Schadenfreude

I just learned a new word. I can't spell it, so I won't try to write it again, but it's the title of this entry. It's the shameful pleasure of enjoying someone else's misfortune. I normally don't go in for a lot of that, but in Richard Fuld's case it was well deserved. Fuld was the president of Lehman Brothers, who ran his company into the ground. He screwed up so badly that Lehman was the only bank that didn't get bailed out. Think how hard it is to accomplish that these days.

After wrecking a 158-year old company that had survived world wars, panics, and the depression, Fuld blamed everyone but himself. He went to the company gym to work out, and one of his employees punched him out. Yay! There is some justice after all.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2099592/posts

As I see it, President-elect Obama has a huge mess to clean up, which is ironic considering that private industry is supposed to be more efficient than the government. Was Lehman efficient? Was Citigroup efficient? AIG? Wachovia? Washington Mutual? IndyMac? Merrill? GM, Ford, and Chrysler? It looks to me like a lot of efficient private companies have come to the government, hat in hand, looking for help. But I really have to hand it to the auto companies. Unlike the banks which messed up by overleveraging and gambling, the carmakers bankrupted themselves working in the industry they knew best. And then the Big Three CEO's flew to Washington in their corporate jets (separately of course) to ask for a $25 billion dollar handout. Which they will use to design and build cars that no one will want to buy.

That's why I like that big S-word feeling, when bad things happen to bad people. Those who are smarter than me added up the tab for the taxpayers, and so far it comes to $7.76 trillion. That is the amount now pledged by the federal government. To print that much money, Ben Bernanke would have to chop down every tree in America, and then go up north and chop down every tree in Canada.

But I have vented enough. The price of gold was trapped in the low-700's for weeks, until the November options expiration last Thursday. Every time gold climbed to $750, it was pushed back. On Thursday the options expired worthless, and the next day gold soared to $800. By now anyone with half a brain can see that this game is rigged, but that one-day move indicates to me that the game is almost over. Herr Paulson is using duct tape to try to hold the economy together until January 20, so Bush can leave town in time for Obama to take the fall.

Of course the silver market is worse. Silver is worth $10 in New York and London, and $14 everywhere else. I think I saw that once on the Twilight Zone, or maybe it was the Outer Limits. When all of this breaks down (i.e. next year) important people will be going to prison, and the average person will be wondering where his job or his pension went. This was not an unforseeable economic upheaval, like some kind of 100-year flood. Bernanke, Greenspan, and every economic planner in the Bush administration could have predicted this, if it had been in their interest to do so. Next year, let the finger-pointing begin.