Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Bear Sh*t Bull Market

DOES A BEAR SH*T IN A BULL MARKET?

Short version for the Durationally Challenged;

INVESTMENT BUNK
Rescue of Investment Bank Bear Sterns stunning display of Corporate Elite Socialism.


Now here is the exhaustive, tedious, whinge...

This past Weekend I visited the United States Of America. Amidst the Financial turmoil that is besetting the most powerful Nation on Earth, the fellers wearin' cowboy hats calmly drove around in their pickup trucks with God Bless America bumper stickers. I don't understand this country.




OK I get the idea that the INDIVIDUAL has the right to pursue happiness (Money) without any Governmental intervention and at any cost to the welfare of their next door neighbour.

I even understand that some of them believe that the Almighty Himself has providentially hand picked this Country as the Zenith of Human Potential Experience. What I cannot fathom is that these people can expect the rest of the world to understand them.

How would I explain this place to an Extraterrestrial or another Earthling for that matter? I guess that I would need to start with one sentence;



You're on your own Pal
... and buyer beware.



You are the master of your own destiny.
If you make it big we love you and if you don't you are just holding the rest of us back...LOSER!


Like most Earthlings Americans seem to adore and worship wealth. What differentiates them is the magical thinking that they are entitled to it and that it is possible.




It doesn't matter how you get rich. You can get it by winning a Lottery, inventing the Pet Rock, catching a ball, siphoning equity, writing Romance Novels, snapping photos of disheveled Celebrities having a coffee, raising 20,000 Hogs on one Farm, designing Nuclear Weapons, or even making the most out of being born with big boobs,

it doesn't matter how, just get it.




This obssession with the Gawd given right to get rich is finally taking it's toll and a day of wreckoning may be at hand. Decades of ignoring sound financial principles and shuffling the chairs on the Titanic may finally bring the chickens home to roost.

Nobody better exemplifies Greed than the so-called Captains of Industry.

Why didn't anyone stop Corporate Executives from plundering the cookie jar? Only 6 CEO's in the Fortune 500 earned less than $1Million..and they all had stock options anyway so that faux salary is just window dressing for the investors. CEO's make about 240 times what the average worker earns.

By January 2nd the top execs will have made more money than the employees will that entire year. ..and why do these f*cking bastards get Golden Parachutes worth hundreds of millions of dollars when the company loses money?

In America the Federal minimum wage is what, $5 something an hour, and that figure has lost ground over the last 30 years. If that downass figure were to match CEO compensation it would be around $25/hr.

In 2006 four of the largest Investment Banks, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers & Bear Sterns, paid out $49.6 BILLION in compensation. ((GAG))



The spectacular but predictable implosion of Bear Sterns this week should wake up the great unwashed. As the CEO James Cayne played in a bridge Tourney in Detroit the stock plummeted to $2/share...his 14,000 employees just lost their retirement savings.

If they had squirreled away $200,000 they now own $2,000 worth of crap.


So what did 'free enterpriser' Bush do? To stop the run on the so-called "Bank" ($17 Billion in 2 days) the Fed OKs juicy JP Morgan to buy Bear Sterns for $236 M and that includes the frickin building. So much for 85 years of fancy financing.



"Juicy Jaye P Morgan"



Despite the illusion of living in a Free Enterprise System the American Elite protects itself with a special Socialism for the Rich. The RICH circle the wagons and protect themselves and their phoney baloney world of smoke and mirrors.



The All American Dream of having it all, getting something for nothing, is a complete fabrication. These dream-makers are slick-sideshow-snakeoil- salesmen. The imaginary economic vision of exponential endless growth is not realistic.

That carrot that the charlatans are dangling in front of their nose cannot be caught. All of those commercials and movies that show everybody else living the American Dream is undergirded by a 110% mortgage.


The rest of the world just shakes their heads at the collective National avarice that they try to export. There has to be some sort of balance. The America of the 21st Century seems to be exactly like the Oligopolized Country that existed at the turn of the 2oth Century. ..
replete with a microscopic 'ruling class' that hijacks and snags all of the wealth.


