With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their "distressed assets", i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we'd give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government. We need your help and you need the Government's help!

Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD "MMMbop", it's not what you can sell these items for that matters, it's what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.

- From BoingBoing.net

BuyMyShitPile.com: Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments too?

Russell Taylor, one of the writers of Alex, the cartoon of city life which runs in the Daily Telegraph's business section, has written his own version of James Stewart's speech from It's A Wonderful Life.

It captures just how Alex Masterley - the caddish hero of the comic strip - would describe the events of the past week.

BBC - Today

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Another crisis, another massive power grab.

naked capitalism: Why You Should Hate the Treasury Bailout Proposal

The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients - or each other - is in danger of becoming extinct.

So says a doctor who has spent four years charting more than 200 colourful examples.
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Top medical acronyms
CTD - Circling the Drain (A patient expected to die soon)
GLM - Good looking Mum
GPO - Good for Parts Only
TEETH - Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy
UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury
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And the number of terms for patients believed to be somewhat intellectually challenged is enormous.

From LOBNH (Lights On But Nobody Home), CNS-QNS (Central Nervous System - Quantity Not Sufficient), to the delightful term "pumpkin positive", which refers to the implication that a penlight shone into the patient's mouth would encounter a brain so small that the whole head would light up.

"pumpkin positive" is by far my favourite

BBC NEWS | Health | Doctor slang is a dying art

Another electronic book reader has arrived, ready to do battle with its paper cousins. But, writes cultural critic Stephen Bayley, it faces an uphill struggle against a truly beautiful knowledge delivery platform.

What is the most flexible, intelligent, interactive data retrieval system yet to appear?

It's the book.

i love books

plus i love that he wrote "books are not going to disappear in a Gotterdammerung of pixellation." That made me laugh "Gotterdammerung of pixellation" what a great expression!

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Beautiful, perfect, supreme chunk of paper

Watching some financial stocks just get wiped out in recent months, I often hear a voice in the back of my head, and it is the same voice as one of those dealers in Las Vegas who coolly tells you as he sweeps up your chips after you’ve busted in blackjack: “Thank you for playing, ladies and gentlemen.”
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Now is the time for coolly sorting out what markets can do best and what governments need to do better.
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But we also need to understand the uniqueness of this bubble in order to identify where smart government needs to step in.
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In the long run, though, regulators need to find ways to limit the amount of leverage investment banks or insurance companies can take on at any one time, because given how intertwined they all are in today’s global economy, one bank blowing up can now take down many.
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“We do not need a regulatory ‘surge’ on Wall Street,” he added. “We need a complete rethinking of how we make global financial markets more transparent and how we ensure that the risks within those markets — .many of which are new and many of which are not well understood even by the experts — are managed and monitored properly.”

In sum, government’s job is to police that fine line between the necessary risk-taking that drives an innovation economy and crazy gambling with other people’s savings in ways that threaten us all. We need to make sure that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas — and doesn’t come to Main Street. We need to get back to investing in our future and not just betting on it.

Op-Ed Columnist - Keep It in Vegas - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

During the present crisis I keep seeing numbers bandied about which talk about company x having assets of so many billion and I saw today how one company recently sold $31 billion worth of mortgage-backed derivatives for 22 cents on the dollar in late July and I remember my basics in economics that the idea of a monetary worth is at worst a fantasy and at best a narrative but sensible people treat it as a concrete thing on which to base very important decisions. The claim that they sold $31 billion in assets or that Lehmans has assets of x hundred billion dollars is not exactly a lie but something else. I was taught that monetary worth was what the market would pay at a particular point in time and that while there may exist some platonic concept of monetary worth it was impossible to say anything other that over time market forces should discover it by finding equilibrium. Price is dependent on the context of the market. Anyone who has ever conducted a stock take knows that the prices recorded for accountancy purposes are almost, but not quite, a complete fiction. You write down not an estimate of market value but a book price. I ran a shop and always conducted the stock take and the book price had no relation to fair market value. Apart from anything else how do you estimate fair market value. Should I have estimated the jewelry at firesale prices? At melt down value? Etc. My job for accountancy purposes was to provide numbers and give the values set by my employers based on the retail price they had set -- yet I was valuing unsold discontinued lines. So for accountancy purpose how do you value a junk bond, or the many, many different securities (sub-prime backed or otherwise).

I hear much talk of greater transparency in the markets which I think is fundamentally important and needed so people can make more rational decisions. But no market is wholly rational and the idea of transparency whilst taking much guesswork out of the market in that it would give traders a better idea of what a company thought its assets are worth is still based on the fiction that a particular company has a realistic estimate of its assets (edit. clearly also if you have more information about the precise breakdown of those assets ie how many are subprime securities and the value the company has put on them there is likely to be a more rational market). So we come back to confidence. So much of the markets is based on fictions and great mountains of fictions. And I am reminded of what FDR said "We have nothing to fear but fear itself". Until the markets start believing in the narrative of confidence rather than fear there will be trouble. Also, where pure capitalists are wrong I believe is that, regulating the market whilst yes it does stifle the market also provides security, stability and an underpinning of confidence. If you are regulated like Fannie Mae and too big to fold then you are backed by the taxpayer: there is a base line of confidence. This is a lesson from the thirties that the political right had forgotten.

This is exactly why we send astronauts to risk their life to service Hubble: in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. I don't know about you, but when a research paper conclusion says "We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class" I get a chill of oooh-aaahness down my spine. Especially when after a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation. Get your tinfoil hats out, because it gets even weirder.
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Apparently, a scientist at the LHC declared that the object is similar to the flash that an Imperial Star Destroyer does when reaching Warp 10. Either that or some dust on the Hubble lenses, so someone tell NASA to get some Windex up there too.

Hubble: Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space, Scientists Puzzled

Making and enforcing new rules is necessary, but that will not be enough. The nation needs a new perspective on the markets, one that acknowledges the self-destructive bent of unfettered capitalism and its ability, unchecked, to wreak havoc far beyond Wall Street.

Editorial - Wall Street Casualties - Editorial - NYTimes.com

Philosophical debates arise at the oddest times, and in the heat of this election season, one is now rising in Republican ranks. The narrow question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president? Most conservatives say yes, on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in different ways that she is unready.

Op-Ed Columnist - Why Experience Matters - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com