Register to vote October 6 is your last chance in a many states.
No Naked Black Holes Science News. No crude comments, since it took some effort to restrain myself.
Birth of an Ocean: The Evolution of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression Scientific American
Starbucks ‘wastes 23 million litres of water a day’ Telegraph
Short shrift James Mackintosh, Financial Times. A good overview of the politics and practicalities of the short-selling bans.
A Countrywide Settlement Angie Littwin, Credit Slips. BofA agreed to pay $3.7 billion in total. Have I missed the stories on this, or was it woefully underreported?
BNP Paribas to Buy Fortis Units for EU14.5 Billion Bloomberg. In case you were busy this weekend….
De-leveraging – Fairy Tale Endings Satyajit Das EuroIntelligence. A great post, but Das undermines his credibility by invoking liquidaitonist Andrew Mellon. Agreed completely that asset values need to find a bottom and bank and perhaps corporate balance sheets need to shrink (most non-LBO companies have been net savers), but the authoriities also need to prevent an overshoot on the downside, know who to recapitalize and what to do with the rest (merge or liquidate) and how to limit the real economy damage. But his critique is well founded.
No sleep ‘til bailout Pierre Briancon, BreakingViews (free two week trial). How our banking regulators are at risk of making bad decisions due to sleep deprivation. Heh, that gives them an excuse…
Antidote du jour:
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Ariel: “I wuv you so.”
Caliban: “?? . . . Say again?”
finally a true antidote ;)
I know you’re making fun of Briancon but he is very, very right.
And great hippo photo.
Interspecies co-mingling always reminds me of mixing synthetic derivatives with unrelated securities structures and then fuc-ing saying that risk and danger, destruction and default are not realistic problems to worry about.
While this rhino may not seem be threatened by this butterfly, the butterfly could cause a chain reaction event which could result in a tsunami of cascading cross referenced events that relate to the space and time outside this narrow frame of reference. Thus, beyond doubt, beware butterflies, trojan horses and snake oil marketing hype — that’s the frigg’n message here (being screamed by Yves) and if you don’t think this hippo or whatever the hell it is, is not taking a crap in conjunction with this exogenous shock — then your a bloody idiot!
Great link for tomorrow
Market Silliness, Lucy Kellaway
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f48a5ee4-933e-11dd-98b5-0000779fd18c.html
doc holiday, good comment. It’s obvious the hippo (main streen) is being hypnotized by the butterfly (financial scum). But when the hippo wakes out of it, the butterfly will simply fly away to another victim.
The market will likely bounce here. The Fed just wanted to create enough fear to have the bailout bill pass, so Paulson’s friends can continue to thrive. The media is clueless and went along and spread panic which worsened the crisis in September. Read about it here. http://www.mijkasamora.com/2008/10/wall-streets-useful-idiots.html
If you think it is cynical, you don’t understand Wall Street.
The notion that governments conspiratorially manipulate markets is dead. As in, “now dead”. That era coming to an end is what this is all about. The excesses that are the result of that manipulation are being wrung out. They have done anything and everything to prevent it from going down, yet it has gone down anyway.