Wall St. in Charge

There is an article in Bloomberg about Henry Paulson and his focus on Subprime issue. As per the article, he wants to ensure that "yesterday's excesses" aren't repeated. These are the problems that were created while he was the CEO of Goldman. But you will never hear him say I helped create this problems.

The article also talks about one of the themes we have been talking about...When main st. needs help, these people don't care. When Wall St. needs help, they stop talking responsibility and they start talking about bailing them out for the greater good!

BTW, these issues are still largely "contained."

``He should admit to having been involved in creating the problem that we
have now,'' said Representative Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat, who
introduced a bill Oct. 22 to make firms packaging subprime mortgages liable for
bad loans in some circumstances.

``I can't help but notice that when middle-class homeowners were losing
their homes to foreclosure, he was pretty nonchalant about it,'' Miller said of
Paulson. ``But when Wall Street CEOs start seeing trouble in their absurdly
complicated financial instruments built on the mortgages of middle-class
homeowners, he feels their pain.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a5IcbvTr6oaM&refer=home

Fleck talks about the Ben bowing to Wall St. Pressure. The fact that Fed and Treasury are helping Wall St. is not even a secret any more. Fleck quoted the fed saying they need to cut because Wall St. is expecting a rate cut!

Hnew moniker for the dollar is xera.

"Both courses of action have risks. Perhaps the biggest is that the market's
certainty that rates will be cut creates a burden on the Fed to deliver.
Ordinarily, meeting market expectations isn't a goal in itself for the Fed. But
the current environment is more fragile than usual, and thus the consequences of
disappointing the market are potentially more damaging."

Thanks to the suggestion put forth by a reader of my daily column, I have come
up with the new name for our currency. Henceforth, it shall be called the xera.
That's a combination of Xerox, for the piece of Xerox paper that it is; lira,
which in the past was one of the world's chronically weak currencies; and, most
importantly, the fact that it sounds like zero. That is ultimately where the
xera is headed.

Wall Street Influence

Greg Ip writes in WSJ about Ben Bernanke and how he rewrote the Fed Playbook in his first major crisis. The article talks about how Bernanke is different from his predecssors. He likes to debate issues.

Look at the article closely and you see the influence of Wall St. on the Fed. The beggars on wall St. were disapointed because the fed reiterated it's view that inflation is the main risk to economy.

One Fed governor spent hours on the phone grilling contacts on Wall Street.
Another official helped broker a deal to help mortgage lender Countrywide
Financial Corp. through a financing squeeze, aiming to avert a disruptive
unwinding of complex loan agreements.

Mr. Bernanke was no stranger to central bankers, but he was a neophyte
to the schmoozing of Washington and Wall Street. To help him make connections,
Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a
veteran of the Clinton Treasury, arranged breakfasts and lunches at the New York
Fed between Mr. Bernanke and financial "wise men." Guests included Citigroup
executive and former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, and former J.P. Morgan
& Co. chairman Dennis Weatherstone.

And if you think the mess is over....

As the meeting ended, an attendee recalled, one of the hedge-fund
representatives said, "See you again next year." In an apparent reference to
the
still-fragile state of markets, Mr. Bernanke replied: "If not sooner."