I wonder if all those skeptical liberals will give back the contributions Madoff made to them?

I'm not surprised that you've missed my point.

Savings in current investments are evaporating, because the companies are falling apart. However, if you opened the box, took out the money, and stuffed it in gold... your 1000 is still 1000 (or if you got lucky 1300 in one month return...).

I'm not surprised that you had little point to begin with. It was just the usual left-wing b.s., which I felt like deserved a little reality check.

not everyone and I'd venture to guess a very very small sector of the entire populous has access to gold, it's investments, or any investments for that matter so that's bunk.

Isn't the idea of all these various investment instruments based on offering choice to their clients. If your future is tied to assets that are volatile (like stocks) and you have no mechanism for liquidating them before they lose 90% of their value, then I'm sorry.

Your talking about a box full of hundreds turning into ten dollar bills, first you put a story on how its deflation (its not) and then you say the answer is 're-inflation' (which will blow the economy up entirely in my opinion). The real situation is if you have a box full of Bear Sterns shares that was worth $1000, and you left them there without selling them during the entire downward spiral, well now it is worth $100. An entirely different problem than deflation or inflation... the banks are begging for inflation (bailouts) to try and fix their stock's spot price, and that is just bad economics.

Gold is just an example of a real asset that is an alternative for your investing dollars than a company stock (and not always a good one, its volatile too, but slightly resistant to inflation). No one says you have to ride the corporate down-bubble all the way to financial ruin, even if you have liquidity barriers at some point the fee for early withdrawl can be outweighed by loss of your principle value. It is not impossible to have savings, heck, given the lobbying for capital gains CUTS its not impossible to have GAINS in this environment. Price fixing stocks and corporate balance sheets to indirectly prop investors is stupid, and easily gamed by the same CEOs/CFOs who created the situation.

And big corporate corruption is not a red or blue issue, screw the politics, transparency and rooting out fraud are important to all of us. It is obvious wall street has been playing games, mocking anyone who exposes it has been a big past time of both big Democrats and Republicans.

i have a feeling that it doesnt matter what's said. What I said is....

I want a balance inflation to counter the deflation (hopefully short term) that is occurring so that we can avoid the cataclysm that I foresee. You disagree with the numbers on the picture....so the argument is silly to have. I believe the numbers on the painting, when painted, complete a dire picture of terrible consequences. You dont.

We are suffering through what I hope is a short period of deflation. On the other end hopefully we'll have a short term of inflation and eventually the see-saw will come to rest.

A $1000 bill isn't a $1000 bill because it was built on a house of cards and when the box was open and re-evaluated to it's true value, on a Tuesday, was that the 1,000 was actually different denominations. Not caused by inflation or deflation but bad (inaccurate) balance sheets (and a whole lot more). The results are the same though that most people, with very good intentions, that trusted a littany of people that they were supposed to, got fucked.

You argue about the instruments being offered as choice but the choices were a deck of lying cards, what choice is that? At some point those with a license have some responsibility to their clients no matter the industry (im sure you feel it's personal responsibility so no need to comment here).

I need a flere diagram to explain all this nonsense about shoeboxes full of ever-fluctuating denominations of money.

I just heard a CNBC contributor talk about it in terms of the "Bogadollar". A dollar valuation that is simply bogus so perhaps that helps tell you what im thinking since I agree with his description.

I'm not surprised that your lack of understanding didn't stop you from getting on your high horse to give me a "reality check".


Feels like we're back in August, Jon.

;)

I disagree that we need the government to induce inflation. I think the see-saw game is what causes depressions, and price fixing of anything is always easily gamed.

If you see the buying power of your dollars increasing, then we have deflation, if you see it decreasing, we have inflation. Ignore the 'experts' that think monetary policy solves all problems, that is how you get 0% rates and it still doesn't impact the economy.

To save some of these bad companies balance sheets through inflation alone it would need to be a triple digit inflation rate. There is simply not enough inflation to handle leverage, every attempt in history to do so has led to economic collapse that makes what we are going through look like a sunny day. The only thing that handles leverage is failure of the entities, the old default risk which is supposed to be the basis of debt pricing.

I am getting pissed that companies are claiming they don't know how to price risk. The fact is they forgot the way this system works. As long as they keep throwing out that line I fear for the safety of our economy being in the hands of these madmen. That is why I want these bad eggs to be crushed, at best they are totally incompetent, at worst they are actively destroying our society.

I wish it could be solved by printing a whole bunch of money. It won't though, it will just make good companies have to share the fate of all the bad ones.

So the rate cut looks like it could have an impact on the housing market with 30-year fixed rates at their lowest rates in decades.

I'm so p'd off a GM today...they've asked us to buyout a supplier in chapter 11 and have had us running through hoops to buy this company that was about to go under. We've been negotiating with them for weeks, really heavy the last 2 days. We were probably only a hour or so from an agreement, they show up at the plant and start taking all their tools.

All these people that thought their jobs were going to be ok because we were buying the plant start balling because they know its over.

Then come to find out, they are moving the tools to another supplier that is already in chapter 11 and they made the decision earlier this week. We've had people working 18-20 hour days on this.

I guess the thinking internally is its only a matter of time before the new supplier goes under so they'll come back begging us in a few months. I doubt I'll make it through the next wave of layoffs though.

almost time to go up to the dealership and offer to buy one of their cars off of 'em for cheap.

I don't understand the pricing right now - we've only had 1 item in the store come down in price recently (1% Milk was bumped up to 3.09 a month ago and just came back down to 2.99). Everything else is staying static or being bumped up - in the case of gum/tic-tacs 0.10 each, which is about 7-9%. Everything went up when gas went up for "transport and processing costs", but nothing's going back down.Of course. Any decent financial broker will tell you they personally make twice as much themselves when the market is going down. (As for oil, of course it will go up long-term, probably not to the $180/b highs, but that market is flooded right now - half the reason OPEC slashed things so drastically is that they're running out of tankers to float and store excess oil in. It's also unbelievable to me that oil has cyclically risen every year in the summer, fallen every year in winter almost like clockwork and most people haven't realized this.) It can't go down any lower - it's to the point where individual people and firms are buying and storing oil, then locking in futures contracts and making guaranteed money. If only I had a few million in excess capital...What does this have to do with ideology? The man ran a Ponzi scheme and committed fraud. It's a rather damning indictment of the SEC and private risk/asset management companies that didn't call him on it earlier, but no "free market conservative" advocates for people to give their money to people doing things they don't understand. If anything, it bolsters my argument that these current regulations (and any new proposed ones) aren't working and only serve to give the masses a false sense of security.

85-90% of people in the finance industry aren't much/any better than the average guy from the street, and due to a number of factors (chief among them a populace that hadn't experienced a large downside event) highly risky behavior was being rewarded, but that's quite different than outright fraud.The majority of the US population has access to investments through 401(k)'s, etc, if not owning stock outright. And if you want gold*, I'd recommend an ETF over an individual stock - Gold exchange-traded fund - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . Nobody physically goes out and buys/sells gold bars.

*I wouldn'tThis I strongly disagree with. Gold is no more a "real asset" than US dollars or tulips - it has no intrinsic value and is merely a placeholder for skittish investors. It's also been much more volatile than the dollar historically and has a huge catastrophic downside risk. Gold could easily collapse 50-90% overnight and you lose that much in straight purchasing power. If you have your money in dollars and the dollar collapses overnight, it will still buy just as many goods (ok, slightly less, but the amount we import is actually fairly miniscule compared to the hyperbole around our trade deficit.)We've "balanced the deflation" multiple times since the late 1980's and had no companies failing. Badly run companies fail, the good ones survive and new, hopefully better ones are started up, and then it happens again a cycle later. Call it creative destruction, call it survival of the fittest, but it is an essential part of any free market system. By "balancing the deflation" you're not solving the problem - you're just going to push it farther down the road and probably exacerbate it.The see-saw will never come to rest. Risk is a part of life. I just watched Batman again and I don't want to sound like the Joker, but things never go according to plan, it's time to accept that and factor it into your daily life and future financial planning.

You're bringing up Madoff, who was clearly cooking the books because he produced small but consistent gains every year in a fairly small, controlled environment he presumably knew very well, yet you're advocating the government do that for an economy at large that is orders of magnitude more complex and diverse. Do you see the dichotomy there? Do you see why it's impossible for the government to do that if you want to have any sort of dynamism and entrepreneurship?They haven't "forgotten". They've made the calculated decision that if they play chicken, the government will come in and bail them all out by paying more than the assets are likely worth. And that clearly appears to have been the correct decision for most companies/industries. If the government had held the line early, you would have liquidity by now - it might be greatly deflated liquidity, but the risk would have been priced in and the larger banks would have been lending between each other again. The $600b+ of bailout money sitting there is allowing them to put off making the tough decisions because they all think there is a chance they'll be able to recoup all the mistakes they made.Amen (along with costing me and those in my+my siblings generation tens of thousands of dollars later on.)

Or actively prevent the system from working correctly - Madoff Madness | The Big MoneyPerfect.

I was reading the newspaper last night (I always read it after work, so I'm basically 24 hours behind on news) and saw that the stadium deal that's been in the works here for a few years is basically being fast-tracked by all levels of government because it's an infrastructure project that can get 'shovels in the ground fast'. Apparently that is the new criteria for getting your project approved now. It's not important if the project makes sense, is financially sound, or has all the details worked out. Can you get to work on it quick? Alright then, have some cash and hire some people!

I also saw that Canada's finance minister has finally decided that our economy might not be in great shape (this guy is a fucking genius!), and that we are going to run deficits for the next 2-3 years at least. From the sounds of it, they will be to the tune of 5-15 billion each year, and I'd bet my house that it will be closer to the high end than the low one. I can't seem to find any charts, but I'm guessing that in the next 5 years we will undo all of the surplus budgets that Canada posted over the last decade. What a joke.

Has OPEC become a joke at this point? They've made two big cuts in supply over the past couple of months and no one seems to flinch. At some point, they're going to have to work as a group and actually cut when they say they're going to cut. Until then, I'm not sure that they have nearly the control that they think they do over the world market.

It may get worse rather than better, mostly due to Chavez. That country is hurting in a bad way financially and relies on that oil revenue. He's preaching from a hilltop how supply needs to be cut, and then failing to do so himself.

Bishop: I think you've somewhat misunderstood my point. For years we've been told by free-marketers that the industry could be self-regulating and there were mechanisms in place to avoid this kind of large-scale fraud. Evidence would suggest, as you point out, that this is clearly not the case.

Now I'm not advocating the implementation of draconian regulations. I just think that this would be a good time to take a look at the illegal (or just downright stupid) activities that led to this mess, derive some lessons learned, and put in place some regulatory tools and mechanisms to help prevent this kind of thing in the future.

I'm going to post this at the risk of sounding really partisan, safe in the knowledge that most of you consider me pretty partisan anyway. :D


I'm not sure that's 100% true.

Since Reagan "the left" has consistently argued that deregulation has been taken too far and "the right" has told "the left" that they're a bunch of idiots who don't understand economics and the free market.


To go off on a tangent for a moment, I've always thought the critical flaw in traditional Socialism is that it fails to take into account human nature - specifically the forces of ambition and greed. Socialism tends to provide no real outlet for these traits, so in any real-world implementation, they found other outlets and eventually bring the system down.

Ironically, however, based on recent history, perhaps one could say the same thing about unfettered capitalism. Responding to the call of ambition and greed, actors within the system behaved in a manner that put the entire system into jeopardy.


Where does this leave us, then? I think we need to finally kill this myth "the right" continues to propagate that the economic system will be totally fine if left completely unfettered. While we're at it, let's kill another myth that "the left" are only interested in a return to quasi-planned economies. No serious Democratic politician believes in that anymore, and the President-Elect certainly doesn't.

I think the bottom line is that we need to take a step back, survey the carnage, and implement, for the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, better regulation for the financial industry and leave aside the mistaken assumption that in so doing, we'll somehow be killing this industry off altogether.

I think transparency is the key to everything. Mark Cuban had a post about making everyone use an XML reporting format called XBRL. Stuff like that would be a great start.

Talk about your law of unintended consequences

My Way News - NY will lose $178M from 6 Goldman bonuses alone

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Gov. David Paterson said Friday that the loss of tax revenue from just six Goldman Sachs' executives will cost New York $178 million.

The executives complied with the urging of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and others who said in November that major Wall Street companies benefiting from federal bailouts shouldn't pay out the usual huge bonuses to executives.

Paterson says it is the right thing to do, but the result is a further hit to the fiscal crisis of state government.

"Things could go even more south in a big hurry," Paterson told reporters.

He said Wall Street firms receiving federal bailout did the right thing by forgoing bonuses to their executives, but that has had a devastating effect on New York's fiscal crisis because Wall Street taxes accounted for 30 percent of state revenue in the last fiscal quarter.

"I think it was the right urge," he said, but "the state lost $178 million in that moment."

I think with oil prices the countries and speculators involved got greedy - now they're scared that their consumers are on the verge of making a real commitment to alternative energies ... until that fear passes (give it 6 months) I don't see oil prices being resurgent to a huge extent.

Once its known 100% which way the cookie will crumble with regards to alternative energy (esp. in the US) I think oil prices will normalise to something more sensible - most likely around $70/barrel (which appears to have been the expert 'consensus' for the price for ages).

Agree with Bishop's earlier post pretty much across the board (I made a longer post a few days ago that got ate up by a browser crash).

Oil prices are behaving oddly, when you start seeing people preparing to create oil warehouses you know its an anomaly set to burst. Right now I consider oil to be one of the big 'negative bubbles' right now, speculation causing a price that is not sustainable in the real world. I almost wish I had a bunch of giant empty tanks and capital, or a refinery.

Alternative energy to me is hardly a variable, the tech is still not there, not enough supply, and despite current pricing concerns the demand is too much. It is high oil prices that increase the push towards alt energies, if you could buy oil cheap versus extensive R&D and equipment expenses, what would you do? Current prices are a reaction to everyone thinking the economy is going to explode... and I would be surprised if anyone is actually selling real oil at this price. At some point it doesn't even make sense to load the ship, you just leave it at your oil field in Saudi Arabia and wait for the shorts to fail.

fact: there IS going to be alternative fuel in the future. some would prefer near future, others speculate at some point in the horizon. but it's coming. oil prices were bound to decrease within the next 5 years once "the next big thing" comes out. people know what $4.50-$5 per gallon gas feels like and no one wants to go back. too late for OPEC to do anything. they basically have fast forwarded their own demise.

i don't know why everyone is up in arms, this was the whole point behind investing in alternative fuels here in the US: to stop putting money in the pockets of Sheiks and Middle Eastern countries. you live by the sword, you die by it. these Middle Eastern countries that don't produce anything other than a finite good (a finite good that will one day be obsolete, mind you). while America may have to curb our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, those countries will have to learn how to produce other goods/services to compensate for the decreased global demand.

I partially agree with this - BUT don't think this will come down to simple economics.

Politically America doesn't want to be reliant upon the middle east for Oil and that will most likely cause the administration to force alternative energy ahead through subsidies and suchlike, this will force the price for alternatives cheaper than Oil and thus encourage consumers to utilise it.

