The Market Ticker

Yeah, the SEC couldn't see that coming.

Uh huh.

Never mind that they were apparently warned several years ago in written communications that Madoff's "returns" were highly abnormal given the published strategies he was using and the numbers he was posting.

Investigate?  What's that?  Why, that's unamerican!

Now we have $50 billion in fraud and, apparently, $17 billion that is just plain old-fashioned missing.  And Madoff's company, just so we're all in the know here, is a market maker on Nasdaq, which means that a lot of other people's money (and shares) pass through his hands.

T+3 will come, but will your shares be there when it does?

Oh by the way, SIPC protection doesn't cover fraud, never mind that its only good for $500,000 anyway, and most of this guy's clients had ten times that much or more with him.

Finally, let us never forget that there is never only one cockroach.

Who knew, who was and is complicit, and how many more cockroaches are behind the wall?

Uh huh.

TNX at 2.5% this morning.  Gee, I wonder why?

Lots of, shall we say, inconvenient questions surrounding this one.

Tonight the UAW decided to destroy the United States auto industry, refusing labor cost parity on an immediate basis as the price of a bridge loan for the auto industry.

Labor cost parity should have happened fifteen years ago.

Tonight, it was the last straw, and the game of chicken that the UAW played with the American economy turned into a head-on collision at 140 mph.

Mr. Gettlefinger, this is your responsibility.  GM will file bankruptcy within days if not hours.  Your employees will lose their jobs.  Ford will survive, but all auto production in the United States will be non-union within 12 months.

You have proven the age-old canard that labor unions will literally destroy a company in order to prevent accepting that the labor costs you demand a firm stomach cannot be afforded.  At a time of deep economic recession your arrogance and personal decision to destroy the jobs of over a million Americans is breathtaking.

You're done, the UAW is done, and you both deserve to be done.

The bigger story, however, is how Bernanke and Paulson ruined this nation.  How they poisoned the well by lying repeatedly to the American People and Congress, destroying trust between everyone who comes before Congress and Congress.

Congress finally had enough, and the vote went down - this time into the maw of the holiday recess - the last holiday recess.

Its over.

For that, Mr. Bernanke, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Gettlefinger, you must all share responsibility - for you are all responsible, personally, for what is to come in this country.

If any of you had one iota of honor you would commit Seppuka by morning. 

But you don't - you're all cowards and thieves.

United States manufacturing is dead as a direct and proximate consequence of your actions - all three of you.

Mr. Paulson's "financial engineering", along with Mr. Bernanke (and Mr. Greenspan) put in place a system where paper pushing fraud and avarice was the order of the day.  That, and the heavy reliance upon and support of global wage arbitrage along with blatant tolerance of intellectual property theft by Asian nations and "free trade" with nations where literal slave labor conditions are allowed made clear to the world that America was a place to send goods to, but not a place to make goods within, nor a place where you had to honor the law, your agreements or basic human rights.

Mr. Gettlefinger and the UAW, along with the other labor unions in this nation have made clear throughout the previous twenty years that they will simply refuse to keep jobs in this country, choosing to flush them down the toilet instead of accepting that $75/hour to sweep a floor or build a car is a salary that is no longer sustainable, that paying people to not work is an outrage, and pension and health care benefits that nobody else in American can afford cannot continue to be provided on the backs of American business in a world where people actually have to work to get paid.

I understand the gambit - this is clearly an attempt to force Paulson and George Bush to provide the $15 billion from the remaining funds in the TARP.  We'll see if Paulson folds or calls Gettlefinger's bluff - whatcha got in that hand Hanky?  Is it 2-7 off-suit or a pair of bullets?

This sort of game of chicken with the lives and jobs of millions of Americans is an outrage, and I cannot predict whether the gambit will succeed, given that should George Bush and Henry Paulson refuse the UAW (and much of America) will clearly blame them - instead of the union and its leadership - for the consequences.

Should Paulson stand firm say good night to all but Ford. 

Ford will still have to break the UAW however, so irrespective of how we get there the UAW and union car manufacturing is finished in the United States.

GM and Chrysler are cooked and so are 2/3rds of the suppliers to the auto industry.  That's gonna suck.

Perhaps I should burn my Suburban in effigy to Mr. Gettlefinger and the UAW, putting the video on YouTube, then buy a Toyota to replace it.

It's what the UAW deserves, and with luck your union "brothers" will exact a proper and just reward for your idiocy as they all become unemployed, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

Welcome to the seventh level of Hell Mr. Gettlefinger; it was formerly reserved for the likes of Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson, but I'm sure The Devil will make room for you.