The West Michigan Whitecaps have decided to kill someone:
Archive for March 23rd, 2009
Ballpark Food
Posted in Baseball, Miscellaneous on March 23, 2009 | 3 Comments »
No, Suck on This
Posted in China, Foreigners, Meltdown on March 23, 2009 | 1 Comment »
It seems Zhou Xiaochuan got Bernanke’s message loud and clear. And decided to bring it right back:
Back to the 1940s, Keynes had already proposed to introduce an international currency unit named “Bancor”, based on the value of 30 representative commodities. Unfortunately, the proposal was not accepted. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system, which was based on the White approach, indicates that the Keynesian approach may be more farsighted.
Lousy Taste
Posted in Middle East on March 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Curious decision in T-shirt design:
Israel’s military condemned soldiers for wearing T-shirts of a pregnant woman in a rifle’s cross-hairs with the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills,” and another of a gun-toting child with the words, “The smaller they are, the harder it is.”
For its own sake, Israel will sooner or later need to let go of the Palestinians, lest it wake up and see DF Malan in the mirror.
Gaming the System
Posted in Corruption, Meltdown, Miscellaneous on March 23, 2009 | 4 Comments »
So far we have been told that the private sector so misprices securities today that with public funds the private sector would accurately price securities.
The folks who brought us this logic now want us to believe that the public-private partnership will work. And the system they have devised is sufficiently complicated that some folks have emailed me to wonder what is wrong with it.
Nothing is wrong with the system if you want to shovel an enormous amount of money to a few folks on Wall Street. How do I know? Here’s how you can game the system if you are a bank (based on the system of Karl Denninger, but turbocharged):
Heads-Up
Posted in Meltdown on March 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Baseline guys have a modest proposal which is quite reasonable – why not let individual investors buy the equity for these toxic assets?
If Geithner’s taxpayer subsidized toxic public/private plan goes forward, I think it would be fair if the federal government allow non-institutional investors to participate via a no-fee investment vehicle.
Problem is, this version will only add more fuel to the fire. The public cannot possibly know the composition of the lousy assets they are buying – the hedge funds won’t either, of course, but that’s the story. So all the public has to go off of is the assertion by Treasury that it is somehow getting a good deal.
And it is not. With explicit public investing, you will only have a bad bank scenario (at least non-depository): the legacy banks unload their junk to the public for a ludicrous premium, and in a few years the assets in the new entity fail and tear through the capital of the bad bank, safely far away from the going concern legacy banks.
Does anyone think the government would be any more able to let that new bank blow up and take its public shareholders with it, just a bunch of Joe the Plumbers who thought they were doing the patriotic thing by getting in on a boondoggle?
The entire plan is predicated on misdirection, because the government lacks the nerve to take over the banks and wants to relieve the pressure to do so.
