Wall Street

Please excuse me while I make a finance post.

Check out Ben Bernanke’s Currency Generator. Everything you need to know about the how the Federal Reserve works, right there for ‘ya.

Also (only tangentially related): Want to visit financially defunct Iceland?

…all revealed in this recent interview. Looks like he stole the plan from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, as he imagines himself as some sort of John Galt:

All right.

I’m back at the computer. WordPress console loaded up. Listening to Pig Radio, which is the most productivity-inducing thing that a person can listen to. And I’m ready. Ready to blog. Blog some Porn.

Porn. Porn. Porn! I really must focus on Porn!

It’s been hard to focus on Porn the last couple of weeks. So much other exciting stuff going on. So many distractions.

There’s Entourage for one. But I can’t blame that too much because it’s only on for 30 minutes on Sunday. Of course I watch it and then I have this burning desire to write that screenplay that I’ve been “working on” for the last three years… and I spend the rest of Sunday night thinking about the storyline and the characters and whether I should joint WGA West… but by Monday morning those Hollywood-screenwriting notions have dissipated.

I watched Touch of Evil last night. “He was some kind of a man. What can you say about people??” That don’t make a whole lot of sense. Nor does the movie. But it’s film noir. That’s film noir as in Film Noir, Mutherfuuuuucker! Moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, according to the Wikipedia entry. Moral ambiguity and sexual motivation… hmmm… sounds like the story of my life.

And the markets! Holy fucking cow! Did you guys catch that DOW +850pt run up in 40 minutes this afternoon. Good grief! Wall Street has turned into a casino where the principal game is some sort of strange combination of No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em and Russian Roulette.

You know… on the Monday on the week before this, when the bailout was rejected by the House and the stock market subsequently tanked, everybody started saying that the Market has spoken. Apparently, the Market was telling y’er congresspeople that they’d better get their act together and pass the fucking bailout. The Senate obliged two days later, followed by the House that Friday.

So what did the Market say this week? Down. Down. Down. Down. And down-up-down-up-down. Seems like the Market is saying nothing more than “You’re Fucked!”.

Been reading two new, excellent financial sites, self-evident and Macro Man. That’s in addition to the usual top-notch sources: Calculated Risk, The Big Picture, Naked Capitalism, and Lou Barnes’s weekly Mortgage Credit News. Self-evident gets props for insisting on this sort of minimalist template and https-only access. Dude is so clearly into Porn. (An appreciation for usability, use of an alter-ego, wittiness, minimalism, and the ability to install a SSL certificate are all indicators of Porn consumption.) Which sort of makes sense, because Porn clears your mind even if it soaks your pants. You only get in mental shape to make a good wad of cash after producing a good wad or two of a different sort.

I don’t have any dog in the stock market race. But I like to pay attention to the psychology. Oh! The humanity!!! Interesting to see how far people can be pushed. And it’s fascinating to watch the societal notions that are subscribed to by a majority of Americans fall apart.

In the brave new world of tomorrow, we Americans won’t have domestic car makers, or iBanks, or credit with any resemblance to what we had before. We won’t have quality infrastructure. We’ll have a huge division between rich and poor; the middle class is disappearing fast.

Much will change. But the one constant… the one thing that will always be a part of America, Ladies and Gentlemen, is PORN. And God. God and Porn. Forever and always.

Fucking bailout is lubed up to fuck us in the fucking ass! America is so fucking (anally, severely, painfully) fucked! No fucking productive economic growth since the fucking dot-com bubble fucking burst, just fucking Wall Street feeding the fucking God-fearing greed of the fucking workaday church-going mainstream fucking masses. Oh here Mr. Wall Street Master of the Universes, here is my hard-earned blue-collar money, won’t you pleeeeese take it from me and spend it on Cristal and high-end whores??? And then the fucking Wall Street wanktoids went to the fucking SEC and begged Oh pleeeeese Mr. Cox won’t you suck our bonus-check dicks and let us lever up to make the party so much more fun??? And fucking Ken says fucking “sure” and it’s like traders offering 2AM cocaine to drunk but fucking hot sixteen year old high school chicks. You know it’s gonna fucking end bad.

And now let’s meet fucking contestant number fucking two in the fucking bluster-battle to manage this clusterfuck… She’s a fucking beauty pageant queen with a fucking bee-hive hairdo and fucking librarian fucking glasses and she fucking shoots fucking moose, fears fucking God, and is fucking itchin’ to fucking Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Bomb-Bomb fucking Iran. Are you fucking serious?

But, my fucking friends, Ed Norton already got fucking there, five fucking years ago. And that fucking 25th Hour is what all you Wall Street fucking wankers should be watching right fucking now, because you gotta fucking come to terms with the fucking dawn! Bzzzzzz! That’s the fucking alarm clock, motherfuckers! It’s morning in America. And today we fucking report to fucking jail.

And that’s just the fucking warmup to what’s happened in the last five years. We are all Montgomery Brogan now. America had it all and threw it away…

I used to work on Wall Street. I quit in August 2007 to peddle porn and other stuff over the Internet. Now I can’t help but watch with grim satisfaction at the implosion of the American finance industry that I left behind.

This single photo tells the whole story of the clusterfuck:

Yesterday was a hard day for many, and today might be worse. Naked Capitalism says we should brace for the “tsunami”. Robert Reich says Wall Street is “melting down”. The Guardian calls the situation a “nightmare” and The Economist does too. “Nightmare” must be a particularly apt metaphor for the British.

But this… THIS is the best commentary I’ve seen on the whole mess (via Metafilter):

So now the only question in the post-modern financial mind is: Will Ben Bernanke drive a stake through the heart of this vampire and dispatch the evil beast from this world? Perhaps we will find out late this afternoon…