Borrow $1000 and the bank owns you. Borrow $1M and you own the bank. It applies here.

There is a common thread running through all this that no one seems to mention. All the firms in question are HUGE. The collateral damage associated with any of them failing will be immense. On a side note, Secretary Paulson is playing in a floating craps game by allowing Lehman Brothers fail. Why have we allowed them to get so large? Why is our entire financial edifice supported by only a half dozen to a dozen major players such that if one fails the entire edifice begins to crumble?

Back at the turn of the last century, the trust busters broke up the trusts because they had become too powerful. Now, there are regulations that limit the size of the deposit banks (I believe it is written in terms of percentages of total US deposits) but those limits are clearly inadequate to prevent financial institutions from becoming so large that they become the $1M borrower. And yet, our response has been to merge the losers in this debacle with mostly healthy but already huge institutions to create even larger firms.

Another adage, if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

But I would add that this also would not have come to pass if the Glass-Stegall act hadn't been overturned by the Clinton administration. When I heard that that had happened, I said, Oh, shit, what are those guys doing?

I hate regulations and taxes, too. The regulations I'm talking about are the ones that have you filling out form after form and getting permit after permit for no real purpose. Governmental controls must take into account human behavior. If they don't, they will either fail or really screw things up or both. But they must take into account human behavior. So, if we know that humans do X (something deleterious), we need a rule to prevent that (like lending out more than 90% of a bank's assets). I frankly don't have any faith that the crew of "C" students we have running things is up to the job of cleaning up the mess we currently have nor do I have any faith that they can or will write rules that will restore our economic system.

Let's talk about taxes. Not being Keynesian, I believe that taxes are required to pay for government spending. They are not to encourage this or discourage that or anything else. Those taxes should be fairly and equitably distributed so everybody pays a fair share. You want lower taxes? Lower government spending. Unfortunately, the crew in charge believes in bigger government - always a bigger military (don't call them conservatives, call them fascists). For example, Ronald Reagan was right to lower what were confiscatory tax rates. The government raked in a lot more in taxes and then promptly went out and spent it all and then some on the military. Our national debt shot up. America needs a smaller government; we can't afford the one we've got. But that doesn't mean that we don't need our government to be investing in America's infrastructure (both physical and human); it means we need to have a serious discussion of what the role of the federal government is and isn't. I'll give you a big hint - we need peace, not war. We need a much smaller military and we need to stop trying to push every country on the planet around.

It is hoodwinking men - we're suckers for that. Most of the persons of the female persuasion I know are unmoved by feminine hotness. I suggest cold turkey. Then there will be one less piece about Sarah Palin that doesn't mention that she's a religious fascist cut from the same cloth as the autocrats we have in DC now.

I'm about to get my 5th passport plus I read the NYT so not only do I think I should be running the country, I'm also very good at crosswords.

Who're talkin' about? Yeah, I read Salon but I don't drink any of that froo-froo double latte, squirt of this, shot of that coffee. High end, expensive, unavailable in the grocery store coffee that looks like but doesn't taste like the stuff you can get in your local diner when it comes out of my coffee maker. No hummus but I do listen to NPR. So let's watch this racial profiling, dude.

On the other hand, with what I learned in the first two days after her selection as Veep nominee, I said: "Quintessential Republican Fascist". Everything I've seen since (including this post) has merely confirmed it.

that I gave the US only a 50/50 of having the elections this fall. If we have a new administration on January 19th, I will have been proven wrong but it ain't January 19th yet.

One more piece of the puzzle drops in place.

His power grab must be rejected. Yes, we need to do something but I'm insufficiently expert to know what. I am uncertain if this is the emergency that will prompt him to suspend the election IAW the "Patriot" Act or weather he'll just go through with whatever he had dreamed up already to suspend the election but watch it, we are in grave danger. And not just from the financial disaster.