That's what we are talking about!

A commercial from the 1950s...

2009-12-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

What do you think now!

Christmas at Arlington Cemetary

2009-12-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

Arlington National

These wreaths - some 5,000 - are donated by the Worcester Wreath Company of Harrington, Maine. The owner, Merrill Worcester, not only provides the wreaths, but covers the trucking expense as well. He has done this since 1992. In addition, in most years, groups of Maine school kids combine an educational trip to Washington D.C. with this event to help out!

Plus or Minus!!!

2009-12-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

J.P. Morgan Global Wealth Management recently published the following information:

Cabinet Appointees with Private Sector Experience:
T. Roosevelt 36%
Taft 39
Wilson 51
Harding 48
Coolidge 47
Hoover 40
F. Roosevelt 50
Truman 50
Eisenhower 58
Kennedy 28
Johnson 45
Nixon 53
Ford 43
Carter 31
Reagan 56
Bush I 52
Clinton 36
Bush II 53
Obama 8

This table shows that Obama has appointed dramatically far fewer cabinet level heads who have had private sector experience than any other president dating back to 1900.

One view: Obama sees very little value in utilizing business talent - even as the government controls large stakes in financial firms like Citigroup and AIG and auto companies like GM and Chrysler, as government agencies mushroom in size and more "agency type" governemnt entities are proposed, and his administration seeks to promote private sector hiring.

Another view: Obama believes that governemnt experience leads to compentency and experience serving the public is beneficial so he sought those type of people.

Guess how Main street and Wall Street interprets this....

ObamaCare - A democrat's thoughts...

2009-11-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

The following was written by John Cassidy and appeared on his blog Rational Irrationality. I applaud him for telling it like it is with respect to ObamaCare - John is a true left of center democrat but he knows the real issue behind this healthcare plan - another redistribution of income... or more simply an entitlement program which once established will be impossible to be rid of in the future. And we wonder why the majority of Americans are upset by the plan - they know they will have to pay for something they do not want; and they know they can not afford it.

Some Vaguely Heretical Thoughts on Health-Care Reform

With the publication of H.R. 3962, the House Democrats’ mammoth, 1,990-page proposal to restructure the health-care system (the outlines of which can be found in this detailed summary), decision time is fast approaching in the big reform debate. Paul Krugman, in his usual forthright style, says, “History is about to be made—and everyone has to decide which side they’re on.” Democrats and progressives can line up behind the reform legislation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put forward last week, or they can help to kill reform for another generation by aligning with hard-line conservatives.

As political analysis, there’s something to be said for Krugman’s Manichean view of the world. But Krugman is also an economist—a very good one—and the economics of what is proposed bear inspection. The President is on the verge of fulfilling his campaign pledge to extend health-care coverage to many of the uninsured. He is doing this, however, not by transforming the existing system of private insurance, which gave rise to many of the current problems, but by extending it. The White House has reached a deal with the big health insurers, such as Aetna and CIGNA. In return for the industry’s agreeing to cover people with preëxisting health conditions, and making various other more minor concessions, the government will force more than twenty million new customers into its arms.

I regard an expansion of the government safety net as ethically essential, economically justified, and long overdue. It is indefensible for a country as rich as the United States to fail to provide adequate health care for many of its citizens. In extending our health-care system, all we are doing is catching up with Otto Von Bismarck’s Germany, which recognized a hundred and twenty-five years ago that universal health and disability coverage, along with old age pensions and a system of public education, were essential elements of a modern society. Moreover, given the reluctance of “Blue Dog” Democrats, such as Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, to support anything that smacks of big government, and President Obama’s determination to coöperate with moderate Republicans, the proposed reform may be the most that can be accomplished today. But we will be dealing with its consequences for decades to come, and I think it’s important to be clear about what the reform amounts to.

