Damn!

It’s getting harder and harder to write satire these days when Insane McCain seems so intent on pushing the envelope of self-parody.

Too bad SNL doesn’t have a male version of Tina Fey to play the guy. Their scriptwriters could take the day off, and just let the script editor insert his own words.

From Politico:

McCain takes credit for bill before it loses

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.

Meanwhile, Americans lost some $1.2 trillion in the stock market today.

Bumper sticker idea: Had enough? No? Vote McCain-Palin

You ASSHOLES may run but you can’t hide

This bailout’s mission is to protect the OBSCENE amount of wealth that has been accumulated in the last eight years. It’s to protect the top shareholders who own and control corporate America. It’s to make sure their yachts and mansions and “way of life” go uninterrupted while the rest of America suffers and struggles to pay the bills. Let the rich suffer for once. Let THEM pay for the bailout. “We”— THE TAXPAYERS— are spending 400 million dollars a day on just the war in Iraq. Make the WAR PROFITEERS end the war immediately and save us all ANOTHER half-trillion dollars!

• POORLY CONCEIVED & LACKS KEY ELEMENTS!
• NO BASIC AID TO HOME OWNERS!
• NO BANKRUPTCY REFORMS!
• NO FINANCIAL INDUSTRY REFORM!
• EXPERTS SAY BAILOUT WILL MAKE IT WORSE!
• FREE MONEY TO THE FILTHY RICH!

Call or e-mail Senator Obama. Tell him he does NOT have to help prop up Bush and Cheney and the mess they’ve made.

Call your Representative in Congress and your Senators.

The way to feed rabbits is to feed hay to horses.

A lovely little adage better known as trickle down economics. Unfortunately, it also describes even the modified bailout plan promoted by congressional Democrats, a plan that has no guarantee of ever working nor limits on the eventual cost.

Instead of a top down approach,  a bottom up strategy that targets homeowners will more efficiently re-capitalize the economy. Of course, this would leave Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson’s Wall Street gambler buddies eating  their phony paper derivatives instead of sticking the taxpayers with their losses.

As I understand it, derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps are largely bets about what the underlying financial products are worth, at any given time. It’s one thing to bet on the outcome of say, the Super Bowl, and another to bet on the coin flip, the point spread, the score after each quarter, how many injuries will occur, how many turnovers and whether they are fumbles or interceptions, how many people will watch it on tv in the USA and throughout the world, ad infinitum.

Problem comes when the game is suddenly halted and after people have already started swapping and leveraging their intial positions for and against others. While unwinding all those derivative positions is certainly possible over time, we’re not talking about a single football game here but a financial market whose scale is literally unimaginable. Apparently Paulson’s come-to-Jesus moment occurred when he tried to sort through insurance giant AIG’s positions and found himself transformed into Nietszche staring into the abyss, a gigantic black hole from which not even light can escape.

The whole logic of the bailout is screwy, similar to Herbert Hoover’s attempt to bail out the banks during the Great Depression. (Which worked for about six months before caving in on itself.)  What is being sold as strictly a liquidity problem is belied by the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Fed has injected into the system. On one day alone last week, it turned on the spigot to the tune of $180 billion. The expectation was that interest rate on their 3-month Treasury bill, which reached a ridiculously low .02%, would send the money ‘trickling down’ from the major banks to those further down the food chain. Given that the 3-month Libor interbank rate was 3.2%, this created a huge profit incentive to get that money out on the street. Liquidity problem solved, right?

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Wall Street Closing In On $700 Billion Bailout Booty

Inspired by the scene from the movie Blazing Saddles where the Johnson brothers point their guns at the black Sherriff Bart, who then holds his gun up to his own head and threatens ”Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it, ” former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson stormed Capitol Hill on Monday demanding that he be given Caesar-like powers to spend at least $700 billion of borrowed money, promising economic Armageddon if Congress refused.

By week’s end, Paulson’s face was covered with humble pie as Democrat leaders in the House and Senate pushed back, insisting on a number of fairly weak provisions that would benefit Main Street as well as Paulson’s profligate Wall Street buddies.

Meanwhile, John McHoover, who hasn’t bothered to cast a vote in D.C since April 6, parachuted into town Wednesday to demonstrate his bold, self-sacrificing leadership, promising to suspend his campaign and tonight’s first presidential debate in Mississippi until he was satisfied that the economic crisis that he all but denied existed the week before was resolved.

