Now on to you guys in the states in a few hours (of course, let's not forget Europe getting into it as we speak).
We went down in Japan by nearly 752 today:
Posted on 01/21/2008 7:12:51 PM PST by B-Chan
[CAUTION: CONTAINS VULGAR LANGUAGE]
Knees knocked last week from sea to shining sea as the shape-shifting monster of economic reality cut a swathe of destruction through the markets and financial ranks. The exact nature of this giant beast still remained largely concealed in a fog of accounting gambits, policy blusters, and reporting dodges, but a few intrepid scouts who glimpsed the behemoth up close said it looked like Godzilla with Herbert Hoover's face.
George W. Bush tried to appease the beast by offering each American adult the dollar equivalent of half a month's mortgage payment -- with the exhortation to drive forthwith to the nearest WalMart and blow it on salad shooters and plasma TV's -- but Hooverzilla just laughed at the offering and pounded the equity markets further into the dust of loss, while the "bank-like" guardians of wealth lay in the drainage ditches bleeding from their ears and eyes.
My favorite moment was seeing Treasury Secretary Paulson and one of his fellow shaved-head deputies at a press conference rostrum frantically trying to calm the news media rabble like a couple of extraplanetary high priests from a Star Trek episode -- the batteries having run down in their laser wands, and their incantations ("liquidity! liquidity!) veering into mystifying glossolalia.
I resort to such admitted extreme hyperbole because it may be the only language that an infotainment-drunk society can still process in the face of an epochal calamity that will transform the lush terms of everyday life as we've known it into something like a bleak surrealist landscape in the manner of Tanguy. That crashing sound out there is the armature of confidence needed to support an economy based on faith that borrowed money will be paid back. It's as simple as that. (Doesn't seem so exciting now, does it?)
The United States is so broke, its people at every level from the Federal Reserve on down don't know whether to shit or go blind. The homeowners cringing in the media rooms of their 5000-square-foot personal family resorts don't know how long they can stay put microwaving pepperoni hot pockets with the default clock ticking. The mortgage "servicers" don't know how they will persuade interested parties like, say, the Illinois State Cafeteria Workers' Pension Fund (holder of X-amount of mortgage-backed securities underwritten by, say, Merrill Lynch or Deutsche Bank) to foreclose on properties scattered everywhere from Key West to Bainbridge Island -- or if there is actually any legal mechanism known to man that would make it possible to "work out" the sliced-and-diced collateral. The millions of maxed-out credit card holders and the issuers of their plastic are stuck together paddling a leaky tub in a sea of troubles every bit as wide, deep, and polluted as the one the mortgage junkies and their enablers are sinking in. The developers of malls, office parks, and power centers are weeping into their filing cabinets as the harsh daylight of insolvency stops the orgy of "consumption" and the retail tenants pack up their unsellable goodies for the liquidators, and the rent checks stop arriving in the mail, and the notes on this mall and that mall enter the eerie realm of "non-performance." And, of course, there are the genius wonder boyz and Wall Street playerz whose algorithms and turpitudes underwrote the script of this horror show -- for all I know they'll end up laughing into sugary skull drinks on a beach in the Cayman Islands, or doing Chinese fire drills in federal prison (or simply ass-fucked on the granite countertops of their Tribecca aeries by mobs of angry, repossessed, swindled former American dreamers pouring into Manhattan from the tract house dormitories of New Jersey and Long Island).
There's a lot to be concerned about out there. I don't mean to be too cute about it. But, as the master once said, nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
A whole closet full of "other shoes" is now waiting to be dropped. Surely the biggest clodhoppers in the closet belong to the hedge funds, representing trillions and trillions of dollar-denominated "positions" which, however hallucinatory, had previously yielded enough real "money" year-by-year to keep all the realtors and Humvee dealers in the Hamptons goose-stepping to Goldman Sachs's drumbeat. These "positions" can't help now from moving into counterparty crisis territory, especially as the bond insurers such as MBIA and Ambac go up in a vapor, and if that happens the damage could be so colossal globally that Stephen Hawking might have to be brought in to run the Federal Reserve.
This is going to be a rough week. Fastening your seat belts may not be enough for this ride. Better superglue yourselves to the floorboards and pray for God's mercy.
Pessimist! But we do need your opinion as well.
Tell’em I’m not done with my day trading...
What the heck is “pickleball”?
I figured 10,000 and my husband freaked. LOL!
This is from memory so beware of it being a fact, although I can look it up in my books, but here’s the deal: Buy S&P on either Friday or Monday (Friday is scary — a whole weekend), and sell on Tuesday after the opening. It gives you about and 80-percent chance of a short-term gain.
I’m sorry to say I haven’t traded in a long time. Just haven’t trusted the market as much as I used to trust it.
I own my home free and clear, there’s enough in the savings accounts to keep up with property taxes, and I have several acres of fertile ground. Plenty of deer around here, too. Y’all have a nice time during the “Panic of ‘08”. Yahtzee, anyone?
Better yet make racoon jerky out of it. LOL! Poor racoons.
whiffle ball, paddles like raquetball, miniture tennis court. Fast moving like tennis, english like ping pong, seriously good workout, lots of fun, very cheap to play unlike golf or skiing....
Holy moley. That’s the Dow Jones, though. Wasn’t it just sold recently, and isn’t it privately held? Never traded it.
I think I would have loved your dad.
You ain’t so bad either. LOL!
Sure. We’ve also rolled a full straight.
I’ve played every single game or sport you’ve named off with the exception of pickleball. ROTFLMAO!!!
Last week I started off a game with a first-roll large straight and ended up with a sub-200 game. Did exactly the same thing in the next game. Sub-200.
I hate when that happens.
I’m also good at the 3 f’s...
Food, finance, and fightin.
Unfortunately or maybe fortunately, my husband, Cyber Liberty, doesn’t play games. He’s a political/historical anything other than games brilliant man.
He takes me a couple of times a year to play Black Jack at one of the Indian casinos around here because he loves me and he has tinnitus. I think the the sounds of the machines are A, C, and G. His tinnitus disappears.
You didn’t get the extra 500 points? Or is that when you reach 300? I have the game here, but haven’t played it in years. No one will play with me because I win about 90 percent of the time.
I’m from a huge family, 11 children, same parents. We couldn’t afford to go to movies every week, but once a month, yes. So we played games all the time. We all got A’s in spelling because of Scrabble. The dictionary was my best friend.
I’m also good at the three f’s, but mine are different. Food, finance and FRIGHTENING. LOL!
Gotta get up at 5:00 a.m, and it’s 2:07 in AZ. I love the night life in here.
God bless all of you! Sweet dreams!
Uncle Sams credit is still in demand:
10-Year Note, Mar 117'26.0 Change 1'27.5 Yield 3.484
yitbos
I don't know how you would put that in Japanese, but it would be very entertaining at least, for most Japanese readers, who want to gain some idea about what it has come to in largely indifferent, dumbed-down, opiated Britney Spears 24/7 Middle America while the North Koreans--who can survive weeks upon end on tree bark--are ready to launch chems and bios at hundreds of thousands of American servicemen, civilians and Japanese in the archipelago due to large unnoticed policies that would make Neville Chamberlain smile.
Maybe it would be:
米国の国家倒産時計により秒読み問題に普通なアメリカ人家庭が恐ろしい表情をしながらジャンクフードをマイクローウェブをして幻いい豪華な6LDKセカンドハウスで来る日が来るまでに情けなく待っているだけに過ぎない。
Now on to you guys in the states in a few hours (of course, let's not forget Europe getting into it as we speak).
We went down in Japan by nearly 752 today:
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