  But, in the end, she redeemed herself by not repeating her gaffes from various carefully prepped interviews.  She sounded, in general, nice.

But I’m not looking for “nice” in my presidential or vice-presidential candidates.

So I came away thinking Biden “won”–whatever that means.

Then we went to dinner at the local Indian restaurant.  Mixed grill–yum!  Tandoori chicken, shish kebab, lamb, curried chicken.  Mmmm.

There was another group at the restaurant, talking vivaciously about the debate, and about the current economic situation.  I first noticed them when they were talking about the debate; one guy shouted out, “She really nailed it when she said, ‘I’m not one of those Washington insiders who says I’m for this then says I’m not for it’!  BINGO!  I want someone who’ll say what they mean and mean what they say!”

So, there ya have it:  Confirmation bias.  I thought Biden came out better; these folks thought Palin came out better.

And then the older woman in the group–who seemed to be a real estate person–started talking about the economic situation and the bailout bill.

She said that a friend had offered on a house, had the mortgage all set up, everything was going swimmingly…and then, the day of closing, the loan offer was withdrawn.  She said that these people had great credit.  I’ve heard similar things online; this was the first I had heard it “first-hand”.  She said that credit was frozen, and she talked about a few businesses she knew that were running on credit and weren’t going to be able to meet their payrolls if it kept up.  She wanted the bailout, even though she thought it wasn’t very good, because it was the only thing going right now.  She mentioned 401k’s that had taken huge hits during the stock drop on Monday and how people who were close to retirement were getting hammered.

All of which is true (except I wasn’t for the bailout).

Then they talked about not living on credit.

Which seemed a bit of cognitive dissonance to me; the entire notion behind the bailout is, in essence, that we should go back to borrowing money like crazy and spending it like crazy and the economy will just go on chugging along, growing and blossoming, tra la, tra la.

So this afternoon the House of Representatives voted for the bailout–the expanded bailout, with $100 billion of pork tacked on to make it appetizing to a wider variety of senators and representatives.

And the stock market, which had been up some 200 points prior to the vote, dropped.  And kept dropping.  And ended the day below where it ended on Monday…the day the bailout vote failed.

Say what?!  Isn’t the bailout supposed to…oh…”save 401k’s and retirement accounts”?  Aren’t we all happy campers now?  Isn’t Great Depression II averted?  Wasn’t the stock market going to heave a great sigh of relief?  The bailout certainly hasn’t saved Wachovia Bank, which is currently being fought over by Citibank and Wells Fargo, like a pair of vultures over fresh road kill.

I’ve been saying it for a while, and I’ll say it again:  This mess is too entrenched, too intertwined, too highly leveraged, for this bailout to stop the unraveling.  Oh, it may end up slowing it down a bit.  But firms that are leveraged 30:1 or more aren’t going to become solvent with a wave of the magic Federal Reserve/Treasury/bailout wand.  And those firms are global in scope; just read a bit about what’s happening in Iceland.  Or see how the Greeks today passed a blanket deposit guarantee bill after runs on the banks, emulating Ireland, which did the same thing yesterday.  Or read about the Dutch government taking over Fortis NV, a portion of Fortis, which is one of the largest financial companies in Europe, today.

I’m gettin’ a heapin’ helpin’ of confirmation bias about the economy these days…

Oh, yeah, and it’s snowing here:  Great big fat flakes.  Holy moly.  Our first snow of the winter season.

Well.  Weren’t they testy?  Both of them.  And both of them just sort of danced around Lehrer’s question about what–if any–fundamental changes to their plans the current financial situation may cause.

Humph.

As for the current financial situation:  I have been watching and reading, slack-jawed, for a week.  First the bailout’s on.  Then it’s off.  Then it’s on again!  Oops, nope, it’s off.  No, it’s on.  NO!  It’s off!  And the markets have sat there, waiting with bated breath, wondering:  which way is it going to go?

The congresscritters have been inundated with angry calls, faxes, emails, letters about the bailout.  A representative from Pennsylvania (Paul Kanjorski, D), says that 50% of his calls have been “No!” and the other 50% have been “Hell, no!”  And 200 big-name economists got together and signed a letter that said “No go” as well.

