Christiano Ronaldo Works for George Bush

The remote and mountainous Country of Finance is experiencing, to employ a gross euphemism, unrest. What is happening within its secret borders can only be inferred from distant satellite photography and the often conflicted testimony of refugees that are streaming across its borders in search of peace. We hear stories of dogs and cats sleeping together, rivers running with blood, mass looting, and the rule of law totally suspended.

The American Federal Government is pursuing a politically safe and ultimately ruinous course. In an election year where Senator O’Change and Senator Mc’Change run on a constantly Changing platform of Change we get to see how little appetite political and commercial institutions really have for Change when the rhetoric is suspended and reality rolls onto the stage.

Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Fannie and Freddie, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and coming next week Washington Mutual have both borrowers and lenders been and have contracted fatal exchange-related diseases. Fatal! They are dead but Sam and Fed have seen Weekend at Bernie’s one too many times and like macabre circus folk have tied strings to all these financial corpses. The world will now get to watch as they force these unfortunate marionettes to smile and do the river dance until someone (maybe Big Herb ) says no more of this perversity.

Between let the hard times roll or spend billions of dollars in a frantic and pointless attempt to push the hard times back three months the Fed obviously chose the latter.
And who walks? CEO’s, regulators, financial shamans and seers. Ideally a lot of these financial tigers would be tied up to trees and shot by letting the markets act. Market mechanisms which most of these failed architects professed an undying love for, but no, poetic justice will not be served, they have all been ‘bailed’ out. They won't be crushed by the falling steel girders of 'raw capitalism'.

Letting Lehman go to the dogs does seem fair. They had liabilities of around 700 billion dollars and real equity of 23 billion dollars. If you are leveraged at 30:1 expect chaos and ruin and horror you greedy bastards.

The full implications of these bailouts are egregious. A bunch of hot shot financiers. Most of them those go-go, attaining, hyper-achievers, that blew minds all the way through high school then Yale or Harvard or LSE created a mad hellish financial kitchen and ultimately couldn’t handle the heat. But they don’t need to sweat (metaphor reaching critical mass). Why should they sweat? The Fed has a magic solution.

There solution is buy everything! Let’s play monopoly and let the kid who stands to lose everything be the banker: if they don’t have enough money print some more!
Along those lines Bush and Hank Paulson have reportedly locked Condie Rice and Dick Cheney in the basement with a 1930’s era printing press, some paper and a lot of green ink.
Even if I misread my source on that one, it's fair to say that barring deus ex machina the US leaders will be pretty desperate pretty soon and this current administration isn’t the most imaginative.

I just don’t think the American government understands how big a piece of pie they swallowed: tainted meat pie at that.