Stuff I heard

Local, National, Politics 1 Minute

From the talking heads on TV this morning:

  • John Edwards is going to endorse Hillary Clinton. Symbolic, especially given that his delegates are already bolting. If he was going to do this, he should have done it sooner.
  • Nancy Pelosi doesn’t understand why superdelegates exist but expects that the nomination fight will be over before the convention so she doesn’t have to.
  • Donna Brazile defended the positions of Obama’s pastor, even going so far to say that Wright is “moderate” compared to other black pastors. Guess that should make people feel more comfortable with a black president.
  • Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the bailout of Bear Stearns was the “right decision.” Um, can I get my share now?
  • The Matthews Meter, consisting of 12 regulars on the show, say that blacks won’t vote for Hillary but whites will vote for Obama. I’ll consider that credible when the MM includes more than 1 black person.

Mark Warner had a great comment about the 3am phone call, saying that he has actually answered those kinds of calls already when he was governor. Too bad SWMBO kept this guy out of the presidential race. Then again, perhaps he saw the handwriting on the wall earlier than the rest of us did regarding the media’s obsession with the first “serious” black candidate and the first “serious” female candidate. Of course, I think anyone who runs for president is serious.

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13 thoughts on “Stuff I heard”

  1. Hey now, we couldn’t let Bear Sterns fail. This is part of the problem with having such large corporations. But we all saw the consequences of driving Anderson out of business. Audit fees are only recently coming down from their height after Anderson’s exit from the market. And if we let Bear Sterns fail, then the panic on Wall Street would just escalate. And this spiral of asset devaluations, margin calls, cash drying up, the flight of capital to commodity future that thereby drive up inflation would just continue on. We need the Fed and the Treasury to help shake us out of this nonsense before a banking catastrophe sinks our economy into a truly nasty recession. The alternative is to let the average American feel a whole lot more financial pain than they are experiencing now.

    When you are multi-billion dollar financial institution, you can get a quasi-government entity and a fellow big bank to bail you out too when you hit a rough patch. =) I’m understating here with rough patch, actually it is more like when your bank account is empty and you cannot get the money to run your multi-billion dollar enterprise.

  2. Too big to fail? Ah, funny how that vaunted free market never really does seem to apply to some folks . . .

    ~

    This Wright BS is just that – BS. I think a TPM reader places it in the proper context:

    What drives me crazy is how this could have been avoided so easily if Wright was the slightest bit media-savvy. Had he merely controlled his tongue and limited himself to advocating an attack on Iran to encourage massive worldwide Muslim attacks leading to a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of end-times and bringing about Armageddon and the summary slaughter of every Jew, Muslim, Catholic, and non-believer on the planet while rapturing him and his flock up to heaven, then followed it up by denouncing Catholics as cult members and blaming Hurricane Katrina on gay people, this story wouldn’t be metastasizing like this. One five minute milquetoast repudiation by Obama and it would all be behind him.

    But what does Wright do instead? He spews this vile “God damn America” bile. What a psycho.

    Indeed.

  3. Well, actually, even if you did get a share of Bear Stearns, it might not be worth a thing come tomorrow morning. According to this WSJ report, it’s either selling itself this afternoon (likely to JP Morgan) or filing for bankruptcy tomorrow AM.

  5. Isn’t this Bear Stearns thing a wow. I was actually on hold with my broker when I heard it on their news they broadcast while I’m “patiently waiting”(20 minutes I was getting rather ticked actually) but that’s when I heard about Stearns and came right over to you Viv.

    I pulled up on the net for some news and found this,
    http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article3564479.ece

    This stock had been trading well, well over $100 last year. Now it’s selling for about 2 bucks. There’s some hanky panky in there, boys and girls. Glad I’m not a holder of that stock, jeesh.

    That sale has been made to JP Morgan BTW if no one heard – I heard it while on hold. I’m just blown away. This market is (not a funny) joke.

  7. “Bear Stearns shares, which traded as high as $170 in January 2007, fell 47% on Friday after the firm was forced to seek emergency funding from the Federal Reserve and J.P. Morgan to stay afloat amid a severe cash crunch.”

    I smell fish. Anybody else smell fish?

  8. Fish? Nah! What it tell me is that had JP Morgan not bought them, Bear Sterns would be a debtor in possession on Monday morning. This doesn’t seem like a deal to me. This will most likely be a big mess to clean up like ING’s buyout of Barings Bank.

    But I do smell a lot of investor suits. This sounds like material information to me that was not disclosed to Bear Sterns investors. I mean the folks there had to have known they needed to make a going concern disclosure. I don’t know whether the SEC will be too interested in prosecuting securities fraud here though. I guess this could be the fish that your smelling though: the failure of Bear Sterns to file an 8-K and disclose a material event.

  10. tx2va’s right, actually. They had their paperwork ready to go to file for bankruptcy Monday morning in case JP Morgan couldn’t get Fed approval for the buyout.

  12. “Too big to fail? Ah, funny how that vaunted free market never really does seem to apply to some folks . . .”

    Looks like you were wrong.

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