A lot of people are pointing to the Community Reinvestment Act as “the” spur for our current financial meltdown.  I liked this commentary from a person monickered “Mock Turtle” in a comment thread at Calculated Risk:

“in round numbers

100 million home owners

50 million have mortgages 50 million don’t (again round numbers)

25 million issued loans in last 8 years

one third of these are sub prime; 8 million

4 percent of subprime has foreclosed: 320 thousand

—

so are you saying that all it took was

320 thousand people failing to pay their mortgages

to bring down the financial system of the United States of America???

—
or was it

…way the mortgages were mixed, tranched, sliced, diced, resold, leveraged and derivitivized that brought the system to its knees

guess you gotta choose

who is more powerful

wall street

or

a bunch of wanna-be starry eyed home owner poor people”

Another commenter wrote:  “All the trillions of investments between banks turns out to just be invested in investments which were invested in other investments which were invested in other investments which were invested in a house in California or Florida by some guy who lied about his income.”

It’s a mess.  There are people saying that Bush, Bernanke and Paulson are running a scam.  My personal feeling is that they’re terrified.  There was an anecdote going around that Paulson got on bended knee to Nancy Pelosi, begging her to help pass the bailout.

So far, in September, we’ve had:  Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailed out…Lehman bankrupt…AIG bailed out…Washington Mutual taken over, but listed as a “failed bank” on the FDIC website…and now Wachovia Bank is looking for someone to buy them out…Brad Setser says that in this month, the Federal Reserve has outlaid some $370 billion to backstop all these failures.

When you’ve got ordinary, everyday mommy bloggers posting that they wonder if they should be pulling thousands of dollars out of their bank accounts, “just in case”…Well, let’s just say it adds up to a serious loss of confidence in the financial system.

Dudes.  Get testy all you want.  But please, please give some serious thought to what you’ll do if you’re the one to walk into the Oval Office next January.

Bobcat:  So we bought a kids plaything with swings and slides and a tower, courtesy of some money GrannyJ provided us, plus savings from the dotter’s dollar container.

This requires installation, of course.

Which requires a spot in the yard.

Which requires that OmegaDad make things complex, by planning to dig the area out, surround it with beams, and fill it with wood chips.

All very well and good, but there’s this “digging out” that needs doing.  Yesterday a.m., OmegaDad dresses in his scruffiest work clothes, grabs his shovel and pick and wheelbarrow, and sets out, all manly-like, to do his yeoman duty.

I wander out a little later, and he mutters about how it would all be easier if he had a Bobcat.

He mutters it to me a little later.  And once more.  And I say to him, “Well, why don’t we rent one?”

After some to-ing and fro-ing, we decide to do it, he calls the rental place, they bring a Bobcat over, and he starts to work.

…

Have I mentioned it’s been raining like crazy lately?  And that the yard is soaked?

…

Do you know what happens when you drive a Bobcat around a rain-soaked lawn?

And when someone who used to be expert at smoothing out lawns but hasn’t done it for 20 years decides to go at it?

Let me just say that at a point yesterday, I was out in the yard and just peered sadly at the large hole.

To add insult to injury, it rained like crazy last night, as well.  So the hole is now a big mud hole.

OmegaDad promises me that it will be fixed and by next summer the lawn will be looking bee-yoo-tiful again.

Drama:  We had OmegaDotter’s current BFF, K., over to spend the night.  The end result was two full-on scenes with tears and misery on both sides, and one time OmegaDad asking why they bothered to be friends, since they made each other miserable, and one time OmegaMom did the same thing.  When they weren’t fiercely hurting each others’ feelings, they were busy running around and being happily noisy.  How two girls, 6 and 7 years old, can make the house sounds like it’s filled with an entire soccer team of little girls, plus a couple of elephants, I have no idea. 

More Drama:  The Mother of All Bailouts.  Treasury Secretary Paulson is running a $700 billion save-the-markets-from-total-meltdown program by the Congress and the President as I type.  The markets were down 900 points in two days until rumors of the bailout began floating, at which point the markets gained more in two days, percent-wise, than they have since…

…are you ready…

…1929.  Oh, boy, isn’t that reassuring?!

