Oh hey here is a novel idea: in order to save our tragically beleaguered financial system, we must 1) replace the management at failing banks and 2) liquidate the banks that are completely hosed beyond repair. This makes sense to pretty much everyone, and our new boyfriend Simon Johnson said something like that a while ago on NPR so it must be true. MORE »

For the past seven million hours, conservative aggregateur Matt Drudge has been blaring the main headline, “OBAMA MOVES TOWARD ‘SWEDISH MODEL’ FOR BANKS,” replete with a sacrilege photo of the profane Swedish flag. The “Swedish Model” is “code” for the evil thing the Swedish government did in the early 1990s after a major real estate and financial bubble: nationalized the biggest insolvent banks, fixed them, and put them back on the market, the end. In other words, it is basically Red Marxism and Islam combined. And now, free-market fappers Lindsey Graham, his “live-in” John McCain, and even Alan Greenspan — who caused the entire crisis, for fun — are voicing their support for Swedish Communist Revolution! MORE »

The Washington Post has an extraordinary article today about why Tim Geithner’s press conference to unveil the administration’s bank rescue plan last week seemed to… suck? Is that the word? Well it wasn’t the plan, so much — as best we understood this vague monstrosity, it was something like, “Public private money tax blah blah uhhh force lending guarantee toxic gas blah blah blah uhhhhh TWO TRILLION DOLLARS,” so fair enough — so much as it was Geithner himself, who appeared to have no confidence in himself, the plan, or America. The Post reports that this is probably because he had ditched a different plan a few days earlier, and what you heard at the press conference was just some unreadable gibberish he threw together on the john a few minutes before taking the podium. MORE »