Even 'safe' funds play with fire
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/19/magazines/fortune/eavis_boa.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007101917
One of the things SIVs issue is asset-backed commercial paper, which is basically short-term debt that is collateralized with assets, although those assets may just be other types of debt.)
Beware banks' bragging on earnings
J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have used their superior results this quarter to try and steal business from rivals. But are they really as strong as they look?
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/17/news/companies/wall.st.fortune/index.htm
The Future Is Drying Up
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
This is an old prophecy, dating back more than a century to one of the original American explorers of the West, John Wesley Powell, who doubted the territory could support large populations and intense development. (Powell presciently argued that river basins, not arbitrary mapmakers, should determine the boundaries of the Western states, in order to avoid inevitable conflicts over water.) An earlier explorer, J. C. Ives, visited the present location of Hoover Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, in 1857. The desiccated landscape was "valueless," Ives reported. "There is nothing there to do but leave."
RESCUE EFFORTS TO SAVE BANKS REVEALS TOTAL BANKRUPTCY OF FINANCIAL POLICIES
If these people had examined critically, even for five minutes, the current state of affairs, it would have been apparent to them, that Bernanke's sell out to Wall Street was a stop gap measure to calm the markets and create a state of illusion. But it did not work for the simple reason that one cannot simply revive, on a permanent basis, a hopelessly terminally ill patient, when all its organs are failing rapidly, save the ventilator maintaining the last few breaths.
