Merril Lynch? Anyone? Merril Lynch?

"My boyfriend's brother's cousin's sister saw Merril Lynch overextend themselves on junk bonds made up of packaged bad mortgages a few months ago on Wall Street."

Hilarious! Peter Schiff, the President of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc., is a talking head on a number of business channels. This video is made up of a series of his cable appearances where he consistently does his best Chicken Little while the smarmy Wall Street mouth pieces laugh him off the screen. The first four minutes are not great, but wait, wait, until the six minute mark when, on FoxNews no less, none other than Ben Stein himself advises us last year to buy Merril Lynch stock. And then the the blonde with the fish lips says to buy Goldman Sachs (HA!). The capper comes in a minute when Charles tells us to buy Washington Mutual (HA! HA!).

I remember when people would say someone worked at Merril Lynch with such reverence, like the bank was run by MacArthur genius grant winners. I would look at them cross-eyed, because I knew that person growing up, and knew they were throwing around a plumber's savings about on Bosnian internet firms while firing off forwards from collegehumor.com. Brokers are gamblers, even if we give them an illusion of non-Las Vegas legitimacy. The only differences between the Golden Girl feeding her Social Security quarters into a slot in Joliet and the 25-year old handling your savings at an investment bank is that at least the Golden Girl knows she can't game the system and doesn't get paid out for losing.

Do not let these hacks get government money. After this recession, do not let these hacks control our pension funds and savings. Wall Street has been the high-class arena for hucksters and modern-day carpetbaggers for too long. Before you take financial advice from anyone, ANYONE, in the future, make sure you know where they make their money. And never buy stock from someone on TV.

Not even if he stole a John Hughes film.

Sidelight-Schiff was an economic adviser to Ron Paul, so to all my PaulHead readers, cheers! Who looks crazy now?

We Are Old- Living Proof

Yes, that is the 17-year old from the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind. Nothing like a picture to jab you right in the gut and tell you that your unresolved adolescent self-image problems are now a real-life adolescent. You feel stupid. It's contagious.

Thanks to PopWatch, Entertainment Weekly's blog.

Iran Won't Bring Back Its Bat And Ball

Life imitates high school. You wanted to hang out with the Bad Kids in high school because you identified with them and the administration treated them with disgust. As long as deans told them to cut their hair and teachers called them stoners, the Bad Kids always had ready appeal. Why can't the adults just leave them alone? What business is theirs how long the Bad Kids hair is?

If you were a bright dean, you wouldn't harass those misfit Bad Kids. You would co-opt them. Bring up how you both listen to Led Zeppelin. Humanize them. Now, the Bad Kids don't seem so bad. They look more like all of us nerds. And as a nerd, maybe I don't look so good with this long hair. Maybe I'd better cut it off. The Bad Kids need to react. Either they continue their surliness and lose their audience, or they adapt to society and try to rein in all that anti-social behavior.

During the campaign, President-elect Obama expressed a willingness to open constructive diaglogue with Iran. Iran is the current worldwide Bad Kid. They have made much hay from the monumental mistakes of the Bush Administration. They are the little shit in the back of the class, middle finger extended, nuclear material (maybe) in their pocket. Iran's appeal lies not in its policies, which, as a Shiite theocracy, are not attractive to the vast majority of the Arab public. No, they're cool because they stand up to us and Israel. They refuse to stop processing uranium. They play our allies off of each other.

But Obama wants to talk, unconditionally. The Arab public's reaction to his election was strongly positive. The new dean doesn't want conflict anymore, and neither does the student body. According to Thursday's Washington Post, Iran won't cut their hair.

"People who put on a mask of friendship, but with the objective of betrayal, and who enter from the angle of negotiations without preconditions, are more dangerous," Hossein Taeb, deputy commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

"The power holders in the new American government are trying to regain their lost influence with a tactical change in their foreign diplomacy. They are shifting from a hard conflict to a soft attack," Taeb said.

