US [public] pension funds face worst losses in history.

Oh well. I'll never be able to affords to retire, but I can have fun with my insurance company and my auto company and my...

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We can't afford not to have single-payer!

Off topic, but go check your email for me. Thanks.

From Catch 22:

"Then you do make a profit for yourself," Yossarian declared.

"Of course I do," [Milo Minderbinder said]. "But it all goes to the syndicate. And everybody has a share. Don't you understand? It's exactly what happens with those plum tomatoes I sell to Colonel Cathcart."

"Buy," Yossarian corrected him. "You don't sell plum tomatoes to Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. You buy plum tomatoes from them."

"No, sell," Milo corrected Yossarian. "I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them up from me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece, I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece, and everybody comes out ahead."

So now you own a share, and of course everybody comes out ahead.

I had an explanation for what the Financial Times was pitching in the article you quoted a while back. Well it turns out that the reason the Fannie and Freddie mortgage rates are not coming down has nothing to do with the fact that the government is guaranteeing debt in addition to the GSE debt. Now it looks like there was some fine print that went along with that Fannie and Freddie bail-out.

Here's Paul Krugman's explanation:

There’s also bizarre stuff going on with regard to the mortgage market. I thought that the whole point of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending agencies, was to remove fears about their solvency and thereby lower mortgage rates. But top officials have made a point of denying that Fannie and Freddie debt is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government — and as a result, markets are still treating the agencies’ debt as a risky asset, driving mortgage rates up at a time when they should be going down.

Actually I, myself, had a sinking feeling about any federal government guarantees, including FDIC, after reading this last week.

It is all degenerating pretty fast. And believe it or not, Krugman thinks the federal government is going to have to throw in money more faster. For the first time I'm thinking this really may not end up well at all.

some people are upset about Carly Fiorina's remarks about the auto industry:

"I don't think the government can rescue the industry," Carly Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) Corp , told Reuters at an event in suburban Detroit.

"Whatever the government does, it should not take away the fundamentals of risk-taking. Sometimes it leads to rewards and sometimes consequences, downside," she said. "In other words, the auto industry cannot be saved from its own bad bets.

I wonder what she thinks of the bailout of the financial industry.