Given a message board full of college basketball fans and a Wall Street Journal employee, I thought this September Madness banks bracket deserved its own post. (source: Fark)

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Was anybody else hoping for total financial chaos?

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Watching the Dow drop like a rock in the tracker in the corner is as entertaining as Barney Frank promising to "talk uncharacteristically nice to Republicans" if they'd vote for the bill.

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It's about time...

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The number of retail store fronts occupied by bank branches is decreasing:

Analysts expect the bank to close about 540 branch sites, many that overlap with JPMorgan offices.

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From the Onion:

Meanwhile, defending a comfortable 600-0 lead in the top of ninth, the Mets decided to rest up Carlos Voltron by moving him to the outfield and replacing him with reliever Aaron Heilman, who lost the lead and eventually the game after giving up 618 runs to close the inning.

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McCain lies about why he can't appear on the Late Show:

Chris Rock unpacks Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin:

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As I was riding down 7th avenue today, I was nearly blinded by this logo all over the screens at 745 7th Avenue:

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• Don't believe the hype: In Mongolia, they eat Mongolian barbecue.
• Horse doesn't taste that bad.
• They're not yurts anymore. They're gers. I'm not sure what happened to yurts.
• Dr. No's in Mongolia and I'm not, goddammit it.

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From an AP story about Troopergate:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Less than a week after balking at the Alaska Legislature's investigation into her alleged abuse of power, Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday indicated she will cooperate with a separate probe run by people she can fire.

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Click here if you've seen any WVU football games this year...

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Morning Edition had an interesting piece about Japan's debt crisis twenty years ago. The good news is that by now the banks have pretty much gotten the bad debt off their books.

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Test your ability to differentiate between different hues.

My score: 16

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Anybody want to go?

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I'm all in favor of the United States providing bridge capital to help financial insitutions get through this bad debt crisis. What I'm against is giving them $1 trillion and saying, "dude, it's all good."

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Click here for more.

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Der Spiegel gets a little hysterical in its coverage of the current financial crisis. In comparing the current crisis to the depression of the 1930s, Der Spiegel scares up this hilarious passage:

"Nothing will be like it was before," said James Allroy, a broker who was brooding over his chai latte at a Starbucks on Wall Street. "The world as we know it is going down."

Brooding over a chai latte? It's just like 1929! More importantly there are some factual errors in the article. It claims that commercial and investment banks have been separate since 1864, but in reality it was only in the 1930s that the two were legislatively separated. Starting in 1980, laws were passed that weakened the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act and in 1999 it was totally repealed.

The irony is that the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed at the urging of the investment banks. In the late 1990s, flush on Internet boom revenues, the investment banks started salivating over commercial banks. Now, since commercial banks are less affected by investments in derivatives containing bad debt, they're the ones snapping up the investment banks.

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The Breeders have a fun new video where you get to choose the perspective. Click on 1 2 3 4 for the different cameras.

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Lynn Forrester de Rothscild on Barack Obama:

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don't like him,” she said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

Elitist? Are you kidding me?

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SNL last weekend:

FEY AS PALIN: "Good evening, my fellow Americans. I was so excited when I was told Senator Clinton and I would be addressing you tonight."

POEHLER AS CLINTON: "And I was told I would be addressing you alone."

Fast forward to today...

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It's like LA, but with lots of Chinese people.

Check out the quiet parts.

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Lehman's 2007 Bonus Pool Rises Almost 10% on Higher Revenue

It's hard to have sympathy for people whose yearly bonuses are multiples of my salary...

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It appears taht David Foster Wallace has taken his own life.

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So I've been here about three months now, but only recently have I begun to appreciate Hong Kong for what it is -- a big petri dish for pro-business capitalism. This is a business town, and what business says will happen generally does happen. Its influence is felt in ways big and little, from the biggest government policies to how I pay the water bill. For the politically minded here, I'm going to try to keep a tab of what works and what doesn't, and whether I think it would apply to a big

A couple of caveats:

One: Hong Kong is not a democracy. Beijing holds ultimate control, but within that the system favors business interests. The people vote for only half of the city's 60 lawmaker seats. Professional groups, of lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers, etc., control the other 30. A staunchly pro-business government that's also a real representative democracy might function differently.

