“Too big to fail’ is the new black on Wall Street.

Bank of America is playing the same game sucking up Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. Even today nobody really knows just how much bad debt is sitting on Countrywide’s books. Mark my words; at some point in the next six months BoA will go the Feds and say,

“We will either have to decimate consumer deposits to cover all these bad loans or you’re going to have to buy them from us.”

And that’s exactly what the government will do; absorb all the bad debt at taxpayer expense, in order to ‘save’ BoA. Now BoA has yet another round of derivatives and ugly debt it picked up from Merrill Lynch and it will go back to the Feds and demand coverage for those bad debts as well.

They are going to use the threat of massive losses to consumer accounts and the huge liabilities of the FDIC to blackmail the government into cleaning up their books by making all the bad decisions go away.

It seems to me BoA played the game pretty good. They've mannevered themselves into a position where its seen that the Federal government has no choice but to bail them out of their 'mistakes'. If this plays out right for them, they will come out of the current crisis with cleaned up balance sheets and all the assets of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. In other words, they will reap all the profits while all of the costs will be born by taxpayers. I'd say the CEO did a pretty good job for his company.

Of course he screwed the rest of us in the process, but we're not millioniares so we don't matter.

Every year we get a host of studies showing how the vast majority of American's are either overpaying or underpaying their taxes largely out due to errors.

The simple truth is, the current tax code is so complex that even with professional help it is impossible to do one's taxes correctly. Twice I've been in a business subjected to audits from the IRS. When I asked the second guy why he was interpretting a provision of the code related to fixed assets the way he was (pointing out the previous auditor interpretted the same passage differently) he pretty much admitted that the code means whatever the auditor decides it means.

It's nuts.

I will lay odds if the IRS did an audit of every member of congress's at LEAST 50% would be found to have errors. The same would almost certainly hold true for every cabinet member going back 30 years.

The reason we are seeing this now is because the Obama team's vetting process seems to be much more thorough than previous adminstrations. They are actually looking at and reviewing past tax issues hence catching stuff previous administrations missed.

I keep saying this, but I really do believe it.

We will see another Oklahoma bombing before we see another 9/11. I remember the rise of the right-wing militia groups in the 90s. I remember how they linked up with the hate groups. It's starting to happen again. It's only a matter of time before they do something big. The radical right passed unhinged several years ago and now lives in a state of near constant paranoia.

What's even scarier today (as opposed to the 90s) is how out in the open all the calls for outright violence have become. FOX was always bad, but even at their worst in the 90s they didn't have anyone as nuts as Beck getting play.

Knew alot more about torture than they are comfortable admitting in public. One of the Bush Administration's claims has always been that they kept Congressional leaders in the loop on DOJ policy. The various Democrats in congress who sat on those committees have always been real cagey in their replies about how much they knew and when.

As much as it pains me to say this, I think some of those memos either expressly state or strongly imply that key leaders in Congress were fully briefed on torture policies and Obama is trying to figure out a way to cover for them.

When people say "Trade is dropping" what they mean is "US comsumption is dropping". For the past 30 years trade has been largely driven by US imports of foreign goods. The more US consumers contract their spending, the more the world economy goes down the toilet.

The problem, of course, is during that same 30 period the US has outsourced its manufacturing base and the good jobs right along with it. For the better part of a decade US consumers have been living off of debt, not wages. Wages have been stagnant or dropping in real terms for most of that same period. The debt faucet has dried up and there are no longer any jobs to replace it with.

Without jobs, the US can't consume. Without US comsumption, the rest of the world can't export.

The death spiral continues.

The guy did spend somewhere in the mid 8 figure range out of his own pocket last year.

And that is why Obama is blocking the inquiries. Because if he agrees to prosecute Bush officials for torture and civil rights abuses than there will be enormous presure to go after Congressional Democrats who were fully briefed in on those programs and did nothing to stop them.

I am absolutely conviced that select Democratic leaders in congress were fully informed of Bush's law breaking and made the polictical calculation to go along with it. They knew full well what was going on.

Democrats want the issue, they don't want the responsibility.