The DOW plunges nearly 800 points in one day, the biggest drop in history

[krabberkris 1]

Here is a neat little chart. Pretty freakin scary , actually. A great comparison to another point in history.

I agree with Charles Smith at Oftwominds.com...here is a person that predicted Fannie and Freddie would fail back in 2006 and people thought he was nuts.

The wheels will come off soon. They are already wobbling pretty fucking hard. Sweep the HILL !

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept08/crash9-08.html

The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.

[livendive 8]

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People just lost 1.2 trillion in value today.

Because taxpayers wouldn't give up 0.7 trillion. To me that says we pretty much suck at properly assessing the value of things we buy. I still don't know well enough to form a firm opinion, but I'm leaning farther and farther away from the bailout.

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

[Gawain 0]

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True - but was there ever anything as bad as this before?

Yes. It's the biggest point drop, but not the biggest percentage drop. Also, during the "depression" unemployment was over 30%...we're doing quite better than that.

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I've decided on simple and market leading fixed rate, with instant access, savings accounts.

I'm playing it safe for the time being...

Certainly your call, and I don't anyone would tell you that's foolish. Though, if you don't want to touch it for a while, CDs might do you a little better.

So I try and I scream and I beg and I sigh
Just to prove I'm alive, and it's alright
'Cause tonight there's a way I'll make light of my treacherous life
Make light!

[ChasingBlueSky 0]

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Honest to god if the GOP wins this election we all need to leave the country because the fix certainly is in.

Gallup 3 Day Rolling Average Polls today have Omaba in the lead by 8 points. Should be very interesting to see 3 days from now.

You really should rely on this site for the best poll information:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

_________________________________________
you can burn the land and boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me....
I WILL fly again.....

[Misternatural 0]

Knights of Columbus- do you have ANY investments?- because thats really helpful considering that fear and the spreading thereof is the dominant variable in market crashes.

Beware of the collateralizing and monetization of your desires.
D S #3.1415

[jimmytavino 16]

is this the SAME stock market, that all the "experts" wanted to 'invest ' all the Social Security Trust $$$$$$$$ in, not too long ago???

that didn't happen so now they look for a "bail out".

just as CEO millions, bonuses, and exhorbitant paychecks were 'direct deposited', into personal accounts,,,

WWWWHY can't some % of that Unearned, and Unfair compensation, be "direct withdrawn" ??? and THAT money used for this purpose....???

have THOSE who not only turned their backs on this issue,,, ( it did NOT occur overnight)
but failed in their fiscal and Ethical responsibilities, in the first place.... pay a fair share towards the remedy..

Those decision makers, reaped millions and millions, while "rome was burning",,, and Now while most of them are scrambling today, to stash $$$ in off shore accounts,, or out of this country real estate paradise, condos, homes and million dollars properties, the rest of "us poor schlepps", will be left holding (the empty ) bag....

what a mess.


jmy

[kallend 1,623]

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is this the SAME stock market, that all the "experts" wanted to 'invest ' all the Social Security Trust $$$$$$$$ in, not too long ago???

It was actually Bush's "top priority" in the 2004 election.

McCain's position (Nov 18, 2004)

Q: Will privatizing Social Security be a priority for you going forward?
...

McCAIN: Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.

McC. voted for Bush's privatization plan in 2006.

Then June 13, 2008 he said:

"But I'm not for quote privatizing Social Security, I never have been, I never will be."

Oooh! Did his nose grow longer?

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[kelpdiver 2]

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People just lost 1.2 trillion in value today.

Because taxpayers wouldn't give up 0.7 trillion. To me that says we pretty much suck at properly assessing the value of things we buy. I still don't know well enough to form a firm opinion, but I'm leaning farther and farther away from the bailout.

The 700B is a guaranteed loss. The 1.2T is only for the suckers who sold today.

[jcd11235 0]

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The 700B is a guaranteed loss. The 1.2T is only for the suckers who sold today.

I assume, based on your post, that you're unfamiliar with the buy low, sell high investment strategy? The bailout loans are by no means a guaranteed loss. Granted, they are not a guaranteed profit, either, but the potential is there, and it's not exactly a long shot either, especially if one considers the cost of doing nothing.

Math tutoring available. Only $6! per hour! First lesson: Factorials!

[FallingOsh 0]

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The 700B is a guaranteed loss. The 1.2T is only for the suckers who sold today.

No, it's not. I don't really like the plan, particularly without judicial oversight, but here's an interesting read. Written by a gentleman who works on Wall St.

