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Yahoo!News: Greenspan Denies Blame for Crisis, Admits “Flaw”

I am so pissed off at Alan Greenspan. This guy was hailed as freakin’ God when he was Fed Chairman for nearly twenty years and basically when he talked, everyone listened. During his tenure, the economy boomed, everything was great and wonderful and deregulation was the talk of the town. Being a believer in the free market, Greenspan resisted calls for more regulation (specifically cracking down on sub-prime mortgages and such), his belief being that the market takes care of itself. He held firm to the idea that banks and investment firms wouldn’t take such risks that would jeopardize their institutions and stockholder’s interests and equity.

WTF rock was Mr. Greenspan hiding under? Was he really and truly THAT blind during his tenure as head of the Federal Reserve, to think that some banks and investments firms, when not held back by the chains of regulation, would exercise caution when given the opportunity to get filthy stinking rich? Who the hell was he kidding?

The deregulation that occurred through the late 80′s and 90′s was like giving the keys for a Ferrari to a 17-year-old and expecting that, since they passed driver’s ed, they’d be able to handle the automobile respectfully.

Balls.

The market may very well take care of itself, if it didn’t have humans involved in it. Greed is a powerful temptress. Where there’s risk, there’s great reward. But where there are no rules, who cares about the risk? Especially when it can be packaged up and sold to somebody else…

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cue up the old REM song, y’all. It’s the End of the World As We Know It! (But I Feel Fine…)

Okay, unless y’all ain’t been payin’ attention today, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch has been bought by the mammoth Bank of America. Lehman Brothers, for those of you like me who didn’t know who the heck they are and aren’t as financially savvy as the media thinks we should be, is a global financial services firm focusing on investment banking and services. It also had a finger in the pie of the subprime mortgage market, something that has been swallowing up and destroying long standing giant investment firms for the past year.

Truthfully, the Merrill Lynch buyout by BoA surprised even me. But I’m just a Average Jane when it comes to finances and investments so what the hell do I know?

But I do know crap when I see it. And the following article from Aaron Task at Yahoo! Finance basically pissed me off…

Top Economist: Americans Should Worry About Bank Deposits if Congress Doesn’t Act

Hey hey, great! Let’s scare the crap out of everybody! You’re money’s not safe in the bank! FDIC doesn’t have enough dough to cover all those assets!

First of all, Mr. Tasks article makes nothing clear so I’m going on some assumptions here. I’m ASSUMING that the $1 Trillion in assets mentioned is basically the total of every freakin’ bank and financial institution in this country. The FDIC fund has about $50 billion on standby to cover for failed institutions. Is Mr. Roubini, the economist starring in this piece of nonsense, basically implying that EVERY bank in this country is going to fail because FDIC doesn’t have $1 Trillion on standby?

If he is, he better rethink what he’s saying. Because, later in the article he recommends that folks who have bank accounts that exceed $100,000 should spread their money among different firms. I don’t refute that advice, as it’s something that is highly recommended anyway if you’ve got more than 100K in money in the bank. (Also you should talk to your customer service rep about account titling and joint account holders as there are ways to set up accounts to cover you for more than $100,000 limit). But if the implication here is that every bank is going to fail and the FDIC doesn’t have enough money to cover it, then why take the time to move funds around anyway? I’m gonna lose out either way, according to Mr. Roubini.

“The intent here isn’t to add to people’s anxieties…”

It’s not? Then what is your intent? I’m not saying that Americans shouldn’t be paying attention to this stuff, because we should be, but I’m so sick of “economists” and talking heads on television (ie, CNN) trying their damndest to scare the crap out of people.  The media wants so badly to see a run on the banks, the way customers lined up outside of IndyMac’s branches in California earlier this summer, that they’ll feed the fear however they can.

And it’s driving me nuts!

Blaugh! I’m slackin’ again. I haven’t posted here for several days and I’m about due for another Screen Cap o’ The Week and I can’t decide on one. I think my brain done exploded.

Ouch. And I was doing so good too! But nothing has struck me lately to blather on about (at least, nothing I wanna blather on about publicly!) and I’m…I’m…stuck.

GAH! This is bad. Even worse is the fact that I’m writing about the fact that I can’t think of anything to write about. Although, to keep along the lines of the Coltrane Skewl of Writing posts we’ve had recently, this might be a good opportunity to talk about journaling and free form writing.

