Dick Fuld: The CEO who destroyed Lehman Bros. What a dick, ha. He was a famously Type-A personality and hard charger till his firm crumbled to dust, thanks largely to his leadership. Then some angry employee knocked Fuld out at the company gym. Even mild-mannered Anderson Cooper blames Fuld in this video clip. You gotta admit, he looks worse than almost anyone right now.


Henry Paulson: Oh, Treasury Secretary Paulson. You picked a time to take your job. Every bad think in America is your fault! Your habit of walking around and looking grave failed to save the US economy. If Paulson could turn this whole thing around before he leaves office, he'd be a hero. But he can't, so he'll be a goat of historic proportions.


Alan Greenspan: Just this week the Times ran a devastating takedown of Greenspan's legacy. He was the Fed chairman for more than a decade, but got out just in time to miss this whole crisis. But in retrospect, Greenspan was obviously not the genius everyone thought. "The financial system as a whole has become more resilient," he remarked in 2004. Dude that was so wrong.


Christopher Cox: American hero John McCain thinks that SEC chairman Cox let the ship sink on his watch! According to McCain (watch the clip for a taste), Cox "betrayed the public" trust by doing nothing while short sellers and their devious brethren undermined the US economy.


Neel Kashkari: The 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker hasn't even started leading the government bailout plan, and already everyone is convinced he'll fail! They say he's too young, too inexperienced, too conflicted, and too bald. We'll overlook all that (at least until he has a couple weeks on the job), but the fact that he proudly declared himself "a free market Republican" is a wee bit scary.


George W. Bush: Sure, Bush is the natural guy to blame for all this. Why didn't he read the lessons of history from 1992, or 1976, or 1932, or one of many other years? But then you remember: he can't read. As much as we would all like to blame him, Bush is far too stupid to be responsible for something as complicated as this. Sigh.


Herbert and Marion Sandler: These two billionaires ran Golden West Financial, which did fabulously well in the mortgage business until, you know, all its mortgages blew up. By that time the company had been bought by Wachovia, which had to eat some major losses. Bill O'Reilly thinks they may be economic villains! Saturday Night Live made fun of them! They're pretty good stand-ins for all greedy mortgage lenders.


Alan Schwartz: He was the CEO who oversaw the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first big Wall Street firm to go down. He set this whole thing off! Here's a video of him on CNBC just days before BS failed, talking about how everything was okay. Some people think he lied about his firm's health.


Jim Cramer: The shouty CNBC financial "expert" used to be a big bull on the market. Buy stocks all the time, people! Then the market collapsed. Then he had to apologize and go on TV to tell everybody to pull their cash out of the market. Forget the losses! Abandon ship! He's pretty bad at money advice, ironically.


The Financial Media: Who allowed Cramer to stand up and give all his ruinous advice? Why didn't CNBC tell us this shit was coming? Why didn't the most prestigious financial papers in the country do some digging and tell us that all the people mentioned above were crooks who would eventually drain trillions from our coffers through incompetence or corruption? The answer, of course, is that the financial media gets caught up in the madness just like everyone else, and ends up telling us whatever we want to hear. Which is why you can't forget the final scapegoat in all this, who tends to go unnamed:

Among other things, he has focused on working with American banks toward adoption of a less-risky system of mortgage-based bonds that is popular in Europe. And he moved to a larger office, with room for sofas and photos of his favorite ski slopes around Lake Tahoe.

Telling!

Mr. Kashkari, who grew up near Akron, Ohio, is a first-generation Indian-American. His parents had grown up in poverty in the Kashmir region of India before becoming an engineer and a doctor and coming to the United States.

Revealing!

In graduate school, he designed a solar-powered car that was driven across the country.

Superfluous!

"I'm a free-market Republican."—Kashkari, at an American Enterprise Institute conference, Sept. 19, 2008

Unnerving!

There are a few different strategies. Some, like failed failure WaMu, use humor, along the lines of "We've dragged our dessicated carcass to a safe place now. LOL!"

Others are going for the old "reassure you despite all evidence to the contrary" tactic:

In advertising, many financial institutions are racing to reassure consumers with soothing messages — that focus on important “S” words: strength, safety, stability, security.

“There is a safe and smart place to put your money,” ads for Commerce Bank tell newspaper readers.

Simultaneously, some institutions are continuing to communicate as if the recent upheavals had not happened. Ads for Discover Financial Services, for instance, try to coax consumers to sign up for yet another credit card, offering enticements like free balance transfers.

Ha, well I guess that's appropriate. The truth is advertising is just a buffet of bad options right now for banks. They can laugh it off and look stupid. They can try to reassure you and look like liars. Or they can try the "straight talk" approach and scare you even worse than you already are.

Or they can do what the FDIC did and hire scary blond Suze Orman. Which is the worst option of all. [NYT]

WELL I GUESS THEY'VE LEARNED THEIR LESSON.
[Excellent catch by Misterstarfish]

1. "Profit" is kind of a scam.

Profit, as they say in the business, is the "bottom line."* But when every financial institution in America can follow a decade of unprecedented "profits" with the threat of Universal Abject Ruin, you have to conclude the whole damn "bottom line" is bullshit. Yesterday the NYT ran a story about an obscure unit of the insurance company AIG that generated shitloads of profits in the boom years. It generated shitloads of profits because it sold "credit default swaps." Credit-default swaps protect the principal paid on a bond in the case of a default. AIG made shitloads selling them in the boom years because a lot of other guys on Wall Street were making shitloads of money rolling up mortgages into bonds, and a guy from Morgan Stanley called up a guy at AIG named Joseph Cassano, told him about these rolled-up mortgage security deals, and asked if AIG would be interested in getting into the business of insuring these mortgages in much the same way AIG insured the houses said mortgages had been taken out to buy. Because Morgan Stanley would totally buy that insurance! Goldman Sachs would also be interested. A few crafty hedge fund guys were interested too. Later that "interest" would yield a profit bonanza for the guys who were smart enough to load up on them!