By most accounts his grandstanding only made things worse. Twenty four hours later, the all but done deal was in shambles thanks to fierce opposition by House Republicans. One can be forgiven for wondering how McSame can lead the country if he can’t even lead his own party.

So, less than 48 hours from initiating yet another of his herky jerky maverick gambles, McCain is leaving D.C. for Mississippi with his tail between his legs, his lie and slime campaign back in full gear. Too bad—I was looking forward to the prospect of Obama debating an actor in a big chicken costume.

Update: WaPo reports that the McCain campaign released a commercial this morning announcing that he won the debate– and before he had announced that he was going to attend. (h/t to HuffPo)

Sir Walter Scott said it best: What a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!

As ye sew, so shall ye reap…

A list of what this latest, inevitable crash of Wall Street has cost some of its leading enablers (from yesterday’s NY Times).

Surprising how, in the case of former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, a $300 million loss to his portfolio would lead him to demand absolute, non-reviewable power to spend $700 billion of taxpayers money to save his and his buddies’ butts.

Actually, the tab is estimated to have risen to $1.8 trillion as a result of lobbying from the likes of UBS vice chair Phil Gramm to add foreign banks with American branches to the soup line.

Impact of two terms of Bush’s management of the US Economy

The Bush Administration today issued a mind boggling record deficit projection of $482 billion for 2009. And that’s not even counting the off-budget estimated $80 billion being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the cost of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and homeowner bailout bill.

That’s a yearly deficit of over one-half trillion dollars, most of it borrowed from strategic competitors like China and Kuwait.

Skyrocketing energy costs are only beginning to ripple through the economy, showing up as higher prices in everything from food to tires to pharmaceuticals.

Home foreclosures are up a staggering 250% (in LA), unemployment is rising rapidly, and even successful businesses with great credit history can’t get a loan.

The entire financial system, ranging from Wall Street, investment houses, to regional banks is in a deep freeze driven by the fact that no one knows what anyone’s paper assets are worth. The economy is so bad that Bush has been forced to betray his conservative base by doing an about-face (legacy pun intended) on the aforementioned bailout. Ayn Rand must be rolling over in her capitalist grave.

Obviously, this is bad news for all Republicans running for office this year. Despite the tragedy of Iraq and the increasing threat of a reconstituted Al Qaeda and resurgent Taliban in Afganistan and Pakistan, we’re back to “It’s the economy, stupid” as the overriding political issue of the 2008 election. And it’s hitting the McSame Campaign like a Democratic mule kick to the gut.

McSame has admitted that the economy is not his strong suit, and that he’s trying to make up it for it by reading the book by the man who did as much as anyone to create the current crisis, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Kinda like asking a surgeon with a history of amputating the wrong limbs to take a little off the top.

McSame’s answer to the ruinous cost of energy— his flip-flop on off-shore drilling, is a classic case of bad timing, considering that oil billionaire (and Swift Boat funder) T-Boone Pickens is currently spending $58 million on an advertising campaign that states that we can’t drill our way out of the crisis.

Oh well, McSame can still run as Commander-in-Chief of the “surge.”

As for his snuggling buddy, George Junior, the latter can sleep easy knowing that once again he has bested his father, the previous deficit champ. By racking up the three largest deficits in US history, W. wins the gold, silver and bronze medals. Now it’s on to the Beijing Olympics, where he has volunteered to judge the synchronized waterboarding competition.

UPDATES

July 29 (Bloomberg) Merrill Lynch, the third-biggest U.S. securities firm, will sell $8.5 billion of stock and liquidate $30.6 billion of bonds at a fifth of their face value to shore up credit ratings imperiled by mortgage losses.

July 29 (Reuters ) Home Prices Fall in May, Erasing Four Years of Gains. ...S&P said the composite index of 10 metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in May, for a 16.9 percent year-over-year drop. Regions that saw some of the largest gains during the housing boom, such as Miami and Las Vegas, were the worst performing markets in May. Miami home prices fell 3.6 percent in May from April for a 28.3 percent annual drop. In Las Vegas, prices in May slumped 2.9 percent, for a 28.4 percent decline from a year earlier.