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So you're saying the Fed has no influence (influence, not direct control, note) on the rates going from 13 weeks to 2 years? Because that would be the first time I'd ever seen anyone say that.

BTW, since I know all you "zealots", as AAA calls you guys, are reading this, are we now going to get any posts on how the gold folks were clued in to today's number, being as how gold shot up yesterday? Or are these conspiracy posts you guys love to make confined only to times when financial...

Greed is always around. The form it takes in finance, though, depends on the environment. Bernanke set up an environment where there was an incentive to lend to riskier people, because risk=higher rates (every bp over a Treasury rate is a measure of the risk you're taking, as Rick Santelli once...

No. Read my post. Find in there some spot where I begged for a cut for the sake of the stock market. Take your time.

I'm making a shitload on options on GDX right now, fool. Can't read, can you?

No, the idiocy on his part was being too tight for too long. The rate should never have been above 4.5 at most in the first place. The flat to inverted curve was an incentive for banks to look for ways to make money other than buying money short and selling it long term, their normal way of...

What they know that you don't comes from highly sophisticated software that tells them who's gonna default on what at what rate and at what amount of debt. Fortunately, Discover is still offering me low rates and 5% cash back. Must not have gotten their software revved up yet.

What can I say? Our computers are programmed better. At the big commercial banks, anyway. Among the IB's, the only one I have confidence in is Lehman, the authors of this report. The others, not so sure.

Only indication I've gotten so far is Bank of America sending me notice that they were raising their rate on balance transfers and cash advances. As if I'd ever do one without a promo rate.

This is one good reason to be long USD. Strangely enough, European banks could be hit harder than the US ones by this subprime stuff. Which would explain the ECB having to put more money into the interbank market than the Fed did.

A mere artifact of nervousness: lots of folks don't want to hold overnight, apparently. Check a two day chart of the SPX: notice that dip at the end on Friday, and then the mirror image bounce this morning; looks like the same bunch re-establishing their positions. The EOD dip today looks like...

Well, as of now, the only hope of the bears appears to be that either a) no rate cut & the market tanks, or b) rate cut of .25 and the market is disappointed. Given all the bearish posts around here, the likelihood of either scenario happening is vanishingly small. I don't know what Ben...

Well, in the latest poll here, posted by Pa(b)st Prime, 8.57% of respondents went for the most bullish case - I just checked. The bearishness around here is so dense it's almost suffocating. If that's any reflection of the real world, higher is the only way to go.

OK, OK, I'll put you on my top ten. As for a higher target for inflation, I'm sure the Admin is working on wringing that out of him as I write this. Next year is an election year, after all. Around here, you can tell 'cause the roads get paved. In Fedland, it's usually either cause for cutting...

I don't really care what Jim Grant's record is on calling the Fed, 'cause he writes like an angel. Best writer on Wall Street, and I really wish I could afford a subscription to his rag. John Dizard of the FT is my best consolation. I'm happy to agree with him on the Fed cutting. Also on the...

I'm experimenting with this right now, and it does seem to be reasonably efficient in terms of dollars spent for amount of protection received. I should say that what I'm trying is long calls on indexes of sectors that I'm bullish on, and then protecting this against disaster with VIX calls...

Mostly I find Kudlow to be a perma-bull with an obvious political agenda. However, his call for lower rates is a longtime thing, and has to do with supply-side logic: a greater supply of goods will soak up the extra liquidity, is the idea. We are experiencing this in the real world, you know...

The dollar is the world's reserve currency, which is why you're seeing that effect. Demand for dollars is greater than it would be otherwise, which makes it chronically overvalued, which is why the US is cornered into running a trade deficit. The tradeoff is of course, that we get everybody...

Yep. You, Bernanke, Trichet, and every useless bureaucrat on the boards of the Fed and ECB know better than all those folks in all those pits trading all those instruments. Right.

The plural of anecdote is not data.