Oh by the way, the financial system collapsed last night

Yeah, I don't know if you were paying attention last night, I wasn't, but it appears we've had some sort of major financial collapse. Lehman Brothers seems on the verge of liquidation after filing for the biggest bankruptcy in history ($613 billion in debt) and Merrill Lynch just was sold to Bank of America for $50 billion because of it's massive massive problems. For good measure, AIG then announced a plan to restructure and grub for $40 billion from the Fed or else it might go down this week. Rumor has it that Washington Mutual might be sucking dick for cash underneath a city underpass soon as well. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are still standing......for now. All because of the mortgage, housing, and real estate crisis. I think the solution is more market deregulation.

If you're paying attention to the stock market you'll have noticed the European markets dropping about 5% per stock exchange at this news. Good 'ole Wall Street has, as of this writing, lost 311 points. It's still early yet.

What does this mean for you, the consumer? I have no fucking idea. I couldn't tell you the first thing about financial markets. All my financial plans involve imagined large lottery winnings, wealthy heiresses I marry/kill, and various bags of money I stumble across. But here's what I have figured out: we're all going to be paying for their crooked, shortsighted, money grubbing, incompetent mistakes. Oh we'll be paying with the damage to the financial markets and jobs lost, but I meant paying in the sense that the American taxpayer will have to bail out these companies. Because the first rule of the free market is "when in doubt get the government to pay for your mistakes." As you read this, the Fed is meeting to decide just how much money to hand over. I'm guessing it'll be a lot.

Campaign wise, Obama has already pilloried the Bush administration and John McCain for the economic policies that helped this clusterfuck on it merry way. McCain has spent the morning strangling Phil Gramm to death, burying him in a shallow grave, and setting about to erase his name and legislative accomplishments for the financial markets from history. Meanwhile, one of John McCain's economic advisers, Donald Luskin, got to write an op-ed for the Washington Post this weekend where he......wait for it....told us to quit fucking whining about the bad economy, everything's fine. Then McCain went out this morning and declared, AGAIN, that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," despite what he described as "tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street" apparently not having felt he's made things easy enough for Obama to attack him on. I'm sure he'll later redefine our fundamentals to be the American worker so he can get some cheap mileage out of claiming that bashing his ineptness is bashing America.

Dust off those old Woodie Guthrie songs, buy a ramshackle pickup, and make your own banjo, methinks belts are going to get a lot tighter.