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I wanted to add a few comments, of course, dealing with this $700bn "bailout."

First a few disclaimers (yes Kraus is actually making disclaimers)
A: I am quite blue (both over our economic/leadership situation, and leftist)
B: I think Bush is one of the worst and stupidest people i've ever had the pleasure of observing and people that identify themselves as outright bush fans, i usually judge vocally to their face... and take a great deal of pleasure in doing so. If I offend anyone that might happen to read this email, I'm glad.
C: I did not see last night's "speech"
D: I have stains and crumbs all over my nice white shirt
E: For those who might receive this email who don't know me, I've an economics degree and I work in finance analyzing macro trends daily.... which certainly doesn't make me a perfect expert. It just means that I may have a little bit of light to shed on the current situation.

The Bailout:
my reasons for actually writing about this are twofold, as I had previously told myself I wouldn't comment on this, but, alas, I feel that I need to A) dispell some rumors over this and B) say something so people will stop bugging me about it. This is the first time as far as I can remember where I've ever agreed with the Bush folk (god, it hurts to say that).

First off: In no way, as far as I've read, is this a bailout and to refer to it as such is simply delusional. This is not a case where the gov't is just giving $700bn to wall street fat cats and then sitting on its hunches. The entire $700bn is basically in an escroe account that is used for buying shit from banks. In return the banks get the money that they sold the shit for, like any transaction. There are actually quite logical and beneficial (to the whole country) reasons to do this.... if you're still interested, read ahoy.

Why is this happening: Well I could easily write a dissertation (or for that matter a few) on why this happening, and why the economy's in such shit and why the Fed and the Treasury (from here on referred to as the Dynamic Duo) are requesting so much money. Let me just say its not people shorting stocks (contrary to what the dumbass politicians worldwide would have you think), its not really regulation (both bad regulation and lack of regulation occur, and for the most part regulatory schemes in financial markets tend to not really avert anything... ever).
Low Interest Rates: When the tech bubble burst, in order to spur on growth in the economy (which is classically viewed as cheap lending) the Fed Chief Greenspan, cut interest rates to very low rates. This spurred on growth successfully until about a year ago, but also made mortgages very cheap. Then mortgage lenders came in and really pushed things called ARMs and Auction Rate Securities, and other equally fancy-titled things. Basically they duped consumers into getting mortgages that sounds great, but were actually shit. Some of them even had something called negative-depreciation, which literally meant you would never be able to pay off a mortgage because the principal kept growing (yes, I also think these people are horrible greedy terrible people). It was predatory lending, and there's really no other way to look at that.

Enter Wall St.: So since the 60s (contrary to what journalists say) Wall St has been developing things called Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). The first ones were quite simple and were offered by the gov't in the form of Ginnie Mae, then enter the GSE's in the form of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in the early seventies I believe. In the eighties, aside from cocaine and junk-bonds, Wall St. started dabbling in serious financial engineering in the form of something called rMBS, cMBS, and CDO and additonal forms of these. In short these would take big bags of mortgages and slice them up into things called tranches and sell of the tranches. Tranches are organized according to what risk is assumed by the buyer. Anywho, these things evolved over the last 20 or so years into what they are today. Now, until early 2007, everyone thought that these things were great. At the time they certainly seemed to be. After all, these MBS would allow mortgage companies to keep giving mortgages without to much restraint for there balance sheet (which is unequivocaly a good thing as odd as it sounds) by selling all their mortgages to banks who would then create MBSs and sell them. Essentially mortgage companies and banks transferred nearly all the risk away from themselves... Or so they thought.
Model's are anorexic: Not the fashion ones... and really not the financial ones behind the MBS. So here's the deal, anything like an MBS has underlying mathematical models, that are truly huge, and incredibly complex. The people behind the modelling of these products are Ph.D.s in things from experimental physics, to number theory and engineering. So where did these models breakdown if they're made by such smart people? The perfect storm of a housing price collapse along with an enormous US debt (which leads to a weak doller which can and usually does lead to high oil prices) had an incredible low probability of happening. As in along the lines of prob < 0.0001% chance of occuring. Now these underlying models worked perfectly at what they were made for the othe 99.9999% of the time, but only when one of these unforseeable events happen did they fail (or so that's what they claim).

