Cut entitlements as the Boomers are getting older. Keep military spending as the birth rate declines does America want another major war with a draft when birth rates are so low?
How many one kid families will say No to a Draft? Simply put we can’t fight a major war politically.
I’m not saying people with big families love their kids less I am saying that if you have only one kid chances are you are a little over protective.
Since we can’t fight a major war lets plan our budget around the reality.

This is playing out exactly as they wanted… things will get so bad, massive cuts in “entitlements” (don’t you love that word when it’s YOUR effing money? …. as if only they are entitled to entitlements).

I find the timing of the crash remarkable… hmmmm… just as Bush left office…. he couldn’t enact SS/Medicare reform when he wanted… now congress is going to say it’s required… cus there will be no money.

I don’t put on a tinfoil hat too often, but I’m thinking this is part of a much bigger rethug/neoliberal plan for them to rape/pillage under Bush (where they made trillions and billions) and then bail, leaving the working class of America to sort it out… read die. Then they’ll move onto other fallow ground around the world… wash, rinse, repeat…

Or put another way: Boys and girls, can you say “shock doctrine”? I knew you could.

also… Thanks Jane for your awesome reporting on this stuff. I forwarded a link to a truthout article revealing the ugly truth about Emmanuel… you wrote back saying truly he is an evil man.

Who would ever have though Obama would have wrought him, Geithner and Summers on us? Just like Pelosi having so much promise and failing miserably…. only about a trillion times worse.

I am really fed up with the wealthy entitlements

the more they make the more welfare they get, this is really bizarre

I cant’t beleive obama is trying to protect the jobs of the people that destroyed this economy

here’s my idea;

1) give the banks nothing, if they want to continue paying the salaries of failures that’s fine so long as they are not getting payed by me

2) break up all big banks, any bank too big to fail is too big period

3) ANY bank that bought other banks and then fired people has to be broken up again

4) get bankers out of the casino business, they are in the money lending business

5) banks are responsible for any loan that the government does not guarantee or mandate

6) no money for the bailout is loaned by the bank,the money is loaned by the government directly, the bank overseas the rules of the loan for a point, possibly two points, that’s it

if the bank doesn’t like it they are welcome to close

bing, those are the plans that will work

That might have been the plan but they are not in control of this Crisis the Same conditions that gave Hitler what he needed to take over also created Stalin and FDR.
2 out of three odds of a bad outcome for the GOP. Since America produced FDR our odds of having another FDR are higher than 1 out of three.
I assume Bush and Bill Bennett ran the numbers for the GOP on this.

Geithner is an even bigger clown than I thought he was.

“Course now right along with ‘em
Got no natural rhythm
But I go dancin’ every night
Hopin’ one day I might get it right…”

A Real Suede Shoe MF…

I am so OD’d on Geithner (and Bernanke who I watched until Geithner started). Completely incompetent, the 2 of them. We are so F’d.

Just goes to show nobody who comes from the financial industries can be expected to fix the problem. Geithner sucks.

After a couple of hours, Senators got tired of the vaguery (paraphrase):

DEMINT: The market doesn’t like your plan.

MSM stenographers duly report the Republican line: Market Tumbles Because Plan Lacks Details

Geithner: second verse, same as first.

It is a bad day for a future. Everyone involved appears to be admitting their ignorance and stupidity. Yet they also appear to be in charge.

We need to think of replacements for Geithner he is not in control a bank or hedgefund failure anywhere in the world could set off another Crisis.
We need a Lefty Economist with a plan.

When Demint and Corker and Vitter (for crissake) can make a person look bad…well…unless something changes – and PDQ – we’re really fucked…

on the bright side, we witnessed today a major advance in the evolution of our language:

shit pile –> toxic assets –> legacy assets

Um, I think it was the other way around. Stock market tanked during Geithner’s speech, and “lack of specifics” was the instant analysis on cnbc. Demint was chanelling that, some 5 hours later. And in this case, happens to be true.

