Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

i dont have a lot of money there and i was going to close the account anyway

so much for free checking for life ;-)

i'm gonna need a bigger mattress

does the FDIC even have very much capital these days?

About $50 billion, apparently:

That "run" could accelerate as people realize the FDIC fund has about $50 billion to "insure" about $1 trillion in assets at the nation's financial institutions, says Roubini. "They're going to run out of money" unless Congress acts soon to recapitalize the FDIC.

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/56994/Top-Economist-Americans-Should-Worry-About-Bank-Deposits-if-Congress-Doesn%27t-Act?tickers=LEH,MER,BAC,AIG,WM,%5EDJI,%5EGSPC

Maybe it's time to move to Chase lol

I'm investing all my money in the Committee To Re-Elect

Holy crap.

AIG down 62%.

Fun times:

Many employees toyed with their résumés in full view of colleagues. Others perused job-listing Web sites – Wharton’s alumni page was popular – and compared notes about headhunters.

“What have you heard?” was a common question, mostly met with shrugs and silence. No one seemed to know their specific fate. No staff meetings had been announced, and cries went up whenever media outlets posted a new tidbit about the firm’s liquidation.

Some desks had already been cleaned out, a hive of screens gone dark above tabletops bereft of personal items. The foreign exchange trading floor, on the third floor of Lehman’s all-glass Seventh Avenue skyscraper, was only about two-thirds full. Empty pizza boxes sat stacked in one corner; suit jackets hung on hangers at the end of cubicles.

Pairs of traders, their brows furrowed, whispered to one another at the ends of aisles. Some perused the bankruptcy papers that their superiors had filed just hours earlier. One trader examined the Wikipedia entry for “conservatorship.”

“I’ll have to figure something out before I run into money problems. What about you?” one man asked a colleague, who sat slumped in his chair, sneakers kicked up on a table. Packets of potato chips and a 12-pack of Aquafina water bottles sat untouched next to him.

“What will you do then?” one woman asked another. “I guess, go back to school … ?” came the uncertain reply.

yeah, getting into b school this year will be fun.

naw, they will all decide to become lawyers

that would give them another year, i guess

i wonder if the fallout of this is actually going to be the thing to bring down housing costs in nyc. i read that they are estimating 100,000 jobs cut on wall street this year. empty condo town usa.

I can haz plan

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/check_cashing/check_cashing01.jpg

lol

i don't think very many people are stupid enough to have $100k sitting in a wamu account or are going to lose their money. i'm just worried about interruption of service.

I just deposited a check written on a WaMu account and my credit union warned me that it could take a couple extra days for it to clear.

Reminder to self: do not check IRA Roth account
Reminder to self: do not check IRA Roth account
Reminder to self: do not check IRA Roth account

i wonder if the fallout of this is actually going to be the thing to bring down housing costs in nyc. i read that they are estimating 100,000 jobs cut on wall street this year. empty condo town usa.

― bell_labs, Monday, September 15, 2008 5:12 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

who is going to live in the MYNT and other such ugly ass locations now?????

My OMGWTF money is in a (non-FDIC) Vanguard money market fund -- one of those where if it breaks the buck then yes we will have bigger problems than worrying about whether the fund has "broken the buck." As in, "pass me the drumstick for that rat we're frying up here, Tom Joad." that said, these funds may be safer -- or more liquid -- than funds in some banks these days.

Also, for the next few months I may have front-row seats to this Chernobyl-style bank fuck-up. Good times indeed ;_;

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/15/business/lehman.531.jpg

(As found outside Lehman offices this morning, sez the NYT)

I am Spartacus!

I sent some of my friends at Lehman emails, wondering what was up. Then I read in Dealbook or some shit that the bank shut down their email yesterday. CAN YOU IMAGINE THOUSANDS OF IB ASSHOLES WITHOUT THEIR BLACKBERRIES??!!?!?!?!

Paulson has been pretty good in this.

omg want (xpost)

i wonder if the fallout of this is actually going to be the thing to bring down housing costs in nyc. i read that they are estimating 100,000 jobs cut on wall street this year. empty condo town usa

No.

NYT: "Nonetheless, he argued that the city remained in relatively strong economic shape. The city unemployment rate is at 5 percent, well below the national average of 6.1 percent. The vacancy rate for Manhattan office space is 5.4 percent, less than half the national average. Real estate values, which have plummeted nationwide, have held fairly steady in New York — in part because of international interest."

although with Restaurant Week getting extended for what, a month, it seems like at least some sectors are being hit.

Fallacy of hasn't happened so far = won't happen

yeah, the Eurotrash demographic is still buying Manhattan real estate. The party may be over for parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Hudson County NJ

Even rich, property-buying eurotrash have finance jobs, use credit, have money in equities, etc.

given that LEH employees are getting 6-9 months severance packages, I really don't see a huge majority breaking their leases. And eurotrash still get a nice deal on the exchange rate.

Also, Black Swan to thread, pls.

No, Black Swan needs to stay where it is, please, puddling around in an unwritten Tom Robbins book.

Rich, property-buying eurotrash don't have "jobs" as you or I know them

I'm referring to this already written book called The Black Swan, which is awesome, and unfortunately, goes unread by the vast majority of IB/HF/PE asswipes out there.

that book is so badly written

irrespective of the quality or novelty of its ideas

and none of this was a black swan, this was just a bunch of greedy fuckos being shameless and refusing to acknowledge that they were lying to each other. Enron wasn't a Black Swan either

the point of a black swan is that people operate on the assumption that a perfect storm won't happen--attribute it to greed or ignorance or whatever you want. Read the book.

I recommend "Why Most Things Fail" by Ormerod as another good read, though, for people interested in alternative models of economic activity that aren't Freakonomics-esque BS

That is a GREAT book.

And yes, obviously greed and decoupling from risk play a huge role here

The guy who wrote it comes across like a clown and a hustler, and anybody who claims that what's happening now is a "perfect storm" i.e. a once-in-a-lifetime combination of seemingly unrelated events that produce a momentous calamity, would fit that description also.

Talking about the Black Swan

"Why Most Things Fail" is a good title for a book.

I'm just so glad that the folks entrusted with other peoples' money who subsequently pissed it into the wind are going to let us all share their pain - it's so democratic

perfect storm

perfect storml?

lol

haha, did don weiner just create a fake wiki page to try to make tracer look like he cribbed, only to have it deleted moments later?

haha, yeah, I have that much time on my hands. try deleting the "l" (sorry about my linkage error) and you get the definition:

"the simultaneous occurrence of weather events which, taken individually, would be far less powerful than the storm resulting of their chance combination"

which is what I was getting at, obviously.

I don't know where Tracer got his definition, but I guess it worked for his argument.

I got it from my head!!