Hubba hubba

The Poor Man has been using these a lot lately. It's kinda frightening. Funny, but frightening.





Found at some wingnut/libertarian dating site. Have at him, ladies.

More on the economy

A nice history lesson.

Why the bailout is about politics more than money.

John Cole puts it in the "what if it were the other party" perspective.

How Wall Street is gaming Congress to get what they want.




Shouldn't that be "Staggering 30% Approve of Bush?"

Bailout thoughts

A fantastic summary of opinions.

Cash money!

Cash is staying.

Now if we could only get Hank to shut the fuck up.

Well, consider that it's PowerLine you're dealing with...

In which Krugman gets to say "I Told You So."

AAAAARGH

As many as 23 million people could have negative equity in their homes, depending on how low the bottom goes.



This is going to end well.

Just want I want to read with my house on the market

But yeah, this is just one of the things I've been wondering about.

Not everyone gets a deal like my friend KC. The company that lured him from CT to NY bought his house after it sat on the market for 4 months.

Food for thought

Larry Summers, on the mess.

Now is not the time for retreat.

Not so wheeee

(Two Billy Connolly references in one day!)

What was that about heat and gasoline?

Jets fans are smart.



This is what happens when you park over hot coals.

That's a big boat

The first of the 5 Solstice-class cruise ships is ready. And it's FREAKIN' HUGE, according to Billy Connolly.





Holy wow. The post at Gizmodo has some funny comments, my favorite being "How much norovirus did you say this thing could hold?"

I, personally, am not a cruise person. I don't like not having control of my itinerary. Instead of seeing 7 islands in 7 days, I'd rather just pick one of them, and hang for a week. But if this is your thing, it's got to be pretty cool.

Hell, if they had an 2-day-1-night stay in port, I'd probably do it just to explore the thing. I do love me some big gadgets. Infrastructure, baby.

The state of our economy - a timeline

1997: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance" speech in 1996 was somehow ignored by, um, Fed Chairman Greenspan. The Fed missed the opportunity to change margin requirements. Had the Fed acted, the bubble would not have inflated as much, and the subsequent crash would not have been as severe.

1998: Long Term Capital Management was undercapitalized, used enormous amounts of leverage to purchase all manner of thinly traded, hard-to-value paper. It failed, and under the authority of the Federal Reserve a "private-sector" rescue plan was cobbled together. Had these bankers suffered big losses from LTCM, they might have thought twice before jumping into the exact same business model of undercapitalized, overleveraged, thinly traded, hard-to-value paper. Instead, they reaffirmed Benjamin Disraeli's famous aphorism: "What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

1999: The Financial Services Modernization Act repealed Glass-Steagall, a law that had separated the commercial-banking industry from Wall Street, and the two industries, plus insurance, came together again. Banks became bigger, clumsier, and hard to manage. Apparently, risk-management became all but impossible, even as banks had greater access to larger pools of capital.

2000: The Commodities Futures Modernization Act defined financial commodities such as "interest rates, currency prices, and stock indexes" as "excluded commodities." They could trade off the futures exchanges, with minimal oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission, nor the Federal Reserve, nor any state insurance regulators had the ability to supervise or regulate the writing of credit-default swaps by hedge funds, investment banks or insurance companies.

2001-'03: Alan Greenspan's Fed dropped federal-fund rates to 1%. Lulled into a false belief that inflation was not a problem, the Fed then kept rates at 1% for more than a year. This set off an inflationary spiral in housing, and a desperate hunt for yield by fixed-income managers.

2003-'07: The Federal Reserve failed to use its supervisory and regulatory authority over banks, mortgage underwriters and other lenders, who abandoned such standards as employment history, income, down payments, credit rating, assets, property loan-to-value ratio and debt-servicing ability. The borrower's ability to repay these mortgages was replaced with the lender's ability to securitize and repackage them.

2004: The SEC waived its leverage rules. Previously, broker/dealer net-capital rules limited firms to a maximum debt-to-net-capital ratio of 12 to 1. This 2004 exemption allowed them to exceed this leverage rule. Only five firms -- Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley -- were granted this exemption; they promptly levered up 20, 30 and even 40 to 1.

2005-'07: Unscrupulous home appraisers found that they could attract more business by inflating appraisals. Intrinsic value was ignored, so referrals kept coming in. This helped borrowers obtain financing at prices that were increasingly unsupportable. When honest appraisers petitioned both Congress and the bureaucracy to intervene in the widespread fraud, neither branch of government acted.

Christmas gift ideas

The Abu Ghraib bobblehead! The Dick Cheney Shredding Snowball! And more!

Find them at America: The Gift Shop.

SNL recap Weeks 2 and 3

Forgot to do this last week.

SNL Week 2
Opening skit, McCain "approving" all his bullshit commercials, was pretty funny. Everything else was horrible, with the exception of Kings of Leon. OK, the Digital Short was passable, where he had the small weenie or something. James Franco has no charisma, and from what I can tell, no actual ability. Of course he was decent as the hateable douchebag in the Spiderman movies. He is a hateable douchebag! That solves that mystery.

SNL Week 3
The opening was fantastic. Tina Fey is out of her fucking mind as Sarah Palin. Everything else was terrible, except one that was a "meh." The one in the boat, where he's supposed to kill her; that one had a couple giggles. What the hell is going on here? This is the result of 5.5 straight days of work by a huge team of "comedy" writers and performers? Anna Faris is, um WHO? The whole episode, all Erica and I could think of was how much she looks like Britney Spears post-hottie but pre-total-meltdown. Then, about 10 minutes before the whole thing was over, Erica recognized her as the ditz in a couple scenes from Lost in Translation. So we had that going for us, which was nice.

And don't get me started on Duffy. What the fuck is that trainwreck?!?! No rhythm, no talent, no voice, shit songs. Love those tits-based record contracts. Awesome job, SNL. Just awesome.

RIP

An all-time great everything. Actor, man, humanitarian.

Must go get Nobody's Fool and watch it soon.

8 years of Bush

After we better off today than we were 8 years ago? That would be "no."

(h/t Ezra)

Cry me a river...

Poor, poor i-bankers...

Some excerpts:

The Trader had come to Lehman only a year ago, after being recruited from a rival firm. He’d studied physics as a grad student, then come to Wall Street as the tech bubble and the aggressive gentrification of the Giuliani years remade Manhattan into a banker’s playground, a place where a $2 million salary could seem like the norm.

Like many on Wall Street, the Trader’s career was moving along briskly. By 2006, he had settled into a new $2 million house in Connecticut with a pool, and kept a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. With two young children, he had private-school tuition to cover. He had recently completed a home renovation, and now there was talk of a new porch with a built-in stainless-steel barbecue. The Trader estimated that he was two years from making enough money to retire and never have to work again.

...

The collapse of the world’s most powerful wealth-creating engine required everyone to take stock of their financials. One Lehman executive in Rye Brook, fretting about paying off a Hamptons summer house and a ski chalet in Vermont, panicked on Monday morning and laid off her nanny, who had been with the Westchester family for nine years. “The nanny called me crying,” says Marla Sanders, who runs Advance Nannies and staffs Lehman homes. “One of the children she had brought home from the hospital.” Sanders knows more cuts for her clients are on the way. “They’re going to have to sell homes. The question is, will the homes sell? They’re cutting some of the children’s activities out, dance class, acting class. Are they going to have flowers delivered every day to their homes? I don’t think so!”

...

On Friday, September 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that Lehman’s former president, Joe Gregory, who was demoted along with former CFO Erin Callan in a management shake-up in June, was listing his Bridgehampton house on Surfside Drive for $32.5 million. The collapse of Lehman’s stock is a blow to Gregory’s lifestyle. He reportedly used to travel by helicopter to midtown from his $3.5 million mansion in Huntington, which was recently renovated, according to a Sotheby’s broker. According to one source, Gregory’s financial adviser was in negotiations with Lehman’s attorneys at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, working to avert his filing for bankruptcy, after he borrowed money against his Lehman stock to pay for the renovation. “He owes a lot of money for it. They called the margin loan” late last week, the source said. (Gregory and attorneys didn’t return calls for comment.)

...

[A Craigslist post] read, “Should I leave my fiancé? … I guess I already know the answer. My boyfriend … rather fiancé, is/was employed by Lehman Brothers,” the posting stated. “In less than a week we went from being millionaires to just having a couple of 100K … I suppose this means it’s over. I am who I am. I personally blame all this on [Lehman CEO] Dick Fuld. I blame him for ruining my happiness.”

Wheeeeee!

YES!!!

(xkcd)

YouTube is the cesspool of all comment cesspools. I remember some commercial using a song I liked, so I googled the lyrics and found the artist, then went to YouTube to see the whole song.

The top (most recent) comment at the time was: "Another nig asking for money."

Yeah. I don't read YouTube comments any more.

I never use protection

Wait for it...

So bad it's... nope, still bad

Of the many series that the AV Club runs, my favorite is "I Watched This on Purpose."

Here is their treatment of 88 minutes.

(Spoilers throughout, but really, were you planning on watching this piece of shit?)

Objectively bad, I'd say.