you’re hardly crazy, see: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Dorothy+silver+slippers

that wasn’t what I was alluding to, anyway..

in my post I was thinking about yon’ Wizard of Oz/FBM, remindered your statement/Q, and, thus, was asking..

this: Hugo Salinas Price, president of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver and the world’s foremost advocate of restoring silver’s role as a circulating currency, addressed GATA’s recent conference in Washington by video. His address, “Dorothy’s Silver Slippers,” detailed his proposal for the issuance of a circulating silver ounce coin for Mexico — a coin that, not being imprinted with any particular peso value, would never be at risk of withdrawal from circulation because its melt value had come to exceed its face value.
http://www.gata.org/node/6254

Salinas Price’s address to the GATA conference is 23 minutes long and you can find it in three parts at YouTube here:

is pretty interesting..’Free Silver’ would be a huge step forward..

in 2 .. “There must be many other consequences we fail to imagine” ya I see it round here … real assets purchased . ie productive factories (then mothballed) & farms ( _____ )

Nothing unusual about recessions. Unusual ain’t the sub-prime. But weird is leveraging the world at 100 to 1 based on the price of a house in Riverside, Ca. and a condo in Miami.

And Weirder: the shadow bank. fix it? anybody seen it? hell, anybody seen the bank bank books? Do they keep books?

And there will be no lending. Cash gifts and years of easing did not induce Japan’s money centers to lend. If they could lend nobody would be mentioning mark to market. Now their gonna say they are lending, but it is really cracked to be expecting them to lend a dime.

There is not enough money, literally, to fix these dudes. Not the banks that bank, I mean the Money Centers: Paulsen knew who they were. Like, did he give billions to a bank in your neighborhood?

There might be enough money but for all the money center banks in the world jumping on this one trick pony. Comic aside: Realize, these dolts sold this stuff to one another using math to turn turds into AAA. Endless variations resulting in endless commissions. And ThenThey Kept The Stuff. a lot anyway.

So, why rush into anything? The Treasury is pure Wall Street and they don’t have a clue. We’ll keep dumping cash on them — Japan had 10 stimulus programs also — and only the shadow knows.

If only Wall Street could do what the Government can: Burn the paper.

1.Why should taxpayers bail out banks?
For the same reason taxpayers are being asked to bail out underwater homeowners. It is easy to place all of the blame on the banks in the current climate. However, what transpired was not just a housing failure, or banking failure, what happened was a systematic failure of our nation. Government policy of deregulation and loose money supply, coupled with unchecked global capitalism, created an environment where both corporations and individuals took on more risk than they can handle. If any entity deserved the most blame, it is our government. As our government is elected by the citizenry (i.e. taxpayers) in a democracy which most of us subscribe to, we taxpayers are ultimately responsible for paying to fix the problem. The shareholders of these big banks have taken significant haircuts, Most of them bear no more blame than the underwater homeowners. Moreover, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan are in their plight partly due to their working with the government in solving this crisis. As distasteful as Mr Chuck Prince’s quote is now, while the Fed and US government were playing the music of deregulation and loose monetary policy and unbridled capitalism, the banks, the corporations they financed, we citizens as home buyers and consumers (also financed by the banks) kept on dancing. Now that the music has stopped, why should bank shareholders be the ones without a chair? Everybody, starting from the government and its taxpayers, down to banks, corporations, ordinary citizens need to share the responsibility and burden. At last check we still believe in capitalism and want to rely on private capital to help get us out of this mess. Let’s be pragmatic and strike a balance in assisting banks/corporations and individuals. If proven necessary as in Citi, limited government participation in common equity to reap more future upside would seem to be a reasonable compromise.

2.Haircut to the bondholders.
Wiping out the shareholders itself doesn’t solve the problem, as evidenced by the continuous flow of government money into Fannie/Freddie and AIG. What Drs. Krugmand and Roubini brush over in a couple of sentences — haircutting the bondholders, writing off the toxic assets, and returning them to private hands, are actually the tough part, and maybe the reason the government has not undertaken them with Fannie/Freddie and AIG. How much a haircut to assign to the various parties in the complex system of derivatives, how to do it in an orderly fashion without causing systematic collapse (i.e. Lehman Brothers)? As our whole country was a debtor nation, it is inevitable much of the haircut eventually will go to creditor nations such as China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc, what effect would that have on their economy and their willingness to buy more of our debt now that as a nation we can’t honor our debt. And if we were able to re-privatize these banks quickly like in one year, who would buy them? for how much? What kind of return will be generated for taxpayers in such a depressed market? If sold at current price level, wouldn’t the long term windfall be reaped by just another set of private or foreign capital instead of benefiting taxpayers? (Witness the trouble AIG is having selling off its assets) There must be many other consequences we fail to imagine. Drs Krugman and Roubini may believe this process can be orderly undertaken in something like less than a year, I would tend to believe somebody like Bill Isaac, who has actually carried out the process, that it will drag on for years, and may prove disastrous. Even Dr. Krugman didn’t want the government owning the banks for an extended period of time either. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and nationalization is not a theoretical magic bullet that will get us out overnight.

3.Banks are not lending.
As pointed out by Bill Gross of Pimco and others, what is ailing the credit market the most is not that the big banks are not lending because they are zombies, but the virtual collapse of the “shadow banking system” of securitization, which made up something like half of the credit market. Bank lending has not decreased dramatically. With increasing deposits and government encouragement and protection, the banks will increase lending. The administration is trying to revive the securitization sector with government assistance to make up for the shortfall. Maybe we should give the administration some time instead of being so quick to judgment based on ideological biases, which seems to be happening from both right and left at the moment.

4.Ultimately, there are more than one way to skin a cat. Nationalization may be the political and ideological acceptable way to go in the current blame-seeking witch-hunting climate. With all its associated risks, one can’t say for certain it won’t work. However, let’s not pretend it is the intellectual superior solution to the problem, because it is not. Suspending mark-to-market to allow time for recovery, for example, seems to me would go hand in hand with the Keynesian approach of loosening money supply and increasing government spending we are adopting now. In both cases, we are engaging in something that could be abused and had helped to get us into this mess. Nonetheless, we can do it and try to reverse it in time when recovery is induced.

I listened to the GLove….

It was actually quite great. It was a pretty good fusion of many, many different genres. They sort of remind me of Red Hot Chili Peppers “mellowed” out and probably better.

I bought the album.

in re: fading trends….It’s difficult to do… In a previous life I made a living fading major turning points and fought many major trends. I made a lot of money doing it, but it required deep pockets and trading much smaller than you might like. As a lonely and small trader, I’ve learned to not do it so much….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz

I’m actually not this crazy. I’m just anti the central bank/Fed oligarchy. Although, i’m all for them backstopping my bank as i have no debt, live below my means, and have done nothing wrong… other than insult people now and then.

SORRY, no one appreciated my music offering this evening. Time for me to got to bed…