As I said twice on the thread, at least we can count on the Rs (unlike the Ds) to be an opposition party. We should mild it as much as possible.

make that “milk” it

No Kidding. Geithner makes Diaper Dave look sensible? WTF?

tomorrow looks to be pretty exciting too: vikram pandit and all the other zombie bankers at the house financial services committee. 10am.

I’m aware that many people besides me, including you, Ian Welsh, and probably Paul Krugman, would be much happier if corporatists (a polite euphemism for fascists) like Geithner were in line holding their hands out and having them slapped for 8-plus years of risky business, instead of being in charge of figgering out ways of helping themselves out of the holes they’ve dug for all of us. I’m also aware that you were never of a mind to think Obama would be a revolutionary when it comes to Wall Street and corporate America. My question is: am I the opposite of a tin-foil hat wearer if I hope that Obama’s choice of Geithner and Geithner’s perpetuation of the status quo with respect to the risk-taking investors is aimed at solving a problem or problems that none of us even knows about (threats from China or Saudi to beggar us if we don’t pay them back, for example), or fears of a cabal of the richest convincing the military industrial complex of the necessity of a putsch, or something like that.
Call me crazy. Actually, don’t bother. I must be crazy

Actually I bet Geithner knows fairly exactly what he’s going to, and he also knows that there’s no alternative, and he also knows that if he said what it is out loud now, then the pols would scream bloody murder and then the markets would tank and then he’d have lost the layer of ostensible cover that he needs to preserve in order to get it done. And he won’t tell Congress a false story ’cause he doesn’t want to go to prison after it’s done. So he’s left with just not saying.

It’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate a straightforward statement of all that, it’s just that I think it’s possible that he may not be in a position to do it.

How long do you think this guys going to last?

Wowie. Can’t wait to see them taken to the woodshed, even though it’s only a kabuki woodshed.

How is a cabinet post recalled? Is there some sort of a legal procedure for giving these dipshits the hook?

I guess the constituents could put intense pressure on congress to recall, but that could take awhile. Then again, we’ve got nothing but time, right? How does your calendar look for the year 2050?

4 years.

lol. me too. when it comes to bread and circuses, apparently there is no bread. might as well enjoy the circuses.

So, was there no discussion of restoring Glass-Steagall?

And if not, why not?

Bob in HI

Beats the hell out of watching “Horror Thriller Chiller Theater”.

Here’s the answer the congresspeople wanted. This is where the money’s going, they just don’t want to tell us.

http://www.truthout.org/013009T Jeff Lieber, Village Voice article 1-27-09: Absolutely, positively must reading for any citizen of the US

“ Imagine if a ring of cashiers at a local bank made thousands of bad loans, aware that they could break the bank. They would be prosecuted for fraud and racketeering under the anti-gangster RICO Act. If their counterparties – the debtors – were in on the scam and understood that they didn’t have to pay off the loans, they could be charged, too. In fact, this scenario played out at subprime-pushing outlets of a host of banks, including Washington Mutual (acquired last year by JP Morgan Chase, which itself received a $25 billion bailout); IndyMac (which was seized by FDIC regulators); and Lehman Brothers (which went belly-up). About 150 prosecutions of this type of fraud are going forward.”
…………
As staggering as the Madoff meltdown was, it had a refreshing side – the funds were frozen. In the bailout, on the other hand, the government often seems to be completing the scam by quietly passing the proceeds to counterparties.”

There are no investment banks (of meaningful magnitude)left, to point to the simplist reason.

The Oxford Dictionary guys were busy today…

oh, this is good news (not). from CR: Obama on Nationalization

TERRY MORAN: There are a lot of economists who look at these banks and they say all that garbage that’s in them renders them essentially insolvent. Why not just nationalize the banks?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, you know, it’s interesting. There are two countries who have gone through some big financial crises over the last decade or two. One was Japan, which never really acknowledged the scale and magnitude of the problems in their banking system and that resulted in what’s called “The Lost Decade.” They kept on trying to paper over the problems. The markets sort of stayed up because the Japanese government kept on pumping money in. But, eventually, nothing happened and they didn’t see any growth whatsoever.

