To quote Kanye: "I ain't saying she's a gold-digger, but..."

... well, you know the rest.

To Quote Spinal Tap: How Much More Black Can It Get?

Could things in the financial markets be about to get even worse when trading opens tomorrow, following Friday's lame attempts by the G7 to settle industry and consumer fears (for in this brave new world, we are no longer citizens but consumers)? Watch this space and, more importantly, watch your pension and retirement funds as they disappear into a black hole formed by 30 years of laissez-faire, market fundamentalist ideological dominance within the international political economy.

Just how bad will things get by the time the financial system finally bottoms out? And is this merely a foretaste of why the Bush administration is illegally deploying the Army onto US soil in the shape of the new Consequence Management Response Force? Exactly what "consequence" are they preparing to "manage" that requires hardened combat troops on the streets of US cities?

Soros

Information Landmine's favourite billionaire once again demonstrates why he's earned that status and respect with a new article in the Financial Times explaining why the Bush bailout of Wall Street is, like so many Bush administration initiatives, a jaw-droppingly awful idea. Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke ought to (but probably won't) read and learn.

Sign the Petition to Stop the Giveaway

Congress is on the brink of making a one-sided deal to give George W. Bush a blank check to bail out his pals - offering nearly (or perhaps more than) a trillion taxpayer dollars to Wall Street to cover its bad debts. That works out to somewhere between $2000 and $5000 from every American family. So what do the taxpayers get in return?

Nothing. No new regulation or oversight to help avoid this kind of crisis in the future. No public interest givebacks to help people whose homes are in the hands of the banks. Perhaps most shockingly of all, the taxpayers get absolutely no share in the profits if and when these finance giants bounce back, even though we are now assuming a great deal of the risk.

This is worse than a bad deal - this isn't a deal at all. This is a blank check to some of the richest companies in the world.

Please sign a new petition calling on key members of Congress to impose a few sensible conditions to this bailout in order to protect the American people.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/no_blank_check/?r_by=911-1064733-qk4puCx&rc=paste

They Break, We Buy

Gretchen Morgenson, writing in the New York Time, nails it.

To quote John Lydon: "It's a swindle!" And it's your money and your future, US taxpayers, that is being swindled away.

Happy?

End of the Laissez-Faire Era?

The Guardian's Larry Elliott seems to think so although, as Tristram Hunt points out in the same paper, perhaps we shouldn't expect too much by way of a backlash. Meanwhile, Meghnad Desai argues for a dose of Thatcherism to be applied to Wall Street and the City of London in the same way it was once applied to the coal pits of Yorkshire. Oh, what delicious irony that would have represented had the Bush administration not just bailed out the bankers with US taxpayers' cash (which, of course, is pretty ironic in and of itself)!

Ain't Capitalism Grand?

Congratulations, US taxpayers: you get fleeced by Wall Street bankers preaching rabid market fundamentalism and then you get to pay their huge, multi-million dollar salaries from your pocket and your childrens' pocket when their cronies that you elected (or failed to stop from stealing two consecutive elections) step in and open up the Treasury to pay for Wall Street's mistakes and excesses. Meanwhile, if your home gets repossessed because the bankers sold you a bad mortgage, that's your tough luck!

The World Turned Upside Down

It's beyond question we're living in strange and uncertain times when the Daily Mail starts lambasting 21st century capitalism for its contradictions and excesses.

I briefly had to double-check the website address to make sure this wasn't the People's Weekly World.

Is Northern Rock Just the Tip of a Humungous Financial Iceberg?

With the news that the UK's New Labour government is planning to introduce secret public bail-outs of ailing financial institutions, presumably because public disclosure of such things will cause further destabilizing runs on banks and financial institutions, the question must be asked: just how bad is the situation in finance and banking in reality?

A huge bill of sale appears to be due after a quarter-century of ideologically-driven, laissez-faire casino capitalism über alles policymaking in which there has been far too little public oversight and far too much sleight-of-hand wheeling-and-dealing across the board(room). Instead of propping up the crumbling facade with clandestine deals involving public funds, it would be more useful to face these issues head-on and admit to the mistakes that have been made so that improved financial regulation and more sober economic policies can be adopted in future.

An acknowledgement that there were good reasons for many of the financial regulations that have been ruthlessly and systematically stripped away since the onset of the Reagan/Thatcher era would be a helpful start.

Soros on World Financial Crisis

The sage that is George Soros, probably the only billionaire that Information Landmine considers worthy of respect and admiration, offers his astute observations on the latest world financial crisis in an article written for today's Financial Times.