But first the profit bonanza's was AIG's. By 2005, this unit of AIG generated three and a quarter billion dollars revenue. And you know what the operating profit margin on that revenue was? Fucking 83%. Eighty-three percent. That is after they paid everyone's salary and Blackberry bills and sleeper-class airfares and five-star hotel rooms and for all their office supplies. AIG shared the wealth with employees more, of course. At the end of the day people who worked in that unit brought home between a third and 44% of revenue. Forty-four percent!!! That is literally unreal. Isn't the whole point of having an "insurance" company that you save money like that to have on hand for disaster? What sort of insurance company makes an record-breaking profit the same year they're on the hook over a billion dollars for a record-breaking natural disaster? (An insurance company with a freakishly profitable near-impossible-to-understand unit that does not report to any insurance regulators, for one!)

Well anyway, Goldman ended up putting as much as twenty billion dollars "on the line" with AIG's CDS-es. Twenty billion dollars is just over a billion dollars less than Goldman gave out in Christmas bonuses last year because, in stark contrast to most other banks on Wall Street, Goldman had been so smart and prudent and visionary and bought CDS-es early and booked record profits. In any case, now Goldman was worried about AIG. Goldman stock could plummet if AIG went under! And Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein must have told his old boss Hank Paulson that, because Hank invited Lloyd to be the only investment banker in attendance at a special meeting two weeks ago about the fate of AIG. Hank saved the insurer, and while they were at it they made some sort of arrangement for Goldman and Morgan — the guys who hatched this whole plan in AIG's head to begin with! — to become "holding companies" that would be protected by the FDIC. This effectively eliminated investment banking, and one hopes, some of the heady profit margins with which it was once synonymous.

2. Because the system — like CNBC itself! — is rigged to reward fear of commitment.

On CNBC this announcement was met with a lot of talk about how investment bank stocks would no longer "justify" their huge price-earnings ratios because, as real banks instead of specialized "investment" banks, they wouldn't be able to continue to take such big risks and generate the same grotesquely large profit margins they once did. There is something seriously warped about that mentality, though. If you watch CNBC you probably buy into the notion that profits are somehow "the bottom line," that the pursuit of profit makes everything more efficient, that profits create jobs and therefore salaries should more closely track the "bottom line," and if everything ran more "like a business" then employees would be more "accountable." Maybe you buy into this notion because it seems rational; maybe you buy into this notion because it takes so goddamn long at the DMV, but whatever the case, if you are watching CNBC now, it might dawn on you that they are too panicked trying to relay to you all this pressing urgent information to give you the real story, which is that all those assumptions about profits and the bottom line and accountability get turned completely on their heads when it you impose upon them the term limits of the fiscal year and everyone gets to cash out. Nowhere is our national fear of commitment more readily apparent than our willingness to allow Hank Paulson to pay no taxes on a half billion dollars in Goldman stock options to take a government job for three years because we are so wary of investing such faith in an entrenched bureaucrat, only to have him hit us up for a line of credit when all that fear of commitment results in a whopping expression of our collective fear of commitment.

3. "Demand" is also a construct.

A corollary to the "profit" construct is the "demand" construct. A story: the other day my friend the NYSE trader was ruminating on the absurdity that the defining buzzword of the subprime mortgage crisis was "tranche." Yeah, why does everyone pronounce it funny? I wondered. Because it means 'slice' in French, he told me. When you are selling bonds assembled from the foggy promises of ignorant unskilled people to pay ever-increasing fees to ensure their continued residences in shitty overpriced tract homes in eastern San Diego for thirty fucking years — unskilled people who at best work themselves in real estate — it helps to pretty up the sales pitch with pretty French verbiage.

On the front of today's Wall Street Journal "Marketplace" section are two stories on top of one another that form a neat little parable about the nature of demand. One is about how fast food chains like McDonald's and Panera Bread are worried about the credit crisis because Bank of America and other banks have suddenly tightened lending to people whose plan to make money depends on opening evermore McDonald's and Panera Bread locations. Just below this story is another story about how food makers like Campbell's, Kellogg and Kraft are excited about the credit crunch, because it enables them to make the pitch to American consumers to spend more money on "value" foodstuffs such as Frosted Flakes and condensed soup, and those kinds of foods have huge profit margins because of course they are actually a terrible value to consumers, but that doesn't matter as long as some ad agency is being paid eight figures to come up with a folksy campaign reminding Americans what great "value" they're getting. Whatever the outcome of the credit crunch, the only logical takeaway of the two stories goes, Americans will continue eating junk.

Which reminds me: I could go for a tranche of pizza right now!

But the point is, demand is highly manipulable, and we are the masters of manipulation. We've convinced ourselves that if a lower-profit margin-generating division of a company is sold to a Japanese company or simply discontinued it is because that division — and thus the country — is "moving up the value ladder." In the market's ceaseless quest to ascend the value ladder America has, of course, left behind such resilient, and also arguably valuable, industries as the manufacture of sophisticated computer chips and the construction of half-billion dollar oil tankers and probably soon car manufacture, for Asians to occupy themselves working on.

