Economics Update

Oil is holding steady, and the dollar has strenghtened, but Gasonine has hit a new record.

My predictions, which are usually wrong, Oil is pretty much permanently above $100/bbl, the dollar has a way to go down still, probably settling sell south of $1.75:€1.00, and Gasoline prices will break $4.00/gal in a year, and that there will be overshoots on all of them.

But my predictive record sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

It looks like the Federal Home Loan Banks will be performing the way that God and Herbert Hoover^* intended, in that will be making things much worse by bailing out investors in bad mortgage bonds to the tune of $150 billion.

Hoover was a stalwart supporter of doing the wrong thing, back to his days in China, where he supporter what came very close to murder in Chinese mines.

Oh....JP Morgan blinked, and upped their offer on Bear Stearns to $10/share. This is a bailout of two groups of people:

• The Bear Stearns employees who f&%$ed up the place to begin with.
• The investors who saw the mess, and said, "Give me some of that."

They both deserve to lose, and, of course, those people who bought at $5/share just made out like raped apes.

^*Hoover created the FHLB system.