Stickybuffalo.com

I’m not the only one suggesting that maybe the DJIA dive is simply the traders on Wall Street doing what they can to force the bailout:

(A) bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This “moral hazard” generates enormous distortions in an economy’s allocation of its financial resources.

Thoughtful advocates of the bailout might concede this perspective, but they argue that a bailout is necessary to prevent economic collapse. According to this view, lenders are not making loans, even for worthy projects, because they cannot get capital. This view has a grain of truth; if the bailout does not occur, more bankruptcies are possible and credit conditions may worsen for a time.

Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street’s hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html

200 Economists agree that yesterday’s vote was the right way to go. Is it a cause to celebrate? No, but it’s certainly time to stop saying things like “Great Depression 2.”

So, John McCain’s campaign has been in trouble for the last week or so, as Palin’s popularity has plummeted, his bestest buddy turns out to be (surprise, surprise) collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for nothing other than assuring that investment banks will have inside access to a McCain White House, and he and pretty much everyone around him have been vomiting gaffes as if their common sense had been up all night shotgunning ipecac. The economic situation others here have been covering well (and I’ve been avoiding, out of sheer terror) is turning into McCain’s worst enemy.

And now, he’s suspending his campaign until some sort of bandaid is signed into law. Nobody appears to be fooled by this gambit.

So now, I ask, with all due sincerity, is there any way in the world for McCain to win this election?

like me, you may still be unclear on a lot of the details of the current economic clusterfuck. but here’s one fact you can easily wrap your head around, even if its implications are nothing short of mind-boggling:

at $700 billion, the bailout so far has exceeded the cost of the entire iraq war. 

did you get that? in one week, we’ve spent more money buying bad debt from wall street than we have in five years of all-out adventurist profligacy in the middle east. remember all those no-bid reconstruction contracts? remember the pallette-loads of cash that simply disappeared into thin air? the millions spent blowing up infrastructure and then rebuilding it? the bribes doled out to tribal leaders in anbar to ensure that “the surge worked”? chump change. drops in the bucket compared to last week’s emergency measures in the financial sector, a move the treasury secretary isn’t even willing to say will work.

it gets worse:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, thought the $700 billion estimate … was not realistic. “It’s going to be about $1 trillion at least.” 

at least a trillion. is that even a real number? how many gajillions is that, exactly? 

something very strange is happening to me. my outrage is evolving into something transcendent: a kind of awestruck giddiness, mixed with what i can only describe as dazed, grudging respect for the psychotics who pulled this off. a sum of money so vast exceeds the capacity of my conceptual and moral vocabulary to describe it. this is more than a fuckup or an ambitious plan gone horribly wrong. it is trans-historical; we have entered the territory of the sublime.

around the middle of last week, i was still shrugging and making the observation that this is what happens when you put a cokehead in charge of your economy. but now i see that i haven’t given george bush and his corporatist gang-rape squad nearly enough credit. the magnificent mess we are witnessing could not have resulted from simple irresponsibility and corruption; you or i couldn’t pull it off if we tried. these people are evil geniuses in the fullest sense of the term, with all the obsessive, grandiose and amoral connotations one associates with comic book supervillains. they have turned our country into a vast nihilist art installation right under our noses, while we debated whether they merely corrupt or simply incompetent.

bravo, i say! my hat is off. i simply don’t know how else to react.