Wall Street Nightmare!

WOW!
Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch are gone!

What the hell happened?

The Dow suffered its worst percentage loss in more than six years Monday as the markets were slammed by an historic weekend that left Wall Street without financial giants Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

The momentous selloff came as insurance giant AIG lost more than half its value and crude oil futures plunged more than $5, closing below $100 a barrel for the first time since March.

Today's Market

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 504.48 points, or 4.42% to 10917.51, the Standard & Poor’s 500 lost 58.17 points, or 4.65%, to 1193.53 and the Nasdaq Composite slid 81.36 points, or 3.60%, to 2179.91. The FOX 50 dropped 39.47 points, or 4.37%, to 863.37.

Did anybody see this coming?
Sure we did. We just didn't think people would overreact like this and we sure didn't think that all those bad loans would go to forclosure like carribou crossing the tundra during the migration!

The markets went into a tailspin in the final minutes of the day, reflecting anxiety over AIG (AIG: 4.76, -7.38, -60.79%), Tuesday's Federal Reserve policy meeting and an upcoming earnings statement from Goldman Sachs (GS: 135.50, -18.71, -12.13%). The VIX, a measure of market volatility, jumped 23.5% to 31.7 on Monday.
“This is a very bad situation and people are justifiably concerned," said Michael James, senior equity trader at Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles. “Right now it's sell first and ask question later.”

So, How did this happen?
Investor's Business Daily has a pretty good handle on the mess...
The Real Culprits In This Meltdown

Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it's dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the "trickle-down" economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.
But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory."

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the '90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.
As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.

Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.

Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.

In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.

But it was too little, too late. Raines had reportedly steered Fannie Mae business to subprime giant Countrywide Financial, which was saved from bankruptcy by Bank of America.
At the same time, the Clinton administration was pushing Fannie and her brother Freddie Mac to buy more mortgages from low-income households.

The Clinton-era corruption, combined with unprecedented catering to affordable-housing lobbyists, resulted in today's nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie, a move that is expected to cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

And the worst is far from over. By the time it is, we'll all be paying for Clinton's social experiment, one that Obama hopes to trump with a whole new round of meddling in the housing and jobs markets. In fact, the social experiment Obama has planned could dwarf both the Great Society and New Deal in size and scope.

There's a political root cause to this mess that we ignore at our peril. If we blame the wrong culprits, we'll learn the wrong lessons. And taxpayers will be on the hook for even larger bailouts down the road.

But the government-can-do-no-wrong crowd just doesn't get it. They won't acknowledge the law of unintended consequences from well-meaning, if misguided, acts.

Obama and Democrats on the Hill think even more regulation and more interference in the market will solve the problem their policies helped cause. For now, unarmed by the historic record, conventional wisdom is buying into their blame-business-first rhetoric and bigger-government solutions.

While government arguably has a role in helping low-income folks buy a home, Clinton went overboard by strong-arming lenders with tougher and tougher regulations, which only led to lenders taking on hundreds of billions in subprime bilge.

Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government's fingerprints all over it.

So, there it is folks. Big goverenment at it's best.
The bail out king at work. Make all these marginal loans available to the least of us and when they go bad, just bail them out. The taxpayers won't mind...

Oh, and don't forget to blame George... Everybody else is!