Top Gun

Nationalizing the U.S. Banking Sector: There's No Choice

Agree totally with Drobezisi! Man, do I agree!

Jim Rogers on the Economy - Bearish on Stocks and Government

Agree with him completely - find the bottom (price discovery, bank failure, etc) then grow out of it. The government could establish a bottom for prices, but it has to be low.

If we put in supports to keep things up, we will emerge over several years as a socialist society. If we let values fall and don't create public debt to replace private debt, we reset and can keep our innovation associated with capitalism.

We sometimes forget why capitalism is important. We use the word "growth". We "grew" in the last five years - all illusion, money supply growth caused by credit creation and the elimination of M3 which stopped investors from seeing real inflation. In fact, capitalism allows for efficient utilization of resources by everyone, improving the human condition. Isn't improving the human condition the goal of socialism as well.

Geithner's Superfund Is the Real Deal

Seems to me we are headed for a bit of resolution, someone needs to value and take these high risk assets. Even putting $500B into strong hands will reduce the overall risk in the sellers portfolio by quite a bit.

I think we are in a bond market for the next ten years, forget stocks. This is new in my adult lifetime. We created so much credit (we, ha!) that all available capital must be deployed against this mess. It's now clear to me that you can add to your list that bankers tried to get the public to absorb all of their mistakes - mistakes they had already made commissions on. Can anyone say $4B in bonuses Merrill Lynch for selling debt we are now asked to take - fungible money, remember?

Citigroup's Derivatives Reduce Bailout to a Non-Event

"Those Wall Street analysts who are recommending long-Citigroup positions should bear in mind that derivative contracts originating in the developing world are also at risk of political intervention"

Couldn't resist - You are indeed talking about the political intervention, to the tune of $8 trillion in guarantees and bailouts, offered by the US government? Perhaps we should be called the regressing world. The real risk is the day when OUR government says "enough is enough". Soon, I hope.