Greed is a terrible thing…….
sop
Alternative New Media for the Gulf South
Greed is a terrible thing…….
sop
And the headline of the day from Yahoo Finance is: Shades of 2008: World Markets on Edge Ahead of Monday’s U.S. Open. ~ One silver lining is that gas will become cheaper at the pump.
We have a reader request for Monday Music and it is a good choice. Dedicated to Tim Geithner who never met a Wall Street exec he failed to pay a taxpayer-funded bonus to under the ruse of contract sanctity. FYYFF!
sop
And that advice was to sell in May and go away. I follow that rule religiously and especially when I see the price of gas go through the roof.
The DC crowd is evidently still completely out of touch with what average Americans are going through financially day-to-day as most have seen their standard of living erode significantly since 2004 as the country speeds down the bankruptcy highway in debt to the tune of 6 figures for every man, woman and child. When all the chickens come home to roost it will be very bad folks.
The way I see it Obama has about 9-12 months left to turn things around. Since he chose to pay bonuses to the Wall Street crowd instead of locking them up for what they did he is in reality no different from the republicans that bailed them out to begin with meaning the public has nothing to lose by throwing his sorry ass out next year unless he turns things around.
So in a change of pace from our recent emphasis on more local topics, I’ll add that my latest foray into Ginnies has exceeded my expectations from a pricing standpoint and in today’s day and age the 3.18% YTD yield isn’t half bad either. For those familiar with the work of Nassim Taleb, a good part of the trick is to manage downside risk and ginnies do that right now.
Some recent headlines that partially explain why I’ll be on the sidelines with my long-term money until there is a substantial market correction: Continue reading “Remember the advice I gave way back in September 2008…..”
In an exclusive interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange said the documents could “take down a bank or two.”
Didn’t I read someplace that the Republicans have repealing the recently passed financial re-regulation legislation as a priority for next year? ‘Tis a silly world when economic theory becomes a religion eh folks….
Also Dr William Black at the U of Missou, well-known and liked here in the Slabbed Nation opines that the Treasury Secretary, along with the Chairman of the Fed are crooked sacks of shit. I tend to agree. (H/T Mr CLS)
sop
I’ll be making sure the Daily Bail makes it into our financial links when I get a chance to add to our links. Mr CLS has been linking it for quite some time on the Allstate board and it is indeed very good. For our newer readers I’ll add covering financial topics is not unusual for us, in fact we trace our root to the financial topic of insurance, which in turn cuts across a wide variety of subjects including espionage.
Let’s begin with this CNN report:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF_vU7WZpUE]
US Representative Marcy Kaptur knows her shit folks and not because she is Carnac the Magnificent, rather because she knew almost 2 years ahead of time exactly what a true clusterf*ck the subprime mortgage market had become. Continue reading “I feel the need to examine the topic of mortgage fraud and other quick programming notes.”
Neil Barofsky sat down with Bloomberg reporter Richard Teitelbaum recently giving a wide-ranging interview on his time as the Special Inspector General (SIG) over what has become the $700 billion “hydra-headed beast encompassing 13 financial aid plans” known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP for short. The piece gives a good bit of insight into Barofsky’s past as a federal prosecutor including his time as a one time kidnap target of the FARC, a Columbian NARCO terrorist organization we previously explored in connection with the politically connected ownership of Republic Insurance in the Lindner family. Here are a few excerpts of the article where we also find out Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now in the crosshairs beginning with Barofsky’s office space at Treasury:
The space assigned to him as head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP, was shoehorned into the basement, three floors below U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s offices.
“They eventually discovered a broken sewer main beneath the floor,” says Barofsky, 40, adding that he doesn’t think any slight was intended by relegating him to the malodorous quarters. Still, he says with a smile, “I wasn’t given the prime real estate in Treasury.” Continue reading “”
And not one preparing taxes either.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKLKop9CD5s]
The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the “salutary science of Hierarchiology”, “inadvertently founded” by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modeled and has theoretical validity.[1] Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.
The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is “The Generalized Peter Principle.” It was observed by Dr. William R. Corcoran in his work on Corrective Action Programs at nuclear power plants. He observed it applied to hardware, e.g., vacuum cleaners as aspirators, and administrative devices such as the “Safety Evaluations” used for managing change. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope. Dr. Peter observed this about humans. Continue reading “Slabbed takes the Regulatory Challenge Part 3: Incompetent is as incompetent does. Tim Geithner and Peter Principle.”
If there is one reason (besides that special interest infested monstrosity also known as Health Care Reform) that the Democrats will get their asses kicked at the polls come November I’ll give it to you in 3 letters: A.I.G.
It’s bad enough the the company is insolvent and taxpayers will never see a return of all the money we sank into that bottomless snake pit, but to actually pay more bonuses to the dumb mother fuckers that caused the implosion of both AIG and our financial system simply defies description. Up next will by Timmy Geithner hitting the airways talking contract sanctity. Marketwatch has the story:
In the midst of bonus season, the people deciding compensation policy at American International Group Inc. believe they’ve reached a deal. The majority of the controversial financial-products group at the company will take a 10% haircut on their bonuses in return for an early payout, as soon as next week. Read AIG bonus story in WSJ. Continue reading “Will someone in a position of authority PLEASE put a bullet in AIG’s head and stop both the misery and insanity”
I’ve been under the weather the past few days but this blurb on the taxpayers getting the billion dollar shaft courtesy of Tim Geithner and the CIT bankruptcy did not escape my notice. As a SBA loan recipient I can attest first hand my file literally employed 2 workers for 12 weeks while Uncle Sam took security interest in everything I owned but my left testes (I drew the line there as a guy has to keep some dignity) yet CIT manages to get signature only terms from Timmy Geithner on the billions in TARP funding they received.
It was while I pondered the discomfort from having our collective financial rear end gang raped without benefit of vaseline on this CIT deal that it struck me the reason for Timmy’s incompetence has been well documented once before several years back in the media. Luckily for the Slabbed Nation I was able to dig it up via youtube. Continue reading “CIT, Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld”