John just forwarded to me an email purpordedly sent by our "spam dragon" Igor. It seems to be making the rounds. Igor actually hasn't had his own email account, so he didn't send it. [Although our admin says she'll see about getting him set up with one.] Having seen the email though, Igor admits that he would have sent it if he had thought of it. Here's the text:
From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson
Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check.
We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson
O.K. Igor, you've had your fun. We need you down in the dungeon!
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And remember, as the British comedian said, “You could refuse to bail us out, but if we go; so does your job, your home, and your pension fund!”
Igor says DOOM !
Hutch -
Isn’t it bizarre that you’d have been much better off as an investor watching comedians than the mainstream media?
Since leaving the gold standard in the rear view mirror in 1971, our National Debt has increased by 3045%. For perspective, during the previous 20 years it increased by 69%.
In 1970,the total money in circulation was around 500 Billion, today it is some 12 Trillion (not sure because M-3 has not been reported since 2/2006).
Out combined debt, public, private, funded and non-funded is $117.1 Trillion.
If our trend continues or increases for the same period of 38 years(which it has to if we attempt to maintain our living standard) the funded debt alone would be $33 Billion.
And a loan for another 80 Billion is the fix?
Sorry folks, bad mind day, the new debt would be $33 Trillion, not billion.
John-
I love that video! I used to think it was satire, but I’m convinced now that it’s educational programming.
That debt is okay, though, since the purchasing power of the dollar has declined by 90 percent or whatever since 1971.
Right now investors are fleeing to Treasuries and in the process funding the emergency measures used so far. Let us imagine (if we can) that this actually works to stabilize markets and restore rates for overnight lending. What happens when the fear stops and the flow reverses? They will still need to sell Treasuries to fund an even bigger deficit.
Will the Fed step in with printing presses to stabilize the bond market? Can we spell TOAST!
Igor says COLLAPSE
mtnmike (#3) -
I’d like to go back another couple of years to 1968 when Lyndon Johnson took Fannie Mae private to help finance the Vietnam War (and then Nixon created Freddie Mac as a pretend competitor in the early 1970s). 8/15 ’71 was certainly a key event, but it’s now becoming clear that it happened in the context of what we would now call the greatest off-balance-sheet deal in history.
How is it that in our country nobody is held responsible for the situation we’re in yet it seems that everywhere else in other democratic societies you see governments collapsing, prime ministers resigning, etc. How can the current administration remain in power for so long? The morons who voted this incompetent administration into office (twice!!) get to reap the full benefits of their stupidity.
Everyone quit moping! Its beutiful here in Denver. The highs are supposed to be in the upper 80′s for the rest of the week and the Denver Business Journal posted this gem:
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2008/09/22/daily20.html?f=et61&ana=e_du
The housing market is coming in for a soft landing in Denver. Those that bought at the “high” will lose a mere few percentage points.
Gotta love the optimism (H.pylori2 is only responsible for the weather related optimism of this message, the remainder was brought to you by NAR, reminding you that today is a great day to buy a home and to remember the every market is different!)
Igor says EXPLODE
I’d love to help you out, Mr. Paulson.
I’m waiting for some money from Nigeria, and am assured that it should arrive any day now. When I get it, I’ll get you those acct. numbers.
Just watched a couple hours of CNN & Fox News.
What is so shocking is how this problem is being hyped as being so urgent, unexpected, and completely catching everyone by surprise.
Maybe they just haven’t been reading the blogs the last few years!!!
These things were seemingly only unpredictable to the “smartest guys in the room.”
Speaking of Nigerian scams…
There is a site which documents the defrauding of the Nigerian scam fraudsters. The guy who runs the site is pretty good with Photoshop – which sometimes makes for very funny results (eg. he send the fraudsters fake “passport” pictures of himself and fake airline tickets pretending he is going to see them). The elborate plots he writes to entertain and waster the time of the fraudster are also sometimes very funny.
http://www.419eater.com/html/davids_harp.htm
http://www.419eater.com/
This makes one wonder…
One way to nip these scammers in the bud would be if a LOT of people actually replied to them! (IMPORTANT: people should ONLY reply from a new “fake” email address, using a FAKE name and other FAKE information. These people can sometimes be dangerous, so must have NO idea who you really are). If even 0.1% of the millions of people who receive these scam e-mails replied with “questions” about the scam, or just random musings and so on, the fraudsters would be so inundated with false-positives that they wouldn’t have enough time to figure out who the real suckers are from the fake suckers. They would have to shut down.
Looking at the site, one might erroneously accuse it of being racist, if only because the vast majority of “fraudsters” for this type of scam are of African descent. Personally, i couldn’t care less what background a fraudster has – if he/she is caught, ridiculed, and distracted from potential victims, he/she deserves it!
John, great video.
Twist and John, I have a question(s). I have CD money split between two banks. I am worried that if everything collaspes that I will lose that money. I am wondering if I should buy a house just to have something even though I know prices are going to go down quite a bit further. Any thoughts??
Surak-
Personally, I’m going to remain a renter- too chicken to venture back into the market. That doesn’t mean that it’s the best financial decision [shrinking little dollars are definitely losing their appeal] but it’s what this blogger with a background in botany is doing. [It's been working for me so far.]
