An awesome term, for when you find yourself doing some task at 8 removes from what you meant to be doing, each step along the way seemingly utterly necessary...

You start out deciding to tidy your room and you realize that in order to do that you'll need some more trash bags, so you need to go to the shops, which will involve you getting out the car, but the car needs gas, so you'll need to go to the gas station first, which means you should probably find your gas discount card, which involves finding your keys, which are in the room somewhere... ( )

And ultimately, in order to tidy your room, you somehow end up shaving a yak.



You know it's happened to you too!

I like being the first one in at work. No interruptions, a nice start to the morning.

That's all :)

Actually, I am glad that the bailout failed. We'll now get a smaller, more incremental bailout. Rough ride for the next year though, no matter what.

Japan in the 90's went through a crisis very similar to ours, a huge asset bubble and then a giant markdown.

I get what the crisis is about - liquidity - but there's more then one way to solve it. If we prop up existing institutions no questions asked, we'll end up like Japan in the 90's, where zombie banks were technically fine but actually not able to loan much money anyways, thus dragging the crisis out into stagnation for a decade.

The current failed plan was to buy the bad assets at their original inflated values, sell them back to the market at a reduced rate, and use the funds from selling them to buy additional bad assets and repeat the process until all the money was totally gone. That is, if you believe the conference call that was held between the government representatives and Wall Street insiders ( mp3 torrent ), instead of what was said publicly.

Banks operate on the velocity of money. They take money in, send it out again. Don't think of them as repositories, but instead as intermediaries between those who need to hold cash and those who need to spend cash. The banking system is not set up for stasis.

The proposed plan would've increased the velocity of money. Something does need to be done, but jumping to the most drastic expensive plan doesn't sit right with me. I'm totally up for $500 billion worth of no interest loans, something along those lines.

But not recapitalization of the largest banks via burning down $700 billion. Plenty of smaller banks are doing fine. Those are the ones that should be getting help, to replace the large burdened banks. A new day on Wallstreet, slaughter of the behemoths is what sounds good to me.

If 10 years from now there are no familiar old names on Wallstreet, and a new crop of giants risen from the ashes of this meltdown, I'll be a happy camper.

Well OK, I just posted that other thing but this is too good to not also make a journal.



Original CBS interview w/ transcript:



I can't wait for the VP debate this week! It's going to be a disaster. That is, unless they manage to take back all the nonsense they've been force-feeding her for a month now. She would've been better off just being her own person instead of programmed to spout talking points.

I was afraid of her for a long time, but they wasted her.

--- UPDATE ---

Check out this bingo score card: play along from home!

(regarding Paul's journal: )



From xkcd - CC licensed -