‘Memmer Last Septemmer?
A couple of months before I started writing blog entries, I “looked into the abyss” on my own personal trading screens here at the office. It was mid-September or so, right after the Fed let Lehman fail and before the significance of what just happened was really felt by anyone but a few… yet.
Early the morning of the 15th of September as I look at my screens, I’m thinking that I’m seeing a “blip”… you know, a data error, an internet outage, the ghost in the machine… whatever.
Specifically, what’s confusing is that the couple of trust preferreds that I follow (like bonds, but traded on exchanges in $25 hunks rather than the off-Broadway $1000 chunks that a regular bond trades), traded at around $15.00 or so a minute ago and now many of them are now being “bid” at an odd $.50 or so. For a few minutes, I thought the system totally freaked. After a while the 50 cent bids finally were replaced by 3 to 5 dollar bids… then up to about 7 to 8 bucks… finally settling in at about two-thirds of what was bid the day before.
Of course today, I now know it wasn’t the ghost in the machine… it was the abyss. I had looked “over the edge”. I had seen the financial “white light”.
And apparently Hank had seen it too. He met with Congress, made the talk show rounds (white as a ghost, btw) and said SOMETHING to Congress and they gave him the money. So, what was the SOMETHING that scared him so badly?
OK, so thanks to Representative Kanjorski of Pennsylvania (maybe he was talking out of school??), we’ve got a pretty decent idea what happened that day. He says that…
“On Thursday, September 15, 2008 at roughly 11 a.m., the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two. Money was being removed electronically.
The treasury tried to help with $150 billion. But could not stem the tide. It was an electronic run on the banks The Treasury intervened, but, had they not closed down the accounts, they estimated that by 2 p.m. that afternoon. Within 3 hours. $5.5 trillion would have been withdrawn and collapsed within 24 hours the world economy.”
Watch the video, his explanation starts at about 2 minutes and 20 seconds into it. I also double-checked some additional congressional testimony tapes where Rep. Kanjorski questions Mr. Paulson about this very thing because I didn’t want to foist some “conspiracy theory” crap off on my loyal readers. In the tapes, Mr. Paulson does not deny what happened.
[[He also mentions that there was only the 'lone gunman' and there was no alien autopsy.... Sorry gang.]]
Now we know.