Let’s remind ourselves of the basics. There are two big (and linked) problems with the current health-care system. It excludes 46.3 million Americans, according to the Census Bureau, and it is inordinately expensive. The proposed reform purports to tackle both of these problems; in fact, it only addresses the first one in any systematic manner. The future cost savings that the Administration and its congressional allies are promising to deliver are based on wishful thinking and sleight of hand. Over time, the reform, as proposed, would almost certainly add substantially to the budget deficit, thereby worsening the long-term fiscal crisis that the country faces. Financing this measure alone wouldn’t break the U.S. Treasury. Other elements of the fiscal picture, such as the looming increases in interest payments on the national debt and an explosive growth in Medicare spending as the baby boomers retire—are far larger. But the numbers involved in health-care reform are still significant—perhaps one per cent of annual G.D.P.

The Pelosi bill, in particular, wouldn’t do much, if anything, to address the overall escalation in health-care costs, much of which is rooted in the nature of insurance, where individuals consume costly health services, and different people—the other members of their risk pool—pay for them. This is the “moral hazard” problem that the economist Kenneth Arrow identified as long ago as 1963. (For an easy-to-understand account of Arrow’s argument, see this riveting new book on market failure.) In the past twenty years, many ideas have been tried in the effort to restrict the growth of spending within a private insurance system, the most notable of which was the creation of H.M.O.s. Some have enjoyed temporary success. None have worked for long.

If you read through the briefing papers provided by the House Ways and Means Committee, the fiscal implications of the proposed reform are pretty obvious. Under the proposed legislation, people whose employers don’t offer health coverage will receive “affordability credits” that fall with income, tapering off at about eighty-five thousand dollars a year. A lower-middle-class family of four earning, say, forty-five thousand dollars a year would be entitled to a subsidy of, say, seventy-five hundred dollars a year, to enable them to buy a basic health insurance plan that would cost them, say, eleven thousand dollars a year on the proposed Health Insurance Exchange, These estimates are based on a table on page 3 of the summary document I referred to earlier, which says that families that earn between two hundred and two hundred and fifty per cent of the federal poverty level would have to pay a maximum of eight per cent of their income in insurance premiums. Some poorer families that couldn’t afford to buy coverage even with the generous new tax breaks and subsidies would become eligible for an expanded Medicaid program. Individuals and families that failed to obtain coverage despite these inducements would be subject to a fine of seven hundred and fifty dollars for each uninsured adult.

By any standards, the subsidies in the plan are big ones. For example, they dwarf the Earned Income Tax Credits for poor and middle-income working families, which have been steadily expanded since George H. W. Bush first introduced them. From an egalitarian perspective, the establishment of these generous subsidies would be an important moment in U.S. history. But two practical questions immediately arise. Who would police the new system, and how much would it cost?

The answer to the first question is the Internal Revenue Service. If you couldn’t prove to the I.R.S. that you hadn’t obtained coverage, it would add the seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine to your tax bill. A healthy, single, self-employed person in his twenties would have the choice of buying an individual insurance plan for, say, five to six thousand dollars a year (considerably less than that if he were eligible for a subsidy) or paying the fine. Undoubtedly, some people will choose to pay the fine and go uninsured. According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Pelosi’s plan, in 2019 there would still be about eighteen million uninsured adults. (In percentage terms, the share of legal nonelderly Americans with health coverage would rise from about eighty-three per cent today to about ninety-six per cent.)

According to the C.B.O., in summary, many more people will, with government assistance, buy private insurance coverage (some twenty-one million) and many others (about fifteen million) will become newly eligible for Medicaid, which is wholly financed by the taxpayer. Surely, this will cost considerable sums of money and add to the deficit. Or will it? The Democrat-controlled C.B.O. says that the Pelosi plan will actually reduce the deficit by a hundred and four billion dollars between 2010 and 2019, thereby satisfying President Obama’s claim that the reform will be deficit neutral. Furthermore, the C.B.O. suggests that the legislation’s impact on the deficit will continue to be negative in the following decade, from 2019 to 2029. I wish I could believe these figures, but I don’t.

Two large items underpin the Administration’s math: five hundred and seventy-two billion dollars of tax increases over ten years, and roughly the same amount of cost savings on Medicare and other existing government health programs. Most of the revenue increase would come from levying a 5.4 per cent surcharge on Americans individuals who earn more than five hundred thousand dollars a year and joint filers that earn more than a million dollars. I am a big supporter of progressive taxation, but at some point it becomes politically unsustainable. If health-care reform goes through, and the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011, top earners will face a marginal tax rate of forty-five per cent at the federal level. Add in state and local taxes, plus Social Security and Medicare payments, and wealthy people in New York, say, would be facing tax rates of about sixty per cent. As sure as night follows day, this would generate more tax evasion and a political backlash. Without a doubt, the next Republican-controlled Congress would reverse the changes.