4. Good people will be punished. Good people are always punished. Just ask the Jews.

The Asian countries, of course, are concerned about this. Just because they work six day weeks in sweltering assembly lines doesn't mean they aren't addicted to our demand. China keeps living standards artificially low to maintain high employment, and they build up excess reserves they have to invest it in our iffy financial system, and Chinese people are aware of this, which is why the government faces angry internet retaliation back home when those investments suffer, as they did when Blackstone stock started crashing a few months back.

Which brings me to the Jews. As any Chinese person could tell you, the Jews have long been associated with a knack for making money. But many Jews also pursue relatively unprofitable jobs, like running for Congress. Much has been made of the need for Congress to vote on a bailout package before the Jewish holidays, because there are 43 Jews in Congress, almost all of them Democrats, and as Barney Frank so wryly noted last week "It's a well-known rule; God will only hear your prayers if you're in your congressional district." Barney can say that because he is of course himself Jewish. Anyway, this morning on CNBC Charlie Gasparino was trying desperately to hammer home to viewers that Barney Frank was largely to credit for getting the bailout package done in time to save Wall Street. (Uh, or not!?!) Other anchors kept cutting Charlie off. As Frank himself just told the Washington Post, "You don't get credit for a disaster averted." You also don't get credit for holding your nose and doing the politically unpopular thing and trying to avert disaster if you did not have the votes to avert disaster because everyone hates everyone. However, Barney Frank does get credit for being funny just now. Sigh.

5. And despite the protestations of contrarian pundits it is hard to believe some sort of disaster was/is not at hand.

Because in a story on the Lehman bankruptcy today, the Wall Street Journal noted that the Tuesday morning following the announcement the London Interbank offered rate, the interest rate at which banks offer one another overnight loans, the interest rate to which some $300 trillion in contracts are anchored, rose from 3.11% the day before to 6.44% and "even at those rates, banks were balking at lending to one another." The two guys who actually calculate the Libor have not been on CNBC to my knowledge, but I bet I can tell you what they were thinking when they went through their spreadsheets that day: "Holy Fuck." (And maybe also: "Why again do we securitize mortgages?
Isn't the one book read by everyone in the entire finance industry sort of about how that was a bad idea?) In any case, nothing on CNBC managed to be quite so startling as this story. Maybe because they've desensitized everyone with their incessant re-loop of Jim Cramer's prescient freakout clip.

*Oh, a lot of finance guys will distract you by calling other metrics the "bottom line" — EBITDA or profit "from continuing operations" or during the internet era ha ha, blah blah "eyeballs" — but all that is accounting bullshit, and the whole system is accounting bullshit.

1. Because money is overrated!
We know this. We know it so well. And just to prove it we pay billions of dollars to science to prove it to us, year after year after year. And yet. As a society we totally live and die (no not really, we just act like we live and die!) by the tiny nuances of the trajectory of the aggregate of all the flows of all that money, as if it Really Totally Matters. We do this, obviously, because we're obsessed with making comparisons — am I at least doing as well as last year? Am I really smarter than his last girlfriend? Shouldn't I buy a house now that all my friends are doing it? — because it is just so much easier than the Is This Bringing Me Joy question that seems so totally sappy and sentimental we find it to be a hilarious joke when some little Third World country like Bhutan pragmatically invents a Gross National Happiness Index because no one actually thought of that first. But as the Times reminds us today:

Research has shown a significant level of depression, for example, among lottery winners. Other research has shown that above a household income of $50,000, there is little or no correlation between income and happiness.

2. Because It is already making New York more fun funner!
Nick wanted me to point out that the Great Depression was good or some industries — electrical engineering, film — that are maybe more worthwhile and exciting than the freaking stock market, but that brings me to a larger point. On Saturday I got this email from a friend who is a specialist on the New York Stock Exchange:

Last week was one of the most exciting weeks of my life. I think traders who had previously taken psychedelics had an unfair advantage.

Which kind of neatly underscores an important truth of this city: we are here for the "action." We are not here for the riches or because Guiliani made it so tidy and safe and Singaporean like our relatives always annoyingly assume when we so graciously leave it to endure family gatherings. I mean, if our relatives ever visited us they would know that New York is still fundamentally gross, and THAT'S SORT OF WHY WE'RE HERE. It is fucked up, but we chose to live among the tenements and the rats and all that once-proud peeling buckling infrastructure and all those whiffs of strangers' body odor because something about it makes us feel alive, even as the constant unquenchable thirst for that feeling also exposes the parts of our insides that we're slowly choking to death. But look! The New York Observer reports people are actually talking to strangers on the subway again. It's a paradox, and creative destruction, and possibly sector rotation — so the action leaves the Street for a little while, it will return in some gross new neighborhood the haters will instantly hate just as much. In the meantime, it's like that time all the power went out! Everyone loved that, remember? Oh and remember the subway strike? People loved that too. Shit, they probably secretly loved the cholera epidemic. Moral of story: we love that the economy is as fucked-up as we are. Like, there is a reason they call it "depression" duh!

