Nobrainer’s Think Tank

• Something about the “plan” strikes me as though the Treasury asked everyone on Wall Street what they needed and reported that back. Someone needs to go back and say “what do you really need?”
• The plan is all about taking a short term gain while completely ignoring long term risk. In other words, they are using the exact same mentality as the CEO’s that they are so pissed at right now.
• I think I read somewhere that McCain’s big idea for getting the bailout passed was to relabel it as a “rescue.” Unbelievable.
• “Leaders” are actively working to make policy to specifically lift the stock market. This is dumb dumb dumb dumb. It is socialism in capitalism’s clothes.

UPDATE: I wasn’t making it up:

“The first thing I would do is say, ‘Let’s not call it a bailout. Let’s call it a rescue,” McCain told CNN.

UPDATE 2:

• I was initially pleased that the bailout failed. However I realized shortly thereafter that a newer, bigger version would emerge that would tie in all kinds of unrelated things that might end up swaying votes. And that’s exactly what’s happening. As Mike says,
  

  I shudder when Congress adds honey to a bill so that you don’t notice the part that tastes bad.

• In some places, people are essentially arguing that the bailout is needed to loosen the credit markets which tightened because there had been too much loose credit which caused a catastrophe. And now, people with bad credit histories are unable to get credit and we desperately have to make sure that those people can get credit again. The solution to our problems is a big 360. WeeeEEEEEE!
  

  But most major banks have their own problems with capital right now, so a company trying to get a loan from one has about as much luck as a person trying to get a mortgage — those with clean credit histories will likely get loans, but at high rates. And those with spottier credit histories might not get loans at all.

  And that is the problem we are apparently trying to solve.

Both Obama and McCain are claiming to be the “change” candidate based on the relatively true proposition that neither of them actually brings anything new to the table. Obama may even be like Bush.

Quoting from Greg Mankiw:

In the debate last night, Barack Obama asks a good question about the present financial crisis but then gives an answer that is, at best, incomplete:

The question, I think, that we have to ask ourselves is, how did we get into this situation in the first place? Two years ago, I warned that, because of the subprime lending mess, because of the lax regulation, that we were potentially going to have a problem and tried to stop some of the abuses in mortgages that were taking place at the time…

Mankiw continue:

… There is plenty of blame to go around. Indeed, the problem goes back at least as far as the Johnson administration, which helped set up a housing finance system that was always fundamentally problematic.

If Senator Obama really wants to transcend partisan politics, as he would sometimes have us believe, he might want to give a slightly more balanced view of the history of how this all started. He also might want to take note that the Bush administration warned about some of these problems five years ago and had their reform efforts stymied by prominent members of Senator Obama’s own party.

In other words, Obama, like Bush, was such a great leader on the issue that he was able to identify the problem [which had already been identified] without actually accomplishing anything to fix it. Change we can count on.

I know there’s more to it than this…

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke bluntly warned reluctant lawmakers Tuesday they risk a recession with higher unemployment and increased home foreclosures if they fail to pass the Bush administration’s $700 billion plan to bail out the financial industry.

Let’s assume that paragraph is worth face value. The choice then is risk of recession, or $700 BILLION bail out? Honestly here, we’ve be on the verge of recession for almost the last year. If we’re only talking about the risk of a few quarters of negative growth, I’ll happily take that over this bloated bail out scheme.

Another software update, another version of iTunes, and another reason to wonder just what the fuck is going on in Cuperttttttttttttttttttttttto, ahem, Cupertino?

The software update tried to install some new software that I had never heard of and that seemed completely unnecessary. That pissed me off.

The new iTunes install was not pleasing either. As I’ve complained before, it auto-places a shortcut on my desktop, which I never want. But this time it went so far as to remove the shortcut from my quicklaunch menu, which is where I do want it.

And just what about the new version of iTunes? None of the new navigation is particularly useful, but I did find a nice bug. When I use a dual-monitor setup (like I always do at work) and I have iTunes visible on the secondary monitor, and when iTunes is in Cover-flow mode, it actually causes my keyboard to lock onto a key I’m typing whenever it flips from one album cover to another, which iiiiiiiiiiiiih, ahem, which is highly annoying.

Via economist Matthew Perry

There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.

~Thomas Sowell

That is probably the most concise explanation of economics that I have ever read.

In other news, things have been a little tense around work over the last week. (more…)