Sweden, on the other hand, had a problem like this. They took over the banks, nationalized them, got rid of the bad assets, resold the banks and, a couple years later, they were going again. So you’d think looking at it, Sweden looks like a good model. Here’s the problem; Sweden had like five banks. [LAUGHS] We’ve got thousands of banks. You know, the scale of the U.S. economy and the capital markets are so vast and the problems in terms of managing and overseeing anything of that scale, I think, would — our assessment was that it wouldn’t make sense. And we also have different traditions in this country.

Obviously, Sweden has a different set of cultures in terms of how the government relates to markets and America’s different. And we want to retain a strong sense of that private capital fulfilling the core — core investment needs of this country.

And so, what we’ve tried to do is to apply some of the tough love that’s going to be necessary, but do it in a way that’s also recognizing we’ve got big private capital markets and ultimately that’s going to be the key to getting credit flowing again.

my bold.

I’m with you. The opposition Party is exposing the stupidity – not that the Republicans wouldn’t love to tank SSI, Medicare and Medicaid entitlements. That is the fly in the ointment.

I wonder how low the DOW would be if Geithner had reported that taxpayers would not be sucking “banker” dick.

The criticism of Geithner by the GOP Senators and some here is way over the line.
There is no easy or straight forward solution. There is never going to be a neat, tidy and detailed plan for fixing this. I was pleased that Geithner understands this and not surprised that dimbulbs like Shelby, Vitter and Corker do not.

Why is Napolean Dynamite our new Treasury Sec.? ;-)

Coincides with Obama’s career in national politics.

Beats the hell out of watching “Horror Thriller Chiller Theater”.

what? no zombie bankers in “Horror Thriller Chiller Theater?”

Who would be able to fix this in this political atmosphere? Name someone, please.

Jane, get Ian and the Calculated Risk type experts to start a Progressive Credit Union.

When Bunning asked whether our largest banks were insolvent, Geithner said he couldn’t say anything about individual companies because of national economic security. When Bunning asked what he thought the ultimate pricetag would be, he punted.

I take it when Geitner is talking about “National Economic Security” he is referring to the well being of the banks not the economic security that would be the american people with a couple of trillion dollars less debt.

Exactly my calculation.

Great report, thanks Mz. Hamsher. I’m losing all capacity for Obama Led Warm Fuzzy.

I’m losing all faith on the banking bailout, I’m losing faith on any hope of preserving social security and healthcare for us aging boomers, I’m losing it on DOJ based rendition/torture issues, on the state secrets issues WRT domestic spying, on the failure to see any serious attempts to stop Iraq and Afghanistan and cut our defense budgets and stop foreign interventionist policies that sell for the war machine complex and the bankers who own it all, and on the domestic stimulus bill.

I’ve lost all warm and fuzzy and it’s obvious from Obama’s choices for his admin, and their decision making and policy making IN JUST A SHORT TWO WEEKS that everything is geared to perpetuating the same system that funnels the sweat equity of our labors upwards into the hands of the few.

I’ve little left to have faith in, other than the american people just plain refusing to accept all of this. And to that end, I see NO sign of a national unity to oppose it all. I’m slippin into that realm of those who think this is all gonna get really, really ugly with troops in our streets before this is all over . . . . I wonder what this nation will look like in a year, or in two years.

Harumph.

Julio’s 24 hours of fame!

You’re saying… that the first TARP traunch has actually being getting paid out to foreclosed homeowners?

Of course there’s no easy solution. Further, it’s well understood that Vitter, etal are idiots. However, a good place for Geithner to start would have been to forego the suede shoe bullshit and get real about the magnitude of the problems we are facing. Some much-vaunted “transparency” would be nice right about now. Then again, how would the financial markets like that? Yup…no easy solution…

that there is no easy solution is no excuse for going with a stupid solution – especially one that involves a major ripoff of the american public.

although roubini (in the CR) link above seems to think that obama knows he’s going to have to nationalize but the politics won’t let him until things get worse (my interpretation of what roubini said).

