I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday For A Hamburger Today

One has to give Senator Chris Dodd, (D) Connecticut, a lot of credit for what he did today. He refused to just hand over a blank check for a trillion dollars to a Secretary of the Treasury, and not a very good one apparently, in the executive branch. Yes, Paulson has initially asked for “only” three quarters of a TRILLION DOLLARS. But believe you me he is going to moving to the trillion dollar mark very shortly.

Chris Dodd is asking “What’s the rush? I don’t get it. Who again is getting the treasure of the United States for what?”

His point was that Henry Paulson would get it. Who the hell is this Henry Paulson anyway? Who the bleep does he think he is that he wants the people of the United States to grant him 700 billion dollars and turn it over to him right now? Why do you need it right now Henry? Let’s have us a little discussion first. Is that too much to ask?

So who is this Henry Paulson character that we’re going to hand over all this money to?
Why he’s a former partner at Goldman Sachs, a competitor of Lehman Brothers. So a guy who is savvy enough to run a premiere investment bank did not see the smoldering caldera of a trillion dollars in bad debt that was simmering inches under his wing tipped feet?

The problem was so obvious that it had been blatantly discussed in financial circles and even by not for profit endowment managers for at least 18 months before this happened. One would think that the Treasury Secretary of these here United States would know where all this pressurized magma had ended up.

He might get a clue in attending one of Barney Frank’s Banking Committee hearings about how not giving mortgages to people with no possible hope of ever repaying them was a form of “redlining”. Frank defended to the bitter end Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the private “government backed” agencies that bought up all the bad loans the banks had been forced to originate according to Barney Frank’s federal banking laws.

So we’re going to hand over to the former head of Goldman Sachs a trillion dollars after his buddies at Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac trotted off with tens of millions of dollars right before their assets were found to be, err, “compromised’? Or maybe these masters of the universe were just using intricate accounting rules to overstate the market value of their assets. In other words maybe they were just plain lying to everybody.

I don’t think we are going to give Paulson all his money right now. If we do then one can only imagine who it is going to. It isn’t going back to the taxpayer that much is certain.

Pay No Attention to The Man Behind the Curtain

Like the new geysers appearing in Yellowstone due to forty square miles of magma starting to poke through the Earth’s crust the great caldera of a trillion dollars in bad debt is starting to make itself felt in the sudden demise of former Wall Street giants such as Lehman Brothers.

Twenty something employees in t-shirts and shorts stormed their offices last night afraid that their personal effects would be locked within by federal regulators causing security guards to call for police back up. Meanwhile Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld contentedly counted his money, $22 million in bonuses he was paid last March, within his 14 million dollar Florida vacation home, which he paid for in cash. Meanwhile the State of Florida’s pension system lost $322 million in Lehman holdings.

Like the caldera under Yellowstone the trillion dollar time bomb is threatening to blow away the entire financial planet. There I said it. It’s not like this hasn’t been patently obvious to anybody with half a brain and an associates in economics from a community college for over a year now. This has been discussed in the financial community, in banking circles and at university investment committee meetings for months and months.

So what does this all mean? It means what small and medium sized businesses with good financials and owner credit ratings have been puzzling over lately. Names, “Why does the bank not like me anymore?” They have seen perfectly good collateralized loans with no late payments suddenly capped at what is owed. They have seen bankers explicitly referring them to “alternative financing options”. They have seen any and all expansion plans that don’t involve internal funding thrown on the proverbial scrap heap. And with the inelasticity of prices out there in the market they are asking “What expansion plans?” How can you expand when all your customers are debating your price structure like Berbers dickering over rugs in a Moroccan bazaar?

Are we going to have a recession? Are we going to have a depression? What do you think it means when presidential candidates start complaining that significant regulations have not been enacted since 1939? Does this give you a clue?