Interesting critique of the administration in the London Review of Books. Since it's the anniversary of Lehman, when Obama became the presumptive President, these anniversary pieces will crop up more and more, no doubt.

Harrison provides a nice round up of judicial victories for homeowners (show me the note!) as well as links about Citi's problems in Belgium (where it got people to move money from savings accounts to investments in Lehman) and evidence that Citi is in trouble globally.

Simon Johnson (and some sane central banksters*) diagnose the first; Yves diagnoses the second.

For my money -- BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! -- Yves has the right of it:

Jr Deputy Accountant:

[I]f you think they haven't tossed the bodies in the water by now you're out of your damn mind. The Fed knows as long as it can buy enough time it will weasel its way out of this one way or another and if not, at least they have enough goons to work overtime dissolving bones in vats of acid or whatever it is they've got to do.

Silly rabbit, audits are for kids. If we're going to dismantle the Fed, we're A) going to have to come at them with something scarier than an audit (doesn't Citigroup pass its audits every year? That's what I thought.) and B) next time surprise attack their asses. Seriously? They've had months to bury bodies. Lehman was over a year ago. What's the delay? We're acting as though we're not dealing with a diabolical cabal over here, WTF?

The Fed doesn't need an audit, it needs a good sadistic proctologist and a nice hard spanking. For starters.

Well, er.

A long article by Andy Xie on the next bubble (and how the bursting bubbles fleece the small, who don't have the inside knowledge of when to get out). This sentence jumped out:

The lesson from the Lehman collapse seems to be, "Take whatever you can and, when it crashes, you get to keep it."

Yep. "Take what you can." Works for the banksters, works for the health insurance companies, works for the permanent government in Versailles and whichever party is running it.