I think Obama just asks for their resignation however any replacement must pass a FBI check and the Senate must approve.

He has worked for Henry Kissinger. He is member of the Council of foreign Relations. But Hanky Paulson thinks he is just fabulous because he helped him think about his job and understands a lot of stuff, markets and government.

He actually helped me get acclimated and think about my job…And he’s a very, very, unusually talented young man. And so he understands government and understands markets.

He is also solving the Social Security and entitlements problem. Simply eliminate the ungrateful people who want government handouts. Lower the population using suicide and murder.

Across the United States, people have been reacting to dire circumstances with extreme acts, including murder, suicide and suicide attempts, self-inflicted injury, bank robberies, flights from the law, and arson, as well as resistance to eviction and armed self-defense. And yet, while various bailout schemes have been introduced and implemented for banks and giant corporations, no significant plans have been outlined or introduced into public debate, let alone implemented by Washington, to take strong measures to combat the dire circumstances affecting ordinary Americans.

Then it’s time to put pressure on the WH to dismiss the whole “economic team” (beginning with Geithner), and make sound recommendations about successors, starting with Krugman, Roubini, Galbraith, Stiglitz, etal.

Bunning is reportedly the stupidest man in either House of Congress, scarcely able to take care of himself. But he’s too smart for Geithner.

Well, at this point I am much less certain about this than many of you are.

BS!

One small but useful advance today: we are now officially talking of more than one trillion.

just one of the reasons i think throwing money at the zombie banks is a massive rip off:

George Kenney: So we put hundreds of billions of dollars into these walking dead banks, and they turn around and they try to pump up another asset bubble?

James K. Galbraith: Yes. Although, as I said, they don’t actually need the hundreds of billions of dollars in order to do this. They can do it simply if they have access to deposits which they may do simply because they’re insured. So that a bank, a bank which is insolvent, can still lend like crazy if you give it a guarantee on it’s deposits and don’t regulate it’s behavior. And that’s basically exactly what happened in the saving and loan crisis in the early 1980s. Because the regulators failed to come in and deal with the banks, take them over and control their behavior, they had an enormous incentive to engage in doubling down, in doubling their bets and trying to recover their capital. The other incentive that they had and which many of them acted on was to loot the institution because after all sooner of later the regulators are going to come in and you’re going to loose your access to all this wealth and power. So the top officers, if the institutions weren’t actually taken over by criminal networks, which happened in very important cases, Charles Keating and Don Dixon and others, the existing officers had an incentive at least to behave in ways to destroy the institution.

Oh, cool, you must know who’s stupider! Spill!

There’s no intention on the part of Obama, his admin or the bankers who run the ponzi game of our life to reinstitute regulations. None whatsoever. Money is funneled up, not down. That’s the plan, and regulation has been dealt with.

Look for MORE deregs across the board of public/busines/government policy as time passes. Look for MORE privatization of all public services with a reduction of access to them.

Maybe it’s the rain and grey gloom in Sacto, but mostly it’s just too much bad news everywhere I look. I’m bummed. I should prolly stay off the toobz for a while . . ;-)

If ya hook up with CT, tell him Larue and his send their love and hope for him and his. Thanks.

Did anyone ask the Sec. of Treasury how much he paid for the suit he was wearing at today’s hearing?

Yes, I can say with absolute certainty that Geithner is smarter than Bunning.
Incredible!

Read Orwell or Huxley.

The problem is that he is disingenuous and not leveling with the people. He is about saving a banking system which is so flawed and corrupt that it needs to be scrapped and re built in a completely different mode.

Perris makes some good points. I have written it before as well. Banks are there to lend money at a few points above what they pay for it. End of story. If that model is too conservative than tuff nuggies.

