Senator Obama’s Statement of Principles for the Treasury Proposal: "Thus far, the Administration has only offered a concept with a staggering price tag, not a plan. "
ASIC in total ban on short selling: That’s the Australians, and with them it’s all stocks, not just financials. And then there’s Germany, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Taiwan…
Why Paulson is Wrong and Oppose The Treasury’s Bailout Plan and Concerns about the Treasury Rescue Plan and Why You Should Hate the Treasury Bailout Proposal and The Bailout of All Bailouts is a Bad Idea and Paulson stops thinking, starts acting and The sticking points in the bailout plan and A Bad Bank Rescue and Hoping a Hail Mary Pass Connects: Just a few of the many, many blog entries and columns saying much the same thing. Steve Waldman sums it up in one word: Bad — although he later calls it "breathtakingly awful" just for good measure. He even has a better idea.
Facts about banks: "The total liabilities of Barclays of around 1,300 billion pounds (leverage ratio over 60!) surpasses Britain’s GDP… What would happen if a big U.K. bank were on the verge of failing? Would the Fed have to step in there too?"
How SEC Regulatory Exemptions Helped Lead to Collapse
To a First Approximation, Last Week Didn’t Happen: Kedrosky looks at a Morgan Stanley bond. "Assuming normality (which is a species of the assumption made my many default risk modelers), and noticing that we saw a $34 price decline, we witnessed a 50-plus standard deviation event, the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen without dinosaurs reappearing too."
Things you can’t do with the short-selling rule: Buy banks’ bonds, if you want to hedge by shorting the stock.
As Markets Swing, Meriwether Hears Echoes of His Own Collapse: He’s down 26% in 2008.