Fans of Wall Street drama should be forgiven for reaching for the dramamine this week. A rally over an unexpected increase in sales of existing homes slowly gave way to more nervousness over the rest of the bad news, and honestly, there was lots of other bad news, and it just keeps on coming. Home values dropped over 10% from last year, major financial firms such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch are bracing for more huge losses, Paulson took some of the joy out of the Bear Stearns bailout by bringing up the ‘R’ word—not ‘recession’, but ‘regulation’—and now the home equity market, which represents over $1 trillion in American homeowner debt, is about to go south.
All in all, it still doesn’t look so good. Citigroup paid out 1.66 billion dollars to settle lawsuits over its part in the Enron scandal, which is the better part of its entire annual budget for legal defense, and it’s only March. Ford sold Land Rover and Jaguar to India’s Tata motors for about one third of what they paid for the two luxury brands. Unemployment in Michigan hit 7.2%, and oil is on the way up again, after “plunging” to $101 a barrel. Seriously, how big a plunge is it when the bottom is $101? Just a year ago, economists were reassuring us we would never see $100 a barrel, and now oil hits $101 and it’s a”plunge.” Sure it is.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Dick Cheney has this to say about the distress of the American people and 4,000 dead American soldiers, “So?”
So…So I wish Cheney and his evil puppet had been impeached back when Dennis Kucinich was calling for it and everyone was looking the other way. Am I the only one who feels like time is slowing to a crawl as we approach the end of this nightmare regime? At this rate, the final week will feel like 50 years. Hell, it already feels like 50 years.
On this note, I’m off to the McBank.
Pray for me.