The financial sector’s miscreants have tanked the entire world economy. We DO need a banking sector. We DON’T need the one which we had. No point to saving it.

The deal should be how we take it down, and rebuild a new one. Investors take it on the chin. Too bad. Why should they be made whole and the banks customers take a bath?

Geithner is a banker and he can’t see it any other way. Get rid of him. He’s an embarrassment.

Ah, miscommunication. Sounded like you were saying Bunner wasn’t the dumbest guy in Congress, I’m totally open to that.

He’ll be gone in four years, along with Obama.

Eli’s up

I was a little freaked out by what happened today, and was actually hoping that watching these hearings would offer some clarity.

Not to be. But thanks for being there, eCHAN — selise and Hugh too. Nice to have someone else there saying that there’s not something there you’re missing.

You might be correct. I belive an informed person could make it in good faith.

That is far cry from calling an obviously challenged person like Bunning smarter.

thanks for being there, eCAHN — selise and Hugh too.

Yes. From me as well. You too, Jane.

This is irrelevant. The reason that there are no investment banks left is that non-investment banks were allowed to do things that investment banks do, i.e., what Glass-Steagall forbade. My point is that we need to once again break the banks up, forcing them to split their investment functions from their other functions, along the lines of Glass-Steagall. If this is not done, the same dam* thing will happen again.

Bob in HI

I see that Krugman is keeping his powder dry.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…..d-to-read/

i’d rather be stupid than intentionally do what geithner did today.

Read them long, long ago . . . . even have read noted authorities in subjects, then and since and now . . . . AND, have even read foreign press when I was younger (and still do, bless the toobz). We don’t live in this nation the way we are TOLD we live. *G* Here’s to hope . . . . right now, I’m just damned gloomy.

Good news: William K. Black is blogging at HuffPost. Hopefully he will do so regularly for the duration, unless the Obama adminstration calls him in. (They could do a lot worse, and apparently have.)

thank you for that link. most excellent. here are the first couple of grafs: The Audacity of Dopes

We are being played for chumps. The Bush and Obama plans could only have been designed by failed bankers — for their principal beneficiaries are failed bankers. We already know enough to confirm that the Bush administration made us the “fool” in the market by massively overpaying for assets. The Obama administration is about to compound that scandal with a “guarantee” program. The bankers that caused the crisis designed both programs. The senior officers at big bank aren’t very good lenders, but they are expert in maximizing their compensation.

Worse, Mr. Geithner, the senior public official who, with former Treasury Secretary Paulson, designed the failed Bush plan is the architect of the disastrous Obama plan. Indeed, as the New York Times has just revealed, it should be called the Geithner plan. He overcame intense opposition within the Obama administration and designed a plan that is even worse than the failed Bush program. Geithner’s gifts to the bankers that caused the crisis include: a unnecessary taxpayer bailout of “risk capital,” a massive coverup of their banks’ insolvency, gutting the proposed limits on executive compensation, and devising a “guarantee” mechanism designed to hide the expenses of the unprincipled bailouts from the American public

and it even gets better….

I think the Obama Administration should have stress tested Geithner before giving him what Obama called his day in the sun. He had no plan, no answers, and no re-assurance to impart to anyone. I suppose it is possible to imagine a lamer performance but this one ranks up there with some of the best stuff of Gonzales and Paulson.

But in the end it won’t matter. He’ll probably get his two trillion and he will squander most or all of it pouring it down the same financial ratholes we have all come to know and hate. And that’s really the point that got glossed over today: we are seeing another of history’s great heists being prepared right before our eyes and its perpetrators couldn’t even be bothered to come up with even a semi-plausible rationale for the theft.

Nothing like watching dumb and dumber, or how I learned to love becoming an indentured financial slave. Geithner, the Bush’s, the Clintons, Bernanke and Paulson know where the bodies are buried. So does this man.
http://www.worldreports.org If this faux plan moves forward, the Chinese will pull the financial plug by isolating the US economically while the rest of the world moves forward with the original G-7 outline which you can find at the link provided. Yes kiddies, the truth will set you free and the sooner Obama comes to that realization the faster this will be over. There are trillions waiting to flood into a new debt free banking system, but the powers to be would rather us to continue crawling through the mud and that’s just downright sad.