Where the hell are you going with this, Kraus?: Hold on... keep reading... i'll tell. Now what happened is that all these mortgage holders started defaulting which meant that the people that held the lower rated tranches started getting wiped out... that's fine and well within the model. Enter oil prices, and mortgage companies collapsing (because they're stupid... literally... i'm not even going to go into this one), along with poorly documented pools of mortgages backing MBS (not sure how the journalists missed this one), and you have more and more 'pieces' of the pie failing. Now with all these pieces tanking, you have investors who are governments, pension funds, hedge funds, school foundations, and companies, etc being hit hard. Along with them, homeowners net worth starts getting destroyed because housing prices are rapidly declining as there no demand in the housing market anymore because mortgage companies (most of them subprime) have either gone under or just stopped giving loans because they can't afford to.
Still waiting Kraus....: So here's this perfect storm of economic diarrhea. Picture this. You're a bank (or any other financial firm that lends money), and you've just been hit with this giant vacuum sucking money out of you from all orifices. You have all these mortgage backed securities which you bought because you truly believed they were safe and offered better returns than government bonds, problem is now you have no idea what they're worth and because no one else has any idea what they're worth given the economic shitstorm (great visual), none of the players who are usually lending money are going to because they can't do any meaningful analysis on their own balance sheet. This matters, because the US' banking institutions are literally fueled by short term debt (money market and repurchase agreements). Actually, a lot of companies day-to-day operations are fueled by short term debt. BUT, because no one will lend those giant gears in the industrial sky just start slowly stopping. BAM! That in a nutshell gives about where we are now.

So what in the world is happening now:
Hopefully, everything above gave you a fairly good idea of the background of the current economic landscape. I'm sure I left things out and I'm sure some of that either misses an important detail or is possibly incorrect. Either way, its still a good background. For sake of readability, I'm not going to go into what happened with Bear Sterns, AIG, and Lehman Brothers. Let's just say I think the Dynamic Duo made the right moves here. So right now in Congress, the Dynamic Duo is proposing that the gov't fork over $700bn to buy bad debt from banks, and all the congressmen are screaming fowl. So before I go into the dynamics of how that could work, I will desribe the current markets. We have Russia teetering on the brink of default, we have Spain, Ireland, much of Southeast Asia, and an enormous portion of emerging markets either in a worse housing crisis, a technical recession, or, for some other reason, in terrible shape. Much of the EU is in a worse situation then we are, or so the data points to that, and Japan is in a technical recession. The massive gears of global growth (and cocktail parties), China, had growth just suddenly shrink (along with oddly enough inflation which halved in the same period). So that brings us to the US. For the first time in history, the possibility of the US government defaulting has been priced into the market. Don't ask me to explain that, but suffice it to say, that there are many traders and analysts out there who see it as a possiblity. So, like I said, they want $700bn to shore up the economy by buying bad debt of banks. How on earth could that help us? Lets say they use up all $700bn to buy shit from banks. That leaves banks with $700bn of new refreshing capital, and the government with a hot steaming pile of shitty mortgages. I know it sounds terrible in all ways, but it effectively works as a giant kickstart to a giant economy. Why?

POV of Banks: Because Banks now have none of that crap on balance sheet, in theory, it means that they can now properly analyze their balance sheets (BS), and begin lending again. Now this certainly doesn't mean it will happen, but in theory it should. Why? Because in addition to banks being able to analyze thieir BS, counterparty risk, which is defined as any risk you take in engaging in any trade with another, is effectively brought down to normal levels, meaning banks and lender and borrowers suddenly trust each other (or in theory will in the medium-term). Has this ever worked in some form? Sure. In Sweden and the US back in the early nineties. Now the current proposal is different than those in many ways, both good and bad, which I will go into in a moment.

POV of the Gov't: Now the gov't suddenly has $700bn of utter crap right? Technically yes, but long term no. This is not quite liking buying a wrecked car for full price as I read in another article (my apologies for overreacting to the sender of that article). Here's how its supposed to work: The gov auctions treasuries at 3-5% to pay for this whopping pile of shit, BUT in buying these debts they purchase them at price waaaay below face value meaning the estimated yield by a purchaser would be around 10-15%. This would mean they would get about 8% a year on this huge investment for the life of holding it. But hold on Kraus, didn't they buy shit, and we certainly learned from the book Everyone Poops that shit can't turn into gold? In theory, because the banks will start lending and companies will start to get a little bit of funding which certainly helps the everyday person because it means those great gears in the sky are turning again, and jobs are needed. Now the idea is that because the economy gets a lil kickstart, housing prices will stabilize and possibly start growing slowly (which is natural). Worst case, housing prices stabilize only a little bit and the gov't gets back probably 80% of what it payed, but in return for halting a financial collapse. Best case is that housing prices stabilize and start growing and the value of all these crappy debts goes way up and they sell the stuff and make off like bandits. In http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122230704116773989.html , it is estimated that the gov't could make as much as $3 trillion dollars off this. I'm not saying it will, but its possible (not probable though).

