I don’t know if you’ve read the Jim Jubak article in MSN Money yet, but, like the Rolling Stone article, this is well researched and it will make you just as heartsick and angry.
I think the real investigations are about to begin, and I think that the truly hard questions haven’t been asked yet. I think Obama is in a tough spot, any way you cut it. He can attempt to soothe us with comforting words and bring this thing down gently, or he can do what he needs to do, which is bring this entire house of cards down. I’m pretty sure which direction he’ll go.[/quote]
This was an excellent article, Allan, and spot-on, IMHO. Thank you for sharing it.
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Also, finally got through the video on short sellers. Yes, definitely agree there was manipulation and insider trading. But to think that Bear Stearns or Lehman Bros would still be here if not for the short-sellers is questionable, IMHO. They were in trouble even without the short selling, though the SS might have sped things up a bit. As mentioned before, I am entirely against naked short selling, but think the focus on short sellers last fall was misguided and might have been an attempt to distract people from the true culprits — those who were behind the deregulation of the derivatives markets and who turned a blind eye to (even encouraged and enabled) all the fraud and corruption that was going on **on the way up.**
The video was created by Deep Capture, which is run by Patrick Byrnes of Overstock.com fame.
Here is a snippet from an article by Gary Weiss about him (though I tend to discredit people who try to discredit others for being “crazy, conspiracy theorists” as many conspiracy theorists are often right). Just saying the opinion might be biased, even though he may well be correct:
One of the techniques of the loony-tunes CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, in advancing his shrill and nonsensical Wall Street conspiracy theories is to dispatch across the Internet an army of paid hirelings led by former Florida Republican wingnut Judd Bagley and disgraced ex-CJR editor Mark Mitchell. Well, Byrne seems to have picked the wrong target.