I was wondering how much more damage the Bush Administration's mindnumbingly poor decisions could inflict in the last months of his Presidency.
Well here is stage two. Stage one was to siphon 52% of the Federal Budget into Military Spending and alienate the country from the rest of the world....now the cost of borrowing $3Billion a day to keep the Government going and allowing the Wall Street to invent creative financing to steal outrageous sums of money from middle class folks squirreling away a couple hundred bucks a month to retire someday is going to implode.


But the Old Boy's Club will be protected. The great unwashed be damned. The Patrician mindset of the Elite must be enforced to discombobulate the common man. What the hell do they know about money?

Just keep yer Piehole shut and do as your told, OH YEAH and keep dreaming.

The CEO's will still come out of this 240 times richer than the Mr & Mrs Joe Sixpack.
Can you honestly say that you believe anything that this Administration tells you.
Well Joe Sixpack,
don't get mad get some!
Open a can of whoop-ass on those bastards!
It's time to storm the f*cking Bastille!



..and you had better not take to long to do it...

believe it or not, this current version of America may have reached it's best before date and it has an expiration date.


All Empires do.

20 comments:

  1. Thank you.
    It saves all the rest of us trying to say all of that, and none of us would have been so articulate about it.

    Unfortunately, I cannot maintain this level of seriousness, so I think that it is appropriate that I should comment on my disappointment on not being named in the sex scandals article.

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  2. Anonymous3:17 pm

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Anonymous3:17 pm

    Well, thank God for the short version! I am definitely durationally challenged (read easily distracted) when it comes to reading things on-line.

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  4. Could you suggest a nice Canadian neighborhood to relocate to?

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  5. First off, I want to ask what part of America did you do to? I don't see too many cowboys around here in the big city. :)

    But now to the nitty gritty. Are you sure you are not American? If not, do you want to be and let me live happily in Canada?
    The American dream is not for all folks, it is for the same people we are trying to keep out of our country. With grants and loans and programs that immigrants can only get, or African Americans can get, it is hard for such an average poor white boy to make it in this world.
    My dream fell short when i was born, a mere victim of circumstance and majority.
    I am proud to be an American. Why? I do not know, but I am. I see the potential of what this country could be when the head is removed from the asses of the great americans that hold all the money.
    I hear these figures of billions of dollars thrown around and i shiver. There is so much money in this country and only a select few are privledged.
    Welcome to the American dream of hope, which is all most of us have.

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  6. I personally believe in all that the Donn writes and me thinks he is the sexiest blogger in the universe.

    You are so right on.

    That is all. :)

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  7. you've put me right off buying a cowboy hat now.

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  8. Anonymous3:19 am

    Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-). I will add in my blogroll =). If possible gives a last there on my blog, it is about the TV Digital, I hope you enjoy. The address is http://tv-digital-brasil.blogspot.com. A hug.

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  9. well said, that man

    *goes off humming Money Money Money*

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  10. Anonymous6:22 am

    All I can say is . . . yep.

    Nothing like another Gilded Age, I always say.

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  11. Sing it, brother! Power to the people!

    (Oops, I'm channeling the 60's, again.)

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  12. If only we could get the Pacific Northwest to go ahead and succeed from the Union so I can apply for citizenship in AMERICA II, THE SEQUAL.

    Wouldn't Seattle make a COOL capital?

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  13. So true. Every Empire follows exactly the same cycle, it's as predictable as it is inevitable. Why we-in general- are so willfully ignorant of history is baffling to me...the present is so much easier to understand if one knows the past...your sentiments echo those of a great many well-informed, non-American persons.

    On the wages: I was a (non-law enforcement)Federal Agent in 1999-2000, had hundreds of sub-ordinates and made $25 an hour...a recent 2008 temp job found me washing trash cans for $8 an hour, which is cool because the cost of EVERYTHING has dropped by 2/3, matching my falling wages...hmmm...know anyone up in the True North who has an extra room and/or couch? I will cook and clean for room, board and asylum.

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  14. What can we buy for $2 in these credit conscious times?

    - a copy of the Financial Times
    - a UK lottery ticket
    - probably a week's worth of family groceries in rural Russia
    - several boxes of matches
    - 2/3 of the Big Issue magazine, sold by homeless people
    - half an hour of wifi at Starbucks

    and OH YES one of the world's largest investment banks...

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  15. Or you can get rich by patenting or trademarking something that belongs to someone else: their crops, bits of their DNA.

