Given this kind of gutlessness, Bob Barr is starting to look good.

That’s just the caffeine talking. Stop reading the tea leaves and use them to make a drink with hot water and maybe some sugar or cream. I feel certain you’ll enjoy it and Bob Barr will fade from your thoughts. You can take that dream on a night train to Georgia and have Georgia on your mind and dream of peanuts and peanut butter and great soul food.

BTW, in Atlanta there’s a great old restaurant called Pitty Pat’s Porch. It’s probably the oldest in town and it’s great — live music too.

Just a thought off the top of my head:

Is it not possible that all these institutional investors took money out of Money Markets all at once to invest in something else? Like the stock market that just tanked and may by some be seen as a bargain?

Has the market gone back up as a result of some investments?
More likely they are holding onto cash to stay solvent and, in the case of banks, to be sure they meet their federal bank reserve requirement.

Why does this have to be seen as a crisis except that the Money Markets broke the dollar?

Because banks aren’t lending to anybody holding mortgages (and that’s a lot of people) money (via credit) isn’t flowing and that slows the economy, eventually to a very low level.

I keep coming back to the belief that America has reached an endpoint.

After the Bush administration is gone that nightmare will end. You might still feel groggy, but that will pass.

You should probably get mad at the system put in place in the 1970’s that allowed investment banks to take part in speculation in the residential market. These people are performing (poorly) a task that is essential to the economy. That’s why the dems have no negotiating room; …

Why should anyone get mad at something which apparently worked well enough for 30 years?

No, something happened in the last ten years and that has Phil Gramm’s name all over it.

Dems don’t need to negotiate now. We OWN this and can toss it in the trash or offer whatever we want. I only hope they see this as an American problem which needs a solid bipartisan solution. No rush job, sound economics.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Are you kidding me? He really said they just picked a ‘really big number’?

It’s dead. You cannot sell $700B to anybody once they know you just made it up.

Now Dems get to throw all the oversight, reporting, restrictions, exec compensation and anything else they want on the table and demand it be accepted.

Dem arguments will be based on something real. That trumps b.s. every time.

But unless he’s got the caucus behind him, I don’t know if that will work.

And presumably, Schumer’s got his lasers focused on bailing out Wall Street — he’s had his finer moments (USAGs), but he’s gotta be Wall Street’s guy in DC.

Whether the caucus is behind Dodd or not, he should do what he thinks is right anyway. If he caves, he’s only going to get rolled. He showed principle on FISA, and IMHO he’s capable of showing spine when he believes that there are principles involved.

And if the Dems participate in bailing out Wall Street — even with CEO payments capped, and even with ‘oversight’, I’m going to view them with utter contempt and derision. They’re acting like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off — ‘Oh, please, just let us be on camera asking Hard, Tough Questions, then we’ll go bleating off like sheep and step off the cliff to bail out Bu$hCo’s sorry, sleazy asses.’

Given this kind of gutlessness, Bob Barr is starting to look good.
Jeebuz.