Monday marks the 173rd anniversary of the fateful landing of the HMS Beagle on the Galápagos Islands. Aboard that day in 1835 was Charles Darwin, whose five-year journey would bring us natural selection and the rise of the neocreationists.
Monday will include a clearer picture of the messy natural selection well underway on Wall Street. Bank of America Corp. will buy Merrill Lynch & Co. for about $29 a share, according to The Wall Street Journal. BofA paid a premium, of course, because it's only money, scads of money. No one outside the loop understands how BofA, a company with declining profits and an albatross named Countrywide Financial in its portfolio, can afford to pay $29 a share for Merrill Lynch, a company trading at $17 a share on Friday. Such is the weekend deal.
Lehman Brothers is in the toilet. Washington Mutual and A.I.G. could be goners by the end of the week. Britain could soon slide into recession.
A "once-in-a-century" financial meltdown, Alan Greenspan says, and "it still has a way to go." Already a notch past the teeter stage, we've yet to see the bottom. Extinctions will continue.
We will evolve and the good guys will win. Now we wait for someone to win, so we can call them good.
2 comments:
I like the close - good description of Real Politik
Why only nationalize failures? The entire financial system needs to be immeditely nationalized.
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