Interesting times

The big news over the weekend was that the Treasury Dept and the Fed will back Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, thus bringing a little welcome socialism to the chaos of mad-dog capitalism that has brought the American financial system very near collapse. Good ol' Jim Kunstler wrote in his Monday post

What would happen if the US Government acted to bail out these feckless enterprises (and what if they don't)? Either way, it's not a pretty picture. If Mr. Bernanke does start shoveling loans into the GSE black hole, he'll further undermine the soundness of his own outfit and do nothing, really, to repair Fannie and Freddie's structural problem of having securitized too many loans that will never be paid back. If instead Fannie and Freddie are flat-out taken over entirely by the US government (and remember the Federal Reserve is not the government), then the national debt will roughly double overnight -- which will pound the US dollar down a rat-hole.

Read all the gloom here. Kunstler practically has us out raising gardens for our sustenance, and that may be a little extreme, but things are certainly a mess. Guy who sends me financial stuff has been zipping out little gloomy rockets by the dozens in the last week or so.