FB: Liberty League

[JT]

Can someone tell Reg why the F gold is so expensive?  I mean, what is so special about gold, are people not mining it anymore?  Is there a huge influx of people getting there teeth did?  Did the A-Team finally start airing in Europe and Asia?

Because the US dollar has gone to ****, mix in the RE crisis, inflation, oil prices, recession etc.,  When people lose confidence in the US dollar and its economy they tend to drift toward real assets that can be used as currency in bad times.

[PBR...]

this whole market and what is going on is HORSE****! PERIOD!  As pbr and a friend have been talking about here is crux of our anger and summation pbr has cut out of our emails.....

Trully stunning. The downfall started last week with the refusal of a european financial institution to act as a counterparty in what would normally be a routine transaction. It just shows how much of our global financial markets rely on confidence and the assumption of trust.
The mortgage derivatives is another example where liquidity was trashed by emotions. When there is no liquidity these billions in mortgage backed securities can no longer be priced by marking to a market but instead get marked to a model and with Sarbannes Oxley, and the fallout from the Enron/WorldCom/etc.s, financial institutions are going to be conservative marking these assets down 80% when the asset is mostly "contaminated" by less than 3% of sub-prime lending most of which will be refinanced and not fail in any case.
Bear Stearns should never have failed.  This obviously leaves Morgan/Merrill/GS/Lehman in a pinch and their fates unknown as well.
BS would not have failed if the laws supported taking a loss only upon the sale of the asset not on marking to a model which lowers your book value, changes many important financial ratios and also defers taxes and affecting tax revenues.
Steve Forbes this morning offered a very simple solution that would work, simply have a moratorium on having to mark to a model and say that a loss is only a loss when you sell the derivative package. That is how the real world works anyways in an illiquid market. Do you mark to market your stamp collection, an antique car or even your house. You can mark to market your stocks that trade on the major exchanges around the world but how about some obscure stock that trades by appointment on the pink sheets. These derivatives are too new and specialized to be truly liquid and in a crisis of confidence every institution stops buying them so there is no market, all because of 3% sub-prime components. So make a change in the laws, even amend Sarbannes Oxley, so that there is no mark to a model requirement in this illiquid period. If that happened last week Bear Stearns would not have gone out of business.


PBR IS DONE RANTING FOR RIGHT NOW....too many good people are going to lose jobs and dont be surprised if the major u.s. banks pay the european banks back w/ a refusal and see a major european bank get sold for less than its HQ building was worth...wtf someone stop the ride pbr wants to get off.........

[Regulator]

Which leads us to the no so popular Vanilla Ice song- "Stop that train".  Gro makes a guest appearance at 36 srconds in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB-6ssu9SM4

Hey Ferarri- how long until Reg makes more money by keeping his money under his mattress compared to having it in a money market account?

[PBR...]

just ranting reg...mark to market does provide some very good things such as clarity in pricing especially for the shareholders of said company...pbr is just very frustrated right now....what happens if the rest of the big boyz start to fall you want to see people panic and withdraw money left and right and create a crisis?

oh well a +k on the 'gro highlight...LMAO well done

EDIT: To put this into perspective the yanks paid more for A-Rod than JPM did for Bear Stearns...

[JT]

EDIT: To put this into perspective the yanks paid more for A-Rod than JPM did for Bear Stearns...

That's criminal.

[union89]

Damn, LD11's invitation to the NCAA pool was rather quick and to the point with no jabs at Gro, Reg or even Union grads.

His eyes must be bleeding from all the Guinness he consumed yesterday.

[Knightstalker]

Rockets Dancers photographer really likes the one chick.

[sac]

EDIT: To put this into perspective the yanks paid more for A-Rod than JPM did for Bear Stearns...

That's criminal.

.....and the first lawsuit has already been filed.

[mattvsmith]

Can someone tell Reg why the F gold is so expensive?  I mean, what is so special about gold, are people not mining it anymore?  Is there a huge influx of people getting there teeth did?  Did the A-Team finally start airing in Europe and Asia?

Scarcity.

Gold always has been and always will be a highly desired metal because of the objective/physical characteristics it has (e.g. maliablity, portability, etc) and the subjective/metaphysical value humans attribute to it (i.e.  pretty, a sign of love).  There is only so much of it, so what we have must last.

Historically a dollar was 1/20 of an ounce of gold.  When the dollar had a real gold valuation, inflation was in check.  the only thing that could cause the dollar to drop in value was either finding a huge deposit of gold (which didn't happen) or turning dollars into pieces of paper and then printing more paper than gold that the paper represented.  (i.e. Abe Lincoln's monetary policy)

In pre-paper money economies, the only way to devalue a currency and cause inflation was to wither clip coins so that they weighed less than the denomination it represented, or to alloy the metal so that the purity was reduced (thus meaning a denari coin ould not have a true denari's worth of gold, but rather had half a denari's worth of gold and then a load of a non-scarce metal like lead or iron).  This was one of the Roman empire's downfall.

In America, we first detached the dollar from gold with fractional reserve banking.  We had, for example, one hundred dollars worth of paper bills for every one dollar of gold.  Then we totally detached godl form the dollar so that the dolla rnow represents nothing more than the subjective value that recipients of dollars assign to it.

