20 Sept 2007

Stormy Weather

Atrios says "the hurricane is coming". Yup, this could be Bush's next Katrina brewing on the horizon.

Mike Whitney says everyone on Wall Street loves Ben Bernanke:
He brings them candy and sweets and lets the American worker pay the bill.
Whitney's analysis is always worth a read:
Bernanke invoked the “Greenspan put”, which means that he used his power to protect his friends from the losses they should have incurred from their bad bets. Now, the big market players know that he can be counted on to bail them out whenever they make poor investment choices. He’s also lived up to his nickname, “Helicopter Ben”; ready to deal with every new calamity by tossing trillions of freshly-minted US greenbacks into the jet-stream over the NYSE so elated traders can jack-up their PEs and fatten their bottom line . We think Bernanke should abandon the helicopter altogether and personally deliver pallet-loads of $100 bills to Wall Street’s doorstep on a Fed-owned fork-lift, just like Bush does with contractors in Iraq.
Meanwhile Goldman Sachs, the Bush cabal's banker of choice, has just announced another massive quarterly profit, surging 79 per cent to beat analyst expectations for the seventh straight period:
Goldman's net revenue rose 63 per cent to $US12.3 billion ... The earnings beat analyst forecasts by 40 per cent.
But as one analyst warned:
"Next year is another story."