Headlines are captivating. Years from now, when any surviving archaelogists (or aliens) pour over the detritus of the worst messers in history, this is what they’ll find as remember whens from September 2008.
A mishmash from the overnight headline stew that is making the Crash of ’29 look like a church picnic in comparison. A crash long predicted. A crash waiting to happen with the financial finagling of debt and equity and foreclosures. And a new profession created: financial engineer.
It also looks like there won’t be enough deposit insurance to cover all the balances in American banks once the fun-run starts.
FDIC fund has about $50 billion to "insure" about $1 trillion in assets at the nation's financial institutions, says Roubini. "They're going to run out of money" unless Congress acts soon to recapitalize the FDIC.Up here in the cold white north, our Bank of Montreal expert takes a bleak look at the financial fiasco and pronounces:
It might not have had the visual impact of Hurricane Ike in Texas, but Monday's shakeup on Wall Street likely is a similarly "once-in-lifetime" event.
"This is the worst I've ever seen," said Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Financial Group.
What Cooper saw was a financial meltdown with Lehman Brothers becoming the biggest bankruptcy in American history and blue-chip investment house Merrill Lynch & Co. becoming a green light discount special and taken over by Bank of America.
The result at the end of Monday was two financial giants disappearing along with the prospects for a short-term U.S. economic turnaround
And what does Bush the Dimmer have to say?
U.S. President George Bush talked about the ability of the country's financial markets to recover on their own.
Yeah, right, go tell ‘em, Georgie.
And to add to the unending fun, Hewlett Packard decides to cut 24,600 jobs.
And the pope, well, he’s all about telling us to die, and to die only, at the time chosen by God, aka the Great Invisible Cosmic Housekeeper.
And after this, it all makes sense in a surreal kind of way that 35% of people prefer their Blackberries to their spouses.
And to round everything off quite nicely, with the markets in turmoil, more suicide bombings in Iraq, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Ike to clean up, bankruptcies through the roof, what are the main political contenders jawing about?
McCain says Obama didn't call Palin a pig
Yeah, the potential leaders of the so-called Free World, still in the sandbox.
You're as sharp witted as you ever are, WWW, and were in the world do you find all this information? You must absorb everything you read. The fate of America concerns me extra, because my daughter is an American, but we always think she has an escape clause.
ReplyDeleteIf I don't laugh, I'll cry, WWW!
ReplyDeleteThat was a black comedy of headline tour. If blogs had existed in Roman times, there'd have been a post comparable to this just before the Fall of Rome. ;-)
Irene:
ReplyDeleteI hope that, like my daughters, she carries an EU passport! As do I, I should add. It may be the only sane place left on the planet!
XO
WWW
What amazes me the most, T, is that mass-panic and/or total revolution has not broken out in the US.
ReplyDeleteOr has everyone just about given up reality when all they are faced with every day are the tales of Palin's lipstick?
XO
WWW