Cknolls

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 19, 2008 -> 11:16 AM) If the government is going to print another couple trillion dollars and hand it casually to the bankers and say "Here, no questions asked, just keep the lobbyists working", why exactly would there be a selloff any time in the near future? Market cycles.

Can I be the first to say we will sell off hard from here. Either late October or more likely November. Next target: 1998 lows near 990.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Sep 19, 2008 -> 09:18 AM) An "abortion survivor"... That's hilarious. Do explain

I have to think gold is a buy here again.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 18, 2008 -> 08:09 PM) Not at all. My fantasy about Congress leaving quickly didn't happen. They decided they were going to re-form an organization with its basis in the S&L mess that will buy and resell this worthless crap that is killing all of these companies right now. In case you are wondering, that mess only cost taxpayers $125 billion. Use a little inflation and multiplier, mix in all of the bailouts, and my silly little prediction of a trillion dollars is looking more and more likely. Not to mention that they are guaranteeing money markey funds. $3 trillion in money markets. Its hard to trade in a rigged market. But you have to trade the market that's before you not the one you want.

After Enron (now that clearly was a matter of greed, corruption, and criminality) the accounting rules were changed to require companies to rate their assets each quarter as if they were selling their companies. Say an investment bank owned a security that consisted of a package of $100,000 mortgages. Let's assume that there were a thousand of these. If all were paying, the security would be worth $100,000,000. If 20 percent of the mortgages went bad, under the old accounting rules, the security would be worth $80,000,000. But if, at the end of a quarter when a panic has gripped Wall Street about mortgage backed securities, the investment bank, because it can't find an immediate buyer for the security, is forced to rate that $80,000,000 instrument at zero. Bam. A downward spiral spins even faster and banks and insurance companies start collapsing. Will all due respect to John McCain this disaster is not the result of greed or poor oversight. It's in large measure the result of an overreaction to Enron.

Senator Joe Biden,speaking at a campaign event in Maumee, Ohio, yesterday: "I used to be a councilman. I left that for this job - for the Senate - you know why? Your job is harder. Keeps giving and giving and giving.

John McCain. 25 May 2005, speaking to the Senate: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac. The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform. For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay. I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 18, 2008 -> 02:14 PM) Isn't it basically a well-worn rule that any time Congress acts rapidly in response to a crisis situation it winds up making enough mistakes to make things worse? Your example would be Sarbanes/Oxley, mine would be the Patriot Act. There clearly needs to be a massive reform of these financial institutions, especially once we own them all. More transparency, lower CEO pay, more long term thinking, some vastly improved regulations on borrowing, requirements for cash reserves, whatever. But if we try to put those in place now, all that's going to happen is they'll make the job of getting out of this mess harder. Sometime early next year there needs to be a massive regulatory reform package clamping down on the financial industry, but the fact is, they're right, the Treasury and the Fed are just so much better at responding quickly in a crisis that they're the ones who should be managing this. Well Fasb157 was a good response to the Enron crisis. Let's mark to market. Hey, what's the market? Don't know. S&P: You're downgraded two notches, you need to raise 50 billion in capital.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. Now who in the world would have done such a thing? Oh I know, the guy who doesn't know much about the economy.

U.K just banned all new short positions in financials until 1/16 2009. This just won't work. Also, Calpers has said it will no longer lend MS and GS shares for people to short.

STT getting the fugly stick today. OUCH!! Down 52%

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 18, 2008 -> 09:39 AM) Some of those instances (i.e. same name, different address/DOB) are probably quite common and not likely to be fraudulent. Some of those do sound pretty ridiculous, though. Just sayin', I doubt all 1100 are fraudulent. But I do hope they chase all 1100 down to check them. Not saying they are, but with this fraud(ACORN) involved, I would check every registration they return.

Sen. Barack Obama has launched a new Spanish-language TV ad that seeks to paint Sen. John McCain as anti-immigrant, even tying the Republican to his longtime conservative talk-radio nemesis Rush Limbaugh. As first reported by the Washington Post, Obama's ad features a narrator saying: "They want us to forget the insults we've put up with...the intolerance...they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much." The screen then shows these two quotes from Limbaugh: "...stupid and unskilled Mexicans." --Rush Limbaugh "You shut your mouth or you get out!" --Rush Limbaugh The narrator then says, "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote...and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that Will the media go apes*** over Barry's new immigration ad like they did last week over McCain's sex ed ad?

"McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition" "McCain Able to Skirt Limits of Federal Financing" "McCain BlackBerry Easily Connects With Gore Internet" "Palin Exaggerates Alaska's Energy Role" Apparently Obama has fallen off the face of the Earth and the Wash. Post feels the need to only cover McCain, negatively of course. Just curious, you think they have any reporters working the ACORN stories in NM, Ohio,or MI.

QUOTE (Rex Kicka** @ Sep 17, 2008 -> 02:18 PM) Is that 4% or .04%? .04. At one point it was negative. You were paying the gov't.

New Mexico: The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards have been turned in to her office. Some cards in New Mexico’s most populous county have the same name as a voter who’s already registered, but carry a different birth date or Social Security number; some list someone else’s Social Security number; some have addresses that don’t exist, Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver said Wednesday. In one case, a series of about nine cards appears to have been taken directly from the phone book, she said. “Those are sort of the big red flags,” Toulouse Oliver said Some of the estimated 1,100 registrations list Social Security numbers for people who already are in the county’s database of registered voters, Toulouse Oliver said. Other cards list the same name — but a different birth date — of already registered voters. Some of the people whose names appear in the list of possibly phony registrations, when called by the clerk’s office, said they never filled out the new cards changing their voter data, Toulouse Oliver said. In addition, “We do have a series of cards identified that appear to be (names) taken straight out of the phone book, Toulouse Oliver said. Toulouse Oliver said the potential scope of the problem has mushroomed since late last month, when the Journal reported on a forged card for Rebecca Sitterly, a former state District Court judge from Albuquerque who has been voting in the same place for nearly two decades. That card was submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a controversial nonprofit organization that says it has handled 72,000 new voter registrations in New Mexico since January. Matthew Henderson, head organizer for the group, said the Sitterly card was set aside as a potential phony by ACORN itself and turned in to the clerk’s office with a batch of other possibly bad cards. Toulouse Oliver said she did not know how many cards in the current stack of questionable registrations were submitted by ACORN, though she said that group this year has done the majority of so-called third-party registrations — those that aren’t turned in by the voters themselves but are submitted by groups organized to enlist new registrants. ACORN contract workers in 2005 were investigated in connection with forged signatures on a minimum wage ballot petition, though ACORN supervisors have said political organizers now oversee the registration gathering and the group has beefed up its own quality control. Nothing to see here, just community organizing.

3 month treasury yielding .04, and thats up from .02 this morning. All time low was .01 in Jan 1940.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 17, 2008 -> 10:27 AM) Couple points in reply. 1. The McCain/Palin office clearly needs better telecom tech support. 2. Why do we want so badly to keep people from voting? Without knowing the details, I can already see a couple problems there. A person registers to vote with one name, and then another agency makes a mistake filing a document, or doesn't update their info after a name change, and you manage to keep them from voting. The law is very clear. We don't let people vote twice. You vote twice under false names and you risk jail time. The fact that documents in some state agency are wrong does not mean that there is going to be a massive voter fraud scheme perpetrated on election day, nor does it mean people who try to commit fraud won't be arrested. I'll repond after I get the turnips off my clothes.

So the one place there is oil for sure is off limits. Nice.

What rabbit will the Fed try to pull out of its hat this expiration? Rate cut or complete elimination of short selling? The latter will kill market makers short term, but will eventually lead to wider markets and larger p/l's. Oh and a stock market crash...

I heard a report that said Putin was the richest person in the world.

Wisconsin is another one of those states I wouldn't put enormous hopes on going red this year. But there are some interesting indicators - like the phone lines in the McCain-Palin office in Green Bay getting overloaded from calls requesting tickets for a rally Thursday. And Obama's lead in the state seems pretty modest lately. Having said that, Milwaukee voter fraud — er, "vigorous Democratic turnout efforts" — should keep the state blue this year. Wisconsin's Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is suing the State Accountability Board, trying to get them to check all new voter registrations since Jan 1, 2006. People in the statewide voter database whose names don’t match up with information maintained by other state agencies would be forced to cast provisional ballots on Nov. 4 and must bring back proof of identification and address within 24 hours to ensure their votes count. It will come as an enormous shock to you that the state Democratic Party is fighting this in court. Now, mind you, this is exactly what Barack Obama did in his first race for public office, except he and his guys disqualified signatures under a much stricter standard — i.e., where the name was in print instead of cursive. But apparently enforcing the law is partisan. The elephants better have run flat tires on election day this time around.

U.S. Treasury announces special series of bill auctions to expand the Fed's balance sheet.

GE notes trading below par.