Current Proposal? Good/Bad/American?: For the sake of arguments, I'm going to ignore all the shit that congress will inevitably tack on. For the most part I think this is a fairly well thought out plan; however, there are 3 major points that piss me off to no end.

1. Judicial Review: A very good and extremely hot friend of mine, brought up the point that there's no check or balances on this. That's just plain stupid. I don't care how much integrity a person has, if you give a man a blank check for $700bn he will probably buy a country, legalize polygamy, and marry all the beautiful women. This is one of my biggest problems with the Bush doctrine: this concept of this strong and powerful executive, which is, if my memory serves me correctly, one of the many reasons this country was founded to NOT HAVE. Basically, just put in judicial review. It should be that simple.
2. Executive Pay: Okay people bitch about how much money people in my industry make and how greedy we are, and how if the taxpayer is going to help us we should damn sure get less money. And McCain in all of his "about to die cuteness" and Obama in his "My head always tilts upwards when i speak because it looks noble" - ness, along with much of congress, are proposing that any banks that uses this plan, should have its executives pay curbed to that of the highest gov't payed employee which from my understanding is about $500k. Sure that's a lot of money, but for a guy that made $70mn last year (L. Blankfein of GS) that's their bar bill. Now politicians yell about how Wall Street is greedy (which I won't deny) and if we are going to help you, we're going to punish you. Here's the problem: from a POV of incentives, if you think someones extremely greedy, why the hell would you curb their pay by many magnitudes? These guys could just as easily keep earning money and run their banks into the ground. I believe it was Barney Frank who in reference to this problem called it "Un-American." Yeah sure, Barney... America, the country of altruists. Hogwash! However, I'm by no means arguing that executives should have control over their salary, but their certainly is some question of legality in doing this. Regardless, my proposal is you could have executive pay given out in options who vest over the long-term and whose ability to exercise (i.e. get actual money from) is not tied to the stock price, but instead to some factor(s) of the balance sheet or other financial statment, economic indicator, etc. That would effectively actually align the interest of Wall Street fatcats with the treasury, the fed, congress, taxpayers, you, me, and that odd genderless hooker who is always outside the subway station a block from my apartment.
3. What's The Rush: Right now this is mostly a financial problem, which I firmly believe CAN very easily and quickly spread to the real economy (meaning that it affects everyone). But why not take a week to analyze the plan. Read this for more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home Or so that is what economic economists say. Enormous problem I do see in this is the money markets, which, if they keep sucking mean that this financial problem becomes a real problem and central park becomes a shanty town again.

In addition to the above problems, anything associated with congress tacking on pork or credit card debt or automotive debt or anything else is just stupid and irresponsible. They are not whats killing the economy right now.

--------------------------------------------------
Stay positive and love your life.

[DrewEckhardt 0]

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is this the SAME stock market, that all the "experts" wanted to 'invest ' all the Social Security Trust $$$$$$$$ in, not too long ago???

The market has ALWAYS made money over a 15-20 year period even when you include drops like the great depression.

As it stands, you may need to out last your statistically expected lifetime by most of a decade just to earn a 0% return on your "investment".

Personally I'd rather have the market. Even if it lost half its value the day I retired I'd come out ahead.

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WWWWHY can't some % of that Unearned, and Unfair compensation, be "direct withdrawn" ??? and THAT money used for this purpose....???

It's payment for work they already did or the job they left to take their current position.

Get into a high enough position and a substantial fraction of your pay is in the form of stock options or restricted stock with a vesting schedule. At the low end changing jobs can mean you forfeit half your pay check for two or three years. At the top where you theoretically have a bigger impact on the bottom line not even 1% of your take home pay could be "salary"

With that sort of compensation package it really sucks to change jobs and get laid off (it took just weeks to happen to one of the financial CEOs), to find you weren't going to do the work you expected (maybe you open new markets and they want an axe man to fire everyone) or have bosses (even the CEO has masters in form of the board. They will and do replace CEOs) that won't let you do your job how you want.

The guys at the top take a lot of the income they earned with them. They have enough leverage to negotiate a settlement package where they keep a fraction of their old pay if they changed jobs recently. It just comes from the new company instead of the old one.

