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Eschaton '08 Challengers

Eschaton '08 Incumbents

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About Me:
Real Name: Duncan Black
Age: 36
Location: Philadelphia

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Monday, October 06, 2008
 
Frustrated Tirade

Obama campaign on McNasty:

"On a day when the markets are plunging and the credit crisis is putting millions of jobs at risk, the one truly angry candidate in this race kept up his strategy of 'turning the page' on the economy by unleashing another frustrated tirade against Barack Obama. And if John McCain is wondering why he's lost his credibility, he should look no further than the out-of-context quote he took from a 2007 speech in which Barack Obama warned of the subprime crisis we're now facing. Since then, John McCain has called for less regulation no fewer than 20 times, proving that he hasn't learned any lessons from the last banking scandal he was involved in and would give us more of the same failed economic policies as President," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

 
They Lost A Lot Of Money

Spending the day watching CNBC, it's really quite stunning that they're unable to grapple with the real problem underlying all of this instead of the consequences of that problem. There's been a tremendous evaporation of housing wealth as a consequence of the bursting of the housing bubble. Lots of banks made bad loans and that money isn't coming back. Dealing with home foreclosures is time consuming and expensive and a lot of houses are underwater. Other people lost money insuring mortgages. Still more people lost money buying up those mortgages. Still more people lost money lending to people to buy up more mortgages. Even more people lost money insuring those loans. Etc.

All of this babble about liquidity and short selling and blah blah blah just obfuscates all of this. A big reason that there is a liquidity problem is that... people lost a lot of money. All gone!
 
Dow Politics

If we remember way back to about 2-3 weeks ago, Hank Paulson was promising that there would be NO MORE BAILOUTS. Then, suddenly, we needed a giant BAILOUT RIGHT NOW. The media typically responded by using the Dow as a proxy for the economy/magnitude of the crisis in order to help hype the necessity of a massive bailout. And since the bailout passed, the Dow has tanked.
 
Poll Porn

Obama up big in Virginia.
 
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE

CNBC guy:

The 700 billion isn't going to be enough.

 
Deep Thought

Too early for 3rd bailout?
 
Health Care

I'm sure most of my readers understand that McCain's "plan" for health care is pretty much The Worst Fucking Idea Since Invading Iraq, but just in case you aren't convinced here's Krugman.
 
It's Yurp's Fault

Gelling narrative on CNBC seems to be that Europe, unlike the US, has failed to "solve the problem" in a comprehensive fashion.
 
Clogged Tubes

My email is jammed today. FYI.
 
Congestion

Since the point isn't made clearly often very often, the point of congestion pricing is that congestion is an unpriced negative externality. It isn't simply that roads shouldn't be free, it's that traffic volumes, especially at peak hours, are greater than what they would be at a social optimum. The point is that when you get on a highway or enter a crowded city at peak traffic times, you're slowing down traffic just a little bit for everyone else on the road at that time. Because people don't take that extra social cost into account when they get on the road, there are "too many" drivers on the road. Congestion pricing is a way of converting wasted "waiting in traffic time" into money which could be spent on SUPERTRAINS or whatever, along with reducing the excess traffic by aligning private/social costs of driving more closely.
 
The Grammster

Harold Meyerson:

Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America "a nation of whiners."

 
Deep Thought

I guess it's time for another bailout.
 
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Monday's here!

LONDON (AP) -- Asian and European stock markets plunged Monday as government bank bailouts in the U.S. and Europe failed to alleviate fears that the global financial crisis would depress world economic growth.

Investors took scant comfort from Washington's passage of a US$700 billion plan to buy bad assets from banks and other institutions to shore up the financial industry on Friday because of the uncertainty still hanging over the details of the deal and the degree to which it will help.

 
Morning Thread

My newspapers are full of crises. Some restoration of confidence. 
 
Overnight

Crazy month coming.
 
Obama Dogs

Funny (top pic)
 
Our Neighbors

So absurd.

SAN FRANCISCO - Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin called Afghanistan “our neighboring country†on Sunday in a speech that could revive questions over her tendency to stumble into linguistic knots.rtx95kp.jpg

Three days after a mostly gaffe-free debate performance, the Alaska governor fumbled during a speech in which she praised U.S. soldiers for “fighting terrorism and protecting us and our democratic valuesâ€.

“They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan,†she told several hundred supporters at a fundraising event in San Francisco.


In her defense, she probably was including our 51st state, Iraq, as part of our country. In reality's defense, that would still make her wrong.

Sunday, October 05, 2008
 
but...but...but...

Tom Brokaw agreed this was ancient history that happened when John McCain was in his 50s.

MR. YEPSEN: This is where the primary has been useful to Barack Obama. We’ve heard about William Ayers. We heard about it from the Clinton people, and we heard about it as part of the rough and tumble there. So it’s kind of an old story to a lot of people. And two can play this game. And this is where I agree with Peggy. This could go on a real bad turn here because we may be starting to hear about Charles Keating. I mean, if we want to talk about...

MS. NOONAN: Oh, of course we are. Of course.

MR. YEPSEN: ...Barack Obama’s negatives, John McCain has some, too. We can start hearing about those. He’s...

MR. BROKAW: John—we have to keep explaining to everyone—that Charles Keating was the Arizona developer with whom John McCain had an, a, a strong relationship, and then he got in a lot of trouble. He was prosecuted by the Feds, and John McCain said, “I made a terrible mistake here.†Yeah.

MR. YEPSEN: And it’s all ancient history, Tom.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah.




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