Financial Briefing: Weekly Wrap-Up

But for those gluttons for punishment -- doom awaits!

Markets closed the week like a 50-to-1 nag shuffling over the finish line. The market extended its longest losing streak since the dark days of 2008. The S&P 500 fell for seven straight trading days.

Do you know what the Ukraine is? It's a sitting duck. A road apple, Newman. The Ukraine is weak. It's feeble. I think it's time to put the hurt on the Ukraine!

This sounds like one of those 1980's action flicks that used to air on Cinemax just before the good nudie movies came on: The Death Cross!

As with many social phenomena, the stock market can be seen in terms of hems and necklines.

NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, no Assets) are back, just like that stubborn herp you caught from that raver chick in the dance-club bathroom a few years back.

Apple, the golden boy of the tech world for the past few years f nal y ad its si nal f lt.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the primary newspaper of one bankrupt state is pointing the finger at another bankrupt state and crying, "Shame!". Pull quote:

Few budget analysts are surprised to see Illinois, with a limping economy and broken political culture, edge close to the abyss. Two of the last six governors have served jail terms, and a third is on trial.

Larry Kudlow points out that it is private business, not the government, which creates jobs. As Mr. Kudlow further points out, transfer payments don't work as stimulus because they don't provide growth (and in true Democrat fashion, transfer payments are usually political pay-offs rather than targeted fiscal stimuli).

The post-stimulus economy will be familiar to any L.A. low-rider who used to take his lowered Chevy or Ford Falcon out for a cruise on Saturday night: low and slow. (Oh, and that $800 billion stimulus package that was so necessary to save us from oblivion? As far as anyone can tell, it didn't do jack shit. We might as well have burned it up in a fire.)

California adds pointless bureaucratic douchebaggery to the lengthening list of reasons why the state is doomed.

For pure elite condescension and unwarranted snottiness, it's hard to beat this little billet doux to the Tea Party movement. Pull quote:

The Tea Partiers may talk about economic growth, but what they really care about is the moral project of rewarding the Responsibles and punishing the Deadbeats. For the movement zealots, it’s the principle that really counts—and even a little Depression may not be too high a price to see it through.

Remember how those vaunted ECB "stress tests" of European banks was supposed to ease investors' minds? Well...investors' minds are not eased. At all.

Today's briefing brought to you by that magnificent Avatar of American capitalism...Mr. Scrooge McDuck.

posted by Monty at 10:16 AM

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