what types of authors were making substantive comments. I found Numerian, of course, sought him out too and the rest seemed to be financial analysts and such - folks with direct contact with share holders. Although this item http://tinyurl.com/6z9xhq caught my eye back in 2/08. Certainly seems accurate.

Thanks for the links. What ever they screw up, there's always something bigger down the road. "credit default" - sounds about as appealing as "subprime." Amazing times.

And now they're shifting the default to us.

I agree with your take on this. The bailout is blackmail, simple as that. So by that logic, those who "endorsed the plan's main thrust" are caving in, just as you say.

But the nation has opposed all sorts of things they're doing and they simply don't care. Same in Great Britain, even bigger derivatives holders than the U.S. - they had single digit support for Iraq and Blair did it anyway.

Time for a big push back from the people.

But the nation has opposed all sorts of things they're doing and they simply don't care.

Until recently Americans haven't been hit in the pocketbook in a big way. When this happens, Americans wake up and, boy, do they feel ugly. We aren't quite there yet, but the bill that is coming due on account of the debt load and the magic of compound interest can't be pushed back too far anymore with the economy heading south and the days of cheap oil and cheap and easy credit over. The day of reckoning is at hand.

The UK is probably in worse shape than the US.

I referenced the GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletion from Summer 2008. Here is their scenario. #2 fits in with the official end of our century:

1. A Dollar in distress (EUR 1 = USD 1.75 at the end of 2008): Panic-fear of a US currency and economy collapse eats into the American collective psyche

2. Global financial system: An impossible requirement – placing Washington under international trusteeship – provokes the system's break

3. European Union: The periphery sinks into the recession, the Eurozone only slows down

4. Asia: The « double whammy » inflation/export-collapse

Good grief, can it get that bad?

Good grief, can it get that bad?

Yes, that is why the people in the know are freaking out. They tried to intervene, then manipulate, and then bluff. It hasn't worked. Now they are almost out of ammo.

If Paulson get this 700 billion (he will) and that doesn't do it (the savvy people already know it won't and are intimating it), there's nowhere to hide anymore.

I don't think there are many people in this country who believe that this is the last bailout for a good while. It's the opening bid. Why think that? Because to get to where we are took a lot of lying and distortion. I like Numerian's suggestion of a big table where the perps sit down and cancel out as much of this as possible. If that would work, the courts might intervene to cancel out the results. They could be informed ahead of time that it would be their path to permanent retirement from the bench. The judiciary is inherently corrupted as evidenced by their debate over the propriety of taking free vacations disguised as legal seminars.

the counter-parties would cancel the credit default swaps.

The real problem is the massive overhang of derivatives and "funny money" created by the shadow banking system to take advantage of the giant pool of global hot money. Now the US public is supposed to bailout Wall Street AND the global wealthy who stand to lose.

NO DEAL.

Let these a**holes figure out to handle it without public monies sans public ownership.

After reading Part 6 of your series, particularly these two references, your comment here seems more like the best we can hope for.

http://tinyurl.com/6z9xhq LEAP 2020 GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin

It's grim and they predicted a lot of this with a fair amount of specificity. They're thinking with the constraints of the current system. If the meltdown becomes a 'systemic' crisis and we're constrained by the current rules, we're screwed. If people get innovative and there's a free dialog, I would see great hope. For example, we can't finance wars as casually or even maintain the crushing expense of overseas troops. People might actually ask, why do we have troops in Germany, Albania, 60 plus major installations around the globe. This may be 'papered over' also. We'll see.

Because the SEC created an artifical short squeeze?

Shorts were only outlawed on the financials.

Lots of factors, I guess. Mostly just paper wealth frantically sloshing around as it evaporates.

Reality bites.

so I really can't tell that well.

On the other hand, preventing shorts on a stock that's in free fall is pretty drastic.

BTW: The list of no-short stocks is now up to 900.

but from my perspective it's in a state of freefall, yet no one in any position of authority will admit to it because they don't want to cry fire in a theater. The problem with not pointing out the obvious is that it is only making the problem bigger.
What if Hoover had inflated the money supply, as the New York Fed wanted him to? It might well have kept the good times going for another ten years, but it would have seriously inflated the dollar. I suspect Roosevelt would have had a far more difficult time organizing the New Deal and fighting WWII if the money had been in meltdown. Well now the money is about to go into meltdown. We are going to have to rebuild the world monetary system.
It will have to be a public banking system, rather then the private banking system. It will require a national currency, while communities will incorporate their own banks and use the profit, rather than having it drained off. Since the government is eventually going to own much of the current system, this isn't as far fetched as it seems.

here

can only function if it rests on a foundation of ..... please fill in the blank. It also must be immune to greed.

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

But to get rid of greed is to get rid of human behavior...

For foundatons of a global monetary to be strong, the levers of power cannot be manipulated by any small group, like central bankers have manipulated the present fiat system, imposing inflation as a hidden tax and using a dominant currency for political and economic domination, as well as outright rapacity through stealth devaluation.

The final straw is the current break down of the system due to this interference. A new system would have to obviate this eventuality.

"It will require a national currency, while communities will incorporate their own banks and use the profit, rather than having it drained off." I've heard a few people talk about the need for local banking, resource sharing, etc. It makes sense if you're in a prosperous area, in particular. You have more control over all sorts of aspects of the economy. By my unqualified estimate, there are about six or seven real "prosperity zones" and with the rest fairly flat or vulnerable. The trick is to get the hacks out of the dialog or at the margins. That's difficult given their power but essential given their track record. Maybe events will just carry it in that direction.