The current plan is all of one page long.  It includes this fun little piece:

“Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Ahem.  That’s not funny, folks.

This $700 billion is to be spent purchasing assets of unknown worth from faltering financial companies, then figuring out how to sell them to someone else.  The problem is that many of those assets are backstopped by mortgages on real estate where the price is still falling.  No-one knows how much that stuff is worth.  But Uncle Sugar Sam is gonna make everything all better, you betcha, and those financial companies that went blindly ahead playing with money on the assumption that real estate always goes up (wrap your head around that one for a few minutes) are going to be taken care of, all nice and tidy.

My personal preference is a conglomeration of suggestions from various commenters on various financial websites:

• Rather than create this new, sweeping agency/power backed by $700 billion, increase FDIC to $500 billion, or the entire $700 billion.
• Increase deposit insurance to $250,000 per depositor. Insure money market deposits and interbank loans for 12 months.
• FDIC judges ACTUAL capital ratios (not fakery reported on balance sheets), and seizes banks that don’t meet existing FDIC regulations.
• FDIC seizes BIGGEST weak banks first (the original commenter names a bank rumored to be very big and very much in trouble, but I’m removing that) and moves down, to maximize positive impact on public trust.
• FDIC corrals bad assets and auctions them off slowly over time. FDIC sells good assets and deposits to good banks.
• Investors in seized banks are treated as in a bankruptcy: equity is wiped out, debt is worked out based on remaining equity, if any.
• Executive management of seized banks, is fired, blackballed from other seized banks, and passed to FBI for investigation.
• Dividends of $.01 from all financial companies until things are cleaned up.
• Any “golden parachute” clauses for current financial company executives are null and void.
• Institute a website that lists each transaction purchased by the government. This could list the details of the asset, the PAR value, the selling institution, the underlying characteristics, the originators of the loans, the price the government paid (and eventual sold the asset for) and any other relevant detail.

Right now, there’s wrangling going on.  The Dems are saying, well, if you’re going to throw $700 billion at this problem, let’s add some more money to create another stimulus check.

Shee-it.

Look, the whole financial market went into a tailspin and almost froze up last week.  There are plenty of commenters at my regular blog stops who think the Paulson plan is only going to postpone things.  There are plenty of people who are terrified that if nothing gets done, and quickly, the tailspin and freeze are going to continue on Monday.  I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t really like the plan as it currently stands…

Hah.  The OmegaFamily is off to help create signs for an Obama rally tomorrow…

In the meantime, the financial Grand Masters are talking some sort of “Entity” like RTC to deal with the mortgage mess.  Like tomorrow.  And the SEC is banning/has banned some/all short selling, and some folks on various finance blogs are pointing out that the Shanghai stock market banned short selling and it’s now down some 50% from its high last year.

Later, gators.

It has been raining for days.  Endless, ongoing, sometimes gentle, sometimes a downpour:  Rain.  This is what I remember from last September, as well.  Sure enough, when I google “average precipitation Suburban Alaska”, there it is:  September is the rainiest month of the year.

This afternoon when I drove OmegaDotter off to her gymnastics class, the clouds parted, and I saw Tamatuska Peak to the east.  There, on the peak and down the flanks, was snow.  Real snow, with a real snow line.  I remember this from last year, too.

We are smack in the middle of the extremely short autumn that we are graced with here.  The deciduous trees are turning gold, some of them orange; the houses in Suburban Alaska are peeping out again as their privacy drapes–the leaves–go cascading down.  Each rainfall strips yet another layer from the trees, scattering the leaves willy-nilly on the lawns and revealing, bit by bit, the structures that lie hidden in the summertime.

The Big City newspaper had a slide show that introduced me to a new term:  “Termination dust”.  Well, dayum, I thought, they’ve even got a name for the dust that comes down from the glaciers when it’s windy!  (In conjunction with the rain, we have had high wind warnings for areas of the valley.)  But reading further, I couldn’t figure out really what they were talking about, so I had to resort to Teh Google again on that one. 

Lo and behold, it’s a grim and somewhat poetic description of the first noticeable snowfalls on the mountains.  See, it’s a “dusting” of snow, and it marks the “termination” of summer, the entrance to our fleeting autumn, and a harbinger of Things To Come.

