Is that a Debenture in Your Pocket or Are You Just Really Happy to See Me?

All this time, based on my own reptilian brain animal instincts and a reasonable amount of reports from credible sources that I'd read, I just presumed the 'meltdown' on the Stock Market was a long time in coming and was a tragic coalescence of a variety of forces to include ignorance, cupidity, deregulation, a diminished sense of personal responsibility, absence of a social conscience and abrogation of the social contract. But, as a guy hissed at me a couple of weeks at a civil gathering where the civility proved to be in short supply, I am pretty much a liberal pragmatist when I'm not being a terminal, anarchistic cynic.

Imagine my surprise to read yesterday in The Atlantic, a journal of the true Fellow-Traveler if ever there were one, quoting the Associated Press, that Senator Chuck Grassley has a memo suggesting employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission were (wait for it) watching pornography on their computers instead of monitoring miscreants in the marketplace (GASP!). Those Ba$tards! And what, do you suppose, were the bankers watching who gave those 300 and 400K mortgages to folks earning McWages to buy houses they lost in six months?

How'd you like to be leading the defense team for Goldman Sachs as jury selection begins? Sort of changes up the voir dire questions, just a skosh, doncha think? Try being a jury consultant who suggests asking things like "Do you own a full-length raincoat?" "How sticky are the floors at your favorite movie theater?" What you're really trying to do is make sure your clients truly wind up with a jury of their peers. Talk about a brave new world, pilgrim! You may as well go ahead and fill out those change of address forms now, because we are here and we are staying here.

It's a fine line between a laptop and a lap dance and we've got the 1009-R's to prove it. "Let your money hustle Bet you’d sell your mother You can buy another."
-bill kenny