This was an exercise we used to do in one of my English classes in Jr. High. We would be given about 10 minutes or so to write something. Anything. And often mine started with “Well I can’t think of anything write about so I’m writing about not being able to write anything. Oh man, have ya ever realized that…” and then I’d be off on some inane topic of importance to a 15 year old mind. Heh!

But ya know, it worked. If you keep at it, even if it’s just still saying “yep, here I am, still trying to think of something to write–I’m so sick of adult contemporary radio…” Boom. Yer topic will come to you eventually.

And I am sick of adult contemporary radio. Kelly Clarkson is pissing me off and if I have to hear Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” one more time I’m gonna take that Louisville slugger to something other than a set of headlights. ARGH! That song can not be the only song that woman has ever recorded! But apparently it’s the only song that gets played on the radio.

Corporate radio sucks nowadays anyway. I think I’ve commented on this in a previous post but it’s worth commenting again. In fact, I’m even gonna write it again.

Corporate radio sucks nowadays anyway.

They play the same dozen or so songs every day, every week. And then boast about having the “biggest variety.” My posterior.

What really annoys me is when one of those songs that annoys the crap out of me gets stuck in my head. Like pretty much any Kelly Clarkson song. “Because of You” Kelly, I’m about ready to puke on my radio.

Gnarls Barkley can best some up my opinion of corporate radio:  “It’s Making Me Craaaaaaaaazaaaayyyy!”

Ahh. There. And lookit that, a blog post!

CNN is pissing me off lately. I’ve gotten so I can’t watch it on my lunch hour anymore. It’s bad enough we have the Never Ending Saga of Human Misery and Suffering playing out 24 hours a day, but from 12noon to 1pm, CNN is Issue #1: The Economy.

Otherwise known as the End of the World As We Know It. The last time I watched this program was a few days ago, when I made the mistake of turning on the TV and seeing some talking head explaining something about FDIC insurance and at the bottom of the screen was “BANKING MELTDOWN.”

I shut the tv off. Please, CNN, stop fanning the flames!! The two hosts of the program, Ali Velshi and Gerri Willis damn near hypoventilate as they carry on about gas prices, oil prices, stocks, the housing market, food prices, The End of the Freakin’ World.  I’m waiting for them to start jumping up and down and scream like Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money. They’re that close to going that route, I’m not kidding.

So IndyMac Bank blew up last week and now we’re looking at 1929 all over again? No! Simmer down y’all!

First of all, the IndyMac thing was caused in part because the bank had some bad subprime mortgages and customers panicked and tried pulling their money out STAT. This contributed badly to an already shakey standing for the bank, as according to the website Bankrate.com, IndyMac had been rated pretty low on the scale for at least the last six months.

But man, they were offering some damn great CD rates! 4.25% for a year?! That was the highest in the land!

Obviously they were trying very hard to raise capital but in the end it wasn’t enough. However, just because IndyMac went down in flames this past week, does not, I repeat, DOES NOT mean the US Banking system is on the verge of a meltdown.

“Meltdown,” by the way, is the buzzword of the year. Right up there with the word “change” which I’m just as tired of.

Anyway, back to CNN. I think Ali and Gerri need to adjust their intro to the program. Something like this would be more suitable…

“Issue number one is your economy. Issue number one starts right now…”

*cue music*

“Hello everyone, I’m Gerri Willis and I’m gonna scare the crap out of you.”

So the “Capital City Gazette” had the following two front page stories in the paper today:

The first: New Grads Arrested On School Roof.

Two recent grads of the local highschool were caught breaking into the middle school. One of them apparently urinated in one of the classrooms.  The other stole a flag. Both had apparently been drinking.

The second, situated right next to the first one:  Wall St. Execs Face Charges in Credit Crisis, Two from Bear Sterns Handcuffed, Arrested.

I think that’s pretty self explanitory. Two hedge fund managers are being charged, criminally, with fraud in relation to the funds they managed that collapsed in the wake of the subprime mortgage fiasco.  They misled investors, saying everything was rosey, when they knew otherwise. They even made sure to pull their own money out of the funds before the collapse.

Somewhere in my deviously peverted mind, I found this amusing. Two schmucks who probably barely squeaked by to graduate are off to a great start in life. Meanwhile, two schmucks who probably barely squeaked out their own money from those hedge funds before they collapsed are off to a great finish in life.  In a sense, the two Wall St. execs pee’d on the other investors and stole their flag too.

Congratulations fellas.