Big Day for Interpreting Cramer and P&G Yesterday

When Cramer starts a position in P&G and then loads up twice in one day, this is a big call.  It is a warning about the general market -- the closest he comes without saying so.  It has been years, really, since P&G served as the safety market.  It looks like this is the year, hopefully decade, for Cincinnati.  Everything is coming up roses for this town.

Two Dualing Gurus Cramer and Jimmy Rogers

http://jimrogers-investments.blogspot.com/2013/10/artificial-sea-of-liquidity.html 

The eternal dilemma, whom to follow.  Cramer has been spectacularly successful with his model portfolio, which is not that easy to replicate, even with low or non-existent commissions/transaction costs.  

Mohamed A. El-Erian

This guy works for Bill Gross, the best bond market guru and manager.  Mohamed is brilliant and is interviewed on CNBC when important crises are afoot.


They don’t have six weeks,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, the world’s largest bond manager. He said fear had reached the very core of the 17-nation group that uses the euro currency, with the price of insurance on German debt rising substantially this week.




“The light already is flashing yellow,” Mr. El-Erian said. “They can’t allow it to flash red. You have to give people a vision of what you want the euro zone to look like.”

Cramer Last Night

His shopping list last night:

So what's on our diversified dividend shopping list, after we've had this incredible crack in the stock market?...




Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #1:

Consolidated Edison, Inc.

Dividend Yield: 4.7%



Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #2:

Enterprise Products Partners LLC

Dividend Yield: 6%



Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #3:

Verizon Communications, Inc.

Dividend Yield: 5.8%



Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #4:

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.

Dividend Yield: 4.9%



Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #5:

Darden Restaurants, Inc.

Dividend Yield: 3.7%



Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #6:

Kimberly-Clark Corporation

Dividend Yield: 4.4%



Cramer's Diversified Dividend Play #7:

International Paper Company

Dividend Yield: 4.4%

S&P's $2 Trillion Error Didn't Change Rating Cut Decision - CNBC

S&P's $2 Trillion Error Didn't Change Rating Cut Decision - CNBC

S and P is a ass.

Jimmy Rogers Interviewed by Dylan Ratigan!

http://jimrogers-investments.blogspot.com/2011/06/video-greece-is-bankrupt-protect.html

[from Wikipedia] Rogers was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Demopolis, Alabama.[1][3] He started in business at the age of five by selling peanuts and by picking up empty bottles that fans left behind at baseball games. He got his first job on Wall Street, at Dominick & Dominick, after graduating with a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1964. Rogers then acquired a second BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University in 1966.


In 1970, Rogers joined Arnhold and S. Bleichroder. In 1973, Rogers co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros. During the following 10 years, the portfolio gained 4200% while the S&P advanced about 47%.[4] The Quantum Fund was one of the first truly international funds.

Cramer -- I Will Return Again and Again

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

I will return again and again to this Cramer of a few days ago. Speak to your legislator. Save us.

Mad Money: A Moratorium on New Financial Products? - CNBC: "First we have double- and triple-leveraged exchange-traded funds, which hedge funds and other institutional investors used to pummel the banks during the financial crisis, nearly bringing down the entire system. And just last week a new group of ETFs, which will mimic hedge-fund investing strategies, hit the market. They are so potentially dangerous that legendary investor and Vanguard founder John Bolge said it was “insanity” that they even existed."

Mad Money: A Moratorium on New Financial Products? - CNBC

(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel

This is the best of all Cramer. Last night. Click on and listen. The written summary sanitizes his slap at the laissez faire Bush Administration as being the cause of the SEC's woeful performance in allowing this crap. (He appeared to me to be a fellow-supporter of deregulation and the Bush Administration, but I could be wrong.)

Needless to say he's spot-on.


Mad Money: A Moratorium on New Financial Products? - CNBC: "A Moratorium on New Financial Products?
Published: Thursday, 3 Jun 2010 9:25 PM ET Text Size By: Tom Brennan
Web Editor, Mad Money

Wall Street right now looks a lot like World War I.
Just as the “high-tech” weaponry of that era vastly outpaced people’s ability to handle it, Cramer said Thursday, we are virtually powerless against the damage caused by today’s financial products."

