Evening Reading Requests

Hopefully you had a nice day in the semi-spring weather today because it is going away for the week and you get to freeze your man and lady parts off the next 4 mornings. El spellhisnamesomhowblo had a good post on articles worth reading, but I’d like to add two more for you this evening while you have a hand stuffed down your pants and are watching Funniest Home Videos.

Newsweek has a great article giving historical numbers and where we are currently and it is worth a read this evening. Here are A couple of snippets for you to get you lazy bastages to read it. It is only 1.5 pages so it won’t taked long at all.

Unemployment will continue to rise for three more years, reaching 11–12 percent in 2011.

The bad news is that these down price cycles typically last for several years. So, even if the big hit on stocks and house prices has come already, the bottom might not be reached until the end of 2010.

The second is Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone which Dorian Gray pointed me to this past Friday.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second.

And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste.
Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

….Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.