MK poops in the carrier 4 parking spaces from home. A cat barfed on the bed.

Ugh!

This is fascinating - how close the economy came to disaster last week....

I heard a similar story on NPR last week (Saturday, maybe?) and it just made me want to stick my head in the ground further.

Also, there's a not-inconsiderable handful of economists who are predicting a massive bank run in the near future. t edit Wait, I just realized that I took that info from the Bill Kristol editorial. I need to find other corroboration before I worry.

It's like telling a crowd not to panic. If you have 2 or 3 people in a room, you can get them to not panic; 10-15 people, well, if you get *some* to not panic, then they can help you calm down the others; but a large crowd? All bets are off. All it takes is one person to start panicking, and mass chaos ensues.

So all it's going to take is enough people pulling their money out of their bank, and soon it's going to gain momentum and people will be flipping out and it'll be It's a Wonderful Life all over again.

t /Eeyore

I am so glad my investments are with Vanguard. They are, like, the anti-panic-ers. They are the stodgy cheapskate grandparents of investment firms.

I know this is Schadenfreude that's going to bite me in the ass, because after all I AM as entwined in American's economy as I can be... but I'm glad this is all coming to fruition during the Cheney/Bush Administration which should make it that much harder to claim it wasn't their policies that brought things to this point.

(Not that some won't try, and not that there wasn't prior legislation that started the balls rolling, particularly Phil Gramm's legislation in 1999.)

Well, ignoring the election stuff (LOVED Tina Fey on SNL - dare we hope that SNL will do a VEEP debate skit?), to say that I got to watch the first episode of True Blood at a friends' house and REALLY enjoyed it. I thought that the tv show would turn out well - mostly because I think that some aspects of the story work better tvwise than bookwise.

I hope that they put dvds out quickly so I can netflix them quickly.

Also, the music was excellent and Bill reminded me of Jared Padalecki. Which is just a bonus.

Heath Ledger's daughter will inherit his estate after all. (He willed it to his parents and sister and they gave it to his daughter.)

I found this timeline of the financial crisis. I thought it was interesting, but I don't know how objective it is.

[link]

Not that some won't try

These are Clinton's policies coming home to roost. Jimmy Carter helped. Reagan and Bush I had no impact in their combined 12 years of control. Really.

My bank is an affiliate of the corporation controlling the Mormon Church. I think they're capitalized sufficiently.

Edit: I shouldn't say "controlling the Mormon Church." I should say, "Managing the copyrights, income, real estate, etc. connected to the Mormon Church."

The NYTimes magazine had a really interesting column this weekend laying out some of the problems with blaming the current financial crisis on the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

Yet the criticism is often vague, which means that anyone trying to understand the causal chain — how the end of Glass-Steagall led to the end of Lehman Brothers — will have a hard time doing so. To many banking experts, the reason is simple enough: namely, that the law didn’t really do much to create the current crisis. It is a handy scapegoat, since it’s easily the biggest piece of financial deregulation in recent decades. But one act of deregulation, even a big one, and the absence of other, good regulations aren’t the same thing. The nursemaid of the current crisis isn’t so much what Washington did, in other words, as what it didn’t do.

The point of Gramm-Leach-Bliley was to tear down the wall, built by Glass-Steagall, separating banks that did risky investing from those that did basic lending. (The mingling of those two helped create a cascade of bank failures during the Depression.) Thus were born Citigroup, Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase, behemoths that owned bank branches, bought and sold stocks and shepherded corporate mergers.

But what else do those firms have in common today? They weren’t the ones that imploded, at least not first. While hardly unscathed, some of them are emerging as survivors amidst the wreckage. The first fatalities were firms that didn’t change all that much in the wake of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Until their dying day, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were both classic investment banks.

[link]

My bank is an affiliate of the corporation controlling the Mormon Church. I think they're capitalized sufficiently.

At least they've probably got two years of food stored somewhere.