Wednesday Night #1388

Late development: Claude William Genest Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Canada, and candidate in Westmount-Ville-Marie, will be joining us tonight.

Yes, we watched the debates. In fact, last Wednesday, in another break from tradition, we watched almost the entire Leaders’ Debate live.
And of course, we watched the Biden-Palin show, although that hardly qualifies as a debate, but certainly stirred up a lot of chatter and we are told, drew a greater audience than any of the other political shows of the year. And yes, we also enjoyed the Tina Fey version from the opener “Can I call you Joe?”, to the painful moment when we all realized that she didn’t have a clue about her Achilles heel (she must have missed Graeco-Roman history/lit/mythology),- or was that part of the strategy that she announced when she said she wasn’t necessarily going to respond to the questions of the moderator or charges from Biden, but instead, “I’m gonna talk right to the American people”?
And we did watch the Obama-McCain debate on Tuesday. As we suspected, it was  advertised as being on both foreign and domestic issues, but the economy dominated given that the questions came  from Independent voters. [see Washington Post: A Debate About McCain — Every debate, every encounter, every moment of Campaign 2008 is its own mini-drama. Tuesday’s debate at Belmont University is no exception. The focus is all on John McCain.] We found Senator McCain’s physical appearance to be old, feeble, and as one Wednesday Nighter said “damaged”.
But it is all about the worsening financial crisis, isn’t it? Congress should hang its collective head in shame over the porkbarelling in the final Bailout Bill. (Bloomberg “The 450- page bill, laden with tax breaks and other measures unrelated to the crisis, grew out of a two-and-a-half page proposal that Paulson sent to Capitol Hill early on Saturday, Sept. 20.”) The administration, the Secretary of the Treasury and just about everyone in any position of authority should be drummed out of the human race.
[For those who feel that we were unduly harsh in suggesting that everyone in authority should be drummed out of the human race, let us explain that what angers us is that people in authority knew things were awry and went merrily on their way. Ron Meisels gives us the perfect illustration: New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae dated Sept 11, 2003 AND Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending By STEVEN A. HOLMES, Published: September 30, 1999.
Incidentally, in searching for the second article, we landed on Snopes (obviously a lot of people thought this was a hoax), which gave an excellent summary.]
And we don’t think much of all the pundits who are gleefully telling us that they saw it coming. Everybody has a theory about how we got into this mess (ex. George Monbiot in The Guardian: Corporate welfare is a consistent feature of advanced capitalism. Read and weep, but who can tell us how to get out?
For true outrage, we recommend the short clip on BBC  in which the head of Lehman Bros, Richard Fuld makes an argument that the system worked with respect to the high compensation of employees – he’s much more articulate than Ms. Palin, but they seem to have taken the same Logic course. Meantime, it’s no longer a U.S. problem, as we are reminded by the Financial Times’ grim headline Markets routed in global sell-off .
We wish we could offer good cheer, but remain in hope that the collective common sense and knowledge of Wednesday Night will muddle us through.
Finally, and in spite – or possibly because – of all the discouraging talk about financial crises and investments, we encourage you to attend the Metastock 2008 Seminar for a free talk and demo by Scott Brown (a good friend to WednesdayNight.com) and learn how to make charts like ours!

Successful Trading With MetaStock 2008
at the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel
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Friday, October 24, 2008
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