If it decides to forgo soaking the rich, the Administration could return to its earlier proposal, which was included in a Senate Finance Committee bill that Senator Max Baucus put forward, to tax firms that provide their employees with costly “Cadillac” health-care plans. “A policy such as this is probably the number one item that health economists across the ideological spectrum believe is likely to stem the explosion of health-care costs,” Christine Romer, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a recent speech. But this idea wouldn’t work politically, either. To raise enough revenue, the tax on swanky insurance plans would have to be set as high as forty per cent. When labor unions, some of whose members enjoy coverage in these plans, learned about this punitive levy they objected loudly, prompting Pelosi to drop the idea, which, broadly speaking, amounts to taxing the upper middle class to provide benefits for the lower middle class.

What about the proposed cost savings? They, too, are questionable. Most of them consist of reductions in Medicare outlays, which, according to this C.B.O. analysis, would save four hundred and twenty-six billion dollars between 2010 and 2019 compared with current plans. Look a bit more closely, and you find that more than half of the Medicare savings (two hundred and twenty-nine billion dollars) come from cutting payments to providers of services under the regular program; most of the rest (a hundred and seventy billion dollars) come from changing the way payments are set in the Medicare Advantage program. Does anybody really believe that these savings will materialize? For decades now, Congress has been promising to reduce the growth of Medicare outlays, and yet every year they continue to go up. The reasons are straightforward: the population is aging; seniors are politically active; and health-care treatments, particularly for the aging, continue to evolve in complex and costly ways.

To be fair, contained in its reform plan, the White House does have a proposal to address these issues: the establishment of an Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), which would provide Congress each year with cost-saving recommendations. “By removing some of the political pressure around such reforms,” Romer said in the same speech, “the IMAC would make it easier for improvements to be made year after year.” This statement can only be described as wishful thinking. I hope it will be proved right, but Washington is replete with now-defunct independent bodies and commissions that toiled dutifully, did good work, and made little difference.

So what does it all add up to? The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.

Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.

That takes me back to where I began. Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted. But as an economics reporter and commentator, I feel obliged to put on my green eyeshade and count the dollars.

Another Thought...

2009-10-14T06:33:00.001-07:00

Not for the faint of heart...ADPT

Another Thought...

2009-10-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

WR Berkley 6.75% Trust Preferred - WRB-A
There has been selling pressure in the last several days that has pushed this security down nearly 3% to the 22.60 - 22.75 range. For an income oriented account this offers moderate risk and a 7.50%ish current yield.

Employment in the U.S. - it is really much worse

2009-10-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

The facts:
Unemployment rate - 9.8% from 9.7%
Payrolls - down 263,000 from the previous month
Job losses since Dec 2007 - 7.2 million
September 2009 was the 21st month in a row of shrinking employment. While history for this data only goes back to 1939 this is the longest losing streak since the government started keeping track in 1939.
But it really is much worse...
The household survey - which seeks to determine whether or not people are working by asking them about their individual job status rather than asking companies - for September was a staggering job loss of 785,000.
But it really is much worse...
The impact of the severity of this recession, coupled with the weakness of the 2002-2007 expansion, is that private employment is below where it was at its December 2000 peak. It has not been a great start to the century.
But it really is much worse...
Many consider U-6 as a more reliable indicator of the employment situation. U-6 reached a new peak of 17% in September, up from 16.8% the previous month, and up from 10.6% a year earlier. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' U-6 tracks part-time jobholders who really want a full-time job but can not find one as well as "marginally attached workers". In real numbers it looks like the following:
Marginally attached: 2.2 million
Invountary part-timers: 9.2 million
"Formally unemployed": 15.1 million
The total is 26+ million people not going shopping, not eating out, not taking their families out.

Now this is real golf!

