I don’t know guys, I smell fish around here. The Fannie and Freddie swaps auction on Monday returned 90+ cents on the dollar, and the same auction for Lehman on Friday lost 90+ cents on the dollar.
So I ask myself: who’s doing the buying? Now, it was clear from the get-go that Paulson et al were in on picking the Fan&Fred party music; who else overpays 800% or more on toilet paper? That’s just got to be someone playing with other people’s money. That doesn’t just smell like fish, that is a all-out glib bald mackerel. Insert Hank the Hammer pic.
A more realistic valuation came in the Lehman “settlement” [sic]. 8.5 cents on the buck. Ya-bleeding-bleeping Hoo!
Nah, want to know what I think? I think the banks and funds bought back their own swaps in that one. You know, save face, and all that. Besides, who cares anymore? They buy it back, and Monday morning Paulson offers to get it off their sheets, at the same 800% overpay, with your money. Dead Stinky Fish. Glib and salty.
Henry got another little sideshow set up as well. Forget about the $700 billion Roman Dictatorship Proclamation. Now, Fannie and Freddie, on top of that fully loaded chewed-up tobacco spit-ball on the Constitution, are forced to buy up half a trillion dollars worth of mortgage toilet paper over the next year, and that amount could grow beyond infinity.
Don’t bother checking for your wallet; you gave it away last week, remember?
Now I see otherwise sane people claim that these auctions confirmed some sort of value for the swaps, and I just ain’t getting that. Don’t they understand how rigged the game is by now? Karl, wake up!
Yes, I agree, the paper needs to be exposed. But that doesn’t offer any hope; it will mean the end of banking as we know it. Which in turn will signal the end of society as we know it. The whole economic system is gone, it’s sleeping with the fishes.
$5 trillion vanished from the stock markets in one week, and I bet you, there’ll still be folks talking about (hyper-)inflation. Who needs logic anymore to make sense of the world around us? When faith can do it?
If nobody’s left who can afford to make an offer on your home, it’s worth nothing. The markets work, just not the way we’d like.
And if nobody offers anything for casino toilet paper, then that isn’t worth dick-all either. And since any value we assign to people these days, and the environment, and food, and drinking water, all is calculated as all other commodities, in a market that is dying, none of it all has any value left.
You now cost more to maintain than you deliver in productivity.
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