Friday, September 26, 2008

Friday Round-up

Whee!! My bank failed this week (Washington Mutual). I don't think it means much as I'm not in danger of eclipsing the FDIC $100,000 mark. I'm barely in danger of eclipsing the $100 mark. Looks like Chase scooped up WaMu anyway. It's still scary stuff, though. Largest bank failure in US history. Is the shine off of unregulated and untethered capitalism yet? I hope so, but I have my doubts.

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There's no point in even making jokes even more:

Sarah Palin Unplugged


Early on, she was like the car wreck that you craned your neck to gape at, out of curiosity. After you got a better look, you discovered how gruesome the sight was with dismembered bodies and blood everywhere and you had to turn away to avoid vomiting. Her answers to Couric reminded me of Miss Teen South Carolina.


courtesy of Steve Bension & Arizona Republic


Note: I just noticed that JA also posted this video. Check out his blog for more discussion: It's Like an SNL Skit, Only Real

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Get Your War On now has animated shorts. Check this one out (just maybe not at work). The Atlas Shrugged and Thomas Friedman lines are classic:



"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." -- Winston Churchill



6 comments:

Scott said...

"Is the shine off of unregulated and untethered capitalism yet?"

It's just too bad such a thing doesn't exist or we wouldn't have such a large mess. Bank failings are a good thing, it's how we weed out the bad companies. The problem is when we bail them out with multi-billion dollar packages or try and fix prices that we extend minor depressions into great ones, such as the way FDR did with his disastrous NRA.

CyberKitten said...

Sorry to hear about your bank going under. Mine's been taken over in a forced merger to stop it collapsing....

We do live in interesting times don't we just!

dbackdad said...

Scott said, " ... Bank failings are a good thing." -- In theory, I think you're right. Along with the carrot for success, there has to be the stick for failure. Bailouts, "golden parachutes" for failed CEO's, the corporation as an entity -- they are all things that take away responsibility from the individual.

But we don't have a perfect, theoretical capitalist system ... and we never have. So, where does that leave us? Who knows.

CK -- The bank failure won't really affect me much. After 6 months or so, the bank branches that I'm used to going to will switch from being Wamu to being Chase. At some point, they will issue new debit cards too.

The people that are really affected are the shareholders of the banks that fail. They basically take it in the shorts.

Laura said...

Bank failings can be a good thing, I agree to a point. However - when you have a banking system where big banks keep gobbling up smaller banks until we're left with only these huge conglomeration banks with their fingers in everyone's pie and whatever they do has a huge impact on the overall market - well then when they fail, it's not so pretty. Sure, weeding out the bad companies is a good thing when there is actual competition. We don't have that anymore in this country. We have mom & pop vs. Walmart.

We're with WAMU too. Basically they're just going to close a bunch of branches here in Chicago. So if they close ours, there's a Chase branch a half a block over. I really didn't want to bank with Chase. :(

dbackdad said...

The stink about Chase's swallowing up Wamu is that when Chase took over BankOne, there was a lot of oversight and questioning about them having too big a market share. This time, because the government didn't want to have pay out all the FDIC claims, they basically gave Chase a free pass to take over Wamu. And now, they are much bigger than they were then.

What a lot of people don't remember is that the last time there were some major bank failures, John McCain was smack dab in the middle of it: Keating Five

And people want him to be President?

CyberKitten said...

If you didn't like Palin before check *this* out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/opinion/26fri4.html?