The last time I remember this happening was moving from 'leaded' petrol to 'unleaded' ... there was no real benefit to the consumer (outside of health which wasn't immediately visible) however in the UK the goverment priced unleaded petrol more cheaply and over the course of a handful of years this and consumer demand phased out leaded petrol being available (accompanied at the end by legal requirements to run unleaded in cars - by this point most people already did so there wasn't a huge outcry).

I expect the same thing to happen with alternative fuel - most likely hydrogen based (as the conversion to use hydrogen on a "normal" car is fairly minor I believe).

Agreed wholeheartedly ...

exactly Marc. but let's not make the mistake of thinking once the next official alternative fuel source hits the mainstream that oil/gas all of a sudden ceases to exist or is going to magically disappear overnight. i'm just seeing a time where oil export won't be enough to subsidize the lifestyle's of the Middle Eastern sheiks. put it this way - broadband didn't make dialup modems obsolete overnight, but the adaptation of a far superior and gradually more affordable broadband just sped up the demise of the dialup modem. but even today with everyone seemingly having broadband there are always going to be those small niche's that continue to rely on dialup. its just if you're a company that makes dialup modems you may want to consider branching out into something else. same goes for the Middle East.

but don't think any of this happens if there isn't a global recession. India/China curtailing their gas consumption is why gas is under $2 a gallon. not because of America. the global recession had its positive aspects.

I'd be EXTREMELY interested to see your source stating that the demand decline in America had no relevant effect on the price of gasoline. Thanks in advance for the link.

I agree in the long term about alternative fuels, should have specified that I do not believe alternative energy is causing the current oil pricing situation. The current situation of low oil prices is demand driven, although I think it is being pushed by speculation just like the incredibly high prices were being driven by speculation (there was no valid supply excuse for $150 and there is none for $40).

Alternative fuels will eventually impact the price of oil, hopefully soon, but the tech and the supply is not there yet. I hope despite the economy we continue the investment... of course I'm one of those fools that think the U.S. needs to 'tech it up' to come back as an economic superpower. High tech fuel efficient cars can drive a part of our economy if the fools at the top of the chain were not concerned with meaningless power plays and corruption. I think other countries automakers realized this years ago, they are hoping to get the first viable, low-cost, alternative fuel (or hybrid) cars out in the market so that they can take the entire market... not just playing the 'oh lets build another SUV' game that GM/Ford were content to do for decades.

i don't know, is there a link for common sense?

we had plenty of help in driving the cost of gas down. global recession is why. Europe and Japan declining their consumption i should've added.

do the math:

you think gas shot up to $5 a gallon because of America alone? in the span of a year we increased our demand so significantly that the price that the price of a barrel of oil had no other option but to increase up to $145? of course not, you aren't that silly to think that. by the same token you can't then think America buying more Prius' all of a sudden caused a barrel of oil to decline to $35 (and dropping).

I too doubt that the demand decline in American had no relevant effect on the price of gas.

Interesting.......that link doesn't work for me. Try reposting it.

Here is to a damn good 2009.

Happy New Years everyone and damn good riddance to 2008.

I would argue that the problem is not that we had an unfettered capitalist society, I would argue that we tried to find a dangerous middle-ground. I use power as an example. When California deregulated, there were some screwy laws in place that commodities could not be bought on the spot market. That meant unless people knew what they needed 3 months out they were hosed. I look at all the small natural gas peaking plants that were built down in my neck of the woods about 10-15 years ago because nat. gas was cheap, and now they are never running because they are not profitable because of the increased demand for nat. gas since all the plants were completed.

On the flip side, I think we all know why over-regulation does not work either. I think the medium is to realize that certain industries do need to be regulated, I think power is a great example. Cheap power is great for industry. It is great for growth, but in a deregulated environment, what incentive is there to provide additional power plants?

Just my .02.

The regulation should be to make all corporate finances as public as possible. Right now studying balance sheets and other filings is an arcane art, and to really get access to important data you need to buy it (like sales figures by product that are not published). Given all the games you can play to rearrange financials, even excluding Enron style shadow companies, it is very hard to adequately evaluate an investment.