The sun is coming up at 7:30 a.m. and setting at 8:15 p.m.

The nights are getting colder, though with the rain the low end stays relatively high…we’re down into the low 40s at night, and up around 50 during the day.  When the cloud cover breaks, the nighttime temperature dips, so I expect our little veggie garden will soon be informing us that all the leafy greens are gone for the season.  We have been enjoying our sweet little carrots, experimenting with kohlrabi and rutabagas, handing out lettuce to neighbors and deliverymen and soon, probably, OmegaDad’s coworkers.  When the next-door neighbor kids play with the dotter, I send them over to the peas (our poor, measly crop this year was due to our late start in getting things planted), or pull out a carrot or two for them.

The cute stubby ones are either Parmex or Thumbelinas; the long orange and yellow ones are Kaleidoscope, and the red ones are Purple Haze.  The Purple Haze and the stubby ones are the best, sweet and crisp and flavorful.

We can expect our first measurable snowfall down here in the valley in mid-October.

(See?!  I can talk about something other than the financial mess.  I won’t mention Washington Mutual auctioning itself off, or Morgan Stanley suddenly talking to Citic, a Chinese company, about being purchased, or how the Dow Jones tanked again even after the Feds performed a miracle last-minute bailout, but I will link to an amusing hand-written sign (amusing in a gallows humor kind of way) found by a Calculated Risk reader at his local WaMu branch…)

Le Petit Coop, c’est fini!  Woot!  The silkies are in their new home; Fluff is out of the bathtub in the downstairs bathroom (yay!) and Puff is out of her jail cell in the garage.

We are regularly getting three eggs a day.

I am planning for OmegaDotter to fund our retirement with the proceeds from egg sales.

(Hah.  I just looked at the returns for my Fidelity 2020 investment fund, and it’s off 25% since the beginning of the year.  We’re gonna need those egg sales.)

Speaking of finances (dontcha love that segue?), the score is currently:  Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy.  The Dow Jones dropped 504 points.  Lynch America is going strong.  Reserve has frozen a money market fund for seven days (this has only happened once before).  AIG is currently begging the U.S. government for an $80 billion “bridge loan”; otherwise it will file for bankruptcy tomorrow, sayeth the press.  Just FYI, AIG is a trillion dollar business.  (Whoa, breaking news:  Wall Street Journal says AIG is going to get that loan and be put under government control…”The Federal Reserve is considering an $85 billion rescue for embattled American International Group that could leave the government in control of the firm, according to people familiar with the matter, though the structure of a deal remains unclear.”)  The Russian stock market was closed after it plunged 17% in a day.

Let’s look back on those days of yore, when the savings and loan crisis cost the U.S. $500 billion dollars.  Remember those?

Let’s talk about the Glass-Steagall Act.  This was enacted in 1933, established the FDIC, and forbade banks from providing investment services, in an attempt to keep banks from speculation that would drive them to bankruptcy.  Phil Gramm (currently a senior financial advisor for the McCain campaign) sponsored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1998, which fully repealed Glass-Steagall.  President Clinton signed it into law, so it was a non-partisan clusterfuck.  And now we have Lynch America, Lehman Brothers in bankruptcy, and a $1 trillion dollar company dangling by a thread.  Oh, well.

Some other chickens that have come home to roost are my various jeans purchases.

Alas, I must have measured incorrectly; all of them are too big.  The custom Lands End jeans fit the best, but they are still too big.  I am sufficiently pleased with the shape of the fit to try again, fiddling with the measurements and changing from a waist-high rise to a mid-rise pant.  We shall see.  The Gap jeans were way too big and I am returning them.  I think I will find a local seamstress and have the Nordstrom black jeans taken in.

I have truly been tied to the computer these past few days, watching the financial services sector go kablooie.  Things have been happening at an incredibly rapid pace.  I don’t know whether to be fascinated or appalled or both…

Let’s see…

Nobody would buy Lehman, so it’s on a bankruptcy watch.

Bank of America, after turning down Lehman, is in talks to buy Merrill Lynch (my favorite new name:  “Lynch America”).

AIG–the insurer of all those humongous multi-level mortgage bond marketing schemes–is “looking for capital“.

