It's different than 1930. Back then, some of the instigators had the decency to jump out of windows. Today, they sit back and collect their bonuses.

when do we start singing HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE
AGAIN and all that jollyrot? Maybe if we
do the jittybug and go to war (against the
real criminals...Bush & Company) we can pull
ourselves out of this deep hole like we did
in the 1940's? Let's give it a try...

Where's all the pictures of people underneath the Bear Stearns sign standing in line demanding their money back?

Pics, or it didn't happen.

Best read on this mess from Bush & Co is by Greg Palast. Here Hart Williams agrees. http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/while-the-press-was-looking-up-another-skirt/

john r. has it right.

Hmm. I wonder if these execs would mind a few squatters in their yards?

Back then, some of the instigators had the decency to jump out of windows.

Seems to me the White House is only about two stories high.

Pics, or it didn't happen.

Yeah--enough of this crazy fear mongering!!

Bear is not a Bank in the typical sense of retail customers making deposits and withdrawls. Bear's main lines of business are securities lending, trading(derivatives), prime brokerage, and to a lesser extent Investment banking. The run on bear was concerning its counter partying trading.

It is all so predictable, the end that is . . . not the precise timing.

Looking back to 1933 and 1934 legislation is a useful exercise. It is also instructive to look at it when measuring legislative efforts since that time to erase such legislation from existence.

Look up face amount certificate.
http://law.justia.com/us/codes/title15/15usc80a-28.html

Compare fixed payout streams, annuities, where the backing to make good on them is based only on a big pile of wishful thinking. Retirement accounts, public and private, -- or as a corporate in-house investment bank or plain old savings bank spin-off -- is one giant subset, and represents the culmination of a tax code inducement to participate in such schemes. It is a complete flip.

The only question I have is whether I might get credit for noting it, and whether such recognition is posthumous or not.

In Oregon, only as to public employee savings, there is like some magic that occurs at the instant of retirement where the recipient is deemed to be entitled to the stream no matter the future flailings of the market. And where early lump sum payments are based on such glorious levels of wishful thinking about future returns that it is insane . . . not me the critic.

Pics from Sept 2006 pitch for participation in "hedge" funds, by Mike Beasley.
http://pdxnag.com/misc/oic/2006sept/

But these hedges are not hedges, just double the speculation. A hedge, as in the grain trade, has a cash side deal for actual grain coupled with a futures contract to transfer risk, where again the other contracting party may be a real hedger that has a matching cash transaction where real grain exists. The traders, as in the grain pits, play the risky spreads, and are not in the least bit viewed as hedgers . . . but as wild speculators who's only asset is the trading value of their document that lets them trade in the pit. They must make good on their accounts by the start of trading the very next day (it is called accountability).

The word "hedge" has itself been redefined to mean exactly the opposite of its real meaning; as part of an intentionally deceptive sales pitch.

Given the politics involved the best I could hope for (then as now) was (is) to make a contemporaneous objection to, and record of, collective group insanity. Heck, I can't even seem to be able to prompt an AG candidate to even laugh at me here, where I could laugh right back, with a sad uncomfortable sort of laugh that should instead be a cry.

I have video too of the sales pitch mentioned above. Don't mind me, I'm just that crazy guy with a camera just taking pointless pictures to waste my day. Will the defense of the OIC members, and the AG too, be that they are just dopes that have been duped? (Blame it on Bush, like the dog ate my homework.)

The bank regulators need to treat the problem like with any speculator in the futures market -- settle up by break of day tomorrow or put your seat up for sale and get lost. Brutal? . . . yes , but clean and unforgiving and fair.

Somehow I dont think Bush & Co can be pinned with this. How about the morons who took out mortgages they couldnt afford? They're not victims.

And the retard brokers who made millions on these irresponsible loans should be jailed.

Maybe some restitution?

The crux point in the Greg Palast piece, (linked above), is his pointing to the record, and the pattern in it, which shows the arriving collapse of the economy was brought bare to bear on purpose. It is the intent of the fascists to incapacitate civil order, so then their martial law looks preferrable to nothing, no structure, or un-self-assured anarchy.

That is, the plan is to redefine, reframe in the massmind, what is 'order' or 'orderly,' 'orderliness' in the environment, circumstances, situation.

Seems to me that the other possibility is to redefine 'civil.' That is, to change it from meaning fifty States, and by separating into regions, or districts, or watersheds, ('balkanization'), then the 'federal' vaporizes, is without constituency and raison d'etre; and which simultaneously vaporizes all instituted empowerments with 'federal' in their namesake or nominative. And to grasp in mind such a 'delinkage' concept in action, consider a 'unification' which overdebted itself enfeebled, and 'sold off' its incorporated constituent parts still solvent, such as the sovereign locals within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did in 1989.

As for why MasterRacists might intend that we all panic, and desperately 'run on the banks,' speaking despair that we cannot commerce with each other and transact relations without a uniform 'fiat' currency -- as Palast details there are those psychotic sociopaths so intending -- the case is made that in shockingly awful traumatized despair, structure by dogmatic edict is instilled before, and more readily than, creative invention and development of societal consensus. The prophylaxis against a fascist 'revolution,' is sagacious 'evolution.' Got any sagacity? [ TheFreeDictionary.COM/sagacious ]

To test the Palast premise, the only reality check you need to self-endorse is to pay attention if you buy into the idea that capitalist-economy meltdown and dissolution satisfies any of the following criteria and conditions under which we --you and me-- are presently allowed to live:

The Election That Might Not Happen, by Betsy Hartmann, CommonDreams.ORG, March 6, 2008.
On May 4 last year, the White House issued the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, key parts of which remain classified and hence shrouded from public view. The directive outlines procedures to respond to a “catastrophic emergency,” defined broadly as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.” ... the Bush directive transfers power ... to the White House, where the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism is assigned the job of “National Continuity Coordinator”.

Where 'National Continuity' means keep the 'federal' going, then balkanizing the 'federal' out of existence ends it.

We might better stand by Rights as States apart, with State Banks and Land Deeds and Water Allocations and Farm Bureaus, than in a national data mine of credit scores and RFID'ed currency direct-deposits and biometric commercialization of demographic information and rations.

And if instead, you might think to void any reality check, the following thread supplies comments popularly circulated by your co-signing deniers.

Bush Could Call Off Elections, Diary Entry by Robert R. Regl, March 12, 2008 .

... declare a national emergency, institute martial law and "postpone" elections until order is restored (which, of course, will never happen)
...
by erik mouse, March 13, 2008 at 8:58:04 AM -- Although very plausible given our circumstances, I don't think these things will happen. And there is one prevailing reason why. It would be bad for business. On the other hand, ... Perhaps ... If there are power struggles happening ... Maybe ... becoming desparate [sic] enough ....

Jon, as you stand on your moral high ground and look down on the "moron" borrowers, I hope you're wearing your hip waders. They may be culpable (it's debatable, in my view, when lenders and their middlemen overvalue real estate used as collateral and don't require the borrower to prove adequate coverage for monthly payments), but you'll be among those paying the tab.

Oh Tensk, I can't read through your stuff anymore.

Couldn;t you juct post something like "911 was an inside job" and leave it at that?

Tenskey is to conspiracy what Van Gogh's ear is to art.