The stock market has rallied in response to Tim Geithner’s latest details on his plan to fix America’s Banks by giving them lots of money for their trash, which makes sense, because the new plan is good good GOOD for Wall Street! Imagine a world where the government put up like 85% of the financing for something that you wanted — a robot, say — and you only had to throw in 5%. But after realizing that the robot was, indeed a piece of crap, made from defaulted mortgage contracts instead of the usual metals, the government lost all of that 85% investment, and you only lost 5%, so whatever. Let us look into this modern marvel of financial engineering known as the “Public-Private Investment Fund.” MORE »

At some point during Barack Obama’s press conference last night — toward the end, after summarizing the major works of the European baroque period, but before reading the entire text of War and Peace in response to a question about baseball — he told reporters to hold onto their pants, because Tim Geithner’s first big press conference Tuesday morning was going to blow their fucking minds. How did it go? Eh, big numbers being tossed around, a lot of crying, the whimpering sounds of a crumbling Empire, crumbling, crumble crumb crumb… MORE »