Well if Gustav fucks up the oil installations and that port in NOLA we could see a pretty dramatic spike in gasoline prices over the next few weeks thus giving a nice punch in the face to the consumer and perhaps the economy as a whole. I think the Pres would have to release oil from the strategic reserves at that point....no choice I'd think.

No, he wouldn't. And it would be an idiotic choice for him to do so, although there may be political reasons for doing it.

Yikes.

That's crazy.

At some level, recessions are needed. We need a gas-price fueled recession to get off oil. It won't happen any other way. We need a credit-based recession to get Americans out of the mindset that they're entited to have what they cannot afford. It won't happen any other way.

I agree. An occassional recession should avoid the otherwise unavoidable depression.

Problem with this is that businesses lose revenue, which then causes them to toss employees overboard, which creates waves that cause problems for other sectors. I see that unemployment has continued to climb and we may end up with a quarter that finally goes negative soon.

Businesses, and Wall Street, need to learn some lessons as well. The sooner they get out of the quarter-to-quarter evaluation process, the better off they and the rest of us may be. Being a slave to what an analyst says about your very next quarterly financial report is a bad way to run a business that you expect to maintain indefinitely. It encourages short term thinking and punishes investments made for long terms, which has never been a recipe for sustainability.

Late Friday news dump FTW:


Complete bullshit that preferred shares are going to be protected by the government and common shares devalued instead of wiped out. Socialize the losses!

Value Driven: The standard-of-living bubble - Aug. 20, 2008

Could be a busy night.

Lehman looks like it has no buyers and will file bankruptcy.
AIG seems set to announce a major restructuring.
BofA looks set to buy Merrill.

Wonder how all this will play this week. Is it a way out or a foreshadow of a broader collapse of uninsured banks?

World markets are down 3-5 percent. Looks like a good day to stay away from CNBC.

Was going to update this thread with the latest Lehman and Merrill news but you beat me to it.

Just 2 notes of reference from my past.

• I remember entering a Merrill brokerage office in the mid-80s in a nice office building thinking 'nice place'.
  
• I remember being in Times Square late one night with a co-worker and we passed by the Lehman office. They had several limos waiting for a pickup and I remeber seeing 2 Lehman bankers (1 older guy, 1 younger guy) waiting outside in the front. I thought 'wow, lucky younger guy, able to be part of the company'.

Sorry to see them go but maybe things are coming to a head and we can get this past us.

On the contrary, it is days like this that make CNBC worthwhile. I watched more of it this morning than I had in quite a while.

Just heard that the major sponsers of my favourite soccer team are going belly up :(

I hope financial history doesn't forget how Dick Fuld completely fucked up Lehman.

Looks like the Dow will start the day down over 300 points. As warped as it sounds, I can't tell you how excited I am about the relatively low market right now. I am putting quite a bit of money into my 401K over the last year or so. This slow economic period is going to end up being an economic boom for my retirement savings over the long haul.

It will. The boom-to-bust cycle in our economy is primarily driven by the ability to forget about history and do it all over again.

sweet jesus what a weekend

Oil has fallen down by about $5, to just over $96 per barrel.

AIG next?


stock's down ~51% already today

Yippee.

I'm not a Greenspan fan. I think he is one of the reasons for the mess we're in.

+1

My wife works for Merrill as a CA. We are on eggshells right about now.

+2

jeezus - meltdown in the markets today!

I switched my 401k mix from 80/20 stocks/bonds to 40/60 last night. I hope that was the right move, but hearing that Vanguard is heavily invested in AIG stuff makes me pretty damn worried.

This has hit pretty close to home for me. One of my roommates is on a sales desk at Lehman, a girl that's a good friend, she's in HR, and a buddy of mine who is a blast to hang out with, he's over in the asset management division. Sucks for all of them.

I have friends at all the other firms as well, and pretty much the only ones who know they're safe are those at Goldman.

yikes Logan - sorry to hear that

Hope so, but GS is down 13% today so far.

It's not really unusual for other players in a sector to take hits on a day like this, is it? Their numbers will come back up before the end of the week, I bet.

I was about to liquidate a couple of my investment accounts and I wish I had done it on Friday. Now I will have to wait it out a couple of days to see where we go from here.

its actually quite scary how intertwined it all is.

Ive been listening all day and people are really scared about AIG's possible failure and the FED just slammed the door on the idea of a 'bridge loan' but apparently Goldman and JP are being encouraged to help out.

nope, not at all unusual.

I wish I knew enough be able to say. I've been taking a crash course in financial blogs over the past few months and have learned some but not enough to say anything for sure.

I do know that Lehman, Merrill and AIG going down in such a short time with WaMu and Wachovia on the horizon can't be a good thing......especially when as I understand it the FDIC has about $70B in their reserves and WaMu alone is up around $120B in insured deposits.

What pisses me off about Greenspan is he blames others for the mess (such as the government running up the deficit, banks not checking themselves, ect.; which are all valid reasons and components of the mess), but he fails to take any responsibility.

I hope NoSkillz was able to get out of those commodity positions a while back. I was right but I wasn't patience...not a virtue I do well with unfortunately.

I know someone whose livelihood is dependent upon WaMu staying solvent (although he does not work for them directly), so their troubles hit close to home. As for Wachovia, I have banked with them since I was in high school, but we had decided we would kick them to the curb earlier this summer and that should be completed very soon.

Re WaMu: I know a couple of people also (they're based here) and they're also who I do my joint checking with......but of course I'm small potatoes so not too worried about not being able to access stuff. I'm likely going to move that account to my credit union though just to be safe.

I bank through both WaMu and Wachovia - but to be honest I'm not convinced that any American bank is particularly stable at present.

I figure that with WaMu at least there's a decent chance of another institution taking them over because of the nature of their business and the amount of customers they have.

(I'm also small potatoes in the global scheme of things and so not panicing too much about things at present)

He was mainly playing POT as I recall - while its down I think it'll resume its grind upward in the future once the market stabalises (the company has recently announced its buying back 10% of shares because they consider the company heavily under valued at present which is a good sign imho).

Ouch...sent my roommate an email this morning, no problem...just sent one now:

You can find ratings on all American banks here: Banks and Thrifts Screener - TheStreet.com

Logan, May want to remove the email address from the post so that seach bots don't harvest it for spam. Who knows, maybe the system is down...

SI

This doesn't seem to work in Firefox or Safari on a Mac. Is this Windows only?

It appears to only work via Internet Explorer for me.

Yeah its IE only :( There's another link that has similar data but I can't remember what it is.

WaMu may not be dead, but it's coughing blood. Their credit rating was lowered to junk status.

Haha...his last name isn't actually "last"...just kept the first name in there :). Thanks for thinking of it though.

Lets just say I work for one of the companies spread all over the news today. Not a fun day.

And now down another 10% to $1.81 in after hours trading. Yeesh.

I have not read this whole thread but I have listened to many of the "experts" speak. Has anyone actually taken any responsibilty for any of this? It seems to me, Greenspan is dong the same exact thing that every other player in this mess has taken.