Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

Ford will still be around after all of this. Chrysler should have died years ago and GM is in for a slow death after selling it's European/Korean divisions to Renault/Nissan or a combine of PSA and Fiat.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Auto_union_accuses_Republicans_of_subterfuge_1212.html

Even though the union was concerned it was being "set up" it agreed to make additional concessions including exchanging a large portion of its claims related to a retiree health care plan for equity or stock in the companies.

"These agreed-to changes would have made an enormous difference in the balance sheets of the companies and largely solved their financial problems," Gettelfinger said.

Claims that salaries were key to the breakdown was "just simply subterfuge on the part of the minority in the Republican Party who wanted to tear down agreement that we came up with."

"Senator Corker admitted to our people on the ground there that the other discussions over wages were largely about politics within the (Republican) caucus," Gettelfinger said.

"They thought perhaps they could have a two-fer here maybe, pierce the heart of organized labor, while representing the foreign brands," he said, referring to the fact that many of the Republican senators who most ardently opposed the bailout represented states where foreign automakers had set up non-unionized plants.

Gettelfinger said the union has already done much to bring their compensation levels in line with the non-unionized US plants of foreign competitors and that labor costs were not the major challenge facing automakers anymore.

"If we worked for nothing it wouldn't help them limp into January," Gettelfinger.

i'm loving this bernie madoff story

between that, blago, and bush getting a shoe whipped at him, it's like the universe is squeezing out every last crazy sociopath shithead in the most operatic way possible

New unemployment claims just hit 1/2 million for just one week. Ex-head of NASDAQ is caught in a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. The entire US auto industry seems hellbound for bankruptcy in a few weeks. Factories are shutting down worldwide.

Any yet, this thread falls off the ILE New Answers page. The horror! The horror!

glut in the doomsaying market; so last month

Yeah, it's not prescient any more when all you have to do is get up in the morning to see you're in a handbasket that's moving along at a pretty good clip.

Is there a thread for the rapid death of the newspaper industry?

this thread is merely splintering into many individual shitbin threads then

one shitbin is not enough for all the shit

so true one wishes it were funny

The Madoff thing is really wo!, indeed... Where I'm working (mathnerd financial analysis stuff) we've continually been going "lol bankers/brokers/fundguys crooks" for years, but somehow been meaning it at a somewhat lesser scale than what has occurred.

lolz @ that doof from mclaughlin group/us news & world report getting caught up in this ... mort zuckerman thats his name

hate that guy

lolz @ that doof from mclaughlin group/us news & world report getting caught up in this ... mort zuckerman thats his name

― K DEF FROM REAL LIVE (deej), Tuesday, December 16, 2008 12:27 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark

wait..how did he get caught up in this? i just saw him on CNN this morning as a guest contributor whining about how not enough ppl in the gov't/media understand high finance and the bailout's implications...is he involved in the Madoff mess?

he lost a shitload

booyaaa!

With all the big numbers being thrown around since September, I thought it might be nice to put the $50 billion Madow torched into some perspective.

I live in Oregon. The population here is about 3.5 million. The total two-year budget for all state expenditures for 2007-9 was just slightly less than $50 billion. That includes more than half of all the K-12 school budgets for the state (the balance is paid from local taxes). It includes all state police, prisons, highways, social services, the university system, the parks and a whole raft of smaller stuff.

Madow single-handedly made that much money disappear. Impressive!

Rachel Bernie Madow

Oops. I meant to hit the double-f key, not the double-u.

yah totally amzing scam

i mean wtf srsly WTF

this is the best quote about the whole thing imo so far

Analyst Henry Blodget wrote on his blog Friday that some savvy investors figured Madoff was up to something because his returns were so high.

"Many Wall Streeters suspected the wrong rigged game, though: they thought it was insider trading, not a Ponzi scheme," Blodget wrote. "And here's the best part: That's why they invested with him."

ASOH! (audible schadenfreude over here)

Lolworthy quote. Utterly convincing, too. I will spread it around.

that's awesome Tombot.

Although Madoff's returns weren't really that high. They were just steady. He never overplayed his hand.

has there been any info as to like WTF THIS GUY WAS THINKING

His returns were just suspiciously consistent. xp

Reliable info on what he was thinking would have to be straight from the Madoff's mouth, and I'm sure his lawyer would advise him against that.

My guess: I suspect he didn't start his investment business intending to create a Ponzi scheme, but got there by small, fraudulent stages, by letting himself "touch up" the books during a disappointing quarter, thinking he'd fix it up later, when his genius really started raking in the big returns. Later, when the "I'm a genius" plan didn't work so well, but the Ponzi scheme was purring along smoothly, he just went with what was working for him.

I loled while on the treadmill today when CNN showed old footage of Madoff talking about how govt regulation made cheating on Wall St. virtually impossible and that the general public didn't really understand this simple fact.

Later, when the "I'm a genius" plan didn't work so well, but the Ponzi scheme was purring along smoothly, he just went with what was working for him.

― Aimless

Plus, once that sort of thing is going, and you've got more money on the books than you actually have invested, how do you get off the ride? I suppose you keep hoping for a big quarter to even things out, and maybe it eventually comes, but I'd imagine that the sort of person who'd dig that kind of hole once would happily do it twice. So you have ups and downs, periods of success and periods of near catastrophic failure, and through it all, you reassure yourself that your "financial genius" will finally see you through. And if not, well, at least it was a hell of a ride. Shit it seems to have worked just fine for decades...

yah thats pretty much what i figured - still v much looking forward to a thorough post mortem

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/735/slide_735_13964_large.jpg

this guys some sort of psycho

so is anybody on here getting ritholtz's book?

if it's going to be a logistical beatdown about how united states is becoming "socialist" then no; if it's going to be three-paragraph chapters with links to actual reporting, then yes

sorry, i love ritholtz but damn

The Real Great Depression

I like to think of it this way:

If we imagine subprime mortgage-backed securities as foetid botulism-tainted cans of meat all marked Grade AAA by unscrupulous meat inspectors (ratings agencies), and imagine the banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and pension funds are the hungry customers who stocked up on these products for their winter food supply, then proceeding from this simple premise it becomes easy to imagine that all these hungry customers are now, dead, dying, or deathly ill from eating the tainted meat, and many of their rotting, bloated corpses are lying at the bottom of the well from which the world's economy draws its drinking water.

See! Economics is easy when you apply a little creativity!

This is why I drink gin.

that's a fantastic article michael.

ahahaha, I'm glad Mort Zuckerman got screwed. He's probably in a bar with McLaughlin, Tony Blankly, and that black dude with the Spike Lee glasses bitching and moaning about how he has to shut down his stupid magazine.

M. White, don't bogart that gin.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-belden/mad-about-madoff-the-less_b_152153.html

yeah, it's not capitalism as per adam smith that's bad. it's the modern model of publicly traded corporations that seems to be utterly and completely fucked up.

http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/2008_pt3/06_17210625.jpg

Staff stand in a meeting room at the Lehman Brothers offices in the financial district of Canary Wharf in London September 11, 2008. Lehman Brothers eventually filed for bankruptcy - the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history - and was delisted from the NYSE, and later liquidated. #

i posted that article about 1873 in October! and Mackro Mackro, i think it was, told me that such comparisons are irrelevant. sorry this is a worthless post :)

Hey I posted it in October! Joshea was unconvinced about the comparison.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/12/chicago-repudiation/

this is the best news I've heard in years

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123025036865134309.html

retail is the new newspaper industry?

Of all the "Chicago Schools of" things, that one seems pretty thrown together.