2009-10-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

This is the Extreme 19th hole on Hanglip Mountain at the Legend Golf and Safari resort in South Africa.

Sergio Garcia (red shirt) and Retief Goosen (white shirt) play the hole. The tee is on top of a mountain and at 470 yards the tee shot on this par 3 is reportedly the hardest golf shot in the world. A $1 million prize awaits the player who can score a hole in one.

Players must take a helicopter ride to the top to play the longest and highest par 3 on the planet. The tee is set close to the edge of the mountaintop and the hole is so high the ball takes almost 30 seconds to land.

The hole is based at the Legends Golf and Safari Resort within the Entabeni Safari Conservancy in South Africa's northeastern Limpopo province. The other 18 holes were designed by world golfing legends including Trevor Immelman, Sergio Garcia, Padrig Harrington, and Robert Allenby.

A round of golf is under $100; but the Extreme 19t hole will set your foursome back roughly $950 and includes the helicopter ride souvenir hat and glove, and a DVD of you playing the hole.

So far no one has come close to a hole - in - one, but Padrig Harrington became the first golfer to par the hole. Harrington said: "This is the type of innovation and excitement we need to get more people playing golf." Just like we are going to jump on the next plane to South Africa -right! In addition, Padrig was quoted "I think this hole is awesome - I love the whole experience, the helicopter, the views, the drama, and having the green the shape of Africa. And I've got bragging rights over all the other professionals who have played this and not managed to make three."

Let's go .... any takers?!

New thought...

2009-09-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

...for the more experienced investor:

CACC

$28 - expect minimum of $40

The recovery in home prices

2009-09-22T06:33:00.000-07:00

Moody's (and they have recently demonstrated that they know what they are talking about - their track record with respect to real estate is abysmal) recently published this chart that indicates when home prices will regain their prior peaks. I wouldn't worry much that Moody's believes California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Minnesota, and Virginia will not regain their peaks until after 2023. Michigan is another matter though...

Stating the obvious

2009-09-21T09:35:00.001-07:00

Our president's budget plan is clear - tax hikes are on the way. The current economic malaise will only postpone the inevitable. If the economy improves enough for 2011 those with the targets on their backs are the high wage earners. For 2011, expect the reinstatement of the 36% and 39.6% income tax brackets for married filers making in excess of $250,000 and singles making at least $200,000. Since the brackets are based on taxable income and not earnings, Obama is just substituting 36% and 39.6% tax rates for the current 33% and 35% tax brackets. Lower brackets will not be changed.
In addition, again effective in 2011, expect a big hit to those taxpayers with capital gains and dividends. The current 15% maximum rate would rise to 20% for any taxpayer in the 28% tax bracket and above.
And expect continued phaseouts of itemized deductions, personal exemptions et al for taxpayers in the highest brackets.
Don't you love the redistribution that is occurring.....

Our government's expertise

2009-09-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

Can our government run a healthcare system? Please read on - Democrats, Republicans, and Independents:

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature,

The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775—you have had 234 years to get it right—and it is broke.
Social Security was established in 1935—you have had 74 years to get it right—and it is broke.
Fannie Mae was established in 1938—you have had 71 years to get it right—and it is broke.
War on Poverty started in 1964—you have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor"—and they only want more.
Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965—you have had 44 years to get it right—and they are broke.
Freddie Mac was established in 1970—you have had 39 years to get it right—and it is broke.
The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, it has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before—you had 32 years to get it right—and it is an abysmal failure.

New thought...

2009-09-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

For moderate risk

IGK - ING 8.50% cumulative perpetual preferred -- $19 ish

Wells Fargo Exec's parties are over....

2009-09-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

What was she thinking!?! Where were her friends (and enemies) who obviously knew something was up?

MALIBU, Calif. (CBS/AP) With movie stars as neighbors and parties that lasted until morning, Cheronda Guyton, a bank exec, probably thought she had it made big. Certainly her 3,800-square-foot beachfront home in exclusive Malibu, Calif., was plenty big.

Problem was the mansion wasn't hers. The Wells Fargo honcho was squatting in the home of a couple her bank had recently booted because they could not make their payments.

