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POPSWhat's with all the zombies?
Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence. "Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says. In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted. Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are,
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POPSWhy Obama’s New Tarp Will Fail To Rescue The Banks Personally, I have little doubt that the second view is correct and, as the world economy deteriorates, will become ever more so. But this is not the heart of the matter. That is whether, in the presence of such uncertainty, it can be right to base policy on hoping for the best. The answer is clear: rational policymakers must assume the worst. If this proved pessimistic, they would end up with an over-capitalised financial system. If the optimistic choice turned out to be wrong, they would have zombie banks and a discredited government. This choice is surely a “no brainer”. The new plan seems to make sense if and only if the principal problem is illiquidity. Offering guarantees and buying some portion of the toxic assets, while limiting new capital injections to less than the $350bn left in the Tarp, cannot deal with the insolvency problem identified by informed observers.
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POPSToo Smart For The GOP "Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality. At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt."
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POPSWhy Obama’s new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks The writer is a heavy-weight FT analyst. In simple terms, Obama's TARP policy falls between the two proverbial stools. Giving up the Fed's monopoly on currency, allowing for the blooming of new local, people's currencies is the answer, as it was during the last depression.
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POPSPaving The Way For America's Lost Decade When you buy a car, you don't stop with the down payment. There are many, many more "payments" to come. How large will these payments be? How long will we be paying them? In the 1990s, Japan's zombie banks contributed mightily to its Lost Decade. In slow, halting steps, America is creating its own zombie army. The results will be the same. Then, speaking of the living dead, there's the Detroit Three. Last year Congress rejected Tennessee senator Bob Corker's restructuring plan, missing an opportunity to craft a responsible rescue for American automakers. So Bush bailed out GM and Chrysler. But this time Obama and Congress will tie any financial assistance to their own political objectives. Thus the American auto industry will remain alive on life support, forced to manufacture green cars that make the Natural Resources Defense Council happy but don't make a profit.
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POPSThe Seeds have already been sown for the next Crash. The bailouts will eventually work, so get out of debt while u have a chance & stay out of it. I repeat stay out of it , because this has all got to be paid for in higher taxes And another crash is likely down the line, another 3, 4 or 5 years after the the recovery kicks in. Because, as the man says "They'll continue doing the same stupid things that got the country into the current mess" and pocketing large bonuses for extreme risk taking. what they call profits on so called "assets" will again turn into massive losses. Would u consider it an asset if a "Ninja" owed u a fortune on a toxic mortgage!
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