Is This Transparency?
The stock market voted on Secretary of the Treasury Geithner’s speech today, and it voted it down. That’s down about 4% in stock values. Geithner only gave an “overview” of his plan, and the lack of specifics rattled the markets. The lack of definition on how the “toxic securities” are going to be valued is the heart of problem. Here’s the problem. There are people ready, willing and able to buy some of those “toxic securities” from banks. But the banks have a problem. If they sell some of their assets, then the rest of them have a “real value” – the value it was just sold at. This would put lots of banks out of business.
Stocks are still trading in a sideways trend, but are testing the bottom of that trend. If the Dow ever goes through 8800, and closes below it – we would then be in a new downtrend.
Bonds rallied as a safe haven place. As did Gold today.
Oil plunges again, but not gasoline – kind of mysterious – huh?
In the news today…..
One of those dirty little secrets came out today. That Stimulus Bill being passed by Congress has our “nationalized healthcare” system within it. It explicitly provides for a system where the national government will be telling YOUR doctor what he can do, and what he can’t do with YOUR health. Hope you like that – I don’t. My belief is that if I can pay for it, I should be able to have it. That will be gone under the bill BEING PASSED right now.
How much transparency is that???? How did it get in there????
Well, the disgraced, proposed Health Secretary, Sen. Daschle, put it in there – so he could have the system he wanted when he got the position. Too bad he forgot to pay his taxes.
We knew that the bill contained the provision to have all health records automated. But, I’m sure it didn’t provide any protection for those records once they are automated. Who can have access??? What can they be used for??? Will insurance companies (life, auto, etc) deny coverage based on your health records, or just raise rates. You can bet they will if they get their dirty little hands on them.
Oh, by the way, do you think the President knows all that is in the Stimulus Bill?? Of course, but he’s not tell YOU about it!!!!!
Oh, did I forget to tell you that the provisions in the Stimulus Plan are based on the UK health care system method?? I’ve lived in the UK, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t want my life in the hands of the UK National Healthcare System.
President Obama’s speech last night…..
Did you hear that amazing question to President Obama about what his Vice President said?? Biden said (referring to the Stimulus Bill) that “if we did everything right, there was still a 30% chance it wouldn’t work”. The President was embarrassed by the comment, but that comment must have come out from inside conversations of the Administration at the President’s level. This is exactly what I’ve been telling you all along. The Stimulus Bill is not a sure thing. It’s a lot of pork with a lot of focused stimulus and a lot of focused tax cuts. The Congressional Budget Office says the House version is actually a NEGATIVE stimulus package. President Obama’s denial of any “earmarks” is just a trick. Officially, there were no earmarks. All these porky earmarks were put in there at the beginning – so they weren’t snuck in the middle of the night – which is the definition of an earmark. However, the bill consists of all the earmarks that had never made it through previous bills, or got kicked out previously. In reality, the Stimulus Bill is an “official package of earmarks” with some stimulus and tax reductions.
A little history of our crisis…..
Back on Sept 16, 2007 there was a run on the Money Market. In a two hour period, $550B was removed from Money Markets by various funds. How did it start?? Great question that hasn’t been answered. Was it a legitimate run, or was it an engineered run??? Who knows.
In any case, the FED stepped in and tried to stop the outflow, but failed. They closed their “lending window” to stem the tide of withdrawals because they couldn’t stop the withdrawals by their own deposits. They immediately announced that all FDIC insured accounts were now $250,000 per account, up from $100,000. That did the trick. They estimated that if they hadn’t done that – that the run on Money Market money would have been $5.5Trillion by that same afternoon – and here is the rub – that would have brought down our financial system, and the world’s financial system the next day.
Could this have been the catastrophe that got the first $700B TARP bill passed by Congress last year? Probably.
Here are the last numbers:
Dow Jones 30 Industrial – 7889 (down 382 points)
10 Year Treasury Bond – 2.85% (down 0.18%)
Euro – $1.2895
Gold – $914 (up $21)
Oil – $37.55 (down $2.01)
Gasoline – $1.24 (no change)
