Fire Sale in Progress ...
I hate to say I told you so ...
Well, actually no, I don't. I quite enjoy it. I've been sitting watching this ticker for two evenings now — watching the U.S. economy tank so obviously even the mainstream media has been unable to perpetuate the placatory "business as usual" bullshit spouted by Helicopter Ben and Goldman Sachs old boy Hank Paulson.
Watching a potential financial Armageddon unfold (The Great Unravelling as Paul Krugman called it) is way better than watching TV.
The manner in which the thin blue line, representing millions of shares and untold millions of bucks, has defended the $100 barrier has been quite heroic. Kinda like Mel Gibson in The Patriot. Then again, I would expect nothing less of those paid so handsomely to defend conscienceless cash-hungry criminals whose shares — worth $250 a short while back, are now worth ...
... well, nothing really. Half a trillion dollars have gone missing in recent weeks.
It's like watching Blackwater at work; fiscal mercenaries doing their damndest to beat back a terrible truth, asserting to the end that complex derivatives based on bad marketing constituted sound economic practice. Moreover, it's evident (in the sterling job being done to protect the psychologically important Ben Franklin) that more is at work at 85 Broad Street than the collective will of the world's central banks and a free market.
I see the all-too-apparent hand of the Plunge Protection Team transforming this bloodbath into the globalisation of fat-cat debt. Mind you, the U.S. off-shored its debt years ago. China's covering most of it. Perhaps that should be the 'globalisation of poverty'. Dark forces loom large in our present and future. Like AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns and, yes, Merrill Lynch and a host of equally vile corporates that have profited hugely off the giant Ponzi scheme referred to as The Global Economy, Goldman Sachs will not be "... allowed to fail."
The global taxpayer, i.e. the salaried schmuck, you and I, will pay for its survival.
So, while it's well and good for me to get a kick out of seeing the sky turn dark with chickens coming home to roost — I'm aware that all I'm allowed is five minutes of fun. Afterwards, all I'll have is the grindstone and the knowledge that I told you so.
And that's worth far less than what I'd need to pay for a slice of Goldman Sachs which, in the time it's taken for me to knock this out, has had another $10 kicked out of it.
Mike Whitney (and, it must be admitted, several others) called this years ago and has been writing up a storm ever since. Did the mainstream media listen to him? Did the economists?
Nah ... Now they have to get out there and get a life.
Footloose ...
... or legless
Sticking with the 'bird' metaphor, I spotted this over at Niek's. Good thing too. Congratulations to all our Paralympians. After bombing out of the Beijing Olympics, South Africa's other athletes took flight from the Bird's Nest to take gold to its current heady heights.
Note: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley made it through the day, bouyed by news that short-sellers are about to get short shrift from the law. (Haven't we heard that one before?) The former dipped to $85.88 but is now riding high at around $120 and the latter, having scraped $11.70, has rocketed to $24.22. Tomorrow promises another volatile day on The Street.