Krugman -- A Core Article Placing Blame on Regan and the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982

Op-Ed Columnist
Reagan Did It
comments

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 31, 2009
“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.
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He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.
Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.
On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.
The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.
The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.
But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

Together with looser lending standards for other kinds of consumer credit, this led to a radical change in American behavior.
We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.
All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.
Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.
But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.
These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.
There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

Came Across This Screed on Goldman Sachs

I'm afraid I sort of agree with this thesis, as poorly [intentionally?] spelled as it is:

http://goldmansachsexposed.blogspot.com/?www.GoldmanSachs666.com

And I believe the gaming goes on, rendering bailout money down the drain perhaps.

Krugman -- China's Dollar Trap

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel

Remember April 2, 2009. The events of yesterday are unique and world-changing.

They are:

change in mark-to-market accounting rule;

attendant rise in the S&P 500 (or "Dow" if you wish to follow that) with the assurance that the market is now no lon-ger a "Bear" market;

Geithner and Obama wow the world and actually accomplish things at the G-20;

Cramer said the unthinkable -- we now are out of "the de-pression." The depression, what??? Nobody ever said that we were in one. But,
as Cramer says, when you have a 60% decline in steel orders that's a depression. (I think I heard him right.)

The following Krugman article highlights the "China Dollar Trap," which may or not relate to the events of yesterday, but the article is worth a study:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/opinion/03krugman.html

By the way did you notice that the tone of the advance the last couple of days was much more even across the S&P 500? Not just the banks. That indicates that the mutual funds are jumping back into the water.

For a brilliant analysis and compendium on the two theories of how we got where we are, see David Brooks today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/opinion/03brooks.html

I am of the Simon Johnson "Greed" Camp, and the Wall Street Stupidity Camp.

The greed narrative leads to the conclusion that government should
aggressively restructure the financial sector. The stupidity narrative is
suspicious of that sort of radicalism. We’d just be trading the hubris of
Wall Street for the hubris of Washington. The stupidity narrative suggests
we should preserve the essential market structures, but make them more
transparent, straightforward and
comprehensible. Instead of rushing off to
nationalize the banks, we should
nurture and recapitalize what’s left of
functioning markets.

Shiller and Summers

Summers had it right back then:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/business/economy/29view.html?scp=1&sq=shiller%20summers&st=cse

What to Expect and Not, in a Financial Advisor

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/your-money/financial-planners/26ADVISE.html?ref=businessspecial3

Friedman -- Now! Dammit!

What Friedman says is what I have felt for a year. We have wasted time, and not a little substance, by the Bush administration keeping deregulation still on the front burner. We must not waste another week or day.

Op-Ed Columnist
We Found the W.M.D.
comments
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23friedman.html

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 22, 2008
So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”
Times Topics: Credit Crisis - Bailout Plan
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Now you know why I don’t get invited out for dinner much these days. If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we can’t afford them. Forget the grandstands; we don’t need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let’s swear in Barack Obama right now — by choice — with the same haste we did — by necessity — with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One.
Unfortunately, it would take too long for a majority of states to ratify such an amendment. What we can do now, though, said the Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, co-author of “The Broken Branch,” is “ask President Bush to appoint Tim Geithner, Barack Obama’s proposed Treasury secretary, immediately.” Make him a Bush appointment and let him take over next week. This is not a knock on Hank Paulson. It’s simply that we can’t afford two months of transition where the markets don’t know who is in charge or where we’re going. At the same time, Congress should remain in permanent session to pass any needed legislation.
This is the real “Code Red.” As one banker remarked to me: “We finally found the W.M.D.” They were buried in our own backyard — subprime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them.
Yet, it is obvious that President Bush can’t mobilize the tools to defuse them — a massive stimulus program to improve infrastructure and create jobs, a broad-based homeowner initiative to limit foreclosures and stabilize housing prices, and therefore mortgage assets, more capital for bank balance sheets and, most importantly, a huge injection of optimism and confidence that we can and will pull out of this with a new economic team at the helm.
The last point is something only a new President Obama can inject. What ails us right now is as much a loss of confidence — in our financial system and our leadership — as anything else. I have no illusions that Obama’s arrival on the scene will be a magic wand, but it would help.
Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving — with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.
“The unity seems to be gone. The emergency looks to be a little less pressing,” Bill Frenzel, the former 10-term Republican congressman who is now with the Brookings Institution, was quoted by CNBC.com on Friday.
I don’t want to see Detroit’s auto industry wiped out, but what are we supposed to do with auto executives who fly to Washington in three separate private jets, ask for a taxpayer bailout and offer no detailed plan for their own transformation?
The stock and credit markets haven’t been fooled. They have started to price financial stocks at Great Depression levels, not just recession levels. With $5, you can now buy one share of Citigroup and have enough left over for a bite at McDonalds.
As a result, Barack Obama is possibly going to have to make the biggest call of his presidency — before it even starts.
“A great judgment has to be made now as to just how big and bad the situation is,” says Jeffrey Garten, the Yale School of Management professor of international finance. “This is a crucial judgment. Do we think that a couple of hundred billion more and couple of bad quarters will take care of this problem, or do we think that despite everything that we have done so far — despite the $700 billion fund to rescue banks, the lowering of interest rates and the way the Fed has stepped in directly to shore up certain markets — the bottom is nowhere in sight and we are staring at a deep hole that the entire world could fall into?”
If it’s the latter, then we need a huge catalyst of confidence and capital to turn this thing around. Only the new president and his team, synchronizing with the world’s other big economies, can provide it.
“The biggest mistake Obama could make,” added Garten, “is thinking this problem is smaller than it is. On the other hand, there is far less danger in overestimating what will be necessary to solve it.”
Conventional wisdom says it’s good for a new president to start at the bottom. The only way to go is up. That’s true — unless the bottom falls out before he starts.

