Sean Olender

Cool Heads Will Prevail

Yes, I agree that once taxi drivers are betting on markets, or currencies, that it's bound to be late in the game. But I don't know if I can agree about super models who almost certainly have more income and assets than you do. People worth many millions are not usually the last to find out that something is a bad bet.

I'm not looking forward to this, but everything the Fed and Congress appears ready to do suggests absorbing the cost of the massive bad debt into the federal debt. That's something a banana republic does just before its leaders and the top 2% of income earners relocate to other countries.

Ben Bernanke's shift from wanting Fannie and Freddie trimmed down in size because of the "systemic risk" they present shifted on Friday to Mr. Bernanke suggesting Congress should raise Fannie's loan cap to $1 million and provide an explicit guarantee rather than the previous implicit one. This sort of shift doesn't happen unless people are expecting catastrophically bad things to happen. Fannie just turned in a big loss for the last quarter and has already huge exposure to the US real estate market - a market that is facing a very severe and imminent downturn.

With this sort of bailout, it is hard to imagine that the resulting chaos won't cause the dollar to slip much, much further. And the fact that it's being proposed at all suggests that major players have more to gain with a bailout and dollar collapse than taking their medicine. These people wouldn't choose to permanently damage the mortgage market in the United States unless they believed that it wasn't going to be a business at all for 10 or 20 years.

We're on borrowed time for sure. When investment banks, banks, investors and others are willing to terminate a huge industry just to get out of their liabilities, you can bet they expect that things are going to be very, very bad.

Within six months there will be a massive bailout and within 18 months there will be a massive default on the debt that was transferred from investors to the US government. I think investors should consider investing exclusively outside of the United States until this blows over... if it does indeed blow over.

Cool Heads Will Prevail

Yes, I agree that once taxi drivers are betting on markets, or currencies, that it's bound to be late in the game. But I don't know if I can agree about super models who almost certainly have more income and assets than you do. People worth many millions are not usually the last to find out that something is a bad bet.

I'm not looking forward to this, but everything the Fed and Congress appears ready to do suggests absorbing the cost of the massive bad debt into the federal debt. That's something a banana republic does just before its leaders and the top 2% of income earners relocate to other countries.

Ben Bernanke's shift from wanting Fannie and Freddie trimmed down in size because of the "systemic risk" they present shifted on Friday to Mr. Bernanke suggesting Congress should raise Fannie's loan cap to $1 million and provide an explicit guarantee rather than the previous implicit one. This sort of shift doesn't happen unless people are expecting catastrophically bad things to happen. Fannie just turned in a big loss for the last quarter and has already huge exposure to the US real estate market - a market that is facing a very severe and imminent downturn.

With this sort of bailout, it is hard to imagine that the resulting chaos won't cause the dollar to slip much, much further. And the fact that it's being proposed at all suggests that major players have more to gain with a bailout and dollar collapse than taking their medicine. These people wouldn't choose to permanently damage the mortgage market in the United States unless they believed that it wasn't going to be a business at all for 10 or 20 years.

We're on borrowed time for sure. When investment banks, banks, investors and others are willing to terminate a huge industry just to get out of their liabilities, you can bet they expect that things are going to be very, very bad.

Within six months there will be a massive bailout and within 18 months there will be a massive default on the debt that was transferred from investors to the US government. I think investors should consider investing exclusively outside of the United States until this blows over... if it does indeed blow over.

Cool Heads Will Prevail

Yes, I agree that once taxi drivers are betting on markets, or currencies, that it's bound to be late in the game. But I don't know if I can agree about super models who almost certainly have more income and assets than you do. People worth many millions are not usually the last to find out that something is a bad bet.

I'm not looking forward to this, but everything the Fed and Congress appears ready to do suggests absorbing the cost of the massive bad debt into the federal debt. That's something a banana republic does just before its leaders and the top 2% of income earners relocate to other countries.

Ben Bernanke's shift from wanting Fannie and Freddie trimmed down in size because of the "systemic risk" they present shifted on Friday to Mr. Bernanke suggesting Congress should raise Fannie's loan cap to $1 million and provide an explicit guarantee rather than the previous implicit one. This sort of shift doesn't happen unless people are expecting catastrophically bad things to happen. Fannie just turned in a big loss for the last quarter and has already huge exposure to the US real estate market - a market that is facing a very severe and imminent downturn.

With this sort of bailout, it is hard to imagine that the resulting chaos won't cause the dollar to slip much, much further. And the fact that it's being proposed at all suggests that major players have more to gain with a bailout and dollar collapse than taking their medicine. These people wouldn't choose to permanently damage the mortgage market in the United States unless they believed that it wasn't going to be a business at all for 10 or 20 years.

We're on borrowed time for sure. When investment banks, banks, investors and others are willing to terminate a huge industry just to get out of their liabilities, you can bet they expect that things are going to be very, very bad.

Within six months there will be a massive bailout and within 18 months there will be a massive default on the debt that was transferred from investors to the US government. I think investors should consider investing exclusively outside of the United States until this blows over... if it does indeed blow over.