Mike Finnegan is touring in Europe this summer. Lambert Strether from CorrenteWire is filling in this week.
Greed and fear? I don't do the greed part; if I were any good at making money, I would already have made some. Fear, I can do; but in common with most of the blogosphere, I do political fear of the criminal Bush regime, not economic fear. Of course, in the future, these two fears may merge, perhaps even quicker than we expect.
But even I noticed that the Dow dropped some large number of points yesterday. Mostly, though, the blogosphere didn't (and the wankosphere was too busy ferreting out lefties who drop the F-bomb instead of killing people, lke the Godly do).
So, when the Dow drops three million points and nobody blogs about it -- well, almost nobody (click on the man; he needs the hits!) -- did it really drop? Herewith the results of my random walk through the blogosphere.
Actually, I had a few false starts: My best hits on Technorati came from "Stocks AND Plunge," and they weren't very good. Sneaky Business at least rated the headlines. Then I checked out Brad DeLong. He's an economist! And for some strange reason, he's writing about Grover Cleveland:
The agitation seemed to [Cleveland]... a threat to law and order.... Coxey's Army was met with a barrage of injunctions and... the Capitol police.... The Pullman strike was smashed by federal troops who kept the mails moving, the union leaders imprisoned, and the union crushed. And the financial panic was dealt with through the highly orthodox and [highly] compensated assistance of Mr. Morgan.
The underlying causes... were neither understood nor dealt with... an opportunity was missed.... If, to take one of them, the problems arising out of the concentration of industrial ownership had been tackled when they were still malleable and subject to effective treatment, we might have been spared some aches and pains that are still with us.
Yes, well. But then Holden asks: Have you seen my Bush boom? Good question, and I have the answer:
Yes! It went thataway!
It went thataway into the pockets of scamming executives (sorry for the redundancy). It went thataway into the pockets of the hopelessly corrupt Beltway elite (sorry for the redundancy). It went thataway into suburban MacMansions that were designed to be foreclosed on. Jim Freeman gives the step-by-step for that, all the way to who'll be left holding the bag (guess), but since I don't understand money, I'll just cut to where we all saw the scam start:
You invent a new investment "vehicle" and call it a sub-prime mortgage. The reason it's called a vehicle is because it's designed to drive off with your money.
Of course, there's always hope, and a financial advisor over at Hecate's Place offers some, in comments:
I asked a financial advisor once ... what people already in trouble could do before things got worse.
His response, not the least bit tongue in cheek, was quite surprising. I thought he'd run down a list of ways to negotiate with crditors, tricks to find affordable healthcare and ways to protect what little you might have. His advice....teach them how to plant a garden in a very small space and give them some goats.
It went thataway!
But enough about stocks. How about bonds?
Guest Bloggerativity: Over at The Mighty Corrente Building we write about gardening all the time. Now I know why.
Classic blogging: Unsung hero Paul Lukasiak on aWol's TANG records. Unsung hero Daily Howler on the war on Gore.
