Don't believe in those liars. There shall be blood on the street

An little excerpt from Naked Capitalism

We're not quite as healthy as we thought we were. Oops. (WSJ)

J.P. Morgan Chase Chief Executive James Dimon said...that March was a little tougher than the first two months of the year....Bank of America...CEO Kenneth Lewis also said that March had been a tougher month for his bank. [Convenient that they decided to dump this information on Friday afternoon, and at the close of a very good week].

Readers may recall that a few weeks ago, those two CEOs---along with Citi's Vikram Pandit---said the first two months of the year had been very good:

Pandit, March 10th: “We are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007.”

Dimon, March 11th: "Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said Wednesday that the bank was profitable in January and February..."

Lewis, March 12th: "We have been profitable for the first two months of the year,” Lewis told reporters after a speech in Boston today.

This was possibly the most nakedly self-serving bullshit the big bank CEOs have offered to date. ("bullshit" being a technical term of course, see Harry Frankfurt)

Karl Marx and AIG

This corrupted rotten US capitalist financial system is making me sick.

A.I.G. is effectively suing its majority owner, the government, which has an 80 percent stake and has poured nearly $200 billion into the insurer in a bid to avert its collapse and avoid troubling the global financial markets. The company is in effect asking for even more money, in the form of tax refunds. The suit also suggests that A.I.G. is spending taxpayer money to pursue its case, something it is legally entitled to do.

While the American International Group comes under fire from Congress over executive bonuses, it is quietly fighting the federal government for the return of $306 million in tax payments.


Here is an interesting quote for J. F. Kennedy

"You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.

We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."

But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.

If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man." - John F. Kennedy, 35th President.