no srsly...

http://barackobamaeatsbabies.com/

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM

WTF man. Seriously.

Fuck you can't go back to Alaska soon enough...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603436.html?referrer=emailarticle

http://www.zazzle.com/obama_i_voted_for_the_terrorist_shirt-235956081389897523

http://jalopnik.com/5062960/barack-obama-advertising-inside-online-racing-video-games-attempts-to-pick-up-crucial-xbox-360-vote

This seems like as good a place to post as any. A buddy on another board posted this explaining the shit we are all in now in laymens terms:

On the credit crisis:
This has multiple causes. Part of this is the irrational exuberance of the housing market in the 90s and 00s. Part of it is an era of uninterrupted prosperity (also during the 90s and early 00s). And lastly a period of deregulation.

The era of prosperity created a situation where the collective worth/assets of the world doubled in the matter of like... 20 years. All that money wanted to find somewhere to invest and appreciate. The housing market in the US was seen as a good place to go, because housing prices just kept rising and rising, and the US was in good economic times (i.e. people could pay their debts).

Well, in order to try and milk the Global Pool of Money (GPoM), everyone involved in the financial system in the US began making increasingly bad decisions in the name of milking the GPoM for all they could possible get it for. This coupled with some serious short-sightedness caused a really huge and unsustainable bubble.

The explanation for the bubble is interesting. Basically mortgage companies wanted to acquire as many mortgages to sell to investment banks, who in turn wanted to turn around and sell them to the GPoM. As more companies entered into the mortgage market, they began to compete, by issuing riskier and riskier loans, in order to have more stock of mortgages to sell to investment banks.

The investment banks and bond rating agencies in turn said "well sure we'll take riskier and riskier mortgages, because, so long as housing prices continue to increase, investors will have an asset that's appreciating even if the mortgage holder defaults on the loan."

Please note the horribly stupid assumption made here.

The bond rating agencies didn't do their job of indicating the actual risk of these mortgage backed investments partially out of ignorance/laziness and partially (probably mainly) out of the interest of Greed. It was in their best interest for the investment banks to sell more to the GPoM, because that's where the bond rating agencies got their cut.

Well. Housing prices didn't continue up forever. At some point housing prices got out of reach of US salaries, and things leveled off. This meant that the party was over. The investment banks suddenly went "oh wait... uh... wtf, these things aren't going to be worth as much as we assumed." And stopped buying bad mortgages. The mortgage companies collapsed, because suddenly they were left holding a bunch of mortgages that they weren't going to be able to dump to the investment banks.

The investment banks slowly started to realize how fucked they were, because suddenly they had these massive amounts of holdings that were swiftly losing money as the housing market declined. Having not done their due diligence originally, they were suddenly in the position of having no idea how much their assets were actually worth. To make matters worse, the way that many of the mortgages had been sold, was basically an obfuscator. Take a whole bunch of mortgages, chop them up into pieces, randomly rearrange the pieces, and then sell off chunks. End result is, nobody owns a WHOLE mortgage, and you have no idea where the other pieces of the mortgages are (and remember a lot of the companies who did the chopping and rearranging have folded and disappeared).

So now, the banks hands are tied, cause they can't even assess their assets. On top of that, in the era of deregulation, nobody was seriously paying attention to what the investment banks ratio of assets to debt actually was (which is referred to as how well a bank is capitalized). The whole modus operandi of the housing bubble was overextension, and now the banks were caught in a position of being over extended. The banks, not sure what their own capital bases were like, and unable to tell what other banks asset liabilities were, just stop lending money to each other. They absolutely can't take any further risk of loaning money, especially when they can't assess what the risk is of that loan (i.e. will the bank being loaned to, go bankrupt or not).

So that is up through about 2 months ago.



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Now the ugly part starts. The banks start to figure out what their asset liability is. They're waaaaaaaay underfunded. They've got way more debt than they had anticipated, and don't have enough money to continue to function as investment banks. They don't have enough money, and they can't get anyone to loan them money to get out of the tight spot they're in, because basically everyone is in the same situation. Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and the like begin to crumble.

This is tips off a whole different set of dominoes. You see there's a whole different set of financial tools (ostensibly unrelated to the housing crisis) called Credit Default Swaps. Originally these were used kind of like insurance. You could say, i need some backup on this loan i'm about to make. I'll pay AIG a percentage of the loan every year to ensure that i get my money back, even if the people i'm making the loan to (Lehman brothers) can't pay it back for some reason.

AIG made the assumption that the investment banks weren't going to do anything so recklessly stupid as to make themselves go out of business and default on their loans (Bad assumption #2).

The really ugly part is that Credit Default Swaps are totally unregulated. A decision was made by the Republican Congress, Alan Greenspan and the Clinton White House that CDS did not need to be regulated. In the early 00s congress actually passed a law saying that CDS could not be regulated. CDS were treated as contracts between two private institutions.

Well, in the totally unregulated market for the CDS, people started doing weird dumb things. Instead of using them only like insurance, companies like AIG started letting people who were NOT party to a loan (or other financial device) take out these CDS (sort of like an insurance policy) on other people's loans. As a result, they became a sort of way of betting against a company's ability to repay a loan.

As a result, over a single transaction, 5 or 6 other interested but otherwise uninvolved parties could bet on a loan going sour, and get a pay out from AIG, or some other CDS offering institution. So now, when one of these institutional loans went sour, they didn't just have to pay the value of the loan back once, they'd have to pay it back 5 to 6 times over. In other words, they were just as ridiculously overextended as the investment banks were, AND had also not done their due diligence (and really couldn't, since the banks didn't even know what their positions were).

AIG is about to collapse, and the Fed has to bail them out.

Well, now the whole world is fucked, because everyone realizes that the housing crisis is not contained. Everyone realizes that there investments in general aren't safe and run for the hills. Since nobody knows what which institutions are over-extended, and which ones aren't, they just stop loaning and investing money. They pull their money out and stick it somewhere "safe".

This is about up to now.



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So the Fed & Treasury sees two ways out of this mess, they can either buy the assets off the investment banks, or they can directly invest in the banks and become shareholders, a partial nationalization of banks.

Well, the Bush Administration and the banking lobby REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY don't want nationalization. They don't want nationalization because government investment would require giving the tax payers preferred stock in the companies, meaning that tax payers get their payout first before anyone else in the company does.

So Hank Paulson (treasury secretary) proposes that the Treasury just buys bad debt from the banks, to shore up their capital positions, and try and fix the overextension.

The problem is that, even now, nobody knows what the banks assets are worth, really, and there's no way to find out, due to the fact that all the banks assets are obfuscated through ridiculous things like segmenting mortgages. It'll take forever to sort out. Even if the banks just start dumping debts onto the US Government, nobody knows which assets are good and which assets are bad (especially since the bond rating agencies were complicit in this mess).

So that leaves only nationalization, which the Treasury looks like it's going to exercise, in spite of banking opposition, because the longer they wait, the worse things are going to get.

The hilarious part is that the Stock Injection (as the nationalization is called, since anything that sounds like the government running business is shunned here) was basically snuck into the bailout bill, by parties unknown, because if it comes to light who set this very very clever clause in the bill up, the banking lobby is going to try and destroy their political career.

Some how, amazingly, Congress did an end run around the lobbying community, and managed to pass a Keynesian new deal style bill in 2008. It almost restores my faith in government.

The important part now is that Hank Paulson has to make sure he doesn't fuck up the stock injection, in order to shore up the banks, and restore faith that the banks aren't going to collapse, and tha they'll be able to pay back the debts that they have borrowed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/us_elections_2008/7665780.stm

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain