File this one as miscellaneous fulminations. A couple of things caught my eye this morning as I used up some of my employer’s valuable time cruising the blogs.
First, if you thought that the subprime meltdown taught the big banks anything, disabuse yourself. Atrios relates that Merrill Lynch is using an accounting trick to artificially inflate its earnings. The fraud involved is so transparent that it’s almost breathtaking. They are booking their debt at its market value rather than the amount they owe:
Basically, the regulators said that these institutions should actually report what their assets are worth – market value – rather than some fantasy made up “model” number. So they said fine, but we want to do the same for our liabilities! So if Merill owes $100 million, but that debt is currently trading at $80 million because of fears that Merill will default on the debt, Merill gets to say “yay! We only owe $80 million.” Of course that isn’t true. They owe $100 million, and they have to either pay or default, but the fact that people are worried they’ll default means they get to pretend they owe less than they do.
Does this make any sense? Of course not.
More than that, they get to pick and choose which liabilities they get to account for this way.
Absolutely breathtaking. I’m no economist and I’m no accountant, but I know that this is a recipe for disaster.
On another subject altogether, my wife tells me that CNN is back to playing the Reverend Wright clip, but per usual we hear almost nothing about the “Reverend” Hagee. During our last Hagee episode we noted that Joe Lieberman is going to make nice with the good reverend, who he prefers not to judge by a single incredibly anti-Semitic outburst. Well, it appears that the holy man believes not only that Hitler was doing God’s work, but that the anti-Christ is, or will be…, you guessed it- a Jew. (via Digby) But not just any Jew. He will be a blaspheming Jew. But not just any blaspheming Jew. He will be a gay blaspheming Jew:
On March 16, 2003, on the eve of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, Pastor John Hagee took to the pulpit to warn of the coming Antichrist. In his sermon, “The Final Dictator,” Hagee described the Antichrist as a seductive figure with “fierce features.” He will be “a blasphemer and a homosexual,” the pastor announced. Then, Hagee boomed, “There’s a phrase in Scripture used solely to identify the Jewish people. It suggests that this man [the Antichrist] is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx.”
This “fierce” gay Jew, according to Hagee, would “slaughter one-third of the Earth’s population” and “make Adolph Hitler look like a choirboy.”
I hereby predict that Joe will continue to make nice with this hatemonger. He will do it because he can’t bring himself to change his behavior at the behest of the hated “left wing bloggers”. I will always be proud of the small part I played in humiliating that loathsome little man and driving him away from the party he was soiling by his presence. The vote I cast for Ned Lamont at the State Convention was one of the high points of my political life.
