elfs | Brains: I'm Not Going Down With The Ship!

Bank of America may not survive takeover of Merril Lynch without Fed aid: [Bank of America's] purchases of money-losing Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest U.S. home lender, will add to credit costs at Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, which has been setting aside too little reserves for its own loans, Graham Fisher & Co.'s Joshua Rosner said in a note to clients today. The Wall Street Journal reported talks on a federal infusion have been going on since mid-December.
This also makes me wonder what I should know about my investment holding company. I don't have a huge investment portfolio-- right now it's barely half a years' salary-- but I should know that the holding company at least knows where all my stocks are, right?(via solarbird)
Karl Dennigner fisks Ben Bernanke: Karl Denniger takes apart Bernanke's speech yesterday in London, and the results are not pretty. Karl's first biting fisking reads:
We had the responsibility to monitor banks, set reserve requirements and keep leverage ratios reasonable. We abdicated all of the above on purpose and got in on the scam because our various Fed Boards are all made up of former, current, or wanna-be-future bankers who make lots of money by cheating the rules of sound banking. This produced a huge credit boom, and it was entirely intentional. Oh, and we knew it would go bust too - we didn't care.
It gets nastier from there.
Two Christian priests secretly "annoint" the door to the inauguration stage: Aided and abetted by a member of Congress, two priests with a history for this kind of thing smeared an unknown fluid on the overhead doorjamb of the door that the president-elect uses when he accepts his mandate from Congress and then ascends to the podium to give give his oath.
US Military experiments with satellite-on-satellite inspection capabilities: The US DoD has decided to try and figure out what went wrong with the crippled DSP-23 satellite, which was supposed to monitor the deployment of nuclear capabilities in space, by sending two other satellites already in orbit to conduct a close inspection. The ability to do this with our own satellites also means we could do it to others, and the Chinese have already voiced concerns over this capability.