A crisis of democracy, not of capitalism

One of the features of the present crisis is that it is not so much financial as political. Vast bailouts of greedy and destructive banks lead Americans to ask, who is running the country, and for whose benefit? Mish and others are turning from financial commentators to pro-democracy activists.

Shall "Government of the people, by the people and for the people" perish from the earth? The lazy, defeatist cynics of the UK fail to understand how Lincoln's words still burn brightly in many Americans' hearts. It's why they are so quick to attack their politicians as liars and shysters, wheras we merely expect them to be that anyway. Their idealism shames us.

A Marmite Backwater

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, now Dark Flow... my brother directs me to a new discovery/theory.

It seems that a great cluster of galaxies that is halfway towards the edge of the observable universe, is moving in a different direction from the general stretching of space-time. It's like a little boat caught in an eddy.

Cosmologists theorise that there may be massive, unobservable structures hundreds of billions of light years away, pulling these galaxies in their direction. They imagine that the universe beyond what we can see (c. 17 billion light-years) may be very different from ours.

And some of us laugh at mediaeval theological speculation. How foolish those people were, building elaborate worlds of internally-consistent ideas, applying nothing but logic to extend their understanding beyond the few things they were certain that they did know, attempting to move from the seen to the unseen.

And now we lift our gaze from the CERN to the unCERN.

I wonder what Ben Jonson would have made of it all?

May I prevail on you all for charitable contributions to fund a new chair of Marmite Studies?

Sell your house now?

If Karl Denninger is right and the long-term trend for house prices is 3 times income, instead of 5 or 6 as it seems to be now, then houses remain overpriced in real terms.

So even though house sales are seizing up and prices dropping, shouldn't we go ahead and sell anyway?

Diary of a mayfly day trader

Wait! I was wrong! The Dow is up 32 points (09:42 EST)! Buy, buy! We've turned the corner! I am renaming this blog Bullwatch!

Oh no, only 14 points now (09:44 EST). Hold. Or maybe sell - over 50% of gains lost in only TWO MINUTES, goodness knows what could happen in a whole hour. Yes, sell! Sell!

Gosh, this is hard. Think I'll watch the TV news, they know what's going on.

UPDATE

OMG, down 32.42 (10:13 EST)!! In only 43 minutes! Over a 7-hour day that means 633.32 off the Dow!!

No, make that "!!!"

And there's another two days to go!!! !!! !!!

However could Mouton de Rothschild stand the tension?!!??

A note to newsreaders from the Pronunciation Unit

Say "new". Say "clear". Now, say "nuclear".

Just wondering

Why does having a ladder on your roof make you drive badly?

Paulson gets super-rich on short-selling

It's an ill wind... No relation to Hank, I suppose.