And This Must Be Read

http://us1.institutionalriskanalytics.com/pub/IRAMain.asp

Effect of Crash on Retirees

What's the difference between "crash now" and "cash cow?"

Answer: cash

I'm now starting to use the label "crash now" on this blog for these stories and my ideas on the effects of the crash-- let's face it that's what it is -- on people.


new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/business/13retired.html
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By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: November 12, 2008
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Since the stock market began to fall, friends have been coming to Barbara Goldsmith to talk about their depression, loss of appetite, insomnia and cravings for hot fudge sundaes.
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10 Weeks of Financial Turmoil
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Times Topics: Credit Crisis — The Essentials
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Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
Seniors like Charles Mailman are watching their retirement portfolios shrink at an alarming rate.
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“People are grieving,” said Ms. Goldsmith, a semiretired psychotherapist who counsels fellow residents of the Gleneagles Country Club, a gated community here. “There was a death. Their money died.”
In communities like Gleneagles and in the homes of retirees across the country, these are days of fear and uncertainty. In theory, retired people are not supposed to invest much in the stock market; in reality, many millions of them do. With the economy in free fall and stocks down about 40 percent this year, legions of middle- and upper-middle-class people are suddenly worried about having enough to carry them through.
To be sure, no bread lines are forming at places like Gleneagles. The community remains placid and, on the surface at least, highly prosperous. Retirees play golf, tennis and cards amid peach-colored condominium villas, ornate fountains, and manicured palm trees and violet bougainvillea.
But sustaining that comfortable life for another two or three decades, as many retirees hope to do, requires money. People with investments that were worth $1 million or $2 million a few months ago are suddenly canceling cruises, clipping supermarket coupons, eating at home rather than at restaurants and cutting back on contributions to their grandchildren’s college educations.
Like retired people everywhere, residents here knowingly juggled what they saw as competing risks.
They all heard the standard advice to move their assets out of stocks and into supersafe investments as they neared retirement. But, with interest rates so low, the returns on safe investments like government bonds were meager, and many of them saw a risk in not keeping some money in stocks. To finance a long retirement, they figured they needed the gains characteristic of the stock market.
Keeping money in stocks left them exposed, of course, to the risk of a once-in-a-lifetime market meltdown. Now, that day is at hand.
“Every television monitor in the card room and locker room is on CNBC, so we can get aggravated all day,” said Jerry Rivkin, 75, a retired appliance store owner. “We’re playing for nickels and dimes while we watch ourselves losing tens of thousands.”
To cope, some people are selling their homes up North, so they will have the money to stay here. A handful of condominiums in Gleneagles have gone into foreclosure, something that was almost unheard of until recently. Humor is becoming darker as residents tell jokes about their shrinking “301(k)’s” and the sorry inheritances their children will be surprised to receive.
For years, retirement and financial advisers have said that elderly people should be lightly invested in stocks, putting most of their assets in bonds, certificates of deposit and other conservative investments. But even some of the experts acknowledge that such a strategy does not always work for retired people in good health who can live to be 90 or older, unless they have a lot of money or move to a place with a low cost of living.
“With life expectancies being what they are, and medicine getting better and better every year,” said Joseph La Scala, a senior financial consultant at GunnAllen Financial, “someone who is entering retirement now needs to be a long-term investor, and that means there needs to be more of an allocation to growth investments such as equities.”
According to government statistics, a third of retirees have almost no stock exposure. But those are mostly poor or lower-middle-class people who rely on Social Security for income. Others are shielded by pension benefits, although those have been shrinking in recent years, especially for younger retirees.
Retirement experts say a majority of people in the middle and upper-middle classes have portfolios that are far more weighted with stocks, and therefore are more risky, than is commonly recommended. According to a recent survey by the University of Michigan that was sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, in the wealthiest 40 percent of the population age 75 and older, more than half had at least a third of their accumulated savings in stocks.
“Older middle-class people have made plans based on a set of assumptions of how the world works, and the world has gone crazy,” said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Those assumptions once included the notions that bank accounts and corporate bonds were secure, and blue-chip stocks were the best long-term investments.
“If you call my mother,” said Jason J. Fichtner, acting deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, “her goal was $1 million to retire on in stock equities. She had that for a weekend, and now it’s worth $600,000.”
At Gleneagles, people still play cards, swing 9-irons and take painting classes. But the anxiety in the community is palpable, and rising.
“I feel terrible,” said Harry Pure, 80, retired athletic director at Philadelphia University, who has lost 25 percent of his savings.
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Paulson

