You certainly have a wide ranging taste in music. Latvia interest rates look appealing, but I think I will invest closer to home.

The nuns in the grade school I attended were of Lithuanian extraction. Order of St. Casimir. We heard a few tales of the Baltics.

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I LOVED that show!

I remember that. It was pretty entertaining. He was so irreverent.

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Don't know yet. You might be right. On the other hand, once we are done with multi-trillions of dollars of write offs, it may turn out OK. Based on the news today, I could see the government doing a several things. One would be to halt all bank dividends until the market stabilizes. You can not be giving money away if you are not making any. All of the stocks would tank, but the banking system needs to rebuild its collective capital somehow. Some of it should be internal. The second thing that could/should be done is a cap on all bank executive salaries. If they can not live on less than $500,000 per annum, let them quit and we'll find someone who can. Also no bonuses. I think that is plenty generous, probably over generous. The third thing the government could/should do is mandate a 90 day moratorium on foreclosures. Once again this would help to stabilize the market. the fourth item would be to mandate a restructure of all variable rate mortgages into a fixed rate model, with a cap of 4% over the existing fed funds rate. That should be enough spread for the mortgage originator and servicer to make money. Not a lot, but enough. The fifth item would be to mandate some accounting standards for the banks that actually mean something. Ban all off-balance sheet accounting. If they do not move forcefully enough, the governments will be forced into a depression era bank holiday. That would be really scary. Overspending and over consumption (greed) got us into this mess and we will not spend our way out of it. The market (collectively) will eventually find its level of true value, but the ride will be very bumpy. It would not surprise me if many businesses cut the wages of their employees 10, 30 or even 50 percent in order to stay in business.

Sorry for going on and on, but at least I got it out of my system.

Cheers

Snow snow, we have snow

There has now lot of snow, and I just love it.
All the darkness has gone, and now ground is so white that it actually looks blue.
Dark trees has get their unique surrealistic figures and there is so much light everywhere...
Landscape is from different planet now.

Ou poi, this is what Skandinavia is about. Winter wonder land.

Snow snow, I <3 snow


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