A real financial planner might do differently- I’d check.
Every member of Congress should demand, at the very least, the following before allowing the $700 Billion bailout to proceed:
(1) Bush must VERY PUBLICLY announce that effective immediately he is repealing ALL tax cuts for the rich that he imposed during his time in office, AS WELL AS adding X% taxes on top of that for the richest 1% in the land. This is naturally a “patriotic thing” to help America pay for this huge bailout expense, and must be announced such that there will be NO doubt in any Americans’ mind that Bush people were responsible for this debt and are thus being MAN enough to take try and fix it (otherwise, if Obama were to come into office and be forced to do make the same tax cuts just to cover Bush’s bailout expenses, we all know Obama would be blamed endlessly for the raising of taxes… and half of American would believe Obama was solely to blame)
(2) NO bailing out anybody with mortgages!! Instead, the government must start a new agency whose job it is to manage the sale and rental of foreclosed homes that have come into government ownership(eg. through the purchase of the toxic government debt). Those people who have been foreclosed on recently can be allowed “preferred” rental rates for a limited time.
(3) NO bonuses to the execs of ANY company which receives bailout money. PERIOD.
(4) HUGE oversight and reimposition of relevant regulations in all bank and other industry.
What about a thread on “What would you demand if you were a member of Congress”?
RE: “From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson”
Oh, that is FUNNY!
I see on the front page of CNN this morning they are going to use the FBI to probe the investment bankers, they’ll find something, proclaim it all over TV, then justify the bailout by scapegoating. I was asking this same questions so long ago.., is someone, somewhere, anywhere, doing anything wrong?
Beautiful Austin Texas. Rolling hills. Tons of trees. Deer. Birds. Ran into a young gentleman yesterday who quietly informed me of his plans to create wealth. Having recently moved here from Lost Wages Nevada I was particularly struck by his plan….Flipping Houses!!!
Please God. Not Here
ps How Funny. Igor says Implode
MikeC-
According to Mr. Twist, they were saying on CNBC this morning that senators and congressmen were being deluged with phone calls and letters telling them to “Just say no”. The ratio is 99%-1%.
This really makes me wonder what Congress will demand. The wrong vote here could cost them their jobs.
Freemonster-
Wow- did he miss the train, or what?
I suppose that’s one good thing about tighter lending standards. Maybe it will help protect kids like this from themselves. They might think longer and harder about the wisdom of their “investments” if they actually have some skin in the game.
As I read the suggestions of what Congress should do, I’m amazed that one of those suggestions isn’t that they should all resign in disgrace.
How can a body who appears totally surprised about the current financial and economic events and who have led an entire nation to the brink of disaster, suggest penalties and wage control on others who have committed the same crimes?
Truth is certainly stranger than fiction.
Mike C–
agreed. however, i don’t think either guy has a shot at a decent presidency (no matter how this plays out). whoever ends up in the white house has no chance to really do anything. it’s like a family with 6 high credit cards. they struggle every month just to pay the minimum balances and stay afloat but they’ll never really be able to change anything about their lifestyle. neither guy will be able to even attempt to do anything they talk about because there just won’t be any money to do anything but pay debt.
AZSaluki-
I agree that Bush’s successor has no shot at a decent presidency. No matter how good he is, he will probably end up being one of the most villified presidents in history.
The wheels of change move slowly, but the public has a short memory. The new president will inherit a big pile of garbage they didn’t create [Unless of course you consider that as senators, they were contributors.] but they won’t be able to make it go away, and American’s will undoubtedly resent them for it.
Twist,
As Senators and as leading citizens, they did in fact contribute to the lie that exponential growth in a finite world is possible. It is not, as such scholars as Einstein, Tesla, Hubbert, Hickerson and others clearly pointed out.
We are not victims of presidential blunders, we are victims of attempting to trump physics.
That futile attempt to trump universal physical law has increased our national debt by 3045% over the past 38 years. Game over.
@MikeC -
There’s another guy who put up a website documenting how he was scamming one of the Nigerian scammers. He eventually turned it into a traveling 2-man act, where they read letters back and forth in character. It’s a riot.
Check it out
@twist
The only good that I can see is that the meltdown happened when it did. There’s no way for Bush to wiggle out of this and claim he wasn’t president when it happened – he gave Greenspan a medal for doing this to the country! If the housing meltdown had started 12 months later (ie, right about now), the blame would solidly be on the next president. That would be a really bad thing, too – for some reason, a lot of Americans seem to actually care about a person’s skin color or gender. Should a non-rich-white-male win, all the dumb people in the US would have been able to point to the economic crisis as why only rich-white-males should be in charge. Instead, the rest of us get to point to several rich-white-males and say we can probably do better!
twist (#14) -
Leave your chickens out of this. They are blameless.
Theoretically it should work. It should even provide cash flow for the Government at 60 cents on the dollar or less. Of course Government has an unbelievable record of responsible use of cash flow.
Igor says ALLGONE
Thanks Twist,
This whole finacial mess is scary. I really value you insight.
twist -
What we have here is a blueprint for Patriotic Socialism.
“America’s bail-out plan: I want your money”, Economist, September 25, 2008.