Fallout From The Meltdown

From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is about to file civil fraud charges against E&Y for the work it did helping Lehman cook its books during 2007 and 2008. The short version of what happened goes something like this. Lehman Brothers, like all the other big banks on Wall Street in those years, was nearing insolvency and desperate for cash. In advance of its quarterly reports in 2007, the firm executed a series of something called Repo 105 transactions in an attempt to make their balance sheet look healthier than it was.

This is not good news for the short term.  And if it gets any real play in the news, it could be  really bad.  It may be though, that it cleans up some of the shit that nobody even wants to look at much less handle.

The unwillingness of Obama to tackle these really difficult problems is the main failing of his presidency.  Maybe I'm being too harsh; maybe he has to deal with the immediate troubles of as many Americans as possible to keep us from going completely over the cliff; maybe.  But unless we stop fuckin' around and start dealing with the structural problems, we're likely to find that we're just setting ourselves up for more shit down the road - and 'down the road' could easily come a lot sooner than anybody's willing to admit.