The end of the world? Okay, then. Time's up. From Investors Business Daily : Along with ending the short-selling ban, Treasury's latest plan "is an invitation to speculative attacks in which firms at risk are driven into ruinously dilutive recapitalizations," wrote Donald Luskin, chief inve ... Read more

Richard Ridgeway has some good comments on the real problem at the root of the subprime mess: unscrupulous housing speculators who took out mortgages they had no intention of repaying. Good reading ... Read more

Here's SNL's dead-on parody of the $700 billion bailout . Thanks to reader Todd Tharp for the link. ... Read more

With brains like this behind them, they just can't miss ... Read more

Here are some thoughts from economist John Seater , just as the Senate was passing a $700 billion banking bailout bill. My reading of the financial market is that there is no financial crisis and we don't need a bailout. We are told we need this bill because of the financial crisis that g ... Read more

My DC -insider friend "Mick Danger" is actually optimistic about the resurrection of the banking bail-out: Today (er, actually this evening) will be a good day (good evening, too) in the Senate. They will pass a bailout bill which might just be an improvement on what failed on Monday. Should be ... Read more

My DC -insider friend "Mick Danger" sifts through the rubble of yesterday's failed bail-out vote. While there may be some merit to further disclosure requirements by major players in the investment world, any new such rules must be carefully written and tightly constrained. Otherwise, we?ll ove ... Read more

Sarko disappoints. From the Telegraph : The French president this week again railed against deregulated financial markets ? a big part of what he oddly refers to as ?financial capitalism? ? and called for a special G8 summit to tackle the crisis. He even called for ?sanctions? against th ... Read more

Strange trading patterns in the Obama and Hillary futures contracts at Intrade . Has Hillary moved from manipulating the live cattle futures markets to manipulating the presidential election futures markets? ...every so often, some individual trader or some small group of traders are short ... Read more

Maybe it's a coincidence. Last week, the New York Times published a false and unsubstantiated quotation from Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack about his company's desperate condition -- which it didn't confirm with him, and has since publicly retracted . With a market panic underway alr ... Read more