Somebody named Bob Brinker apparently said something like “get all your money out of Washington Mutual”.

(Update:  A good quick round-up of the weekend’s financial shakeups.)

All the big news sites are still talking about Ike (which, thank heavens, wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been).  The financial stuff is only a sidebar, and only one of those items is being discussed.

So tell me, who’s the economy wonk on McCain’s team and on Obama’s team?  Whoever it is had better be prepared for a long, hard ride…

SiteMeter moved to a new system.  My problems with it…hmmm…1) It won’t “remember” me as logged in; 2) every time I try to load the stats in the new system using IE7, I get an endless “Loading Reports…” screen (though it works in Firefox); 3) hitting the “Refresh Stats” button sends me back to the home page, no longer logged in.  I’ve already sent through one help ticket and am contemplating sending in another, so I go to the SiteMeter website I have open, hit “Refresh Stats” just to see if anything happens, and I get a “404 not found” error.  So I go back to the SiteMeter homepage, and what do I see?

Whoops!

Aw, man, it must suck to be on the SiteMeter development team right now…Just like it must suck to be in that high-level group of financiers that was called into a weekend-long emergency meeting by Paulson.

OmegaDad’s four-ganger box for the regular light timer, the heating lamp thermostat, the ventilation fan thermostat, and Something Else is too small.  (This is in the Junior Coop.)  He is irritated.

The good news?  The “Alaska Women Reject Palin” protest in Big City was apparently very well attended.

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.

(Thanks to Jeb for the word!)

This is how I feel about moose right now:

Yes, the moose returned, as Jean said it would.  Even with the PlantSkydd.  It’s time for the recommended moth balls, Irish Spring, marigolds, maybe a bazooka or a nuclear warhead.  OmegaDad, when we were wakened at 4:30 a.m. by the howling dawg, barreled down the back stairs (this time wearing shorts, rather than just tighty whities), lit the fuse on one of our leftover fireworks, and sent it flying.  The moose ran, most satisfyingly.  But not before it had eaten the broccoli, win win choi, mei tsin tei choi, and goodness knows what else.

My boss, when I signed into IM and messaged that I was going to do Something To The Moose, suggested “moose burgers…”  We back-and-forthed for a while with:

Moose kebabs.

Moose steak.

Ground moose.

Moose sausage.

Moose a l’orange.

Moose fricassee.

Moose a la king.

I can think of more.  Give me half a chance.

Let’s just say that it was bad enough being roused at 4:30 a.m. by the dawg, let alone the firework (only one!), let alone the realization that our SuperSized not-a-Pet had chowed down on our veggies yet again.

In other news:  The dotter’s feet have grown six inches in the past two weeks.  Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration.  Maybe she’s grown six inches taller in the past two weeks?!  Whatevs.  The end result:  a dotter whose shoes are suddenly too tight throwing a mini-fit at having to wear them to Bike Day at summer camp, no matter how much OmegaDad and I reiterated that the folks at summer camp–no liability fools, they!–would insist on the shoes in addition to the helmet, and that all of her other shoes were too tight, and no, she could not wear the flip-flops.

Oh, yes, and she’s no longer an inch beneath the midline of my bust, but an inch above the midline of my bust.  (Okay, let’s be vulgar:  She’s an inch above the nipples.)  Now she’s showing large amounts of ankle and shin when wearing her pants that fit her just fine about four weeks ago.  I am left contemplating some big time shopping for basics, so she is not razzed for flood-waders when first grade starts.

In the wide world Outside:  President Bush says the “Banking system is basically sound.”  Given his track record, that’s not exactly confidence-inspiring.  Nor is the contrasting testimony of Bernanke before Congress.  Nor is the fact that IndyMac bank was taken over by the FDIC this last weekend–the second largest bank in U.S. history to get that honor–and that the government also had to prop up Fannie May and Freddie Mac at the same time.  Rumors are a-swirlin’, as is the SEC, which has subpoenaed more than 50 hedge-fund managers and analysts, looking for evidence of market manipulation.  Good luck with that; from my reading, the rumors are popping up like mushrooms, and not (seemingly) as manipulation, but as frantic “OMG, is my stock going to tank?!” as the Dow Jones keeps deflating, one step forward, two steps back.

