A little stroll down the FEC website  and you find why politicians espouse certain "solutions" in times of crisis.

Hillary's Campaign PAC list reveals this:

Bank of America........................$5,000
Citizens Financial Group Inc...........$9,000

Fifth Third Bancorp PAC................$2,300

International Bank of Commerce
Committe for the Improvement and
Betterment of the Country..............$2,000

New York Bankers Association...........$4,600

New York Mercantile Exchange...........$10,000

Price Waterhouse Coopers...............$15,000

::more::

You may have noticed that the stock ticker these past few days is tapping out a happy tune.  The immediate crisis is over.  So now our bold  candidates are emerging from their bunkers to lubricate their index fingers and pronounce in forthright terms how the Federal government should respond post haste.

"If the Fed can extend $30 billion to help Bear Stearns address their financial crisis," she said, "the federal government should provide at least that much emergency help to families and communities address theirs." - Hillary Clinton, March 24, 2008

More below

We knew it had to happen at some dire point along the credit crisis:

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve, struggling to contain a crisis of confidence in credit markets, will for the first time lend Treasuries in exchange for debt that includes mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed said in a statement in Washington it plans to make up to $200 billion available through weekly auctions. Officials told reporters on condition of anonymity that the program may be increased as needed.

The S&L-like bailout the taxpayers were expected all along to chump up.  Corporate welfare at its best.  Nationalized Risk Industry.

Ben is fit to be tied.
As reported in Bloomberg Bernanke and the markets' hinges are becoming even looser.
It seems that even General Electric with its AAA rating can't escape penalizing costs of borrowing through corporate issued paper.  Why is it that the soundest and safest corporations now are being caught up in the structured debt fiasco?

Look below at the amazing if disturbing answer

Great news on Friday 2/29 as the Federal judge in San Francisco reversed his mindblowing injunction that suppressed the whistleblower website Wikileaks.

From the Inquirer

If you hadn't followed the story, the Swiss bank Julius Baer filed for the injunction on the premise it's privacy rights were violated.  Judge Jeffery White provided the injunction and the ISP, Dynadot, the site was hosted on took down the DNS entries for the site in compliance.

Why was this outrageous?   Read below.

Tomorrow night we have the Cleveland State Debate.  This calls me back to October of 1980, when as a teenage Clevelander on the near west side, President Carter met the unflappable Ronald Reagan in a battle not unlike Hearns vs. Leonard a year later.  Such classic soundbites like "There you go again..." and "Are you better off now than you were four years ago" first echoed off the American consciousness in Cleveland.

The Debate at Wikipedia

More...

Check out Bloomberg's expose´ on our ex-pres's big buddy movie with the generous Canadian investment banker Frank Giustra.

Bill does a whole lot of multi-tasking it seems when combining his "charitable" tax exempt activities with the speechifying windfalls and the lobbying on the part of mineral rights deals across the globe for pal Frank not to mention campaigning for Hillary.

Many new and maybe senior users on this site may not be aware of the phenomenon known as Concern Trolling.
Loosely defined a Concern Troll is one who may or may not be overtly aware of their position in furthering or disseminating a Right Wing frame or meme that seeks to leverage legitimacy in an otherwise empty attack against left candidates.  A Concern Troll is someone who adopts the frame or swallows the pill and brings it into the progressive discussion in a way similar to contagious disease.  And they always do it by taking the position that they are only "concerned" for the exposure and damage the right could do progressives if only we took the Right Wing Noise Machine more seriously. There is no excuse for it.

I'll cut to the chase.  Bloomberg:

Deutsche Bank AG's writedowns on subprime losses were 2.16 billion euros ($3.09 billion) -- less than they would have been if not for the offsetting short trades of Greg Lippmann, the bank's global head of asset-backed securities trading.

and then, near the end, this:

Deutsche Bank recently began meetings to create a new index on another security, Alt-A mortgage bonds. It will allow hedging against defaults by Alt-A borrowers, who have prime credit and get mortgages without verifying their incomes.

Investors will also be able to wager that Alt-A homeowners will quit making payments, potentially turning losses into more and bigger paydays.

If your instincts are piqued by those two paragraphs then maybe this diary is for you.  Let's look at the real moral issue at stake here underneath the turbulent roil of the money market of the past twelve or so weeks.

Perhaps you've heard about the big Arctic meltdown this year.  And you've glanced at the headline of Russia planting it's flag on the ocean floor of the North Pole.  Maybe accounts of the Northwest Passage being open for business caught your attention recently.

Behind these accelerating events swirling the Arctic circle is the thawing of the U.S. position on signing international treaty as proactive diplomacy to settle dispute.

It is called the U.N. Convention on the International Law of the Sea (CLOS) and it's been floating around for over 25 years.  It could be the first time the U.S. will accede to the logic of multilateral treaty since Reagan was in office.

Why now?  And who's pushing for it?  See below for the shocking answers and maybe some positive if unintended consequence for Kyoto and beyond.

Oh, actually I'm not sure who I'm going to vote for.  Heh.

The NYT has this to report today:

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

Sens. Clinton, D-N.Y., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., announced they would introduce legislation that would require the president to seek a reauthorization from Congress to extend the military effort in Iraq beyond October 11, 2007.

I've put up this diary since the other diaries seem to be nothing but cheerleaders for the primary candidates.
Is it possible to have a frank discussion on the value of Hillary and Bob's angle on ending this war sans the jockeying for our favorites?