Everyone keeps saying how Geithner fought to get his way inside the PBO administration, but that is not making good sense to me. How did he win all those fights exactly? Based on the public presentations I am not convinced it could have been on the merits. In that case, why are they letting Geithner go do it this way? Is it that they think he knows better and it’ll work? Or is it more that they’re setting him up to take the blame for what they expect will be a failure, and have a second act in mind? Or as I suggested before, maybe they all know he’s going to have to do something very very unpopular and he’s the designated Bad Cop? I do not begin to know how to read all this…

Lotta material there, potentially interesting. Can you point to a summary article on the theory you described, please? Thanks in advance.

Yeah I kept waiting for him to say ’I have no recollection.’

He’s not technically stupid, but he’s been trained to suck up to diffuse confrontation. Add to that a propensity to provide answers that weren’t responsive to the questions he was asked and it was an oily, unsatisfying performance.

Bernanke weirdly had the air of being more forthright and competent. Which is not to say that he is — I have no idea.

I’ll try yo keep it simple, but you really have to go back into his archives.
HYIP’s or High Yield Investment Programs are a brilliant way of leveraging vast sums of money. This is how Europe was rebuilt after WWII and the Marshall Plan. The average return on such a program is 35 basis points per day. Multiply one million or a billion dollars by 35% per day and your calculator will burn out rather quickly.
What Story has been trying to tell the world for the last two years is that the Queen of England as well as the Chinese have made trillions of dollars available to the US to rebuild its economy, but those who are in control of the Federal Reserve ( the old guard )are resisting. They would rather remain in power while continuing to suck the life out of America.
This is a battle of good and evil and Old man Bush, Bill and Hillary along with operatives like Alan Greenspan have been at the center of this, the biggest crime in financial history.
This is not conspiracy theroy nonsense. It all started with a little known Ambassador by the name of Leo Wanta. The money is real and so was the court case. CV 02-1363A.
It’s really amazing what you can find, when you begin to connect the dots.

Geither comes from deep inside the Wall Street mind set. Most normal folks don’t understand their double speak, though a few more have learned a bit in the past 3 months.

It is a house of cards, a massive Truman set and aside from it being hard to explain it is even harder to JUSTIFY so they just spout rubbish such as we need to save the credit system we have, because we can’t imagine a system we don’t have. And who better to tinker with the system that we do have – the guys that have set it up and know how it works, where are the bodies are and how NOT to reveal them.

There are economists who can see the emperor has no clothes. They are not fooled by this liar and will tell you that all the banks are insolvent and they can’t possible undo the mess that they brought even with a few trillions. All that goes to counter parties who a pissed off that they have been screwed and they will not take it lying down. And these are not mom and pop stock holders. You can take that to the bank.

I agree it is hard to imagine Geithner winning a fight and two trillion dollars for what amounts to no plan. Curiously we didn’t see or hear anything about Larry Summers in all this. That makes me wonder about how real this “argument” was that Geithner won. It sounds more like a Summers or a Summers-Geithner policy, and since Geithner is Treasury Secretary he was given the lead on it.

The simple fact is if Geithner and his plan fail, and they will, that failure will attach to Obama and his whole Administration. Also while Obama and some of his advisers may be thinking in terms of second acts, the economy is so bad and getting worse so fast that it is unlikely that there will be either the time or money available for any such second acts.

I also look at this in terms of the stimulus package. It produces less than half the stimulus the economy needs. So what we are seeing is not plans within plans. What we are seeing is weak policy.

Well, don’t stop there! Thanks very much for the summary, and I hope you are able to help promote the information for peoples’ consideration and evaluation. I’m having a little trouble with the QEII-is-good part, but so far the story makes me want to hear more.