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Those decision makers, reaped millions and millions, while "rome was burning",,,

I don't blame the CEOs who were being judged on quarterly results against their peers. They played the game well according to the rules as they existed at the time, where more mortgages created and repackaged as securities meant more profits and the bond rating companies confirmed that what they were doing was sound with CDOs stamped AAA the highest rating available.

I don't blame the mortgage brokers. Most sales jobs are about selling people things where the consumer arguably has better places to spend their money on like education and retirement. Diamonds (worthless without the DeBeers market manipulations), new cars (which depreciate 20% when they roll off the lot), designer clothes made for nothing in sweat shops where the value is in the embroidered label, or mortgages for bigger better properties (700 square feet and a garage is pretty nice for a couple and a cat) are essentially the same thing.

I don't blame the investors. While not risk-free, the bonds were stamped AAA.

I don't blame the sub-prime borrowers or congress people who opened the market to them. People with sub-prime loans were just the first to fall because they didn't have other assets which allowed them to sell at a loss or deplete their savings making payments while the market recovered.

I blame the bond raters like Moodys. Although long term inflation adjusted housing values have remained constant for over 50 years with a couple of small peaks which quickly collapsed, in a decade we shot up 80% over the average and 60% beyond the last peak even though household income didn't increase 15% over the same time. If the collateral reverted to its mean value as had previously happened there'd be a lot of people seriously underwater. There had to be a reason for the increase, and the reason was the apparent cost of mortgages (option arms, teaser rates) was not real. As soon as people had to bear the full cost of their mortgages a significant fraction went under. The bond raters should have seen how the current situation differed from their models and built better ones or refused to rate where the future couldn't be predicted based on past behavior.

I blame Jack and Jill investor who leveraged themselves to get more properties in spite of this. People shouldn't be investing money that they can't afford to loose.

I blame Joe and Jane home owner who stretched too far and got mortgages they couldn't afford when their ARMs reset from the teaser rates or optional payment plans that allowed the balance to grow. Most people should assume that they won't be making significantly more money in the future and not take out a mortgage that will require them to spend a lot more for their housing in a few years. Lots of us have bought smaller properties (town homes or condos instead of houses), moved to more affordable locations, or remained renters because of the mess.

The government probably should have done more. We put warning labels on alcohol (glad I'm not a pregnant woman) and tobacco; why not mortgages? Caution: This mortgage payment will increase to $XXXX/month within 2 years. Since property values do not always go up you may be unable to sell without bringing $XXX,XXX to the closing in cash or refinance at a better rate.

That would give people the freedom to be stupid (We let people gamble in Las Vegas, where the odds always favor the house) with a hint for the ignorant that what they're doing is not the best idea.

[kelpdiver 2]

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The 700B is a guaranteed loss. The 1.2T is only for the suckers who sold today.

I assume, based on your post, that you're unfamiliar with the buy low, sell high investment strategy? The bailout loans are by no means a guaranteed loss. Granted, they are not a guaranteed profit, either, but the potential is there, and it's not exactly a long shot either, especially if one considers the cost of doing nothing.

Which part of selling today qualifies for buy low, sell high? Quite the opposite, in fact.

Results of the defunct $700B 'investment', if you prefer, will never be quantifiable the way the realized losses by some people today were. And if the bailout, as I prefer to think of it, fails to discourage certain people from repeating mistakes, it will cost us both the principle and the opportunity in the future.

[DSE 3]

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I don't blame the CEOs who were being judged on quarterly results against their peers. They played the game well according to the rules as they existed at the time, where more mortgages created and repackaged as securities meant more profits and the bond rating companies confirmed that what they were doing was sound with CDOs stamped AAA the highest rating available.

I don't blame the mortgage brokers. Most sales jobs are about selling people things where the consumer arguably has better places to spend their money on like education and retirement. Diamonds

I plead ignorance to most of the math surrounding this stuff, I'm a right-brainer. I agree with, and entirely embrace compensation tied to performance. But...when performance went to shit, how much reduction did any CEO, manager, director, VP, or any other "higher up" of which you speak, make on their contracted compensation? To read stories of quarter-billion $$ salaries is grotesque. If you took the salaries of the top 100 earners on Wall Street over the past year (I'm not talking earners based on performance, just gross salaries), I'd bet it could sure cover a huge hunk of the proposed bailout value, yeah?

[DrewEckhardt 0]

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I don't blame the CEOs who were being judged on quarterly results against their peers. They played the game well according to the rules as they existed at the time, where more mortgages created and repackaged as securities meant more profits and the bond rating companies confirmed that what they were doing was sound with CDOs stamped AAA the highest rating available.