When the objective fundamentals of our economy were sound (i.e. robust agriculture and manufacturing) the world understood and assigned a high subjective value to our greenback.  Now that we have over-extended ourselves, destroyedthe agrarian culture, destroyed manufacturing, destroyed even the service industry so that all we have left is a self-immolating consumer culture, the world says, "Holy shizz, the United States is all hat and no cattle!"  We don't even have the most robust intellectual life anymore, either.  You guys from RPI are truly unique in America in that you can do maths.  Problem is, even though you are some of America's best engineering graduates, we can go to India or China and find a middle school student who can out calculus you while sleeping.  they are also learning how to be creative (which is where we Americans formerly excelled).  We're in deep doo-doo.

Big mistake that people in the U.S. made was making that mental transformation of a house being a place to live into an investment.  You can't liv under a pile of money, but you can live under a roof.  they are not the same thing.  There is a value to a house that no quantifiable analysis can put its finger on.  Same thing with food, water and clothing.  We subverted the Natural Law and it's coming back to bite us in the azz.

They also mistook paper profits for real profits.  A house is only quanitfiably worth what someone else will pay for it.  Instead people sold the floor out from under themselves to go shopping for flat screen tvs and whatever else people buythese days.  So when they borrowed against their projected profits and those profits didn't appear, they basically bought themselves a form of chattel slavery.

The governemtn will protect the wants of the companies and the citizens will be left holding the tab that they can't pay back.  The Rev predicts that offspring will soon be liable for parent's debts so that the lenders will be guarenteed payback.  Watch Congress.

Rev out.

[mattvsmith]

An addendum:

The Great Depression went form bad to worse due to government intervention.

Unfortunately George W Bush can't hold a candle to Herbert Hoover.  Hoover might have made disastrous decisions, but he did not have an endless war costing trillions of dollars to put him into an even worse situation.

The Fed needs to do nothing and let the market work itself out.  Otherwise the only thing the Fed is doing is preventing the amputation of gangrenous limbs.  Amputations need to happen or else the infection will spread to the bloodstream and heart of the U.S. and we will become a rotting, pustulant corpse...a zombie prowling the earth feeding on the living.

As an after thought, The Rev wants the airline industry to shake out just as the banking industry needs a shake out.  Rev's desires:

US Airways to simply fold.  Least favorite airline ever.
Delta and Northwest finally merge for real instead of just sticking the tip in to see how it feels.
United and Continental merge.
American Airlines absorb a strongish smaller carrier like Frontier.
Jet blue and Souhwest no change.

[lewdogg11]

Damn, LD11's invitation to the NCAA pool was rather quick and to the point with no jabs at Gro, Reg or even Union grads.

His eyes must be bleeding from all the Guinness he consumed yesterday.

Dude, get off my nuts.  I'm tired, sore, old, sour, and crabby.  Just join, donate your money, and shut your v-neck  sweater wearing, volvo driving, cheese eating ass up.

I need time to recover.

['gro]

Damn, LD11's invitation to the NCAA pool was rather quick and to the point with no jabs at Gro, Reg or even Union grads.

His eyes must be bleeding from all the Guinness he consumed yesterday.

Dude, get off my nuts.  I'm tired, sore, old, sour, and crabby.  Just join, donate your money, and shut your v-neck  sweater wearing, volvo driving, cheese eating ass up.

I need time to recover.

In what has become an annual tradition, prepare to give up your hard earned coin to 'gro in the 2008 bracketology bonanza.  You can lose to one or both entries: Endangered Feces or Rosenshontz Jam Session

[JT]

An addendum:

The Great Depression went form bad to worse due to government intervention.

Unfortunately George W Bush can't hold a candle to Herbert Hoover.  Hoover might have made disastrous decisions, but he did not have an endless war costing trillions of dollars to put him into an even worse situation.

The Fed needs to do nothing and let the market work itself out.  Otherwise the only thing the Fed is doing is preventing the amputation of gangrenous limbs.  Amputations need to happen or else the infection will spread to the bloodstream and heart of the U.S. and we will become a rotting, pustulant corpse...a zombie prowling the earth feeding on the living.

As an after thought, The Rev wants the airline industry to shake out just as the banking industry needs a shake out.  Rev's desires:

US Airways to simply fold.  Least favorite airline ever.
Delta and Northwest finally merge for real instead of just sticking the tip in to see how it feels.
United and Continental merge.
American Airlines absorb a strongish smaller carrier like Frontier.
Jet blue and Souhwest no change.

JT is plotting a radio blog/show about all this ish.  Would the Rev be a regular (semi regular) guest? The current college aged student generally makes JT ill. Have they read the Constitution? The current govt does everything they can do to crap on it.

JT's thinks the current crop has gotten just about everything they want because technology is so cheap.  How often have they been told no?  And from what JT has read from these geniuses, they have no concept or appreciation of history.  If they did, they'd realize that no government program has worked.  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are ponzi schemes.  Healthcare would be no different.

So when a politician says you get, these kids say OK.  Give me more.

JT likes Continental but is so so on United.  Will the mergers reduce competition?

[Ralph Turner]

IMHO, Sarbanes-Oxley is the 21st century equivalent of Smoot-Hawley.

Why have an IPO in New York, when the IPO in London is much easier.

[mattvsmith]

JT is plotting a radio blog/show about all this ish.  Would the Rev be a regular (semi regular) guest? The current college aged student generally makes JT ill. Have they read the Constitution? The current govt does everything they can do to crap on it.

Tell The Rev time and place and he will be there.