Picture of the Day; September 16th, 2008

To brighten an otherwise dim and depressing day….

Still No Good News

From the Dealbook at the Times:

The prospects of a private market solution to the deterioration of the American International Group appeared to be faltering on Tuesday, as talks involving the Federal Reserve and several banks turned to the possibility of using government money to shore up the ailing insurance giant, people briefed on the negotiations said Tuesday morning.

Fed officials were still meeting with A.I.G., JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Tuesday morning to discuss possible options. It isn’t clear that any solution, including one involving government money, will emerge, this person said.

If a financing solution is not reached, A.I.G. may file for bankruptcy as soon as Wednesday, a person briefed on the matter said Monday night. The company has hired the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges — which is also handling the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy — to draw up bankruptcy papers.

Shit White People not only Like, but Rely On

The following is excerpted from this website, which I discovered through a multicultural education listserv to which i subscribe. I thought you all would enjoy it as much as I did…

This is Your Nation on White Privilege

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

• White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

Answer to Matt Damon’s Question

Care of Salon.com:

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.’”

And yet she’s still the VP nominee for the Republicans.

Midnight Economic Outlook

While things could change very quickly between now and tomorrow morning (well, this morning), things still don’t look up. Even after digesting Lehman’s Chapter 11 filing and Merryl’s sale, AIG still remains in bad shape and the futures market for the DOW tomorrow remains bearish. What is so frightening is that although Lehman was a big names on Wall Street, AIG is not just a big name- it’s a behemoth. It has over one TRILLION dollars in total assets (compared to Lehman’s paltry $600 billion). Its failure would probably be worse than the Lehman collapse due to the level of exposure all the other major banks have to AIG. In the words of BofA’s Chairman (the only bank that seems to have any money these days):

`I don’t know of a major bank that doesn’t have some significant exposure to AIG,” said Kenneth Lewis, chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp., in a CNBC interview. An AIG collapse would “be a much bigger problem than most that we’ve looked at.”

That is, if AIG goes under, every other major bank will have to deal with assets that may be worthless in the wake of the collapse.

Of course, in addition to viewing the potential failure of AIG as a macro problem we also must consider those closer to us. I truly hope they pull through.