I think we need to go a new direction, although it is touchy where the line is drawn (too much information may lead to mass overhead, or if the sheep investors are in panic mood, they might use the increased information to fuel more panic and volatility).

Regulate that everything that can be made public, is public. I would go so far as to breakdowns of accounts to what they are holding (say a massive bank should have to say by percentage how much is in credit swaps for instance versus standard 30 year mortgages). For utilities, break down revenues, supply costs (and what supplies), etc...

More information is better. Heck, you can give computer geeks like me jobs to sort and process it all even. Secrecy has no value in a public company doing public business... even areas with secrets like R&D, trade secrets, and so on, they can provide breakdowns of what money is in those areas without revealing specific distributions (the point being that a company abusing the protection would be obvious because they would have really high percentage in secret accounts).

So regulate that information is released and is accurate. Then its up to the investors to make informed decisions with it, if they actively ignore companies building up massive sub-prime portfolios, well then we are screwed (I managed to detect the shenanigans without access to such detailed information, but it was not easy and involved guesswork to find sources for anomalies in the reports... although any idiot could have seen super leverage at Freddie Mac for instance).

The economy can not be 'controlled' and perform well, most of the controls I have seen over the last decade of paying attention have been anti-business in my opinion (they boost big business at the expense of gimping new entry). If we increase controls what you will see is the value of government lobbying and crony politics INCREASES, and performance will decrease yet further. The government itself is corrupt as all hell, we openly admit that its campaign dollars that swing policies, not ideals... so how can you not expect billions in pork tacked onto 'emergency bills', and fights over auto bailouts based on self-interest lines (south likes foreign autos they vote against, north is auto puppet, they vote for), and so on.

We need vicious money making driven investors who do not have the incentive to loot the corporations. Right now our economic structure is all about the CEO/BoD buddy system, and the weaknesses of it are becoming increasingly obvious. It is simply too easy to loot your own business for bonuses and stock options, manipulate short term price, and bail with a golden parachute... far easier than to come up with creative ideas for growing your business. This is why we had the generation of CEOs evaluated as good for how well they cut jobs when a company is in the crapper, or the megabonuses for creating a one year gain at the expense of a three times loss two years later, or periods of removing the 'old guard' like at Ford before you can do anything. We don't have leaders in the businesses, and they don't have accountability to the shareholders who mostly seem to behave like sheep. Vicious investors that demand competence from companies is critical, the incentives need to be realigned so that your CEO bonus and survival depends on increasing the economic health of the company both in the short and long terms.

We need people when they hear about a CEO leading the company into a gutter to actually expect his ass to get thrown on the street, and not 'oh he should be able to keep his job too, lets all sing kumbayah'. We seem driven to mediocrity and status quo, even though in reality this happy little period of the modern world is only about 100 years out of thousands of human existence. Any time the masses get content and don't want to rock the boat, the boat usually ends up sinking in dramatic fashion.

Well ... its definitely getting worse, eh?

I would like to pose a stock picking question though and maybe get us thinking ahead and get us out of this damn funk.

Are there any high quality companies (GE, P&G, Walmart, JP Morgan etc.) which I should consider buy stocks now with a time horizon of 15-20 years? I'm thinking I should stock up on some of these in my Brokerage 401k in place of other mutual funds.

Intel. Intel is trading at it's cheapest P/E in YEARS and their annual research budget is equal to AMD's annual REVENUES

I would definitely say the tech sector in general. That's the industry that will likely lead us out of a recession.

I am trying to avoid giving advice, especially because as Bishop pointed out earlier, you can never oversimplify a situation (for instance he knocked me good on gold, I wrote probably ten paragraphs agreeing with him and explaining trends in gold and currencies, but thankfully it got destroyed by a browser crash and the world was saved from boredom)....

