Clint, surely you wouldn’t want anything untoward to happen to the PPT?

Starting to see come capitulations.

I cashed out of everything I regard as liquid Wednesday, and am starting to liquidate selected mutual fund holdings. Better late than never. I too think that the bottom lies sufficiently far below to merit salvaging the remains of my assets. Hopefully my money funds will hold up. I’m pretty sure that some will not (beyond the ill-fated Putnam Prime Money Market Fund).

Clear the streets of the wimmen and chillen, it’s High Noon.

I’ll take km4’s numbers of $124B for the cost of the RTC, and $800B as our “investment” to date … from the St Louis Fed, here are some numbers for GDP (1980 – $2.8B) and most recent reported ($14.3B). If we use the ratio of the GDP price deflators to convert the 1999 dollar cost for the RTC to current-comparable numbers we come up with a RTC-equivalent cost of about $291B, so the ratio of RTC:GDP is about 1:10, and the ratio of our fix (to date) to GDP is about 1:18.

This is all incredibly sloppy, but I think it’s in the ballpark.

I invite some more perspicacious knit-picking soul to reproduce this with more detail and accuracy, but by my lights, we can handle another $700B before the impact is as great as the RTC, all things being equal (which they ain’t, we’re carrying a boatload more debt, thanks to Dubya).

Not that I am eager to go this route, but it seems to be possible.

Just after I cashed out of every equity, today’s rally started.

I’m still glad I’m out. If it goes up 2K points, I don’t care. I think a Dow of 9K is very real eventually in early 2009.

With all the crap accounting & oversight that has been going on, how can the Dow legitimately go over 14K or continue to sustain anywhere near the current levels??

These asshats have done what Enron couldn’t.

The faith of the U.S. Market has been destroyed or at least seriously damaged both here and around the world.

It looks to me like it could be deja vu all over again looking at the 0ct. ‘72-Dec.’73 dump.

My tinfoil cap tells me something isn’t right. How can there be such strength in the market today (with so little volume for the most part of the day) when I would expect there shouldn’t be, given the total inept economic stewardship of the Administration, FEC, Congress and financial talking puppeteers on T.V. AND the lack of underpinnings of real value — somewhere??

Whatever happens in the market, I hope the movements whack the market players that are not conducive to an efficient and fair market.

I also hope this whole thing puts the fear of god in every incumbent politician that they will be working at a soon to be extinct, as they know it, Freddie and Fannie or possibly out of a job asking for handouts.

I hope there is a significant jolt to bring real management and value back to our market and economy.

That means Nat’s newscasters reading a teleprompter making 100K rather then millions.

That means a CEO that doesn’t grow and make the company profitable, the don’t walk away with millions.

That means if diversification is good for investors, it’s good for the economy…stop the monopolization….but hey I’m a nobody..what do I know.

Oh yeah…and bring back manufacturing to the U.S.A so we can be a country again.

Posted by: AGG | Sep 18, 2008 5:48:46 PM

sounds, to me, like a seriously good idea.
even if the markets stay open and zoom higher–there will be other days with other rays..
~
“It will do for the national economy what the TSA has done for air travel.”
constant, I wonder if you know how accurate you are..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Assisted_Passenger_Prescreening_System_II
http://www.unrealid.com/what.html

While making my garden-grown tomato sandwich, my mind would not allow me to think of anything other than the fact that this morning we were told that the US, Brits and somebody else was passing money around in the order of $100B to $250B because lending in other Countries was seizing up.

Why do I think a significant portion of this money was used to drive up the market in the last couple of hours as a means of endorsing the newly talked about RTC plan in a dramatic fashion.

My gut tells me that the Fed and Treasury are getting increasingly scared in regard to what they have already thrown at this problem with no clear improvement in investor sentiment and that they are STILL losing the ship at this point in time.

Now, they are really getting desperate in turning this thing around ASAP any way possible. This RTC plan sounds pretty damn desperate to me. This stuff is really getting bizarre.

It feels to me like the US Government has walked into a snare and is now deeply impaled. The more she moves the deeper the spears are embedded and the more pain inflicted.

(By the way, the sandwich was excellent.)

Even the “rumor” of a giant federal bureaucracy to make our financial problems disappear scares the willies out of me.

It will do for the national economy what the TSA has done for air travel.

Tomorrow should be a most entertaining options expiration day.

Break out the Dramamine and buckle up.

I was trading in all those periods, but the only one that sticks out in my mind, as a mere mortal trading via retail brokers, was the Adventure of ‘87.

I was lucky enough to get my broker (at We the People, God rest their souls) on the phone very early on the Big Day, and had him “sell everything” at market. Their order entry systems collapsed under the load (it wasn’t just me selling), and it took me three days to get any kind of confirmation from their systems (not through the mail, but just on their computers), so I could be sure that I had even made any sales or what my account looked like. That was pretty scary. I finally got my confirmation, and things seemed to have bottomed, so I went all in the next day, and made reasonable, (not outstanding) profits through it all.

I eventually came to believe that they just made up sale prices to clear the order book.

Whoever watches over drunks and small children had my back that week.