MOMMY, WOW! I'M A BIG KID NOW!

Hello all,

Before we begin today I just want to ask if any of you caught The Daily Show last night, if so, you'd have heard John Stewart deliver a joke that pretty much copied my 'Oh, he only made those racist threatening remarks because black people are angry, THAT'S a relief' joke. Now I'm not trying to say I have a copyright on the joke, though if any of you out there know anything about copyright infringement, call me, but I thought you'd appreciate knowing that, as a devoted reader of the best blog on the interweb highway, you're always ahead of the current events/comedy curve. Go on, give yourself a pat on the back.

Today's Thoughts:

This Bear Stearns news is becoming fishier and fishier. In case you aren’t aware the trouble started last week when rumors started circulating that BS had a liquidity issue. (Now, while I admit I may not grasp the full depth of the crisis posed by a lack of liquidity, I do understand that when people come asking for money you owe them, you can’t pay them back in office space.) BS responded by saying, no no, we don’t have a liquidity issue, we’re the Evian of investment banking, the Perrier of sub-prime mortgages, the Poland Spring of cash on hand (This may not be the central cause, but as an incidental point, it’s probably not the best idea to invoke Poland, the polish or anything that brings to mind a Polak joke, when defending your business acumen, it could lead to well, more jokes, e.g., how does a Polak solve a liquidity crisis? By selling his stock for a 93% discount!).

Anyway, it would seem people believed these rumors, not the Chairman of BS (though really when evaluating the trustworthiness of a statement, I feel like the guy called the Chairman of BS is at a severe disadvantage.), and in response called in their debts. Accordingly, a liquidity crisis, whether real or imagined before, became, unquestionably, real. What interests me, however (and if it interests me you can be sure you’ll see it on the Daily Show), is that the SEC is now investigating the source of those rumors; attempting to discover if they may have been perpetuated and perpetrated on the market by people who had shorted BS’s stock. In other words, if people made crap up so they’d win their bet about BS going down. This, apparently, is illegal.

More to the point though, I mean rumors are rumors, and people will always wonder if they’re true and maybe speculate on their own (unless they’re about Tom Cruise being a nutbag Scientologist who brainwashed his wife and thinks Earth was spawn by alien’s, in which case they ARE true and doubting them makes you kind of a ‘tard), but what we’re talking about here are rumors, possibly unsubstantiated ones destroying an entire investment bank. BS stock wasn’t sold by uninitiated tourists from Omaha who flinch at the sight of a working car, it was dumped by professionals, people at the top of their field, if they were hookers, Elliot Spitzer wouldn’t be able to afford them. Yet, these supposed masters of their domain, these MBA waving, hair gel smearing, gym at lunch going, fat bonus taking, cowards, wet themselves at the thought of a BS liquidity crisis, like a thirsty octogenarian with bladder control issues. These are the people in charge of our economy, the people’s who’s confidence and fears decide whether we will have to continue pretending the Canadian dollar is worth less than our own or whether we can go back to using them as kindling and toilet paper (surprisingly soft, though not very absorbent) Does this not concern anyone else?