What we’re seeing Hugh is a sham. As one writer put it. Geithner and others know where the bodies are buried. What the Fed fears the most is having their game come to and end and it will. The Chinese will see to that. I can assure you that after the upcoming G-7 meeting this weekend, the “plan” that Geithner has put forth will change yet again.

Or a plan to fail, though unpacking possible motives for that gets into tinoilery pretty quickly. Not that that’s necessarily the wrong direction, just that there are so very many possible threads to start pulling once you go there.

Please do your self and others the favor of simply passing the site on. http://www.worldreports.org. Some day, someone perhaps in a press conference is going to ask Mr. Geithner why he didn’t allow Wanta who controls 27.5 trillion that was made by bringing the old Soviet Union down to pay his taxes of 4.5 trillion to the US Treasury. That is what the court case was all about. I sent away to government archives three years ago in Philadelphia to get a copy of the court transcripts on CV-02-1363A. And low and behold, the same names you are hearing about today are all involved in this case.
Most people just shut down because the lies and hypocrisy are just too much to fathom. But as they say on a pretty good t.v. show, the case is real, the people are real, and we the American people are being taken to the cleaners for no other reason but to retain power over the masses.

The simple fact is if Geithner and his plan fail, and they will, that failure will attach to Obama and his whole Administration.

that failure will also be attached to us and to the entire center/left coalition – especially if we support obama’s polices now that we’ve seen them. the only thing i can think of to head off a right-wing backlash is to be loudly critical of obama using left populist rhetoric because if the only opposition to obama is from the right, when obama fails where will the anger go if not to the right?

i’m already seeing small bits of right-wing populist rhetoric from progressives. if we are susceptible how can we expect people to our right not to be?

is there a downside to this approach i’m not seeing?

i shut down when the primary evidence is not readily available to me. if you have the court case, can you get it scanned and posted?

it’s over 175 pages. But if you read through Story’s site back into early 2006 I believe he does provide links. Further, I think there is some way to obtain these pages through a computer system that lawyers use. All they need is the CV # which I have provided.

It really is too much to expect people to read through. Find a journo or blogger to vet the material, reduce it to stories, and then champion it.

That’s the problem today Hugh. People want knowledge through sound bites. Apathy is our greatest enemy because people just get turned off if they really have to dig into something as it’s always easier to have someone else do it for them. Story has, and all anyone has to do is just read his last two updates, then start asking some pointed questions of those in authority and watch them squirm and scurry away.

People here are neither apathetic nor lazy about seeking out important information, you will find. There is however an awful lot going on in the world at the moment and the truth is that you’re competing for peoples’ attentions. For example, might consider posting links to those two “updates” you just mentioned. Unless you don’t think the info is important enough.

And BTW you mistake me for my better, Hugh.

Geithner: second verse, same as first.

“And the black girls sing…Do da do da do do do” — from some crazy song

when it comes to bread and circuses, apparently there is no bread. might as well enjoy the circuses.

Maybe Geithner is just a really sophisticated misunderstood pantomime kabuki artist. Wave the arms a lot, say a lot, tell nothing for ‘national security’ reasons. Did they offer the senators popcorn?

There are trillions waiting to flood into a new debt free banking system, but the powers to be would rather us to continue crawling through the mud and that’s just downright sad.

Probably a lot of the capital will move into the no-loss toxic assets. If yo know which hedge funds or other firms are going into these you can take your chances with them.

However, if you don’t want to go that way you can take a new look at debt-free banks and consider going into those stocks.

Third, you could look at those and say no thanks, but see it as a good sign for the overall economy and go into other non-financial-sector stocks.

Flip your three-sided coin and takes your chances.

i’m not a lawyer and don’t have access to pacer. i may be lazy but my priorities are not yours, if you can’t be bothered to help make the primary evidence available to me, i’m not going to be bothered to go track it down for myself. and being called apathetic is a new one for me – kinda funny.