In political news, Chez asks whether the Left has lost its sense of humor.  Or, actually, he asked a month or so ago, and now feels that he has confirmation.  I’m with Chez on this one.  I mean, c’mon, folks, one look at that New Yorker cover and you can tell it’s a cartoon, right?!  And, um, correct me if I’m wrong, but cartoons are supposed to be…um…funny, right?  I thought it was hilarious–it was a perfect send-up of all the fear-mongering.  You might also check out his dissection of the recent Jezebel.com hoorah.  Chez is interesting; very New York, very acerbic (sometimes too much so), often narcissistic, and a good source of new or obscure music.

On the science front, Scienceblogs has a concerted pre-release review fest of the new “mockumentary” about global warming, Sizzle.  The reviews are quite mixed.  There’s a certain amount of backstory here, wherein communications specialists say scientists need to “frame” issues properly to get their concerns/ideas/beliefs before the public in a persuasive manner.  In the old days, we used to call this “PR”.  The “framing”, I mean, not the review fest.  Even these days, people would call the review fest “PR”.

In the meantime, I’m going away to find me a guar-an-damn-teed method of moose eradication.  Ya, you betcha!

ETA:  Well, dayum.  I totally forgot about this one:  Disgruntled S.F. city IT dude locks entire IT administration out of computer system, and is currently in jail for this.  I’m trying very hard to ascertain whether it’s just the IT admins who are locked out, or if everyone is locked out–the story doesn’t quite make that clear.

We’ve all encountered those questions.  They’re in the pseudo-IQ-tests you can find online; they’re definitely in my dotter’s homework now and then.  You’re supposed to look at a group of items and find the one that "doesn’t fit".

So, with that in mind, here are real headlines from MSNBC’s Business section today.  That’s one day.  I’m not going to link them all, just send you to the Business main page:

"Automakers see sales fall during March" - GM sales down 19% year-over-year, Ford down 14%, Toyota down 10%, Nissan and Honda sales down, too.

"Truckers protest high fuel prices" - Remember the song "Convoy"?  (Yes, I’m dating myself here, that’s a big 10-4!)  NJ truckers formed a convoy to protest high diesel prices.  Diesel is going for $3.99 per gallon at our local gas stations.

"European banks see $23 billion subprime hit" - UBS Bank (Switzerland) expects $19 billion in write-downs, Deutsche Bank to write-down an additional $4 billion.  Since January 2007, banks have seen write-downs or credit losses off $232 billion; that’s a lot!

"Construction spending falls again in Feb." - Residential construction spending has dropped for 24 months straight.  Recent news indicates that commercial construction spending is starting to turn down, too.

"Manufacturing activity contracted in March" - An index of manufacturer economic activity was at 46.5 for March (above 50 means growth, below 50 means no growth).

"Just how bad can the economy get?" - Worried readers ask questions of the business desk folk at MSNBC.  The response?  "First off, we have yet to see confirmation that the economy has entered even a mild recession, let alone a severe downturn."

"Auto industry workers face hard choices" - Chrysler, GM, and Ford have recently announced cutbacks and closures.  How is this affecting auto industry workers?

"Food price hikes changing eating habits" - The average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32% over the past three years.  Eggs have gone up 50% over the past year.  People are making fewer trips to the stores, eating out less, cutting coupons more.

"New home sales fall to a 13-year low in Feb." - Sales dropped to an annual rate of 590,000 units, with inventory of new houses at the highest level in 26 years.

"Some homes worth less than their pipes" - People are breaking into empty foreclosed houses to rip out the copper plumbing and electric wiring.  The headline, of course, is a bit off; they’re talking houses in some really really rundown areas of rundown cities.

"Analysts see 200,000 banking industry layoffs" - More layoffs are inevitable, say banking industry pundits.

"Wall Street soars amid economic optimism" - "Wall Street began the second quarter with a big rally Tuesday as investors rushed back into stocks, optimistic that the worst of the credit crisis has passed and that the economy is faring better than expected. The Dow Jones industrials surged nearly 400 points, and all the major indexes were up more than 3 percent."  Another news source calls it the best first-quarter end for the DJIA since 1938.