    Or by destabilising democratically elected leaders just because you want them to open their markets to USAnian goods.

    Or get rich by threatening sanctions against poor nations unless they buy your patented anti-AIDS drugs instead of cheaper generics ... and never mind how many people suffer and die early because the USAnian empire wanted to squeeze more money out of people who can't afford it.

    Or you buy materials mad by slave labour in China and slave/child labour in parts of Asia (no workers' rights, indentured servitude) and build them into products that earn megabucks for the USA.

    Don't get me started on that noisy, uncouth, indoctrinate-from-birth nation between Mexico and Canada. It's a greedy, resource-squandering country that wants a whole darn planet for itself because it's incapable of sharing the world with others unless it is the one that dictates the terms.

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  16. i just heard the american dollar has slipped below the canadian dollar by seven cents?!?! and yes the kill or be killed theory is still in effect here... great post

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  17. A nice piece of skewering. And, sadly, well deserved.

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  18. vicus,
    I will be more than happy to slander your good name in the my new tell-all book about the sexual revolution. As a matter of fact you shall have your own chapter entitled; Camilla's Gorilla.

    citizen mondo,
    Please forgive my verbosity...I do tend to ramble on and I know how tedious that can be. I must work on being more concise.

    angela,
    Yes mine. I want you to live next door so that we can talk more often.

    frank,
    Grand Forks NoDak. There are a surprising amount of cowboy hats. I realise that to most Americans NoDak/Minn are akin to living in the Arctic Circle but it is part of the Far,/Heartland...salt of the Earth I tell ya.

    America frustrates us all because it has unlimited potential and squanders it like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

    kindness,
    Oh you!
    *hangs head and shuffles foot

    ziggi,
    Don't you have to wear one of those fancy schmancy riding caps..the ones that look like Sherlock Holmes Deer Stalker thingamabob...what are they called?

    tv dig,
    I will investigate your blog thank you for poking around. I love seeing new faces.

    I still heart the view,
    I should have placed a photo of the Donald...he makes an excellent mascot for everything that is annoying about the money money money side of the US..brash and tacky.

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  19. fronty,
    Yep is right. Congratulations on your new and improved Rockefellers and DuPonts...you would think that after a Century of servitude to Monty Burns that the people of Springfield would catch on?

    hey Jonas!
    No kidding eh? There is still time to pick up where everything was left off in '68. Who knows why it took 2 generations to kickstart The Dream again.

    THE michael,
    I'd move inland because a tsunami/quake is going to eventually reshuffle the entire west coast...somewhere in the middle is usually the best place to be anyway.

    allan,
    Come on up! To be fair to the huddled masses they are being pounded by the propaganda wizards and they have been pulling out all of the stops for decades. It is disconcerting that the entire Vietnam experience was completely lost on the phantom Government. They can only imagine a war-economy..instead of education and healthcare...imagine if the spending was reversed?

    spentrails,
    As an insider who understands the dynamics of the market perhaps you can explain how the elite socialism is OK for them and yet they denounce it for the great unwashed as pinko-commie bullsh*t.

    llewtrah,
    Tell it tell it."a greedy, resource-squandering country that wants a whole darn planet for itself because it's incapable of sharing the world with others unless it is the one that dictates the terms"...Wow...you need to understand that the nobs at the top actually believe that they are saving the world from itself.

    Unfortunately so many other people live in such sh*thole countries that need so much work ..but it is more of an educational problem and that is exascerbated by any military action. I don't have all of the answers but the present pro forma definitely doesn't work.

    hola inner voices!
    Ooh the Northern Peso is a juggernaut these days...plus the Euro is kickin' some ass too. Thank Nixon for abandoning the Gold Standard..which is now around $1000!! HELLO!

    peteratlarge,
    Welcome. Of course I'm not whitewashing all Americans . Clearly half are awake to all of this..it's not exactly news is it?
    I hope that Americans realsie why the rest of us are so interested in the election this November.

    Today's poll had McCain @ 49% over Clinton/Obama 42%...come on!

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  20. I only wish I did understand the dynamics here; of course I'd use that knowledge for the greater good, not to buy that Mercedes I've always wanted, etc etc. One rule for them, one rule for us, huh. Yeah right.

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