And I now understand why we could not afford nationalized health care.

is military expenditures totaling more than the rest of the world combined. All other developed countries have universal health care, and many developing ones too.

The US has forgone this for global military hegemony.

and bottom up growth, when the order gets old and crusty and it can't keep expanding to define further growth, it has to be shed, like old skin. This is a very natural process, but at the level we are talking here, probably painful on the personal level.
Revolution doesn't happen because the people are rising up. The people are always trying to rise up. It happens when those at the top lose control. These people have destroyed their method of control. That is not all bad. That is actually quite good. In the long run. For those of us who live to see it.

Hegel explained it in terms of the historical dialectic, and Karl Marx modified this historical dialectic, holding that it is driven by the interplay of socio-economic forces rather than reason as foundatonal principle, as Hegel postulated.

Schumpeter called it creative destruction.

Others account for it by "sh*t happens."

May the Force be with you.

it's a convection cycle, with the interplay between rising/expanding energy and collapsing/top down order/mass. These people have been carried aloft by a generations long economic updraft which they have little real understanding of, except that they are very high up and things are starting to cool off and they don't want to think about falling back down. Fact is, gold makes a lousy parachute, as they are burdened by far more then they control.

I tend to spend a bit of time discussing this on physics forums and how such a convection model explains the expansion of space and gravitational collapse, since they both co-exist and effectively balance each other out, but physics is stuck thinking in terms of particles, rather then processes. Here is an essay I have in this contest;

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/category/10

I think time makes more sense as a consequence of motion, rather the dimensional
basis for it.
Consider; If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed
through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future,
then in the past. So which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then
physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if
time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the
events created go from being in the future to being in the past. Time as consequence of
motion means it has more in common with temperature, then space, since they are both
descriptions of and methods for measuring motion, rather then dimensional basis for it.
This relationship between the matter/energy moving forward in time, as the events
created move back in time applies to all scales, whether the earth rotating and creating
days, or a cesium atom going through transitions, or strings and their vibrations. This
isn't presentism, because as a measure of motion, it would be meaningless to describe
time as a point. The only absolute temperature is the cessation of all motion and the
same would apply to time.
If energy is perfectly conserved, there is no time function for energy, because it simply
is, so the only time function is a consequence of the energy, not the basis for it. Just as
temperature is a consequence of energy and when temperature changes, it is because
energy is dissipated to, or consolidated from other areas. So with time, when one
potential direction of events prevails, others are reduced or dissipated, so the energy
consolidates to the events that happen, not alternatives. The energy doesn’t collapse,
but the information does, as it goes from future potential to past circumstance.
The sun appears to travel from east to west, but it’s the earth rotating west to east. To
the extent reality just is, a clock to reflect that would have a stable hand to represent
what is, with the face rotating the units of time past it. Currently the clock represents the
sun moving east to west, so it has hands moving left to right across the top of the clock.

Think about a thermal medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules
moving about. If we were to construct a time keeping device out of this we would take
the motion of one of these points of reference and measure it against the medium it is
moving through. The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock.
Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all
other clocks. The motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/
face of the clock. At any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an
event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium
against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is
displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around, so the events go from
future potential to past circumstance. The illusion of direction is created because the
physical reality of the points moves one way through the series of circumstances,
though these events go the other way. There are innumerable points of reference
describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so every
potential clock constitutes its own measure of time.
This model defines life as well. The physical brain moves forward in time, but the mind
is a record of the events receding into the past. Most motion is at the speed of light, but
we cannot process it in real time, so our minds create flashes of perception, like frames
of film. Thus to us, time does seem like a series of instants. Of course these thoughts
go from present to past, as the brain goes on to the next. Ultimately life amounts to a
larger organism that is constantly moving on to the next generation and shedding the
old like dead skin. It is the units of our individual lives, like markers on the face of a
clock, that start in the future and end up in the past.
Regards,
John Merryman
Sparks, Maryland

For further exposition of how it ties into the larger physics model, I've offered up some points in the latter posts in this entry;

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/238

They have more than enough money. What they think that they need is control over us. Somewhere in the back of their minds they assume that if they lose control, we'll be so furious they won't be able to retire to the gated community of Dubai. What they don't know is that nobody cares about them, unless they make messes like this. They can just come clean, retire, and nobody will think much of them (except plaintiffs in the numerous lawsuits;)

The people are rising up and I expect that science and technology, combined with real humanism, will gain the lead and we'll be able to solve many of the major problems.

.. don't think they ought to be able to keep their ill-gotten gains.

I have no problem with them retiring to Dubai. But their descendents shouldn't get to live lives of idle luxury in palacious estates in the Hamptons for generations.

Fascism is based on the marriage of state and corporate interests so there's really no distinction and the state becomes an agent of the corporate interests. This crew has made a 'great leap forward' in that plan and will get their victory without giving in for much more than a stupid "oversight" panel.

Bailout is well represented but no bailout will only have a few votes. What a disgrace.

I think they've gone way over the top and the Democrats seeming signs of a pulse in speaking up is one sign of just how much grief they're taking. If the pressure keeps up, maybe they'll represent the interests of the people. What a great day!