Well, the upscale Southern California squatter got the ax this week, after Wells Fargo found out that this senior vice president stayed at the bank-owned $12 million beach house, in the exclusive Malibu Colony, when it was not hers.

The bank says the executive violated company policy. Neighbors complained to the Los Angeles Times that the woman and her family were using a house that was supposed to be empty.

Bank spokeswoman Jennifer Langan confirmed that Guyton was the only employee involved in the alleged violation of company policy.

"We deeply regret the activities that have taken place as they do not reflect the conduct we expect of our team members," the bank said in a statement.

No phone listings could be located for Guyton.

The previous homeowners, Lawrence and Linda Elins, turned over the house to Wells Fargo in May. Their real estate agent said they were financially devastated by Bernard Madoff's fraud scheme and had to sign the property over to Wells Fargo to help pay a larger debt.

The home was not foreclosed and the bank agreed not to immediately sell it, Langan said.

Neighbors told the Times they saw Guyton's family at the house and that it was used for at least one party where guests were ferried from a yacht.

The Devil's Dictionary - Financial Edition

2009-09-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal and author Matthew Rose for some good reading...

By MATTHEW ROSE

Just as the financial crisis has morphed into a daily grind instead of a daily fire drill, its peculiar argot has found its way into everyday conversations. This is probably an unwelcome surprise to those not conversant with the narrow byways of Wall Street. So, in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce -- whose "Devil's Dictionary," originally published in 1906 as "The Cynic's Word Book," provided a guide to the political and cultural language of the day -- here is a Wall Street Journal Baedeker to acronyms, neologisms and bastardizations that shape the popular understanding of the pickle in which we remain one full year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

AAA, n., obsolete. A rhetorical device used to dupe buyers into purchasing securities backed by shacks dressed as houses, and to secure the highest possible spot in telephone directories. Common usage: AAA Septic Drainage and Mortgage Backed Security Services.

ADVERSE FEEDBACK LOOP, n. See FEEDBACK LOOP.

BAILOUT, n. First known use: Noah. Novel regressive taxation scheme whereby vast sums of capital are transferred from those citizens who didn't participate in the illusory Bacchanalia of the housing bubble to those who did and weren't clever enough to get out in time.

BANK, GOOD, n., archaic. Sober, conservative, risk-averse institutions designed to midwife customers' capital and enable prudent lending to deserving businesses and consumers. See Capra, F., the Bailey Building & Loan Association.

BANK, BAD, n. 1. Everyone else. 2. Especially Goldman Sachs.

BANK FAILURE, n. 1. A process by which towns across America are denuded of their feckless local bankers, paving a way into the market for feckless private-equity investors. 2. An increasingly common Twitter tag that spikes on Friday afternoons. See #bankfail, #wheresmymoney, #runitsthefdic.

BORROWERS, n. For liberals, the unwitting dupes of unscrupulous bankers and lenders whom one shouldn't blame for the crisis. For conservatives, irresponsible graspers with a credit-busting taste for cathedral-ceilinged entryways and 70-inch flat-screen televisions whom one should absolutely blame for the crisis.

CHRYSLER, v.t. To torch all pre-existing contractual obligations. Entered dialect after Truman's seizure of U.S. steel mills. Reference spotted in 1952 editions of obsolete periodical "Steel and Steelmen," under the "News You Can Smelt" section: "We just got Chryslered!"

CREDIT-DEFAULT SWAP, n. loose translation from the original Latin "ubi mel ibi apes," or "where there's honey there are bees." 1. A complex financial instrument vital to the functioning of a modern economy in the way it spreads risk among consenting parties. (Greenspan, A., pre-Sept. 2008.) 2. A complex financial instrument that nearly destroyed modern capitalism (Greenspan, A., post-Sept. 2008).

CREDIT LINE, n. A set amount of borrowed money available only to those who don't need it.

CREDIT-RATING FIRMS, n. Firms that do scant rating of people with scant credit.

DEFICIT, n. For the party in power, at worst a minor irritant and at best a precondition for economic growth. For the minority, the gravest threat to the stability of the Republic.

