...& On: hell in a handbasket

Things that I'm not impressed with:

Eliot Spitzer. Trash. The governor of NY was recently busted for soliciting a prostitute during a Federal wiretapping investigation. Keep it in your pants and realize you're a role model with a reputation to uphold. Especially when you're considered the poster boy for anti-corruption. What public figures do in their private lives is their business to a limited extent, I understand, but when you start messing with public funds and publicly and irreparably damaging your family then you don't deserve respect or power. Getthatouttahere.

U.S. Federal Reserve. The Fed is coordinating with other central banks to inject $200 billion into the markets as a bona fide bailout. Please. I'm all for financial stability (obviously) but the world, Americans especially, need a wake up call. Speculation is running rampant and greed is taking over. At some point we're going to have to pay. I don't care how much money you put in to cushion the fall, at some point the numbers mean nothing. What is $200 billion anyway? Especially when estimates for total future damages surpass that by a minimum of $50 billion. It'll do a lot to soften the blow though so I support Bernanke for that but it still doesn't get at the root of the problem. They also have this whole good debt for bad debt trading system getting set up which is necessary because if no one can get their debt off the books and the debt is literally worthless then we'll just be stuck here forever. Accounting majors stand up! Has anyone heard from The Oracle aka Greenspan? He's been uncharacteristically out of the picture...

Oil/gas prices. Why, why, why?! I was going to insert a graph here but for what? You know what it looks like. Bush recently went over and asked OPEC to increase production in order to lower prices (think back to your first econ class...) but they basically said, "No way, Jose" because they said production isn't where the problem is:

"OPEC rebuffed its top consumer, arguing that the world was well supplied with oil and blaming financial speculators and mismanagement of the United States economy for the current high prices."

It seems like the entire world is fed up with the shakiness and instability associated with American financial markets and strategies that have spread across the world. This great editorial from Arab News really drives home the point of how (at least some) Middle Easterners view the situation. We need a resolution.

If all this makes you want to go build a bomb shelter in your backyard, never fear: lots of new music dropped while I was in D.C... load up the ipod and get to building