AIG Tower
Photographer, Niels Jakob Darger
Oh, look, the market is going up again. Now watch after all the bartering today, it will fall again tomorrow. We've been here before and an $85 billion bailout is nothing compared to the $200 billion for Fanny and Freddie. The 'bailouts' are a bounce that never sustains. Institutions are collapsing folks, the 'bailouts' are meerly a down payment on what is actually happening globally.
When bailouts occur there is contracture of the market place because there is consolidation of middle management that is duplicated in the take-over. The company being bought out is cannabalized and its products marketed under a new name that no one recognizes. A 'take-over' or 'bailout' succeeds in doing one thing, it cuts the jobs in the market and synthesizes assets into liquid and the demographics of the 'business/fiscal' world changes.
The 'bailout' of AIG will bring what every other measure by the FED and US Treasury has brought, a 'bounce' that lasts about 36 hours. That is all that is going to happen here.
Look, this is serious. These are long standing financial institutions that once garnered a great deal of respect. They are gone. That is trauma and loss of fiscal clout within the infrastructure of the USA. Barclay's is welcome to obtain whatever advantage it can find by purchasing Lehman, but, its a British Company and its not purchasing Lehman to keep the doors open, so much as salvage its assets.
This is bad news no matter which way one looks at it and I just can't wait until the federal notes come due and the USA Treasury has to print more money without any commodity to back it up. These programs are only 'stop-gaps' to disaster and nothing more. The markets will bounce today, but, will stagnate again by Friday. This market is not going to recover. The reason the markets haven't completely collapsed yet is because they are bouyed by promissory notes that appear to have a degree of integrity. It won't last and in the meantime, Bush and his administratin is trying to figure out why the tax cuts aren't working the way they should.
This isn't terribly different than the 'negative feedback loop' of Human Induced Global Warming. An institution fails, it is rescued and hacked apart placing more people out of work, hence creating more problems with mortgages and so on and so on. This entire mess is a house of cards and it ain't over yet !!!
Barclays to pay $1.75 bln for some Lehman assets (click here)
Reuters , Wednesday September 17 2008
...Most of the price tag was accounted for by Lehman's New York headquarters and two data centers, while the British bank will pay just $250 million in cash for Lehman's North American investment banking and capital markets businesses....
