Let's Play Bank

It's a good day to be a bank. Congress, the President, Paulson and Bernanke, everyone told us the world was going to explode if we didn't throw 700 billion of our money at buying up these "troubled mortgage-backed securities". Not a single dollar has been spent on said securities and it sure looks like ATMs still work and the financial system hasn't yet collapsed. Since approximately zero of the TARP money is going to help taxpayers losing their, jobs, homes, tuitions, grow the economy, etc., I wonder if you move to New York, live in a cardboard box labeled "Systemically Critical Bank", will you get some of that $700 billion -- excuse me -- $2 trillion dollars going to pay CEO bonuses, junkets, and buying up other banks? Seems everyone's doing the banker dance now; American Express pleaded and just became a bank holding company, guess they want some of that socialism too.

Maybe we could have a big game of buying up each other's cardboard banks, which is fitting since cardboard is pretty much what the AIG building is made out of about now. Whoever owns all of that wet, grimy, imaginary cardboard bank-matter at the end gets to turn it into a real cement-and-steel-girder institution! It would be like a big game of McDonald's Monopoly.

Also, since banks were making bad loans from fabricated money they didn't have at 30+ to 1, seems only fair the taxpayers should be able to print up their own counterfeit money to debt-slave each other and artificially inflate markets. Oh, and since it's been discovered that the Treasury [i]illegally[/i] changed bank merger tax policy which will cost us another $150 billion in lost revenue, I think every Joe-the-clerk and Jane-the-substitute teacher should be allowed to repeal and create laws as they see fit, since that's effectively what congress is allowing. And of course they're just gonna put up the "shocked! appalled! outraged!" face and let it slide, so the deals under the giant black bandaid on the hole in the festering shadow banking system known as the "Rescue Plan" can stay under that rug. At least till the Depression, which becomes more unavoidable by the day, when they make their planned exit.

Speaking of McDonald's... it's just in yesterday that McDonald's has the monopoly with its stock up 5.4% in the third quarter as the rest of the market is tumbling, Circuit City gone under, GM nearly there. That, along with the surge of Wal-Mart commercials, must be a sure thermometer of recession. The double-cheeseburger index.