NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — As The Reserve cut the net asset value of its flagship money market fund to 97 cents a share, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said Tuesday that it had also downgraded the Colorado Diversified Trust to Dm from AAAm due to exposure to Lehman Brothers Holdings commercial paper. S&P said the Trust, which had about $200 million as of March 28, fell below the $1 net asset value per share and will liquidate Wednesday. The Trust held money from local schools and governments. Its remaining assets will be transferred to the Colorado Local Government Liquid Asset Trust.
-Russian Stock Market has lost 25% of its value in the last 2 days - a crash
-Feds are trying to find a buyer for WaMu: NYPOST Article : Made phone calls in last couple days
-Ambac - a bond insurer - had huge exposure to Lehman
-Biggest Money Market fund is worth less than $1. A money market fund is a type of account you can get at a bank that yields a little bit higher than a savings account. The biggest one in the world - which holds 62 billion - was frozen because investors will only get 96 cents to the dollar.
-The government changed the rules allowing banks that hold deposits to use deposits as collateral. That means your money at the bank is being used as collateral for loans cause the banks dont have anything else.
-Fed nationalizes the largest insurer in the world - AIG - a monumental event.
-Morgan Stanley is in discussions about whether or not they need a buyer. Roubini believes Morgan and Goldman will merge with a commercial bank.
“ The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the streets believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.
–Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet and dramatist, in the 1920s.
This financial crisis has uncovered another type of malfunction in our system. It has identified globes worth of people I call “delusional optimists”(could easily call them Polyannas, but this sounds worse) who think irrational positive thoughts- that the financial crisis will recover by the end of this year, that everything is fine in Iraq, that this is a typical recession, that America is in good shape, yada yada. These people are bizarre.
I sent out an email to my friends a couple weeks ago warning “U.S. Financial System Meltdown in Days/Weeks.” Looks like it was one week. And this is the real downturn folks - greed created the mother of all crisis’ - the U.S. economy is capitulating. It won’t be over for years.
The New America will look very different - Budweiser will be a Belgium Beer, a major airline or two will go under, and the automakers, once the heartland of America, will be no more.
This is Jim Rogers. Jim is a man with 150 million dollars. He is also very radical. Soros had to fire him, even though he started Soros’ company, because he was too negative and radical. Soros himself is radical, but in a polite way. Anyway, the best investors are radical. Bankers blow cockboys.
The rest of the world is going to pull the plug on us…this would be right in line with the Germany Finance Minister’s comments yesterday. From Mr. Pritchard, or Dr. Doom: More….
Recently I have been accousted by friends and colleagues a like over my belief of the existence of state-run earthquake machines capable of spurring earthquakes at will.
I would like to take this post to point out that in the last twenty years or so, there have been a number of areas subjected to rare earthquakes. These same areas, which span the globe, are often the site of large-scale, ongoing, military operations!