3. Because Haters are tired of Hating!
I am not such a hater that I did not find it touching how right after 9/11 the Two Americas united to declare War On Haters. Petey Pablo penned that patriotic remix of his "North Carolina" song and Ja Rule and Kid Rock hung out together at some military base, etc. etc. Fast forward seven years, and the New York Times brings us the amusing news that Sarah Palin actually refers to her critics as "haters." This nonsense rapper concept reached all the way out to Alaska! Can we kill it now? It turns out yes! Because the very next week, following comparisons of the professional stock market haters known as shorts to terrorists and homicide bombers, the SEC actually outlawed short-selling! It outlawed hate. You would think this action would have gotten more hate from the shorts, but I have a theory: Haters really like nothing more that to be put out of their Hating-Ass Misery, at least for a few weeks. (Remember 9/11?) And this way they got to be proven right in the process, which is really all they care about. In any case, the Depression will sort of force Hateration Nation to acknowledge the symbiotic nature of its relationship with the Plutocrats, Jocks, Preachers, Republicans, Bloviating Public Intellectuals, Venture Capitalists and Self-Help Gurus that Make This Country "Great" and vice versa. Fittingly, this grudging detente was prophesied by the rapper Maino in the remix to his song Hi Hater.

4. Because everyone feels a lot better about capitalism now that Warren Buffet is the guy who will be making another few billion dollars profiting off its near-collapse!
If you are a capitalist, Warren Buffet was your hero when you were, like, eight. By the time you started your first private equity internship or whatever you were more like "Ah, Buffet, sentimental old sucker, making his money the hard way like that." Why? Because Warren Buffet made $62 billion over a six decade career investing in real companies over the Very Long Term, and that is just so unnecessary when you can make like at least a billion dollars in like a year just by taking a 20% fee on some money you got from rich folks plus a whole lot more money you got to borrow from banks at superlow rates, and throwing all that into some algorithm whereby the money makes a gazillion trades a day on some supercomplex financial instruments made up by bankers who got bored of collecting fees splitting up and re-packaging the weary pieces of the American economy and in any case, now you somehow make a half penny on the dollar every time some ratio goes below pi and none of it requires any entanglements with companies that actually produce stuff at all (thank god because that would be awkward.) Well, putting all that money through all that pointless action was not for Warren Buffet. Not because he worries about detachment from labor or any of that Marxist crap, but because it actually did just seem so pointless. (Buffet once said of gold: "It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.") Anyhow, so all this madness goes on for a few decades, generates a little "liquidity crisis" and suddenly Goldman Sachs has to become a real bank, which basically means the Smartest Richest Most Elite Motherfuckers on Wall Street are forced to sit acknowledge the existence of the Actual Economy. Put a wonkier way: Exchange Value, Meet Use Value! And Buffet sees that investors are worried about this, but he knows it's a good plan for the Long Term everyone laughed at him for caring about, so he plows $5 billion into it at supergood terms and suddenly everyone's like, "Damn, that Buffet, he really is pretty smart." And smart turns out not to be incompatible with good!

5. Because there is a reason they call it the "Dismal" Science!
At some point the economists of America got sick of no one listening to their earnest well-intentioned prescriptions for making globalization not so shitty, so they launched a hostile takeover of psychology and wrote ninety different books full of highly detailed "analyses" of why people do the things they do. The message of these books was generally: "Hey, Starbucks Is Smart And Other Crazy Ideas!" These books became bestsellers because in times like these there is a huge market for books that state true facts without being totally depressing or resorting to "self-help," which is to say they basically amounted to self-help, which is to say they kind of dumbed down the profession. Well, here is a true fact: last week chief Freakonomist Steve Levitt made the following admission on his own damn Freakonomics blog:

As an economist, I am supposed to have something intelligent to say about the current financial crisis. To be honest, however, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what this all means.

Anyway, the point is, the fiftieth anniversary of The Affluent Society came and went and no economist managed to write a more relevant book about the economy. Although The Affluent Society author John Kenneth Gabraith's son James is apparently trying to do that now!

The "Top Shit" is all pretty Lol, but be sure not to miss
1.The Entire GDP Of China, Inside My House

2. Loan To Retarded Brother And Sister-In-Law

3. Tom Friedman ha ha and (seriously)

4. Worst columnist ever Michael Gerson

From Brokaw:

- A pawn shop in Reno, Nev., has an excess supply of eight-track cassette players, flower print shirts, broad white belts and Wayne Newton tapes, having gambled that the '70s would come roaring back. The owner pleaded for a Treasury take-over, arguing, "How can the government stand by and let such a rich part of our American culture simply fade away?"

- The owner of an NFL poster shop in Green Bay, Wis., reports that he has given up on divine intervention and is now asking for Treasury to take over his business in a last-ditch effort to preserve the notion that whatever our differences, we're all Americans.

Asked how his business got into trouble, Karl Andursen of Muledeer, Minn., said he met a man who specialized in printing Minnesota Viking and Chicago Bears posters. Mr. Andursen said the man was willing to bundle his posters and sell them at a discounted rate to anyone who would take over the Green Bay territory.

Mr. Andurson said in the back of his mind he knew that could be risky since Green Bay is sacred ground for Packer fans who wouldn't cheer for the Vikes or the Bears if they were promised a fleet of new snowmobiles and lifetime hunting rights on Brett Favre's farm.

But, as he said, everyone was in the NFL merchandise game and he figured he'd take the territory and after 30 days flip the franchise for a big profit. A year later and he's not made a sale, not one, but who knew?

He's offered his complete inventory of Go Bears! and Vikings Rock! posters for 20 cents on the dollar or $500,000 in 30-year Treasury bonds.

(Personally, everything I ever buy is liquid so I don't have much to add to this list. But I hear Jezebel editor Dodai is moving this weekend!)

