Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Original Post Time: 6:52am Pacific; updates below
I stopped by Yahoo! Finance for a quick look-see.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down somewhat over 200 points.
About ten minutes later, I saw this:
Right now it’s at -898.03 — but it’s been bouncing around. I hope everybody involved is well stocked with Dramamine or Bonine!
Update 7:11 am, Pacific
Update 10:55 am, Pacific
OK, OK. I don’t have time for this.
But here’s a bit to acknowledge that this crisis thing is big stuff for this country (and for the world, no doubt).
| House defeats financial industry bailout bill
The House has defeated the $700 billion bail-out legislation for the financial industry. More than enough members of the House had cast votes to defeat the Bush administration-pushed bill, but the vote was held open for a while, apparently as efforts were under way to persuade people to change their vote. On Wall Street, stocks plummeted as investors followed the developments in Congress. |
I’m surprised they defeated it.
So it’s “the Bush administration-pushed bill” — never mind Pelosi-pushed, Reed-pushed, Franks-pushed, etcetera-pushed. 🙄
But they held the vote open?! I guess I’d forgotten they could do that while they tried to armtwist and/or threaten and/or entice persuade people to change their votes. Wow! 😯
And stocks plummeted. By more than 700 points at one point. But “only” 514 as I type.
I’m sure that by now most of you have heard of the financial meltdown being faced by the United States economy. It all started with the banking system starting to tremble. No, wait, it all started with people not being able to pay back all the money they had borrowed from the banks. Actually, I think it all started with real estate prices going down. Well, come to think of it, it really started before that, back when real estate prices went up. Or I guess it started before that, back when the banks decided to loan money to anybody who was willing to borrow money, which is what helped make the land prices go up.
Anyway, it started somewhere, sometime. And by all appearances, getting it started was a lot simpler than getting it stopped is going to be. You see, just this evening President Bush got on the radio, TV, and just about everything else he could get on and told Americans in general that there is going to be a widespread financial disaster. In other words, the average person would lose his house, his job, his retirement, his savings, his insurance, his sanity, and perhaps an arm and a leg. Unless, of course, we allow the government to step in and bail us out. Bail us out, mind you, to the tune of seven hundred billion dollars. For those of you who don’t know how much money that is, it is a 7 with a whole wagon load of zeros.
Anyway, in the midst of a world full of financial turmoil and uncertainty, I thought you would all be excited about a couple of wonderful investment opportunities I recently learned about. These are both guaranteed not to lose any of their value, and will not be affected by moth, rust, thieves, or financial market melt-downs. You have no need to fear when you invest in these securities, because they are backed by a pool of wealth far in excess of a measly 700 billion greenbacks. Read it all