an occasional reader

GM: More Bailout-Worthy than Citigroup

Math Error! Math Error! Math Error!

Oh, wait. It's $300 billion, not $30 billion. And THAT's a really BIG number.

With my math skills, maybe I can get a job with the government...

GM: More Bailout-Worthy than Citigroup

We're debating about how much money Detroit should get so that they will be able to build more cars.

But nobody wants to buy any cars....

Instead of giving Detroit a bunch of money to produce more cars when there is no demand, we should rather spend the money to create demand for cars.

How about this: Congress should send every US citizen (between ages 18 & 65) a coupon worth $5,000 toward the purchase of a new car! If 60 million people are eligible, that's only $30 billion!!!

Credit Card Defaults Are Just Beginning

One positive: all those annoying Visa pumpers seem to have abandoned these forums.

The fact that credit card debt is "known" to be risky will not keep the stocks from falling further when issuers (COF) announce additional charge-offs, write-downs, and reserves and transaction processors (V, MA) announce diminished activity.

In fact, I think the surprise here is how little these stocks have fallen given the iceberg that they are headed toward.

Today the market is down in part because retail sales came in relatively weak. But certainly a weak consumer at this point is not a surprise. Evidently that knowledge was NOT already priced in...

Nixing 'Mark to Market' Won't Solve the Problem

Repealing mark-to-market is appealing in its simplicity, but, it may not help. I can't imagine investors rushing back into financials that have taken huge write-downs just because those banks can now artificially inflate the value of their assets. If there is no market for exotic, toxic "assets", maybe they are indeed worth zero, and maybe the market value is correct after all...