So we enter this crucial weekend with our fate with Paulson and the G-7. And with the inkling that maybe he didn't really know what he was doing, but he has authority under the bailout plan to do the right thing anyway.

And apparantly a lot of bad will follow if Morgan Stanley or another bank goes under this weekend, as could happen. The Japanese Mitsubishi is supposed to contribute $9 billion for 21% of the company Tuesday but it is believed they would be crazy to do so. MS's market capitalization stands at $11 billion as of the close Friday, after the horrendous selloff of the week.

James Cramer laid it all out last night (Friday night), including the scenerio of the Great Depression, which he says is possible. It took until 1954 for the stock market to recover back to where it was in 1929.

If Paulson and the G-7 come out with good this weekend, we're back to the races on the upside. Their announcement so far isn't thrilling, but maybe there will be more before the market opens up again -- it is Monday, isn't it? Or is Monday a holiday from stock trading as well? I don't think so since nobody talked about it Friday on CNBC.

Soros on Bill Moyers was as usual excellent, if a little blurry. James Rodgers on CNBC hit some home runs and planted a seed with me that Paulson is playing catch-up without a playbook. And seeds of doubt about the bailout thus far. Rodgers sees the very big picture, from Singapore this time. He needs teeth whitening job. Too much beetle juice over there -- or is that only Vietnam?

It appears there was a monumental screw-up in letting "little" Lehman go bankrupt. Not too clear why, but I think because there were tens of billions of credit default swaps that left many other counterparties on the verge of going under themselves. But this screwup, if it was, lessens Paulson's credibility and lends credence that he's playing catch-up without a playbook.

Is it "only" 1987 or 1929? We'll know Monday.

You might click on my "Crash of 1987" blogs infra, as the lawyers say.

Herbert About Another Herbert -- A Gold Standard Op-Ed

Op-Ed Columnist
The Mask Slips
comments
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/opinion/11herbert.html
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By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 10, 2008
The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.
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For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.
Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.
It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.
Voting has consequences.
I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.
The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.
In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.
These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.
Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.
Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.
When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”
Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.
“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.
The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.

Overnight Notes During Crash

3:58 AM 10/10/2008
on tivo:
paul volker on Charlie Rose earlier in the evening:
we have the resources to deal with this problem
central banks are working together
former chairman, federal reserve
netting arrangements for these credit default swaps which eat up money and collateral
we have the tools
let's get this thing settled and go back and rebuild the system
This problem is bigger than first imagined but we have the tools
it's been dealt with piecemeal
big fight in congress was not confidence-building
putting it together on an international basis

Overnight Notes During Crash

3:33 AM 10/10/2008
many stock not open for trade
basic resources are hardest hit, not financials
"who is a forced seller" [same analyst with the open shirt -- looks like Robert Redford
3:36 AM 10/10/2008
Putin: trust in Wall Street and US "gone forever."
imf to help!
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director, IMF