But ya, research your stocks. Look at their revenues and earnings, I'm a big fan of the dividend as I'm a hardcore for the traditional intent of a stock... but dividend like earnings is an indicator of cash value of that piece of paper. Realize that they are not fixed though, nothing guarantees they won't cut dividends or estimates of future conditions especially in this climate.

I like tech sector and I agree the U.S. needs to 'tech it up' to hold onto the economic superpower title (if we keep on the path to mediocrity expect to be outpaced by foreign business, actually I made a killing my first year favoring international growth... but situation is different now). Buy tech with a business model you understand though.

Financials in my opinion still have some of the worst downside risk. Heavilly research, although I think there are some diamonds in among the rough (as always happens when an entire sector is crapping out, sometimes some future winners get roughed up, and sometimes solid ones just become more affordable).

I do think it makes sense to have a long portfolio (not saying the market has a bottom now, but that moving on good companies has to happen before the upturn if you want to get 'lucky'). Just please attack the books as best you can, break down any funds you own to see what is in them and how they are distributing after the bloodbath... if you play stocks directly, I really think its best to look at companies reports during recessions... yes the numbers might look bleak, but this is probably the closest you'll come to real truth about what a company looks like. Any company looks good in fat years, its at the skin and bones stage where you can see how they survive. For instance, I learned loads about the CURRENT financial disaster by doing a college project a few years ago now about the S&L years.

Okay I needs to be shutting up.

If only I wouldve shorted Oil when I said I would (or was thinking about it), dang.

GE and good, established pharmas are, like everything else, beaten down at the moment from where the market will usually price them and are, I think, very safe to continue to do well, economically.

I think all financials are high risk, high reward. The only three I'd consider investing in are JP Morgan Chase, Citibank & Bank of America, and even one off those three could go under (or get taken over by the government).

Read up on recent history on Bank of America (I can't comment on other two)... I'm a bit paranoid and wary about them at the moment. They've made acquisitions that at least a few people have lightly criticized, also while it may not be explosive bad collapse scenario I think they will need to either estimate low or they will miss it.

My paranoia should not prevent you from doing your own research, I have been madly wrong before (say about buying oil for instance). Also if it is any indication about the strength of my thoughts, I have no position in regards to BoA, either buy or short... I'm mostly researching for indirect stuff and more examples (in particular more data on what I'll randomly call 'merger cannibals' I guess ;) ).

Another heart-warming tale of how our current economy works:

The Highest Paid Man on Wall Street - The Daily Beast

Just more evidence of the massive looting incentives that have been the modus operandi of the top level corporate thieves for a while. Even after the company is busto there are ways to corrupt large sums of money into your hands at the expense of others, its just terrible if you ask me.

Or free market capitalism at its best, depending on who you ask. I'm sure this can be twisted into somehow being the fault of government intervention in the market.

This happens in free market capitalism when the incentives are screwed up (as I mentioned before). If corporations were functioning correctly, they would not let worthless executives sell assets below value in order to earn a third party paycheck to said worthless executive.

Corporations are not built just to provide looting for the top CEOs, we have the executives of this generation looting the efforts of the past few. I'll be more than happy to show how that is not free market capitalism, but a system guaranteed to collapse.

US Bank is the strongest of the big banks. They are very conservative and do not have a large portion of their capitol in the mortgage market. Also, the don't touch sub prime lending.

Yeah, that's a good point, and I'll admit my post was pretty rushed. Another bank that seems to be in good shape is Wells Fargo, for similar reasons.

Not a good week for economic news, Obama seems to be raising red flags every. Another foreclosure report caught my eye ...
Flood of foreclosures: It's worse than you think - Jan. 23, 2009

On the hand, my company did end up in the Fortune 100 best companies to work for which I thought was pretty cool. Its not for everyone but I do think it is one of the better companies.
100 Best Companies to Work For 2009: NetApp - NTAP - from FORTUNE

Deed in lieu of's are also on the rise and those dont even show up...plus you have to add that my home should be on the market in a few weeks so +1 :)