DEFLATION, n. The state of being when confronting unified theories of the financial crisis with grand names -- The Great Contraction, The End to Moderation, The Bubble Era -- that don't, in fact, explain much more than our continuing inability to agree why we are in such a deep hole.

FEEDBACK LOOP, n. Process by which the significance of an event is amplified by constant repetition. Orig: CNBC. See ADVERSE FEEDBACK LOOP.

GREEN SHOOTS, n. 1. The first signs of spring, often clobbered by summer's heat and autumn's rain. 2. A sign the economy is falling apart more slowly than previously thought. Related: DAISIES, PUSHING UP. See also THINKING, WISHFUL.

LIGHT TOUCH, n., obsolete. Theory of regulation in which financial companies recycle profits to lawmakers as campaign contributions, prompting them to relax the rules until the banks inevitably mess it up, at which point the dominant theory switches to "heavy hand," prompting years of economic contraction and the cycle to repeat.

PPIP, or PUBLIC-PRIVATE INVESTMENT PARTNERSHIP, v.t. Orig: Gladys Knight. To use a form of hypnotism in which merely saying you intend to fix a problem has the effect of making everyone forget about the problem. Usage: "We really peepipped Congress on those AIG bonuses." See ASSETS, TOXIC.

QUANTITATIVE EASING, n. A regulatory approach based on the point in Western movies when the sheriff, having fired all available bullets, in an act of final desperation throws his gun at the bad guys. See also INFLATION, HYPER.

RESET, v.t. A process by which an initial expectation is altered to another expectation, as in mortgage payments, or deficits or personal fulfillment. As in, "I have reset my views of financial regulation."

RISK MANAGEMENT, n. Until recently, the process by which banks make giant bets with other people's money before persuading someone else to take the fall. Currently known as "federal supervision."

SECURED CREDITORS, n. In modern American capitalism, the parties last in line for repayment after a company's failure. The others in line include the government, unions, sundry suppliers, friends of the union, friends of the government, unsecured creditors and people vaguely familiar with the matter.

STIMULUS, n. An indeterminate sum of taxpayer money used to generate violent debate. Previously known as "government spending."

STRESS TEST, n. 1. A measure of arterial blood flow to the head. 2. Alchemic process by which struggling, undercapitalized banks are transformed into paragons of modern finance. (See BANKS, GOOD.) Also known as the "Timothy F. Geithner Seal of Approval," which some bankers insist is good until it isn't anymore. (See BANKS, BAD.)

SUBPRIME, adj. A measure of diminished intellectual capacity and increased financial mendacity.

TANGIBLE COMMON EQUITY, n. unknown origin. Definition unknown; purpose unknown; how it's calculated, unknown; what federal regulators think it means, unknown. Usages: "Macbeth," Shakespeare, W., Act II, Scene (i): "Is this TCE which I see before me...I have thee not, and yet I see thee still."

TARP, n. acronym. 1. A synthetic device designed to cover up an unsightly mess, or to protect perishable goods (firewood, banks) from the ravages of the elements, typically costing somewhere between $12.99 and $700 billion. 2. Prime example of how governments use otherwise anodyne acronyms, abbreviations and sports metaphors to disguise matters of controversy. See also TALF, TLGP, TURF, FHFA, BACKSTOP, WRAP, OFHEO and SPECTRE.

TOO BIG TO FAIL, idiom. Banks, insurance companies, car companies, presidential approval ratings, Fed chairmen seeking second terms, other people who think they should be Fed chairman, the reputations of people who'd be responsible for letting things fail. Antonym: TOO BORING TO SAVE.

TOXIC ASSETS, n. 1. A collection of bad loans and other botched financial bets that caused big losses for banks, prompted a credit crunch and sank the economy (Sept. 2008 to May 2009). 2. Long-term investments that will pay handsomely when the housing market recovers (June 2009 onward).

U-SHAPED RECOVERY, n . An opportunity for economists to incorrectly predict the timing and nature of the recession's end just as successfully as they incorrectly predicted its inception, depth and duration. Variants include V-shaped recovery, L-shaped recovery and :-( shaped recovery.

Let's do this!

2009-09-15T09:37:00.000-07:00

Let's do this .... the right way!