Financial Briefing: We haven't reached DOOM yet, but you can see it from here

That’s a hell of a haircut. And I’ll bet the barber didn’t even give you a slicking-up with Brylcreem afterwards.

Have mortage rates hit the floor?

"Savage" austerity on the way for the US? I guess it depends on how long we pretend that we can paper over our financial problems rather than actually fixing them. The longer we wait, the worse the correction is going to be. At some point in the not-too-distant future, "austerity" may be the least of our worries.

Fannie and Freddie need feeding again? I swear, they’re going to eat me out of house and home! They barely finish eating, and they’re crying and saying they’re hungry again! We should have just bought a dog.

We have a word for what Teh Krugman is shoveling, and that word is “horseshit". (Or is that two words?)

I remain astonished at how many public workers cannot seem to fathom this simple sentence: "We are out of money." Blame the banks, by all means: there is much blame there to be shouldered. Blame the politicians, the idle rich, the oil shieks, the speculators, the stock brokers, the bond salesmen, the welfare-cheats, the taxpayers and tax assessors; blame the culture (what’s left of it), blame your overbearing boss or your lazy underlings, blame the weather if it pleases you. At the end of it all the debt still looms, and something has got to give.

Au secours! Au secours! Je suis opprimé! (Roger Kimball has a cure for what ails them! Carousel!)

Barack Obama: Hey, it was hard work pissing away all that money!

"They’re real, and they’re spectacular!" I dunno; I’m still skeptical. I’ll need a much closer look. I've been fooled before!

Hold on...is that the theme from Jaws that I hear?

Remember what I said about Social Security and Medicare? Yeah.

I asked, in a previous Financial Briefing, if the banks would get a mulligan on the foreclosure mess. ZH expects a mulligan. It’s a gentleman’s game anyway, and it’s rude to actually keep score. Let the plebs keep score on their scabby $20-per-round course out by the airport; here at Chumpwood, our members expect a bit of deference in return for their substantial membership fees.

Remember what I was saying about municipal debt being the next debt-bomb to explode? A dissenter speaks. There is an opposing argument to my doom ‘n’ gloom. (Full disclosure: I consider the article to be a wagon-load of cowshit, but I am simply a hayseed blogger and not a Finance Professional.)

Timmy Geithner: “See, the USD is like Rocky Balboa, and I’m like that crotchety old bastard Mickey." Mr. Geither assured the Brazilians that he’d have the USD drinking raw eggs and running through a run-down neighborhood with a motley gang of kids every day until it was in good enough shape to beat Apollo Creed’s ass.

My Cocoa Puffs are about to get more expensive. No es bueno! It’s a vital part of my diet -- black coffee, Cocoa Puffs, lowfat milk, and beef jerky. And multivitamin-enhanced Val-U-Rite vodka, of course. It’s built me into the Gollum-like creature I am today. (I blame the scurvy on General Mills; I thought Cocoa Puffs had more vitamin C than that.) I’d switch to Cocoa Pebbles, but they both look and taste like dried rat-turds.

California, the Land of the Boned: Somehow, I suspect that the interests of the taxpayers do not align well with the interests of the public-sector unions. Call it a hunch. I just get that vibe, you know? Like the union-members don’t really give the fattest kind of shit about anything except their own paychecks.

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posted by Monty at 07:23 AM

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