FASN8N

I already sold out and booked 17.5 points

phatmitzu

DFW01E55

Anyone investing in the market should be calling their congresscreeps and senators to complain about this bailout.

You and I and our children will be paying for this experiment in socialism ... probably forever. It's gonna' be trillions, not billions.

It needs to be stopped before it destroys the financial backbone of this country.

And the guys who took multi million dollar bonuses by breaking the laws on exceeding the leverage and falsifying assets and liabilities, STILL have those bonuses and will walk away unscathed.

And the SEC that didn't do their job in preventing this .... no problem, they're government employees for life.

Bend over taxpayers.

Code3 Performance

Remember, it's only bad if you have to sell. Otherwise, the stock market is cyclical so just sit tight.

My $0.02

-Aaron

bigben320e

I have questions:

Who is in charge of this?
Where does accountability start?
Who is in charge of the SEC?

Accountability is the new curse word for a while now...

DFW01E55

Bernanke, Paulson, ***, Fuld,Thane, Willumstad.

It's government, there is no accountability.

Christopher ***

bigben320e

Some of this I knew the answer to, but there goes the issue as you so eloquently put it:

It's government, there is no accountability.

The rest well, are we assuming they suck at their jobs?

DFW01E55

IMO, we each have a personal responsibility (accountability) to notify our representatives that we are tired of being screwed and they should NOT count on our support if they don't fight for the taxpayer.

I think Vader55 was right on target, don't belong at the wrong time in this market.

FASN8N

I want to know when S&P and Moody's are going to get sued.

How can Lehman debt that has a high probability of repayment be downgraded from AA to junk levels over a weekend unless someone was asleep at the wheel?

CWW

The problem with Lehman is that its net capital was insufficient to cover the writedowns it was going to have to take by the end of the quarter on its CDOs and unsold packaged mortgages, and everyone knew that for the last 6 months or so.

The expectation was that Fuld would bring in some extra capital, either through an offering or a direct sale to a big investor, and this expectation had a lot to do with why they weren't downgraded earlier. But instead he acted like an arrogant azzhole and walked out of the Korean Development Bank negotiations because the price they wanted to pay for a 10% stake was "too low". GOOD POSTURING there Richard, now the shareholders get $0. Idiot.

Anyway, once that happened, the stock took a nosedive which cut off their other possible source of capital, and then it was just a waiting game...they would eventually go into negative equity and fail. It hasn't come out in public, but I suspect that a boatload of their counterparties shut them off after the KDB negotiations failed, and I bet a lot of their clients started pulling their accounts. The ratings agencies then jumped on the bandwagon and went into CYA mode by downgrading them, essentially 6 months after the fact.

Ratings are a F*ing joke and have been for the last 5 or 8 years. Enron carried investment grade ratings until a week or two before its bankruptcy, and we all know what a complete house of cards that was. AIG, meanwhile, never should have been downgraded. No matter what happened, they weren't going to default on their debt. I dunno. I don't trust ratings, and can't believe anyone else does either. I too think they should get sued off the face of the planet.