"Back in the U.S... Back in the U.S..."

"... Back in the USSR!"

"We believe that free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity"

Hah!

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Some comments on the New RTC and the SEC/FSA bans (?) on short selling from those smart folks on my blogroll at left:

• Paul Krugman: "Comrade Paulson seizes the economy’s commanding heights"
  
• Calculated Risk: "Details of how this will work aren't available yet. But one of the key problems - in addition to the risk to the taxpayer - is that this program will actually reduce regulatory capital as losses are realized. The opposite of the goal! "
  
• Long or Short Capital: "The obvious question is, who will bail out the Treasury?  The answer is paper."
  
• Macro Man: "Pretty soon, the authorities will simply delete the "sell" key off of all electronic and broker trading systems, and appropriate all red paper sell tickets that may have survived from the 1980's."
  
• self-evident: "Congress appears ready to move on a plan to buy bad mortgages.  There are no words for how hideous this idea is.  The wealthiest people in our society — the same ones who created this mess through their unyielding greed — are about to get bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. "
  
• Big Picture: "We Are A Nation of Morons, led by complete Idiots, making us complicit in our own self destruction."
  
• Aleph: "Eliminating shorting is stupid.  Enforcing getting a locate is smart" and "Anyone going to the new RTC should feel pain, and a lot of it.  It should be the last resort for companies that are failing.  It should not try to keep companies alive, but merely conserve the value of assets, and prevent contagion.  "
  
• Cassandra: "Tttttthhllllwwwwopp! (sound of cork popping)"
  
• Dealbreaker (1): "Welcome to Pakistan"
• Dealbreaker (2): "When the big bad short sellers came to blow your houses down today, you could've yelled through the window, "Huff and puff away, f**k sticks, unlike Lehman's house of straw, and Bear's trailer park of hemp, these bricks ain't comin' down." Instead, you caught the next train to Coxville to cry to your mama and clutch behind her legs while she wields a bat at the bullies."

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Finally, a jolly thought for the weekend, aidst the euphoria... is Nemo at self-evident right?  That MS is counterparty to $10.3tn (that's TRILLION) of derivative trades vs GS at just (!!!) $1.8tn?!  And then there're both BAC(+MER) and C at ~$40tn?  JPM at $90tn??!!!  (That's TRILLION.)  

Yes, nominal etc etc, but... $90 trillion???!!!!!

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