Dan Walker

Options Trader: Friday Outlook - Too Little Too Late?

Phillip, wake up and smell the cow patties. Dodd himself described this bailout as a turd with a marshmellow in the middle. He just made sure the marshmellow was larger.

Of course the commercial paper market seized up. The biggest player in that market was Lehman. If you want to engineer a crisis to scare everyone into passing the biggest bailout in history, of course you want to first bail out FNM, FRE, and AIG and then let the principal CP dealer go bankrupt. It shuffles the pain down to main street to make them think that they should support this nonsense.

Will this be it? Oh hell no. The CDS issue has not even been mentioned, California is about to ask for a bailout, and GM will have given the $25B we gave them to the unions by next March. Bailout part !! coming to a news outlet near you by early next year (if it takes that long).

Where's the Bottom? Still Anybody's Guess

Regrettably, I fear you may be right. As much as I decry fiat currency, as much as I would love to see a stake driven in the heart of the federal reserve, as much as I fear the proposed bailout will decimate the dollar and collapse bond prices, he fact remains that our economy is still in better shape than its compatriots, and we may, in fact, emerge from this "crisis" smelling like a rose in global comparison. This is about as depressing a scenario as can be imagined. There is no reason to get long, but neither is the risk on the short side worth the reward. I can envision a post-bailout scenario where equities trade in a range the next two years while the dollar grinds down incessantly. This is the worst case scenario where short the dollar is the only remedy but the dollar keeps popping up because of weakness overseas. About the only thing to do is jump on gold and hope the PPT gets distracted or runs out of money.

U.S. Bank Dividend Yields Revisited

Don't you think it prudent to wait until the shooting stops before you start picking up causalities?