1. THE 'HOW THIS IS PLAYING OUT AT THE STRIP CLUB' ANGLE
What's the best barometer of the real effects of an occasion that mostly concerns a bunch of overstressed obnoxious white guys reporters are scared to talk to? What's true at Republican conventions is true of Wall Street meltdowns: um, surely the strippers can explain it to us! Though shoe shiners will do too. But there seems to be an ongoing debate as to whether sex work is a "recession proof" industry. The New York Post reported today that strippers are suffering from something called a "lap deficit." But wait, no they're not, New York Magazine reports, Rick's Cabaret is full! Back in April, Page Six Magazine suggested strip club patrons were simply rotating their excess funds into the Asian massage sector.

2. THE 'DETESTABLE RICH PEOPLE PUT OFF PLASTIC SURGERY' ANGLE
Yup, for guys who love to scoff at the whole concept of "trickle-down economics" the media has never met a trickle-down angle it couldn't turn into an evergreen trend piece! And how can you blame them? There is perhaps no more satisfying a story to report (or read) than the "clueless white people who put the 'despicable' in 'conspicuous consumption' forced to cut back on pointless grotesque spending patterns'"…because, even as this angle invariably gets tired and predictable, it also manages to get more ridiculous as the wealth controlled by the plutocracy has geometrically expanded. Witness the Journal's Saturday story about how yacht builders, jewelers, plastic surgeons and caviar purveyors are coping with the crisis:

A nose job in a hospital with a private nurse in attendance had been something of a rite of passage for Joan Asher's children. But when her fourth and last child was ready for her own rhinoplasty recently, Ms. Asher asked her to postpone it.
The financial markets were simply more out of whack than her 16-year-old's proboscis.
"The other noses were more prominent," the stay-at-home mother from a tony New York City suburb in Westchester County told her 16-year-old daughter. She could get hers done when things settled down.

The upside of this disturbing trend: more women will buy fancy makeup and face creams!

3. THE HA HA HA, 'ASSETS FOR SALE ON EBAY' ANGLE
When a firm collapses because no one will buy any of those fancy financial instruments whose underlying value has been wiped away by ninety seven layers of fees and discredited wishful thinking, well, that iswhen it is really fun to point out there is still a liquid market for the one palpable thing that firm was producing while it was collecting those fees: tote bags and associated other memorabilia! When Bear Stearns collapsed last winter its signature teddy bear became an instant collector's item. And 450 Lehman Brothers-related items showed up on eBay last week, including this handy emergency evacuation kit! The crap is probably mostly all made in China, but the "brand" lends "added value" because it so succinctly evokes the ultimate final collapse of the myth that shit like brands add value.

4. THE 'END OF GREED' ANGLE
It's the end of investment banking, the end of greed, the end of Nobutini-addled banker sex following 90-hour workweeks, New York as you knew it, basically. Once there was a time you could be a smart, ambitious student at a top-tier university, pursue a field other than finance or consulting, and still live with yourself! That all changed some time after most journalists graduated from their Ivy League institutions. All the brightest minds wanted to do was i-bank! Because they were drawn in by the glamour and greed and fancy jargon they got to throw around like they were in some cool secret society. Well, that is over, say trend story writers.
Thank god, says NYT columnist Roger Cohen, who praises the "death of a culture."

5. THE 'END OF AMERICA/CAPITALISM/END OF HISTORY' ANGLE
America and/or capitalism is dead. Welcome to the Third World, America! Or as Niall Ferguson calls it, Chimerica. Yikes! Polish immigrants are going home. There's a crescendo of schadenfreude across continental Europe, where we have long mocked them for actually believing in stuff like "regulation" and "social safety nets." But no one could be more psyched than Hugo Chavez. Ha ha ha, too bad Chavez had $300 million invested in Lehman Brothers. Shit, whose currency do the North Koreans counterfeit now? And what would Lenin say? Wait, are we even joking anymore? No!

6. THE "WALL STREET: YES, IT REALLY DOES AFFECT MAIN STREET, SORT OF, WE CAN'T TOTALLY EXPLAIN WHY' ANGLE
Well clearly, Christmas is going to suck! Possibly numerous percentage points more than it did last year! Retailers are already bracing for weak holiday sales, reports the Journal. People are second-guessing their purchases of everything — even prescription drugs (but I thought all prescription drugs were life necessities?!). Even Bratz dolls! What does it have to do with, say, the new restrictions on short-selling? Nothing! But hey, the government is a big hedge fund suddenly and these aren't rational times we're talking about.

Each bean is fully dried before roasting, ensuring a more evenly cooked bean, which makes it less bitter.

That's right, you've finally lived to see the historic day when Folgers sells coffee grounds that are the product of a slightly upgraded pre-roast drying process! The future is now.

Also notable: Folgers' ad agency says this campaign is "the largest marketing investment in the history of Folgers.” So how big is it?

[It] is expected to be in the low six figures.

Starbucks spends that much every day on nutmeg, dude. America's not dead yet.

[NYT]

Can I really figure out the crisis on the internet?
Okay, so not really. On Tuesday Slate's new business site The Big Money posted a story on the next dominoes. Morgan Stanley was not even listed. Morgan Stanley was not listed because no one was talking about Morgan Stanley failing on Monday. Well that was all the way back then, and this is now. So yeah, no one writing on the internet really has a handle on what's happening, but that is why it is so important to figure out who can at least tell you what just happened.

In that vein, do you mean to tell me the systems of the financial capital of the universe made it possible for these guys to not only put up a hundred bucks to borrow five thousand bucks worth of a company's stock in hopes that the company's stock would plunge on account of all the guys borrowing shares with the intention of having it plunge, but to do all of this without even actually borrowing the stock to begin with?
Uh yes? But not anymore because so-called "naked" shorting is being outlawed? Here is how Dealbreaker explained it last month:

It's Saturday afternoon and you stop by your ex girlfriend's apartment to pick some of your old stuff. You guys are friends and all, so you just let yourself in. You're grabbing your clothes from behind the fridge and see that she's got a case of Budweiser sitting in the pantry next to it. You happen to be on your way to a pool party and you know that your frat boy friends will be out of beer by the time you make your "casually late" entrance.

So you "borrow" that case of beer from your ex. That's called the locate, and since you didn't get her permission then that'd be called doing it naked. (Hey, stay focused here and stop dreaming about your ex's great body. I'm learnin' y'all something right now.)

Is there a cool animated graphic that could visually connect my own mortgage payments to all these complex securities that got bundled together and repackaged with so many ever-credulity-straining "terms" that by the time all was sold and done they were worth 22 cents on the dollar?
Well that is not why Si Newhouse created it but Portfolio has a very cool one!

Where is the definitive guide to how the Chinese Communist Party made all this happen when it decided the best way to make everyone forget about democracy was to keep the lives of its citizens improving at a dramatic but steadily controlled rate by getting them all jobs manufacturing stuff Americans could not really afford because they work retail but would buy anyway because of the cheap credit that got us into this mess and anyway, the US Treasury will bail everyone out, because no matter how much they overpay the mercenaries keeping the peace in The Iraq China will always have excess wads cash under the mattress to lend them?
Glad you asked! It's in the Atlantic Monthly of about nine months back.

So are We Turning Communist?
Hey, yes, and the communist country that gave you Jerome Kerviel is totally schadenfreuding at our gargantuan hypocrisy, and the Trotksyists over at the economics blog Marginal Revolution is laughing with them. But Equity Private over at Dealbreaker points out, this kind of inane oversimplification of shit is how we got into this mess to begin with.

I do grow a bit tired of hearing about this or that being "nationalized." You would think a prerequisite for being a member of the "financial media" would be the proper use of the word "nationalization" and its derivatives.

It has almost gotten to the point that "bailout" was at with reference to Bear Stearns. I understand that it is all the rage with the kids these days to bend and twist meaning until all semblance of communication is the same muddy color as brackish harbor silt, but that has to end at some point. No?

I find it difficult not to draw a connection between this sloppy linguistic tendency and the crash. After all, when every corner is rounded off, every edge dulled, every sacking becomes a change to "pursue other opportunities," every slip in revenue a "market harmonization," every crash a "correction," every incompetent failure an "emerging challenge," every takeover a "strategic opportunity" every CDO "Triple A," every auction rate security "just like cash" and every mass firing a "downsizing," how the hell is anyone supposed to know what's risky and what isn't?

Lest you think Equity Private lacks a sense of humor because she resisted the obvious "derivative" pun, you can read her funny guide to translating Wall Street announcements here and laugh at things you don't fully understand too.

Hey, do you think there could possibly be a photo gallery of some of the lesser-known hot babes of CNBC?
The blog CNBC Sucks has one. The blog CNBC Sucks is incidentally awesome! Not least for this endorsement of Barack Obama:

Let me break it down for you. Obama is 47, McCain is 72. If you are 47 or younger, you can expect to live another 30 years. ALL of McCain's policies are based on him being safely dead by the time we starve and kill each other on the streets as a consequence of his policies.

Isn't anyone taking the whole Those Fucking Greedy Banker Douchebags Can Fuck Themselves approach?
Why yes. That is why some nice rich lady edits The Nation!

This is an unfair world. Most of the time, it feels as if there is no God. No old dude with a beard making sure that if two bad things happen to you, then two good things will happen down the line. The amount of suffering in the world is not evenly distributed. Poor people get crushed. Rich people get breaks. Most of us are not destined to be the ones seated inside the fancy restaurant; we're the ones outside on the sidewalk, looking at what's on their plates. So as disastrous as the market crash may be for all of us in the long run, take a minute and enjoy one part of it. Revel in their misery. Toast their unemployment and celebrate their pain!

But you know what, dude? We are just not feeling it today.

*Well, of course you can, that is the whole point.

Ok, sad thing first: a good Samaritan reset the password and tried to alert Sarah. But he also posted the new password, causing multiple people to try to log in at once, freezing the account for 24 hours. And now, the account has been deleted! Which is, as we said, maybe destruction of evidence? So for now this is, we think, all we'll get to see from this email account (if anyone finds evidence of saved emails, let us know.)

The full timeline of events, with corroborating evidence of the legitimacy of these screengrabs, is here. Here's why it all looks convincing:

• The emails to Ivy Frye, a Palin aide who's mentioned in the earlier email stories specifically wondering how best to hide her correspondence with the governor.
• The attached contact list (below) features an email address for husband Todd Palin that is legit. As well as an apparently genuine phone number for Bristol Palin and an address for Beth Leschper, Palin's deputy communications director.
• The email from Amy McCorkell, a known associate of Palin's from Wasilla who might have the governor's personal email address.
• Emails to and from Lt Governor Sean Parnell about a local radio talk host.
• Calls to the phone number listed for Bristol Palin apparently go to her voicemail.
• The public profile for the gov.palin address dates its last update to April of this year—well before she became McCain's running mate. So if it's a hoax, it's a hoax that began long before anyone outside of Alaska cared about Palin.
• We haven't seen these family photos before. Have we?
• The previously accessible public profiles for gov.sarah@yahoo and gov.palin@yahoo were both deleted at the same time.

Here are the screenshots of the emails saved before the account went dark, along with the contact list. It's newsworthy and we will not be taking it down!

