Fun and Games on Wall Street

Well, LI is nearly there on the 12,500 prediction - just fifteen days late!
Might as well lay down my prediction for this year, which is a year end unemployment rate of 6 to 6.5. Citi melts down - the congress investigates big bad ball players - John McCain looks forward to the next 100 years of our occupation in Iraq - and it is another day of crackle and pop in these here states!

I can tell it must be bad on Wall Street, as all the gleeful econ-bus blogs that were doing the sarcastic thing over the past month about how bad the financial meltdown really is - making with the black humor jokes - have stopped joking. They are unusually sober. There's an old wives tale that just before you get a heavy rainfall of stockbrokers jumping out of 25th floor windows, there is an uncanny quiet - not a peep from the wheeler dealers, the spinners, the bucketshop boys.

This portends a bad bad year for LI. Which is so sad, since we were going to join the lower middle class this year. But it looks like we will have to keep the sharp eye out for nice shady spots under the interstate. At least, however, we can be thankful that brave but daunted CEOs who dropped the casual three billion here, twenty four billion there - out on the street like so many - still are carrying away those 20 million, 100 million packages with them. But don't worry about their companies - unlimited credit from the government will keep them propped up until the next bubble comes along.