Palin: Post turtle (via moby's blog)

http://www.moby.com/journal/2008-09-29/a-friend-wyoming.html

from a friend in Wyoming:

A doctor in Cheyenne was talking to a patient of his, a 75 year old rancher. They started talking about politics and the doctor asked the rancher his thoughts on Sarah Palin.
The old rancher said,

"Well, ya know, Palin is a 'Post Turtle'".

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a 'post turtle' was. The old rancher said,

"When you're driving down a country road you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a 'post turtle".

The old rancher saw the puzzled look on the doctor's face so he continued to explain.

"You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, and she doesn't know what to do while she's up there, and you just wonder what kind of dummy put her up there to begin with".

philosophical, or big picture questions about this financial crisis

I need someone to explain to me why the economic system is going to collapse if some suitable bailout arrangement isn't arranged in the next week. It has already been nearly two weeks since the alarms were first raised, and everything seems to be going fine so far. If anything, the markets are ripe for picking at the moment, if you happen to be one of those lucky ones with cash to spend. (Of course, the question is, what to buy? Paul Krugman's personal assets are in money markets right now, but he says that even those aren't doing well. My own advisor is recommending T-bill mutual funds.)

I'm trying to keep it simple in my mind how this works. Treasury Secretary Paulson, himself a former Goldman Sachs exec, is telling us that the sky's gonna fall. Isn't it possible that he sees his own sky about to fall, along with that of most of his closest friends, because of the egregiously greedy financial practices that have been undertaken by the major banks and investment houses? I mean really, not to put too fine a point on it, this stuff reeks to high heaven. In this week's Sunday New York Times, I read about these complex credit derivatives that allow asset-rich insurance giants like AIG to leverage their credit rating to insure loans purchased by banks and other corporations, which in turn are resold to other banks as attractive debt packages that are supposed to be comprised of "blue-chip" loans and debts that would never default... Then in due course, they find out that these "blue-chip" loans really contain a whole bunch of those sub-prime mortgages that are already in default or will be within the next 2 years due to their built-in rising interest rates, and when the analysts start looking at everyone's balance sheets to see who has the actual cash to cover off these loans, insurance policies, and other credit derivatives, they figure out that this is just a very big house of cards.

In that light, doesn't it just seem like this is a bubble that's meant to burst? The Treasury didn't step up when Silicon Valley went up in flames in 1999, and in that one, thousands of Main Street investors lost millions. When any given sector of the market, even the investment banking sector, starts playing too fast and loose (in this case, by creating spectacularly complex investment instruments to make seemingly endless gobs of money), I don't see any case that supports a government bailout more than any other.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that the amount is even all that significant. It's the same as what's been spent on the Iraq war so far, and the US economy hasn't choked yet.. Why can't the financial sector absorb the same amount from within itself? And -- let's face it, honestly -- why can't we be seriously discussing employee compensation within the financial services sector? If this system is in the crisis we're told it is, then the belt-tightening by definition must begin with the executives. Any annual compensation packages of over a million dollars in any form (i.e. salary, bonuses, stock options, whatever) need to be stayed, if not overturned, if the taxpayer is about to bail out this entire industry. I could not stomach a whit less than that.

My ignorance of the finer points of economics is clear. But at the macro level, that's how I see this.