I don't blame the mortgage brokers. Most sales jobs are about selling people things where the consumer arguably has better places to spend their money on like education and retirement. Diamonds

I plead ignorance to most of the math surrounding this stuff, I'm a right-brainer. I agree with, and entirely embrace compensation tied to performance. But...when performance went to shit, how much reduction did any CEO, manager, director, VP, or any other "higher up" of which you speak, make on their contracted compensation? To read stories of quarter-billion $$ salaries is grotesque. If you took the salaries of the top 100 earners on Wall Street over the past year (I'm not talking earners based on performance, just gross salaries), I'd bet it could sure cover a huge hunk of the proposed bailout value, yeah?

They aren't getting $250M in salaries. At high levels most compensation is in stock which pays off after the fact if the company does well, hopefully in reaction to something you did as opposed to the market as a whole where high tides float all boats.

Some of it is signing bonus or golden parachute. It really sucks to change jobs and find you've flushed half your paycheck for a couple years based on things that weren't true (That division you were going to run - so sorry, you can be vice head of the one we're reorganizing it into). The guys up top have enough leverage to get a fraction of what they earned at their own job if things don't work out. Hopefully it discourages their bosses (the CEO reports to the board) from being too arbitarry with them. Too bad the rest of us can't get the same thing.

A lot of it is deferred compensation. If you don't need all your salary to live on it would be nice to set it aside until you do, allowing it to grow tax-deferred until that happens. Executives have that deal, where they get paid years later (when they may have retired or be closer to it) for work done last year.

Most of their pay package comes from stock which went up in value hopefully due to their actions. To use one example, although Larry Ellison of Oracle reported a .5B increase in net worth he only took home a $1M salary. The 7 million new options weren't too shabby having reached $14M beyond the strike price by the end of the year. The big $541M win was exercising options he'd picked up before increasing share holder wealth $19B in the last year alone.

Executive pay packages aren't relevant in the way you think they are to the collapse. The biggest pieces of executive compensation come from sustainable increases in the company's value. The executives aren't getting anything significant they didn't earn years ago in the jobs they're getting fired from or a previous job.

[mnealtx 0]

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Honest to god if the GOP wins this election we all need to leave the country because the fix certainly is in.

Oh, fucking spare me. Funny how whenever the Dems don't win, "the fix is in".

Allow me to remind you WHICH party had the 'votes for smokes' scandal - and which party ACORN works for.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

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[mnealtx 0]

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What makes you think GWB actually won the popular vote either time?

What makes you think that the popular vote decides the Presidency?

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[mnealtx 0]

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Then what?

The Chinese people look after us, or course. That's been the general policy of the Bush administration for 8 years now.

Good thing Clinton paved the way with that Most Favored Nation status, eh? (I'm sure the missile tech didn't hurt either)

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[rhys 0]

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Because taxpayers wouldn't give up 0.7 trillion. To me that says we pretty much suck at properly assessing the value of things we buy. I still don't know well enough to form a firm opinion, but I'm leaning farther and farther away from the bailout.

That bailout would have been treated like african aid....

The fat cats would slither most of it and you all still would be in the shit.

If america doesn't impeach the Bush administration, all those little signatures he (they) has (have) made over the last 8 years will smear you economy into the ground even more and widespread war would most likely be the outcome.

Sad, scary but true.

Why would no one listen 7 years ago?

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will see peace." - 'Jimi' Hendrix

[Rookie120 0]

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If america doesn't impeach the Bush administration

You do know that he leaves office in January?

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck!

[likearock 1]

Great read.

[jcd11235 0]

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Which part of selling today qualifies for buy low, sell high?

I'm referring to taxpayers buying today.

You should read the post below the one of mine to which you replied; it's quite enlightening.

Math tutoring available. Only $6! per hour! First lesson: Factorials!

[mnealtx 0]

And back up 245 points as of 0815 Eastern time.

Mike
I love you, Shannon and Jim.
POPS 9708 , SCR 14706

[quade 3]

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What makes you think GWB actually won the popular vote either time?

What makes you think that the popular vote decides the Presidency?

I don't. I was, however, responding directly to something said by another person.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[piper17 1]

The Chinese people...oh, you mean the people that the Clinton administration was selling missile technology to...or the "monks" who were contributing to Al Gore's campaign chest.

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition"...Rudyard Kipling

[NoShitThereIWas 0]

We will just keep that to a matter of opinion.

Roy Bacon: "Elvises, light your fires."

Sting: "Be yourself no matter what they say."