Are you sleeping?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end. The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget.

Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars. What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a failure of government, of our political class. Whats going on? Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves.

An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. And yes this means us Brits too.

We the serfs are just spectators.

local to global

Eh well Katy didn't reply as yet, funnily enough,

wow anyway from local to national,

it all happening now with bush about to hold a press conference to the American people to tell them how much shit they are in, and its only a matter of time before Brown follows suit, most of us are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function but I see three main fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plans to keep bailing out banks with tax payers money

1) Its fairness. But when have we the peasants ever been played fair with anyway, The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses surely. Is it to much to ask that our government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards. Again if we the taxpayer are buying this black hole of debt the bankers have created, surely we should be told how much and how many generations will pay for it! (yep its that big a hole).

3) Its long-term effects. What bush and brown are up to is fundamentally weakening markets in order to calm short-run disruptions, this is I'm afraid desperately short-sighted.

Interesting times, if you have anything invested in a pension on the stock market GET IT OUT NOW!
Bush and Brown are just trying to slow down the collapse.

I'm predicting hyperinflation,,,, you may laugh, I'm not!

Recession depression addiction right enough!