CONTACT LIST

Beth Leschper (Beth Leschper SOA) [Edit]
beth.leschper@alaska.gov
Blanche Kallstrom (Blanche) [Edit]
mbkrdk@starband.net
Bristol Palin (Bristol) [Edit]
bristol_palin@hotmail.com
Chuck Heath (Chuck) [Edit]
chckheath@yahoo.com
fek9wnr@yahoo.com (Todd) [Edit]
fek9wnr@yahoo.com
ftb907@yahoo.com (Frank) [Edit]
ftb907@yahoo.com
Heather Bruce (Heather) [Edit]
khbruce@gci.net
ivy.frye@alaska.gov (Ivy SOA) [Edit]
ivy.frye@alaska.gov
ivyfrye@yahoo.com (Ivy Personal) [Edit]
ivyfrye@yahoo.com
Judy Patrick (Judy Patrick) [Edit]
jpphoto@mtaonline.net
kris.perry@alaska.gov (Kris Perry SOA) [Edit]
kris.perry@alaska.gov
krisandclark@yahoo.com (Kris Personal) [Edit]
krisandclark@yahoo.com
paymckhea@yahoo.com (Molly) [Edit]
paymckhea@yahoo.com
Roseanne Hughes (Roseanne Hughes SOA) [Edit]
roseanne.hughes@alaska.gov
Sally Heath (Mom) [Edit]
salheath@mtaonline.net
Sean Parnell (Sean Personal) [Edit]
sparnell@alaska.com
Sharon Leighow (Sharon SOA) [Edit]
sharon.leighow@alaska.gov
Sleighow@aol.com (Sharon Leighow Personal) [Edit]
Sleighow@aol.com
Track Palin (Track) [Edit]
track_44@hotmail.com

UPDATE:

ARLINGTON, VA — Today, McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis issued the following statement concerning reports about Governor Palin's email and an invasion of privacy:
"This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment."

Point one: legitimacy confirmed! Point two: I guess we'll have to blow up the internet now?

Forbes: "Merrill is in damn good shape."

In April, Forbes published a cover story about Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, headlined "No Thain, No Gain." Like Fortune, Forbes spends a lot of time talking to the executives it covers, and angling for access. It has been known to churn out plenty of hagiography, if not as steadily as its competitor, and the Thain piece edged into that territory: Thain was compared to Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, called the "Mr. Fixit" at his last job and described as "athletic" and "coolheaded." Even his facial expressions were reassuring, with a grin that "says, No need to brace for disaster."

Some of those compliments held up reasonably well, given that Thain managed to sell Merrill just in the nick of time, and at a point when two similarly-troubled competitors could not find buyers.

But then Forbes' Daniel Fisher had to go and write, "Aside from its obvious troubles—afflicting all the largest financial institutions (see chart)—Merrill is in damn good shape... Part of Thain’s job, like that of a good physician, is to do no harm. Meaning: Keep the cash machine going..." Whoops. (Thanks to the tipster who emailed this one in.)

BusinessWeek: "Don't Be Leery Of Lehman"

For the "Inside Wall Street" investing column in its April 7 issue, BusinessWeek touted the benefits of owning Lehman Brothers stock. "Don't Be Leery Of Lehman," the headline on the second item read. The magazine said that "most shell-shocked investors are still leery" of the stock, but then quoted two Lehman bulls:

"The fears surrounding the firm's funding and liquidity position have been overstated," says William Tanona of Goldman Sachs (GS) (which has done business with Lehman). His 12-month target: 58.

... "Lehman's management, led by Richard Fuld, is the best in the business," says [Punk Ziegel's Richard] Bove.

Fortune: Merrill Lynch in "best stocks for 2008" and AIG in 2007 "10 stocks to buy now."

The magazine's thoughts in December 2006 on AIG, before an 18 percent stock decline the following year:

It's clear that AIG was no Enron. Under CEO Martin Sullivan, a 30-year company veteran, AIG... is reporting impressive profit growth once again. Led by a strong showing in its property and casualty business, the company registered a 38 percent jump in net income in the first three quarters of 2006 before investment gains or losses, to $11.6 billion. As Don Yacktman, who recently purchased more than 100,000 shares for his Yacktman Funds, puts it, "A little bit of plastic surgery and - voilà! - the ugly duckling becomes a swan."

Expect more strong results in 2007. Hurricane Katrina, which damaged billions of dollars' worth of homes, commercial structures and energy facilities, should help AIG's P&C business...

The similarly disastrous reasoning behind selecting Merrill Lynch this past December:

Question: What do you call it when an $8 billion asset writedown translates into a $30 billion loss in market cap? Answer: an overreaction. Yes, Merrill's shares deserved a punishment for the firm's mortgage-related bungling. But the public flogging has far exceeded the transgression, which is why smart investors should buy this stock before everyone else comes to their senses.

Surely there are other examples out there. If you know of one, we'd love to hear about it! tips@gawker.com

1. Gladiator Wars: Assuming Maghound takes off, it will offer a pure look at what consumers want to read (at least within the limited, non-Hearst pool of 240 magazines) when offered a broad array of choices. It could become the Billboard charts of magazine popularity. Plus you can watch magazines get dropped from subscriber lists immediately when people find out their content sucks! Now we just have to ask Time Inc. to make all this data public.

2. Price: Three titles for five bucks a month, five for eight bucks, seven for ten bucks. It's a deal and a half. If Maghound takes off it should cut into news stand sales, because it allows you to sample issues without paying the price of a subscription or the higher price of a news stand copy.