Keep up the pressure, incoming Obama administration. Unless we see a spike in oil soon, Iran's regime will be on the ropes. Let's let the Bad Kid define itself without that bad 'ole dean image handy. Don't withdraw the offer to talk, and stay positive. We can't get the Arab public to cut their hair overnight, but we can humanize everybody and that's a huge first step. Let's make the Arab public think for themselves, and not allow our policies to be ignored through the Bad Kid's ignorance and our heavy-handedness.

Michael Lewis Gives A Post-Mortem

Today is nuts. The web is just alive with great material about the end of Old Capital. Is it just a coincidence that the Republicans have been run out of town on a rail at exactly the same time that Wall Street decided to kill itself? Hmm, I'll let that one be rhetorical.

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball, wrote in yesterday's Conde Nast Portfolio a post-mortem of the Wall Street we knew. What killed the golden calf? A truly toxic combination of greed and arrogance. But mostly just pure, unadulterated greed.

And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he’d just done so he could do it better. He’d call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. “The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,” says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. “She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,” he says. “One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ‘How did that happen?’ ” It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. “By the time they were done,” Eisman says, “they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments.”

This is some far-out, Apocalypse Now kind of financial irresponsibility. I'm glad the guys who ran those investment banks are out-of-pocket. No one would match that insanity by hiring one of those CEOs to head, I don't know, the Treasury Department. Guess again.

The Bush Administration. Making dumbfoundingly awful decisions all the way through to January 19, 2009.

Paulson's Pot Of Gold

Shambollocks is on record as against the bailout. Open taxpayer checkbooks will not get us out of this crisis. Responsible leadership will. When Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked for $700 billion dollars of our money from Congress, I was more than a little skeptical. First, he wanted complete control of the money with very little oversight. Second, as a life-long employee of Goldman Sachs, he would personally profit from a government buyout of Sachs' bad debt. Third, he did not lay out a coherent vision for where the money would go.

I don't like to say I told you so, but today's New York Times reports that Paulson doesn't know what he's doing. Plan A, buying bad debt, is out the window. Plan B, creating some kind of government 'bank' which would foster lending, sounds thoroughly half-baked. The Democrats want to give money to Detroit to save the unions. President-elect Obama remains silent. One, he's not President. Two, this is a seemingly no win situation. I have an idea. Why don't we sit down and take a little time to come up with a coherent strategy between the incoming and outgoing administrations instead of playing the 'React to the Dow Jones' game? The economic teams from both sides get into a room for a week, come out and tell the American people where we're going. Even if a solid solution isn't reached, it would at least show that both parties can lead through a crisis together.

Bad money has already left the building. Let's make sure the next semis of cash that leave the Treasury have a well-thought out plan behind them. Please.

- Details on the complete lack of congressional oversight on the $700 billion (of which $290 billion is already gone) in today's Washington Post.

P.J. O'Rourke Plays Taps

One of the few reasons to read Rolling Stone during the '90s (when I read it religiously thinking it would turn me into Hunter S., when instead it turned me into someone who inexplicably owns a Live CD) was the work of P.J. O'Rourke. Smart, funny as hell, he was the main reason I loathed the Democrats during the '90s. In short, he gave me much early education in politics. When I stopped reading Rolling Stone, I stopped reading P.J. I don't even know if he writes for the Stone anymore, it has been that long since I picked one up. I digress.

From this week's Weekly Standard, Mr. O'Rourke on where conservatives went wrong. Very, very, funny. The man can still cut.

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

God, P.J. How I wish you were on my side. Either way, it's good to read you again, and know you'll be sticking pins in the Democrats for the next eight years at least, which is what you do best.

The Grant Park Countdown

Enjoy. The above is footage of the countdown to 10:00 PM CST in Grant Park, when Barack Obama was declared President by CNN. Goose bumps. Check. Go see other victory celebrations around the world at the Countdown to Victory blog.