rock and roll suicide

i just wrote the greatest little bit about america being a rock and roll suicide. and i went to publish the post and i received an error. i lost it all. it was beautiful what i wrote. i said how we were young and we were a rebel and then we went corporate and died a bloated rock and roll death. it was great. sorry you didn't get to read it.

and i had a bunch a links with funny stuff, but i'm not going to write it again. here are the links:

mish's global economics: bailout to hit $4 trillion.

msn money: why the bank bailouts are doomed.

bloomberg: US economy shrank by 3.8% last quarter.

avclub: possible arrested development movie.

the amazing sounds of orgy

"the day the banks collapse on us." - radiohead

so the banks are still failing. the original idea was to buy these troubled assets under the TARP program. that didn't happen. so now instead, there is an idea being floated of creating a "bad bank" that will buy these assets and get them off the banks balance sheet. here's the scoop.

here is a great blog that contains major breakdown on the possible nationalization of the banking industry.

"privatize the gains and socialize the losses."

great blog out there that actually reads through company's 10K filings and picks out really interesting stuff buried within the filing. it's footnoted.org. check it out.

great conversation with niall ferguson over canceling the US debt. he describes the various stages of a bubble: Displacement, Euphoria, Mania, Distress and finally Panic. that's where we are now is Panic.

i remember that shirt on the fence

he knows what he's waiting for
he's been shown the door
it's happened to him before

there is no circumstance
no unjust romance
there's only sudden happenstance

making his way through fenced-in fields
marking time, his cloak and his shield
always weighed more than they could yield

he'll rule the day away
from a back room delivery bay
it was always meant to be this way

let it bleed

we have a new treasury secretary. he name is timothy geithner. he forgets to pay self-employment taxes, but we're hoping he can turn a stealth hand unlike hank paulson. there are suggestions of how he should handle part 2 of the TARP plan.

"panic in detroit." i love david bowie's aladdin sane more and more every day. "he looked a lot like che guevara, drove a diesel van. kept his gun in quiet seclusion, such an honorable man. the only survivor of the national people's gang, panic in detroit, i asked for an autograph, he wanted to stay home, i wish someone would phone, panic in detroit." great song.

these companies are not firing people.

cameras processing real time decisions.

FDIC might run bad bank that gobbles up bad assets.

why dealing with indebtedness is so hard.

the kids don't stand a chance

i recently saw sam donaldson make a case for expanding credit and allowing the taxpayer the ability to be able to continue to borrow money. he claimed that would fix the mess we are in. if his solution sounds familiar, it's because that's the reason we got into this mess. cheap money. excessive borrowing. leveraging debt. it's not time to borrow more money, it's time to pay it back.

they also mentioned something called the paradox of thrift. this is a theory put forth by john maynard keynes. this theory says that during times of economic depression, people save their money, thus compounding the situation by a fall in demand and stifling ecomonic growth, thus lowering the real amount of savings for all involved.

keynes magnum opus is a book called "the general theory of employment, interest and money." i've never read it, but i intend to this year.

anyway back to what i was saying earlier, the consensus seems to be that a massive stimulus package will start to grease the gears of this economy. i'm not sure that is going to help. lots of this goes over my head, but it seems to resemble a person who you first thought had a cold and it turns out they're much sicker than you thought. and not only are they much sicker, they were a closer to end than anyone imagined. that's how i'm feeling right now about our situation. hopefully it's just a cold.

lots of new albums out this year already:

ac newman
franz ferdinand
animal collective
andrew bird

the super bowl is this weekend. whoo!

rebel side of heaven

man, it's good to be back on the grid. i've been living in a solitary office with no connection the world outside. they only thing i knew or was able to tell was the weather. that was it.

the top 25 paying companies.

there is a new marketing blog on the street. go here to get an insider's perspective on the marketing scene. i have no idea what he's talking about, but it's quite interesting.

here are the 25 best financial blogs going. i do not appear on the list.

i had a friend recently tell me that only 20% of women actually experience their water breaking before pregnancy. if you watch television/movies, not only does every woman's water break, but it creates a tidal wave, like a splash from a bucket of water three stories high. when in reality, a woman is probably wearing pants, or something, and that will soak up the prenatal bath water. so yeah, apparently 80% of women do not have their water break. which means, they are standing/sitting/jumping one minute, the next minute, there's a baby. that's how it works, or at least that's my understanding anyway.

today has been a good day. i hope tomorrow is too.