that is my guess. Hey, we're about looking at the details, the statistics, the policy and the effects....so, ya know, someone can be a nice guy, Charismatic, etc. and still have rotten policy or economics that are going to harm the long term growth of a sector or nation.

Either that or he is having a bad hair day.

brain boggle on terms. I guess I'd get an F in political categories, oh well, to me, it's who is writing the checks and who is getting them.

How about corporatism or global corporate feudal lords.

No genuine nationalism perhaps, but certainly the same phony nationalism National Socialism gave Germany, its IG Farbens and Krupps, and its people. Its the same abuse of tragedy - Reichstag Fire/9-11 - to justify the suppression of liberties, the same positing of phony casus belli - Gleiwitz/WMDs - to justify military aggression, the same depersonalization and torture of enemies - the Commissar Order/Abu Graib and its White House authors. I could go on and on with the parallels. Ours is a form of fascism alright; it certainly isn't parliamentary democracy. If you think we're in a democracy, try finding a sponsor in Congress for a resolution condemning the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The American people would support such a resolution, but your "freely elected representatives" won't. Their just lobby chattle, filth.

Not only from China's perspective but ours as well. If we focused on improving our living standard maybe we wouldn't be the joker to the world.

We should have a single focus of improving our living standard and everything else will fall into place.

Looks like comrade Beria stepped in doggy poop. :-(

They have a right to laugh.

The U.S. is currently $63.8 TRILLION in debt with more to come.

Geithner and his buddy Bernanke are bumbling idiots.

I just read this article about the canning of Wagoner.

Now here's the thing we missed. We did not look at GM's own restructuring plan as a public audience and evaluate it against what our pals Larry Summer's and Tim Geithner's $50 Billion dollar bankruptcy is doing.

I noticed this paragraph, buried in the piece:

The plan contained a provision to shed the Saturn, Saab and Hummer brands and cut 47,000 more jobs worldwide. The UAW would be asked to give up benefits and take on more health-care costs. Bondholders would be asked to exchange $27.5 billion in debt for $9.2 billion and equity.

A matter that still needed to be resolved was the prospect of a Chapter 11 filing. The government wanted a full exploration of the bankruptcy option.

As the four men talked about where in the report such a discussion might go, Henderson raised his hand.

“I want to write this section,” he said, according to a person familiar with the proceedings, who reconstructed the exchange. “I know what it should say.”

Appendix L, the section of the Feb. 17 plan that handled bankruptcy, took up the last 16 pages of the 117-page document. The overriding message: Bankruptcy would be a taxpayer nightmare. It would cost the U.S. about $33 billion to fix GM out of court, compared with $45 billion to $103 billion in court protection.

Is that true? $33B vs. $50B+ in U.S. taxpayer costs?

Lest we not forget, our government assumingly is all for GM offshore outsourcing 98% of production as part of the Ch. 11 bankruptcy....

So, did we miss the beat and not track on what was really going on with GM?

The bottom of the commercial real estate market will be when properties are sold at a discount, either by private investors willing to take the hicky or banks needing to purge their books of distressed assets. With the percentage of non-recourse loans on the books, our focus must remain on the banks. As long as we continue with tweaking the definition of 'distressed asset' and sending billions to these defunct institutions, we're delaying the inevitable. Inevitably a deluge of private investment dollars will be required to pull us out of this mess, and the private dollar is not buying at 2007 values. The banks must be big boys and take their losses, and quietly selling paper is not the answer.

What do you guys think of this new hybrid IPO for startups?

Bloomberg article.

I'm reading it and thinking, hmmmm, it's a 2 stage IPO with first all sorts of institutional member investors getting first dibs on shares....then the public?

Doesn't that put the public in a lower tier on returns and make the insider pre-IPO stock awards of the 90's more legal, except they must join this VC who is putting these together?

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, although enabling more start-ups (abet with better ability to execute and better business models!) in the U.S. is a must have to innovate the economy and help get out of the current mess.