Does anyone else see the irony in that?

So the big things I saw yesterday were DOW walking away from ROH, ROH suing to try and force them to complete the deal, PFE finally doing what everyone expected them to and bidding for WYE and SSCC filing.

DOW walking does not bode well for the M&A market specifically, the credit market in general or the overall tape. If you don't think I am right then why is ROH suing to try and force them to complete the deal?

PFE has nothing in the pipeline so they had to buy one, hence why they are taking a run at WYE. Not sure it will generate a bunch of M&A in the pharma space but the thing I noticed was PFE geting their credit rating downgraded and guess what- a part of the deal is dependant on PFE keeping the credit rating they had prior to announcing the deal.

So BARC said yesterday they don't need any more capital- right. Last time they said that they paid 14% for paper from the Mideast, which was roughly 2$ more than they would have had to pay to their government. Something tells me I am not going to believe them this time.

So the President thinks the second part of TARP should go directly to families/consumers. Let's think this through: The second part of TARP goes right to families. There is nothing to say they will spend it. MY guess is they would use it to pay off debt or save it. Kind of defeats the issue of boosting the C part of Y= C+I+G+(X-M), doesn't it? If they don't spend it it does nothing on the margin for the economy. Oh, well, it looks good to the polity.

The above comment is a good segue into a couple of editorials in yesterday's WSJ discussing the theory of the Keynesian multiplier effect.

I am bummed that it appears someone is trying to make John Thain the sacrificial lamb to crucify for our economic sins. He got subpoenaed today. The NY AG may be pissed he did not get to replace HRC. In the big picture, him spending $1.2 million on the CEO's suite of offices in the global headquarters of the company are small potatoes compared to the ~$15 billion lost due to his predecessor's actions and choices. He was man enough though to apologize and say he'd pay for it out of his own pocket. If Main Street wants a head on a pike Thain is not deserving. He prevented MER from going the way of LEH and BSC. Someone should defend the guy and there are much more appropriate people to have their heads on a pike- two that come to mind are Angelo Mozilla and/or Franklin Raines.

Some of you may not believe but our government lies to us. Yesterday S cut 8k jobs, CAT cut 20k and HD cut 7k. There is no way the unemployment rate can be less than 10%. The qualifier is the government keeps changing the denominator, i.e changing the rules. Of course I wanted to write this last night but we had dinner guest and today the WSJ had an article stating that many states the rate is at or above 10%.

I had dinner with the Hanson Brothers tonight. They are not old time hockey but they are old time Wall Street. I have known the older one for 17 years. I was glad to see them to make sure they are holding up in the current environment. I am a bit distraught though. We somehow got onto the topic of the ex and the older one made a comment "But you left her." Funny how now people I thought were my friends and would not judge me really do. Sobering actually but I was a bit bummed that he waited this long to- albeit unintentionally is my guess- to tell me that is how he really feels.

So yesterday I spotted a headline about Zeus. Since the boys and I were discussing Greek mythology over the weekend I of course had to read it. Two things: I did not know there was such a thing as petrified lightning (it's called fulgurite fyi) and one of the main representations of Zeus was the labrys which the Romans called a bipennis. Well apparently the labrys is also a symbol of the lesbian movement and/or female/matriarchical power. I guess it is some women trying to reassert what many theorists think about how millenia ago the sky was though to be a goddess and the earth a god. At some point those two were reversed and it became the sky god and the earth goddess/mother. So now by appropriating a bipennis I guess some could infer think they are twice as envious.