Jack Donaghy: Those are your new interns.
Liz Lemon: Aren’t they a little old and over-dressed?
Jack Donaghy: They’re all former investment bankers who were laid off in the economic crash that Nancy Pelosi caused. They’ve got zero real-world skills, but, God, they work hard.
-30 Rock
Citi (NYSE: C) is going down about 1 cent per minute. It’s at 1.65 as I type this with 160 minutes left until the market closes. Will C beat the clock?
Update: It looks like that Meredith Whitney contrarian indicator must have finally kicked in. XLF is now up on the day despite the fact that there has been talk of nationalizing the two largest banks. I don’t make the rules of crazyland, I just live here.
Update II: They beated the clock! They survived to fight another day! Maybe.
The deal provides $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, for example, including money that could benefit a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.
Line Item: $8bn for a maglev train to connect Disneyland to Las Vegas
Source: Washington Post —-> Despite Pledges, Package Has Some Pork [there’s a shocker]
Rationale: Undoubtedly some wealthy donor to Reid’s campaigns stands to obtain the construction contract and/or has purchased lots of land on the corridor that will need to be purchased for the right of way.
Preposterous?!: Los Angeles to Las Vegas is already a very easy 4hr drive. This is why LA residents are already the top visitors to LV. Furthermore, it is a cheap, easy flight served by numerous airlines; there are round trip flights available every day of this month for less than $150. Which means $8bn could pay for approximately 53mm Los Angeles residents to fly to Las Vegas and back instead of building a maglev train that will be inevitably be way late and over budget (see Big Dig) and likely won’t run at promised speeds (see Amtrak’s Acela).
Bonus item that didn’t actually make it in: “Republicans also killed or reduced a number of projects they considered objectionable, such as $200 million to re-sod the Mall in Washington.
Preposterous?!: What the hell type of sod costs $200mm?! That works out to $650k per acre or $15 per sq ft. You could cover the mall in gold leaf for that much money. Literally.
The stock market responded badly to Geithner because it is crying out for someone in authority who can make bold moves and justify them, someone non-mealy-mouthed, someone who has an equal mix of brains, principles and confidence. The market wants Churchill and they keep tossing it Chamberlains.
–Emanuel Derman
Like most of you, Long or Short Capital is not entirely immune from the current dislocation going on in capital markets. Also like most of you, Long or Short Capital recognizes that this period of extended dislocation and, more generally, the backdrop of the Great Regression, provide the perfect cover for past acts of corporate malfeasance and accounting shenanigans.
The good news is that you, as subcriberholders under our former dividend policy, have been compensated both in the form of money, and in the form of insightful investable recommendations. But there is bad news. Due to the current capital market uncertainty, especially the difficulty we have encountered in trying to secure a revolving line of credit so that we are able maintain sufficient liquidity, as well as the difficulty we have had in finding (entirely theoretical) potential debtor-in-possession financing (seriously we aren’t going to file, we swear on Madison’s life), we have entered into a cash conservation mode. We will be suspending our dividends, retroactively and futurely.
We have hired a financial advisor to explore our options both with respect both to our capital structure and to maximizing value to our executive team. We have them looking into the appropriateness of soliciting reverse dividends from our subscriberholders so as to improve our liquidity and ease the burden of certain off-balance sheet arrangements that were undertaken to finance my yacht (sometimes referred to as “the corporate yacht” in our filings), as well as my summer yacht.
We appreciate your continued support in these trying times. Personally, I think you can relate to the humiliating devastation I feel as I am forced to go from one mega-yacht I purchased due to my excessive compensation as CEO, one company yacht (in name only, I used it exclusively), and one summer yacht paid for by embezzling LoS capital funds, to only one mega-yacht.
For updates on our dividend policy, always navigate to our Dividend Policy. Thank you.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.
-Catch 22
Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?
Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow.
-An exchange between William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S Grant during the Battle of Shiloh
Nothing to do here other than link you to something hilarious for you to invest in.
Here are the Six Sigmas: Teamwork, Insight, Brutality, Male Enhancement, Handshakefulness, and Play Hard.
-Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock
Dear Colleagues,
When I sent that message earlier, the one that ended with “Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry,” I did not mean to send it to the distribution list to which it got sent. I know that much of my language was not only colorful, but wholly inappropriate, and for that I apologize. Larry, I am sorry for the comparison I made between you and certain feminine hygiene products. Not only was what I said unfair, but truth be told, I am not even clear that they make sense based on my understanding of the working of those products, which is admittedly imperfect. Sarah, I don’t think that you resemble the legume (gourd?) which I used to describe you — you have to understand it was written in the heat of the moment. The same heat of the moment that caused me to reply to the whole distribution list rather than just the one person I intended. As I pack my bags and prepare for what looks to be a long unemployment, a time no doubt when I will be forced to work unpaid jobs either emptying female sanitary waste baskets or harvesting the aforeimplied legumes (gourd?), I just want you all to know how sorry I am. Let this be a warning to all of you that if you let your Blackberry be your greatest lover, the edge which you constantly ride, the constant tether to the space station of your work, that it can totally cost you a job and lead to sloppily expressed thoughts. I am not very good at metaphors but I think you get what I am saying.
-Joseph Wipskittle
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949)
Anyone who expects markets to restore a disturbed equilibrium instantaneously will be disappointed. People cannot discover the relevant changes, confirm and assess them, consider alternative arrangements of their affairs, and carry out those changes in an instant. The competent economist appreciates the necessity of patience in evaluating the market’s operation. Simply because the market does not appear to have reconfigured itself fully soon after a shock, we have no warrant to conclude that “the market doesn’t work anymore” or that “the market doesn’t work the way it used to.”
-Robert Higgs (ht: Econlog)
Don’t you realize? The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what’s right for them. Because it’s their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.
-Mikey from Goonies
Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.
– Charles Ponzi, on his scam over the people in Boston (Note, this was submitted by reader Charles T on November 10th, a month before Madoff came to light. I’m not saying he has a time machine, but there is a distinct possibility)
