One billion seconds = 31.7 years

One trillion seconds = 310+ CENTURIES!!!!

We’re 0-1-2(?) in those. Just sayin’.

Ideally, the bailouts should dull the sting of high unemployment in exchange for high inflation “later.” That’s how bailouts are paid for: by diminishing the value of your savings.

But I think once we find out what is really going on with TARP, it will be seen as the biggest looting of the US Treasury in history, meaning we will both see the high unemployment as well as inflation somewhere between the 70’s and Weimar Germany to follow.

The Fed’s solutions to all of these financial problems are to do more of what got things screwed up in the first place – only do it bigger! The whole thing got started with too low interest rates which made it too easy for large, unregulated investment banks to lend money imprudently creating too much debt against falling assets. So what to do? Lower interest rates to zero and throw large amounts of money into those very same large banks and simply transfer the bad debt to the public (Treasury) balance sheet.

EEK!!! What’s the definition of a fool; One who does the same things over and over again expecting different results? Why not use our capitol and invest in the more prudent local banks to increase their lending capability and reward the good banks while motivating spending in our economy.

What should really drive us mad is when the large, imprudent banks take the public capitol and, instead of lending it to stimulate the economy, they use it to buy up smaller banks and make themselves even larger. Yet our Congress feels the need to take all of their frustration out on the Auto Industry, another victim in the Financial crisis they didn’t cause.

this scenario is exactly what Osama bin Laden had in mind when he baited us into our “war on terror”

“Allah hath declared that the great Satan would overextend its financing of mortgage backed securities, and a painful doom would follow the disbelievers throughout the land!“

We’re printing money like it’s going out of style, offering paltry or nonexistent returns on the swelling loans we keep taking, and yet folks keep flooding in to buy more “safe” US gov’t T-bills.

Right now, it seems like other nations are unable to figure out a way to punish us without punishing themselves just as badly. Hopefully for our sake they’ll be stumped. Remember, any currency is worth precisely whatever folks think it’s worth that day. So if folks decide that a dollar is worth the same amount today as it was a month ago even though we’re printing them as fast as we can, who are we to say they are wrong? It sure is stunning though. I worry it can’t last.

every day my guts says it’s going to get way worse, and every day I just hope I’m wrong. Glad not to be an expert, I think.