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Time Magazine assesses Geithner and the stress tests in a reasonably honest article entitled "Stress Tested: Has Geithner's Bank Confidence Game Worked?". A "confidence game" is, of course, just the formal name for a con job.
Time writes:
In a remarkable bit of salesmanship, Geithner has managed to package [the negative realities regarding the banks' health] as positive... Facts are important too, and some think Geithner and the government are fudging them. Nouriel Roubini, the hard-headed pessimist who foresaw the financial crisis, wrote Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal that the overall positive message of the stress tests "would be good news if it were credible," but it's not...Roubini is not alone in questioning whether the government used appropriately pessimistic assumptions in conducting the stress tests, especially as the financial sector faces a potential flood of commercial real estate losses that could mirror the residential market's recent woes.Hey, hey! (I'm honking my little toy horn right now, but you probably can't see that.)
Hi, my name is Happy, and I’m the layoff clown.
What started as a little side business during the sky-high gas prices and minor economic downturn following the terrorist attacks on September 11th has certainly blossomed in the last year.
In "Why the Government's Attempt to Instill False Confidence Will Backfire," George Washington's Blog further elaborates on the risks of denying reality and failing to apply the only real cure for what ails us. The government is doing its best to try to "restore confidence" in the economy. Indeed, Obama's top economics advisors believe they can fool people into believing that everything is fine, and then the economy will recover. And for that reason, defenders of the status quo think that it is important for everyone to keep quiet about how severe the crisis really is. Are they right?
No.
The bankruptcy trustee hunting for Bernie Madoff’s assets suspects that some of Madoff’s relatives, employees, and hedge-fund associates may have known—or suspected—his Ponzi scheme was collapsing. It is the latest sign that the circle of people aware of at least aspects of the Madoff scheme may have been much broader than originally thought. The Daily Beast has learned that in the 90 days leading to the collapse of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, $735 million was withdrawn from accounts controlled by Madoff’s relatives, employees, and their relatives, and by people who fed billions of dollars of investors’ money to Madoff. The dollar amount has been previously known. What has not been reported until now is the unusually short period in which the withdrawals were made, and how close it was to the collapse of the Madoff firm and to his confession on December 10, 2008.
The IMF has just released a new working paper, with more detail than you likely ever wanted to know about how Ponzi schemes work – particularly in and around the Caribbean. Ponzi schemes are everywhere and, at least in some environments, new versions arrive frequently. But why are they so hard to prevent and shut down once they appear?
One well-known contrary sentiment indicator for what the next direction of the stock market is corporate insider trading. In the aggregate, insiders are more likely to purchase their company's stock when they think it's cheap, and to sell when it is expensive. In that way, they also tell us something about the health of the overall economy.
Discussion of the 50% Retracement Rule,
potential future price levels, time studies, key dates, Fibonacci, Gann, Astro numbers, Robert Rhea's Great Depression analysis.
For more than a year the 11th floor apartment at 101 Central Park West – advertised as the pinnacle of New York City living – has been awaiting a new owner. Potential buyers have no doubt been attracted to the 3,300 sq ft flat’s nine spacious rooms and 10 windows overlooking treetops and skyscrapers – not to mention the two reductions made to its price. But, in the midst of the worst US recession since the Great Depression, a property listed at $12.5m, down from $15m, is still a tough sell.
“This is the way to live if money is not an object,” says Anne Snee at real estate agency Corcoran. But, for even the wealthiest New Yorkers, money is now an object again and, as a result, demand for such properties has plummeted.
I'd been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard. Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel's shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained. I didn't fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Almost everyone else was a maths or economics major and had family in banking.
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
