Online Journal: The Real Story is the United States is Bankrupt

The toxic mortgage-debt paper is only a cover. The real story under the covers of the history book written since the Great Depression is about the investment bankers and their allies who have returned with a vengeance to totally bankrupt America and its financial system with their greed, which created the present subprime debt and recently raised the national debt ceiling to $11 trillion and change. The fact as David Sirota noted in Saying ‘No Deal’ To this New Deal is "We now face market forces uninhibited by democratic governance -- Chinese dictators and Saudi princes [who] can move trillions of dollars without so much as a press release. This bailout, marketed as a speed enhancer, is an aggressive attempt to discard democracy’s checks and balances and pantomime that kind of autocracy."

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3840.shtml

Who will be today's J Pierpont Morgan?

Seems about the same level of drop we've seen past few days. "Crashing" seems a little over the top. If it's crashing, it's taking it's time. Instead of Black Friday, it's looking more like Black October :-/

On Today, they were showing Palin, Obama and McCain masks for Halloween. Nothing on Biden.

I want dress up as Henry Paulson, knock on doors, and demand they give me all their candy to save the country.

A year ago TODAY the DOW set it's all time high 14,164

I know Googles numbers run on a delay... the Final number will be up in a few minutes...

But right now its at -647

Dow Jones Industrial Average. INDU (INDEX)

8,589.70
Change:-668.40 -7.22%
Volume:429,762,890
4:06pm 10/09/2008

The bright side in this is that Obama is now virtually guaranteed a win.

I'm going to state the obvious here:

THANKS A HELLUVA LOT, REPUBLICANS! THIS IS YOUR FAULT, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE TAKEN AWAY.

This was emailed around my office:

If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left. With Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000. With AIG, you would have less than $15 left. But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 cash. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

That's what they did in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Cheers

This is entirely predictable. And in fact, was predicted.

As James Kunstler points out, money is based on trust, nothing more. No one trusts the money now.

Again, you can also look at the trend in this country for the past 25 years or so -- we have monetarized our economy. The financial sector was the most dominant sector during the Clinton years.

For convenient memes:

Bush family = Big Oil
Clinton family = Wall St.

I repeat: both parties are to blame. The GOP has done more recently, of course.

The dollar is collapsing and the only thing keeping us afloat is that others have pegged their currency to us.

There are several next steps:

a) China and other foreign investors (including the Arab nations) can now start dumping their foreign currency holdings at their leisure. They can literally finish us off at any time of their choosing.

b) The Chinese can stop hoarding the yuan to have it become the defacto standard.

c) The end of cheap energy will prevent us from righting ourselves -- it will be costly to build any infrastructure.

d) What oil is left is in the new "eastern bloc": Russian, Arab nations, China.

Many of you kept talking about how I was "doom and gloom"... of course, had you been listening, you might have steeled yourself to this.

And, yes, MUCH tougher times are ahead.

Want proof? Iceland has looked to RUSSIA to bail them out of their mess. Why? Because we spent our national treasure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/business/worldbusiness/08icebank.html

And for those of you wanting the blame the GOP: you still don't get it. Ralph Nader did have it correct in 2000: both parties are beholden to corporate America. That doesn't mean you should have voted for him, it does mean, he was correct.

The worse is yet to come: wait until this plays out to heating oil and gasoline.

Then you can break out the hankies and sob.

Donal, I got some trouble with that Mazza article. Smells to me like some self-serving tripe in there. Here, in particular: "We now face market forces uninhibited by DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE - Chinese dictators & Saudi princes [who] can move trillions of dollars without so much as a press release."??

The American economy (and to a lesser but still real degree, the rest of the OECD) has long fed off the remains of the countries it drove into the dirt. Like in the Asian crisis. But as long as it was happening somewhere else, to someone else, why hey - those people weren't really working; their economies weren't serious economies; those currencies didn't count; those liquidated savings weren't real money - so screw 'em! And it was OUR mammoth firms that went in & bought up the remnants for 10 cents on the dollar. That ate up engineers and skilled workforces and new equipment and patents, that re-employed people for nothing, that "persuaded" other nations to hack their social services to nothing, and privatize everything.

And you know what? Everyone in America (and the rest of the West) made money off those deals. Every... last... one... of... us. We got cheaper food and clothes and toys and electronics and steel and cars. The fat that rolled in meant our taxes could be lower. The profits meant our Marketing & Management & Money-shuffling bonuses could be fattened up.

Democratic governance???? Where was democratic governance in all that? In the nations affected? Anybody remember open & informed debate on this shit back here at home? But let's be clear. 5 minutes research would have shown us precisely what was going on. We didn't want to know. Better to have another $50 knocked off the cost of that plasma tv.

Maybe we should've asked.

Well... World markets were down bigtime today... I think the Nikkei was down over 10%.

All others were down, too...

Let's see if the mistrust/panic feedback loop continues today...

-128.00 Today (10-10-08)

Not bad considering it was down over 600 points at least twice during the day...