TOUGH TIMES

I mean when you have to highlight the bold and brave move of Moody's in lowering Greece's rating from B1a to B1 you got a serious blogging problem on your hands. These are tough blogging times my friend, really tough times. Maybe, I should become a political pundit; there always seems to be room for just one more of those. Then again, constant raving is probably not particularly good for my my overall physical and mental state given the quality of our politics and politicians these days. So Greece becoming junkier and junkier is all I have I guess for the foreseeable future.

Oh yeah, Poo Bear did put out another warning last week that she and the FDIC would deal harshly and quickly with any bank that was in danger of failure. Who cares. And along the same lines, the pols and the news guys have finally figured out (well, almost) the Dodd/Frank has probably made the situation a good deal worse by the clear creation of two (at least) tiers of financial institutions as witnessed by the fact that the risk premium assigned to institutions deemed by the market as not big enough not to fail has increased to 78 basis points according to one report. I don't know whether this is correct but clerly what will happen is that the big will get bigger, risk in the system will be more and more centered in the big institutions making them more risky, the small will want to get big and take bigger risks in an attempt to accomplish that goal and the realization will eventually come that we have made things worse not better. Way to go guys.

Oh yeah, another worthy news item. Bill Gross, he of PIMCO, proclaimed today that what we need are more taxes on the "rich" (to be defined) and higher taxes on corporations. I am sure The Leader and his mob will be screaming, "See, see, see, a leader of American finance says we need higher taxes!" The New York Times will be right along with them. Of course, overlooked in all of this is the fact that poor Mr. Gross is right where you don't want to be in an enviornment in which the Fed is going to do it's damndest to inflate the hell out of our problems: Mr. Gross owns the biggest fixed income (bond) portfolio in the world and is about to get murdered. What Mr. Gross is trying to say is we need more revenue at the governmental level but being no brighter than the average politician he thinks the way to get it is to raise taxes rather than by redoing the tax code in the manner that Billy's guy and the Wyoming Wing Nut suggested and which everyone has ignored, especially The Leader who appointed them...Oh damn, I'm becoming a political pundit. See what happens when there's nothing going on. Scary.