Maybe you had to be in the NYC metro area in the 1970s to have seen the first in-your-face TV ads for a local electronics retailer (who later went to the pokey on fraud charges) but that is the vision that comes to me now.
Crazy Sam's - His bailout prices are in-saaaaaaaane!!
I'm not going to pontificate on the extreme nature of the current Federal intervention into the capitalist system. I won't call this country the USSA as one message board poster did (Get it? A play on USSR and the socialists). I won't blame Bernanke or Greenspan or Paulson or Cox or Bush or .......
I also won't extol the virtues of our current Treasury Secy for being the only one who understands the problem and takes action.
What I will rage against, besides the machine, is that current meddling - necessary or not - has rendered the free market obsolete. How am I supposed to measure supply and demand when a source of supply has been outlawed? When all of the sudden money market funds are on par with treasury bills in terms of safety? When someone has the power to pick and choose which companies he will save and which he will let slide into oblivion?
Where's the level playing field on which capitalism is based?
The environment is insane. None of us have the proper tools to tell us whether to buy or sell at this point.
Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam. Your efforts to calm things down just created a bigger mess. Mark your calendars to October 2 - the day the short sale rule expires.
2 comments:
"I also won't extol the virtues of our current Treasury Secy for being the only one who understands the problem and takes action."
I guess so, he would know. It was Paulson and his cronies at Goldman et al that helped create this crisis. Now in what can only be a twilight zone episode he gets to treat the Treasury as if it were a mergers and acquisitions division at his old firm promoting the solution to the problem his firm helped create at great profit. A company I might add he left only in 2006.
Worse still the majority stand around and applaud him. Talk about Stockholm syndrome.
The financial system is more like the China Syndrome. :-)
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