3. Expansion: The roster of magazines available now lacks big names like The Atlantic, The Economist, Esquire, and a bunch of others. But if Maghound proves to be a successful business, that list is bound to expand, because magazines—except very high-end titles—will see that it's in their economic interest to be included. So it's fair to expect more choice in the future.

Or the thing will fold, but you only lost five bucks a month. So who cares?

[Folio, Paid Content]

Council Member David Yassky of Brooklyn is calling for the city to begin allowing advertising on municipal trash cans and suggested that such a move, which he estimated could bring $2.5 million in revenue, would help during difficult economic times.

That's sure to be an advertising hot spot for trash bag companies and, uh, any number of others. The city is also proposing to sell space on its scaffolding , zoos, swimming pools, and other park facilities.

As long as we can still look down on Michigan.

[NYS]

[UPDATE: Jeff Bercovici notes that he posted his own copy of this yesterday afternoon. They really did hit the city's most discerning readers! Not us.]

The cover features Sarah Reinertsen, the first female leg amputee to finish an Ironman triathlon. She’s wearing one Nike shoe and a Nike t-shirt, with the words “Where Will You Be?” under the date “08.31.08” emblazoned on her chest. In the bottom left corner, Nike’s swoosh logo accompanies a cover line—“The Human Race 10K”—and a callout to “See page 12.”

The inside cover features a two-page ad for Nike Plus’ “Human Race” taking place on, yes, August 31.

See, the problem is that once you've sold your front cover, what is it exactly that separates you from the tons of ad circulars that appear on front steps across the metropolitan area? The publisher himself even wrote shilltastic ad copy inside for Nike's race. Having one sponsor for an entire issue of a magazine is becoming common; but even those sponsors manage to keep themselves off the cover.

Don't say it's okay just because they used an inspirational handicapped woman for the product placement. That's cheating.

[Folio]

The term: "Place-based media." The meaning: Ads RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, everywhere—security kiosks, bus stops, the Duane Reade checkout line, jukeboxes in bars. Learn to love it. You gave them your permission for all this, after all:

“The consumer will let us know when it’s too much” ...

In trying to avoid alienating consumers with too many ads outside the home, “it’s all about balance,” said Ron Greenberg, senior vice president for digital media and chief marketing officer at the TouchTunes Corporation in New York. “You have to be careful.”

Consumers will “give you permission to present your ad” he said, “as long as you’re not disturbing what they’re there to do.”

[NYT]

“I’m kind of relying, my client is relying, on just the inner workings of that station,” said [Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal]. “Not that editorial would ever give a heads-up to sales or be expected to give a heads-up to sales, but these are professionals. They do realize that some businesses’ brands, some businesses’ reputations, could be at stake in terms of how commerce and news are interacting here.”

Setting aside how the deal complicates reporting on certain topics, one also can't help but note how it highlights those parts of the news operation already considered journalistically weakest. For the Las Vegas station, the second part of the morning newscast can be sold for product placement, but not the first, since... the first contains the real, actual, trustworthy journalism? At other stations mentioned in the Times story, the entire morning newscast is marked off this way.

The stations are moving forward with the product placements despite the fact that the national news divisions ABC, NBC and CBS have ruled out such practices as misleading. It's almost enough to make one wonder if the local affiliates care more about ratings than presenting a balanced, helpful newscast.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll take a break from all this journalistic hand-wringing and enjoy a crisp, cool Miller High Life. It is truly the champagne of beers!

[Times]

• "It's been a tough hop for this caravan of sales crews, though. Winding their way down from California, they lost a few agents. Two were arrested in Albuquerque after they allegedly forced their way into the home of an elderly couple and beat them to death, raping the wife first. A few weeks later, another agent allegedly raped a woman in Claremont, California, so he got picked up, too."
• "In the eight months the Press investigated door-to-door magazine sales across the country, the industry has seen at least three murders, one rape, two attempted rapes, one stabbing, one attempted murder, one vehicle fatality and one attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl."
• Crystal Mathahy (pictured), a 17-year-old in Texas, got recruited to join a magazine crew. An older cousin signed a "permission slip" for her to participate, since her mom was illiterate. She didn't make enough money to eat, and tried to leave the crew, but couldn't afford a Greyhound ticket. Shortly after, the crew's van plunged 80 feet off the side of a mountain, crushing Mathahy to death.
• "[In] Houston in 2005, a sales agent raped a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl who answered the door of the apartment she shared with her mother. To gain her confidence, that agent acted as if he had a disability as well."

Apart from the individual tragedies, the real scandal the story lays out is the blind eye that big players in the magazine industry—including the MPAA, Conde Nast, and many other top-tier publishers—turn to the well-known excesses of the subscription business. That's to say nothing of the financial risks to consumers, like being subscribed to magazines against your will. The whole thing is worth a read.

[Houston Press]

CBS signed up Roehm to be a judge on Jingles, a new show where people compete to make the best ad jingles (sounds awful). But the show has already been "postponed" before it even launched, because the network needs more time to promote (kill?) it. So how did Roehm, famous mostly for her spectacular failure on one of marketing's biggest stages, get the gig?

According to executives familiar with the matter, the "Jingles" casting crew was in a tizzy as of just a month ago, sending out dispatches to ad folks citing a "time crunch" in assembling a judges' panel, with a specific eye on pinning down a female ad or marketing executive.

Oh, and part of the criteria was the hotness factor: "It is television, therefore, being attractive would be a bonus," said one e-mail dispatch from Sam Gollestani, casting director for the host and judges.

The article also points out that every similar show has failed. Should be great!

[Ad Age, Forbes]