predictably

ouch
      Price  Change Percent
LEH    0.21   -3.44  -94.30

this is an extraordinarily bad idea

This is a very, very, very bad idea:

The Fed has announced that it will take equities as collateral for loans. "Equities" is a fancy name for stocks.

That's right - for the first time in history, now banks can take stocks to the discount window. Maybe even their own stocks.

The Fed has gone from taking only the highest-quality securities - "AAA" rated debt instruments - to taking everything up to and including the most dangerous (common stock) all at once!

I mean omg.

The Red Wheel

The Red Wheel

meanwhile, in the election to the north

In Quebec, the New Democrats/Nouveau parti Démocratique are running ads against Harper for not supporting marriage rights. So that's what an opposition party looks like. I'd wondered.

PS: HELL YES NOM

Meanwhile, in the Senate

Remember the Senate? A committee just passed a bill letting the Justice Department be a proxy claimant in copyright infringement suits, so all those bad-publicity-for-Hollywood RIAA and MPAA lawsuits could be filed by the Justice Department instead. It also "creates a Cabinet-level copyright-patent czar charged with creating a worldwide plan to combat piracy." All Democrats voted for; most Republicans voted for, but four voted against.

Also, if you missed it, MSNBC'c Scarborough acknowledges that they cover whatever the McCain campaign wants them to cover:

"I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?" Scarborough replied: "Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive."

And here's the kind of sick fundamentalist politics I mostly stopped covering: American Family Association's One News Now condemns France for France's support of letting queers be legal, and, oh, by the way, the Large Hadron Collider is stupid because if they want to know about the origin of the universe they should just read Genesis. Morons.

Another little surprise

In addition to Surprise! Now The Fed Takes Stocks! from earlier, you also have Surprise! Now Banks Can Use Deposits To Fund Investment Banking Operations! (News also sourced here.) So, yeah, pretty much it's all "make it up as you go" at this point. @whee!

oh this is bad

Getting that US$75B to keep AIG in business is not going to be easy.

The TED spread, or interbank overnight lending rate, has spiked up to 1.81, tho' it's off its worst-point-of-the-day of 2.0. If that sounds tiny, please consider that the last two spikes of this height were followed by major implosions, and a typical good-economy spread is 0.25.

The Fed funds rate has also spiked to 6%, triple the target of 2%, a worse multiplier than the trigger event for the 1987 stock market crash. (Note: it's not the percent that's the alarm, it's the multiple over the target rate.) I'd like to link to the Fed site to give you the current official number, but, annoyingly, it hasn't updated.

They also have not updated the TAF/TIO/etc - Temporary Open Market Operations - figures, or even the slosh data. That's also annoying.