Two: Hong Kong is pro-business, but it's not laissez-faire. To the contrary, the government helps existing businesses to a great degree. A few years back it bailed out the stock market here with a big injection of money. One of the biggest business lessons this place has given me is that for a government to be truly laissez-faire, it needs to be both strong and independent. Who knew?

The areas so far:

Taxes

What's good: They are low and they are flat. As an American citizen who wants only the best policy at home, I have deep doubts about its fairness and practicality in the U.S. As a self-centered bastard, I have to say it rocks. They take 16% at the end of the year. It's a bit more complicated than that for expats, but it still applies to most of our income. This means extra spending money, which is good because alcohol is one of the few things that's heavily taxed here, and Dr. No has developed a taste for old fashioneds.

What's bad: It's hard to tell. I have a generally nice employer who pays me enough to keep me from exploring public assistance programs and benefits that keep me exploring public health programs. I did have a nice trip to a public hospital -- I kicked a wall, it was hard, it hurt but nothing brokey -- and it was clean and quick. I had to pay about HK$130 (@ $17 U.S.) for treatment, but there may have been something invisible between them and my company going on.

Infrastructure

The good: Not sure about the roads, but other businesses -- the ferries, the subway, etc. -- are owned by corporations instead of the government. And boy are they clean. In New York, I wouldn't eat anything I dropped in a car or on a platform. In Hong Kong... ok, I still wouldn't eat it, but I'd think twice. I don't know for sure there's a relationship, but I expect there's at least some. The transportation here is much cheaper. It's the way this stuff should be run.

The bad: Naturally, it's more expensive to carry people farther out. And people farther out are generally less affluent, as rents near the city center are sky-high. That means less well-to-do people pay much higher fares to get anywhere. In New York, this would be cause for revolution. Here, that's just how it is. As a business practice, it's sound. It might be a better environmental practice, too, to charge people who use more energy higher prices. But it adds to the burden on lower-income folks.

Basic services

The good: They're pretty good. Not quite what I'd expect in the U.S., but there's Internet banking, and grocery stories and all that.

The bad: There's almost no competition. The same family that gives us cable (the only real cable provider for us English-speakers out of the two providers) also provides Internet (one of two), cellphone services (one of several but the one company dominates) and owns our local grocery store (one of two major chains). I don't know who owns the water or electronic companies, but I'm afraid to ask. The government lets business do what it wants, and that means it ruthlessly stamps out competition. As a result, prices are higher and services aren't as competitive as they are in the U.S.

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New York has a great article about contemporary architecture in NYC. Using before and after photographs, one can compare the current building with past buildings (or parking lots) on the site.

I love it because my extensive peregrinations around the city (and love of architecture) have led me to see most of the buildings, but, because of my short tenure in the city, I often did not know what had come before.

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Do the Norli believe that a President Obama would authorize cross-border attacks into an uncooperative Pakistan?

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Kareem Michael Lamont Allen, Mr. Guapo and I share a love for the movie Blood In, Blood Out: Bound by Honor. Should have won a Best Screenplay Oscar for the line "I'm white on the outside, but I'm brown on the inside." But as much as Mr. Guapo and I love that show, we've never killed anyone over it. The same cannot be said for KMLA.

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Every once in a while I come across something that leads me to reconsider eating the spicy pumpkin seeds that they sell in ziploc baggies at Reyes Deli. Today it was a piece of gravel.

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As I was listening to McCain's speech on the radio, at one point the crowd started shouting "USA! USA! USA!" for no apparent reason. The announcers stepped in at that point to say that there was a protester on the floor of the convention and at one point a banner for Iraq Veterans Against the War was visible.

Who was the protester? A Ron Paul supporter who's voting for Bob Barr.

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The Republicans at the convention loved her. Her speech also managed to upset me with, what I thought, were unfair characterizations of Obama. That's the sign of a good convention speech.

What's interesting though, is the the independents on the Detroit Free News voter panel were much, much tougher on her speech than the Democrats.

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The Republican candidate for president meeting the father of his running mate's illegitimate grand fetus.

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McCain/Palin is losing the battle in the media that normal people read. Here is the Obamas' cover story for comparison purposes.

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A fascinating collection from this fella, from 1958 to 1960. This one's my favorite but it wouldn't fit on this blog.

The one posted above might be the most ironic, considering that the message seems to be that a space program is an expensive waste of money.

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