Blowing some steam
Wall Street
Ok, I’m just getting fed up. Seriously.
First off, I’m sick of those damn wall street analysts. They go on the shows, post their blogs, write in the papers. They are oh so smart and know everything. Well if these dueschebags knew what the hell the were talking about, then A) we shouldn’t have gotten into this mess anyways, and B) they’d be running their own company. Not a consulting firm. They be running their own banks skipping merrily along the way because all of their rivals are being handed to them on a silver platter by the FDIC.
Comprehending the news has always been an art of distinguishing the bull from the truth, but honestly, nowadays it’s blurred so much you don’t know if it’s a horror movie or the 1930′s revisited. These guys have gotten into everyone’s heads that the sky is falling, grade A Chicken Littles! Sure, the sky is broken, some pieces may be dropping, but the last time I checked, the sky is still up there.
Today I was reading through the news and some “analyst” decided that banks like Citigroup and Bank of America should be nationalized, Wells Fargo and a couple of others close to it, then deemed JPMorgan Chase to be the safe bank (along with a couple of others). First off, so much of what crashed Wall Street came from the labs of JPMorgan Chase. They worked with the rating agencies to make them appear AAA. They created the system of slicing up the junk end tranch and creating a whole new “product” and getting a AAA rating from it. I don’t care which side of a horse’s ass you kiss, it’s STILL A HORSE’S ASS! So why don’t we start charging them fees for creating a monster.
As for Citigroup, Citi has been in trouble since BEFORE this recession. They may be past the point of surviving this thing intact. Honestly, good riddance. Bunch of grade AAA crooks. The whole lot of them.
Bank of America. Interesting story there for that bank. A few months back they don’t need TARP funds, being possibly the healthiest big bank at the time. They accept, to set the lead for other banks. No black sheep in the family. Now they are up to $45 billion in it?
However, the whole story – the way the “analysts” have portrayed it is pretty much – is skewed from the truth. First people were screaming because they accepted $25 billion and cut of the loan to Republic. They actually received $15 billion, the additional $10 billion came from its acquistion of Merrill Lynch, which was government brokered. Then people screamed because they needed more money for all of the losses attributed to a dismal December for Merrill. Nobody read the very long article in the Wall Street Journal. Definitely not the analysts. The day for day, meeting to meeting break down of the entire deal. If the shareholders need to sue anyone, it’s those S.O.B.’s in the Treasury and the Fed at the time. People sometimes forget, the government in many ways can be like the mafia. And this was definitely organized (i’ll stop short on crime).
Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, NC
Bank of America also lead all of the other big banks in lending for the fourth quarter. Yet they are supposedly an insolvent bank, a large blundering zombie. At least according to the “analysts.” By the way, Bank of America also did something today that apparently most of Obama’s choices for cabinet positions couldn’t do: pay their taxes. More like their interest payment to the government for the capital injection, but it’s interest on tax money, so I’m going to call it taxes. $402 million dollars. So a bank that manages to lend out $115 billion, more than any other bank, is being true to their obligation and paying out $402 million dollars to repay their debt (payments are to be roughly $2.8 billion for 2009). As a discloser, I am a BoA shareholder, and as long as the government does something with some sense and doesn’t nationalize BoA, I am going to continue to smile for getting BoA stock at where I am.
And as for Wells Fargo, I’m not sure much on those guys. I live out in the east coast, and they are a west coast operation. I do know they picked up a real mess when they bought Wachovia. I think Wachovia could’ve survived had they been around long enough to receive TARP funds, but you’ll never know. They ain’t a big poison apple with the purchase of Golden West, which goes to show that you should stay true to your principles. Prior to that acquistion, it was the official stance of the CEO and much of the upper management that the types of business Golden West profitted from were too risky. Yet they bought them, and lied to themselves about the inherit risks. Every single reason they gave regarding how Golden West had mitigated the risk turned out to be every single reason why it sucked the life out of that bank.
I’m not finished yet either.
Bipartisanship is going strong still. It may be even worse now. It’s horrible. Welcome to America, the land of the partisan and the home of the get nothing accomplished! The Democrats are just trying to run the show and the Republicans are just bitching about how they are left out. Yet I see neither side really wanting to play fairly, so no side has a real arguement. Screw the lawyers, we gotta get the politicians!
Sometimes I’m afraid our leaders are going to drive us straight off the end of the cliff, and then what will happen? Who knows, but communism and socialism are nearly one in the same. Maybe they’ll make us hate Jews too! We can have progoms and everything! Some nut will still all the Jews and the Arabs onto indian reservation, hoping that they’ll kill em all off. Hell, a third of Europeans blame the Jews for this financial disaster, so why not?!
Why, I’ll tell you why. Jew hating is pretty lame. I might as well hate a guy because he’s from Tennessee! Sorry, another round of things that’s been pissing me off lately. We may not be in a world war, but the whole fucking world is at war. Except maybe the Canadians. But do they ever go to war? Hell, the U.S. is always in a perpetual war with something. Drugs. Terrorism. The Vietnamese. The Russians. The Iraqis. Hell, I think we may be the only country in the world who may have just picked a fight with almost every country out there. We’re concerned about nuclear proliferation, yet we’re the only ones who has dropped atomic bombs on an enemy. Sometimes this country is such a farce.
We always have to be reassured that there is something to fear. If there is nothing to fear, then you can be like Clinton and cut back on defense spending. You don’t need a standing army if you don’t have a standing threat. Just ask Washington! The original G.W., George Washington. He didn’t believe in a standing army.
And even though we do have real threats out there (BTW, the majority of planning and training for 9/11 occurred during the military and intelligence lean years of the Clinton admin. Defense spending cut back on the number of cigars he could…), they always try to manipulate us into being just a bit more frightened than maybe we should be. Why? People aren’t inclined to bitch about invasions of their privacy. Our country has found so many ways to screw us on our constitutional rights. I can hear Thomas Jefferson now, hooting and hollering looking down on us and saying “I told them boys they needed a good revolution every 20 years or so! Keeps the government honest!”
Friendly Reception of Taliban Fundalmentalists
What I do know is we are heading nowhere good rather quickly. We are declaring a timid “victory” in Iraq, though few are sure what they define as victory. Iraq drew us away from our real goal, which is Afghanistan and the Taliban and Al-Queda. Yet what do you know, we are sending 17,000 more troops over there. Too bad Afghanistan, as bad as it is getting since we started to ignore it, is no longer the real problem. It’s Pakistan. Making deals with terrorists. Islamic law rules again. Savage perversions of Islamic law, used in perverse ways to drive sane people mad, to make even the sweetest pet into a trained killer. Welcome to the new crusaders.
