Excerpt from
Following Through
(PDF Format)
Keep Up With
the
Markets
On Jake’s Blog
markets2watch.blogspot.com
a
femme fatale who may speak English as a fifth language but clearly knows
what’s what.
Find it impossible to imagine a world in which a glass of beer goes for ten
billion Papiermarks? A world in which fifty dollars gets you one Japanese
Yen or one Chinese Yuan or one German Papiermark?
Jake finds nothing impossible to imagine. Among other things Jake imagines
are these:
A bank CEO who after engineering the credit bubble as a grey eminence of the
then incumbent Administration pockets several hundred million dollars in
cash and stock for presiding ten years over a company the stock of which
goes nowhere for eight of those years, arcs downward for twenty-two months
and then craters in two, who is invited to deliver (and does deliver) op ed
economic advice to the Nation in the New York Times on the day before the
election and stands to be an important part of an incoming Administration
that claims to represent positive change?
A private equity firm fronted by a former Treasury Secretary who blames the
disaster over which he once presided like General Custer on his
Administration’s unduly sympathetic attitude toward home ownership ambitions
of the impecunious, and which pays less than nothing for control of an auto
industry albatross and leverages its ownership into a taxpayer funded
windfall as the price of not holding up salvation of the only American
industrial enterprise still making in America a few things that move under
their own power?
A Federal Reserve Board Chairman who thinks private regulation of financial
markets is superior to public regulation even when no individual human
making more than chump change has any personal incentive to regulate them,
and thousands of sociopathic money obsessed self aggrandizing steroidal
humans have every financial incentive to indulge in every imaginable form of
chicanery and legerdemain?
A Swiss banker who finds a currency trading loss of four billion francs in a
single quarter disappointing but expects to rehabilitate his bank by
focusing on trading strategies that aren’t linked to market movements?
An inheritor whose only industrial or commercial product is hot air who
insists for more than a decade, in good times and bad times, at all times,
morning and evening, day and night, weekdays and weekends, that only
reducing to the vanishing point his taxes and those of his inheritor pals
will stimulate investment and make everything hunky dory?
A world in which the effectiveness of Fortune 500 company CEOs is tested by
a real time experiment in which the executives are replaced by monkeys
flipping coins when presented with budgets and strategic plans?
A President who when told we must attack the commercial paper market asks
where to find it?
A senior economic adviser whose resume features front line service in a
short list of turn of the Century financial black holes?
A former Treasury Secretary who believes the financial services industry has
been a major source of jobs and profits and has done a good job of taking
capital from those who cannot use it well and funneling it to those who can
(no doubt excluding those who have funneled most of it into thin air)?
A television network dedicated relentlessly to inflating the market value of
the stock of the company which owns it?
A politician not living in Rumania or Argentina who is so powerful he can
sabotage critical financial regulation by putting his wife in charge of an
independent agency?
A world in which Japanese Yen (and soon perhaps Chinese Yuan) will be a
safer investment than any Fortune 500 company stock or bond?
A Biblical patriarch on the wrong side of the first default swap, arguably
the worst one ever engineered?
An America in which the family golf course replaces the family farm with
Jeffersonian consequences and benefits?
A merger of England and America as a strategy for reforming (by replacing)
our most seriously deranged institutions: Congress, the Supreme Court and
the Constitution?
A government buyout of credit card debt followed by a write off of one
hundred thousand dollars per family and a refinancing of the balance at four
percent?
A business person’s credit card with direct access to the TARP?
A world in which giant corporations actually are compelled to pay taxes and
have a financial incentive to become smaller?
A securitization scheme in which brokers create a package of developing
golfers from which they hope to engineer one golfer competitive against
Tiger, and banks generate mouth watering commissions by selling off the low
handicap players to return obsessed investors while keeping the higher
handicap foozlers for the bank?
A corporate balance sheet which StandingPoorly or MoodSwings or anyone
familiar with the English language or accounting either might evaluate
intelligently?
An economist with the dimmest appreciation of how markets or industry
actually work who has not made a career of toadying to the needs of monopoly
capital?
A collection of German banks losing $275,000 per fisherman by loaning money
in Iceland?
Ken Lay resurfacing in Zurmat or Monte Carlo but indistinguishable in all
respects from Al Gore?
What things will be like when China has not only half the world’s energy
resources but all America’s technological knowhow too?
Jake can enlighten you about all this and keep you laughing too for three
hundred pages of non-stop insights on money and markets, golf and baseball,
male female relations, business celebrity compensation, the oxymoron known
as shareholder democracy, taxes, government regulation, our bizarre system
of elective politics and other things crossing the mind of an only slightly
insane over-educated person with nothing else to do but think about what has
been going wrong in America for nearly fifty years.
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