Even Stephen Forbes can see that the current economic crisis is because of the Fed.

The venture capital comany that funded the likes of Google, Apple, YouTube, Electronic Arts, Atari, Cisco, Nvida, Gracenote, Linkedin, Zappos, Yahoo, Cafepress, eHarmony, Paypal, and Oracle had a presentation on October 7, 2008. The company required representatives of all companies it funded to be in attendance, and the message it shared was bold: Rest In Peace, Good Times.

The video has been kept to Silicon Valley VC firms and high-tech upstarts, but it’s pretty intense. The slideshow can be seen here

The bail out passed. How is your 401K?

I am far from a fan of CNBC’s Jim Cramer from Mad Money. He urged investors to keep their money in Bear Sterns, a company which later dropped to a level of almost worthless. But Kramer has been instrumental in keeping consumer confidence in the Stock Market, stating that “there is always something good to be invest in.”

…Until now. For the first time in a long time, Kramer is forced to face reality. See the video.

Even with the bailout package firmly in place—a plan under which the federal government will buy bad mortgage-related assets off the books of banks—investors remain worried that banks are too fearful to lend and are cutting off air to the economy.

Today the Dow Jones dropped another 369 points, finishing below 10,000 for the first time since climbing out of the crisis after September 11th. The index fell to 9,525.32, the index hit its lowest level during a session since Oct. 24, 2003.

But if the market is going to keep dropping like this, what, exactly, did the American public pay $700 billion dollars for? “Investors across the board are realizing that the $700 billion U.S. bank bailout was not a cure-all,” said Dan Genter, president and CEO at RNC Genter Capital Management. “The package involves the Treasury buying bad debt directly from banks in order to get them to start lending to each other again,”

President Bush said Monday that the purpose of the package was to loosen up the nation’s credit markets to “get money moving again.” However, Bush said “it’s going to take a while,” for the program to start working. “We don’t want to rush into the situation and have the program not be effective,” he said.

But if this is the case, then why this, from a White House spokesman?

“There should be no question out there that this plan will get done this week,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto on a conference call with reporters. “We are very, very confident that it will get done this week. We believe it needs to get done this week. It is unthinkable that Congress would work into next week on the rescue plan. It would be a very, very serious situation for our economy were we not to get this legislation passed,” 

Why is it that those who proposed a bill for voting with barely sufficient time for congress to read the bill are now calling for “patience” in “troubling times?”

For a while I felt like i was one of the only people against the bailout; like Ron Paul and I had no chance of convincing the rest of the American public that the bailout bill was inherently economically flawed. Then it didn’t pass the House and I was ecstatic. But then it did pass and I was furious. And then I saw this on cnn.com.

It’s a good thing billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending can save an atrocious bill, or our stock market might still be in trouble. Now for a quick check on how the bailout bill has helped the stock market…

The Dow is still down 180+ points.

Aw, crap.

Sometimes you just wish the Federal Government would watch their Saturday morning cartoons.

The 700 billion (plus) dollar bailout package that was nearly rammed down Congress’ throat would have been atrocious. It made a mockery of our constitution, and promised nothing but more debt for the American people. It proposed a bailout of those who made bad investments and not the average American nearly as much as it pretended to. But above all it was economically foolish. And we’re being told that it is unavoidable.

Claims arising from both sides of the aisle say that the market caused all this – they have become conventional wisdom, with the desired result of letting those who caused this whole mess off the hook. The Federal Reserve System is telling the people that it is the savior, instead of the culprit. Let’s get some things straight about the bailout that was put forward.

1. The Treasury Secretary was authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means that $700 billion was only the beginning, and truer estimates ran around $1.2 trillion by the end of the year.
2. The bill designated financial institutions – banks, investments, and large market shares of the stock exchange, as “financial agents of the Government.”
3. And then there’s this. The 32 words placed at the end of the bill that should give any American who understands the doctrine of checks and balances the chills: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this act are non-reviewable, and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or administrative agency.” In other words, the secretary can purchase whatever debt he wants to, give the debt to the American people, and then have no responsibility for his actions.

And those are just the political issues with the bill.
The two major candidates for the presidency both indicated their strong support for this bailout – another example of the choice we’re supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Lose or lose worse. Poor domestic policy or poor foreign policy. More power and choices to the government or the virtual suspension of the freedoms granted and protected Constitution.
But let us understand not only the political issues with this bill, but also why it is fundamentally flawed, and based on economic fallacies. To do this we need to understand one question that politicians are hesitant to answer: Where does this money come from?
As of at the time of writing, the war in Iraq has cost the United States 558 billion dollars. We have clamored and debated about the cost of the Iraq war for years. The deficit has become so great that my generation winces at the thought of having to pay it down. The United States government has spent more in the past few years on the war in Iraq than we will be able to pay back in an estimated range of anywhere from 10 to 75 years. Yet the proposal Congress was directed to act upon in a matter of days ranged from just a little bit more than that cost to nearly twice that. An additional 10 to 150 years of taxpaying, we would conclude.
However, this money will not be taxed away from the American people.

The real way this money will come to be (and “come to be” is the proper phrase here) is an insult to the logic and astonishing to those who understand how the banking system works. This money will, in essence, be printed. New money that has never existed before – 700 billion to 1.2 trillion dollars that didn’t exist this morning could have existed this evening. Now that the US Dollar isn’t backed by gold stored at the Federal Reserve (as it was intended to), it can be created with little more consequence than the devaluation of the dollar. It is a common misconception to the American people that the money we borrow from banks is backed by cash in some vault somewhere. Banks can actually loan out 9 times what they are owed, and can legally conjure this money into existence. Banks basically loan debt against debt, and as long as everyone (or a majority of people) pay their debt back, they make money based on interest.

This is a very complicated explanation, please see money as debt for more information, but in essence the way this would be paid for would be by taking a little of the value out of every US dollar currently in circulation.
We can see a heightened example of this in Zimbabwe with the current Zimbabwe dollar. The corrupt Zimbabwean government prints and spends enough money every day that the inflation rate is pushing 1,000,000%. If you have 1 Billion Zimbabwean Dollars one day (not enough to buy a loaf of bread), the next day that 1 billion will be worth what 750,000 was the day before.
And that explains why the price in gold skyrocketed upon the announce of this bill, and started to sink once it was turned down. Once another proposal is submitted it will rise again (stock market analysts, here’s your free tip), and may we all pray and write our representatives that it drops again as that proposal is turned down.
While we are in an unavoidable recession, the worst thing we could do would be make a rash decision devaluing our currency and furthering the weakness of the United States in the world economy. We cannot artificially raise prices without there being consequences. The people in the United States are so used to easy and free money that they balk as soon as there is a trough in the economic cycle. It is normal to have growth, a peak, recession, and a trough. Hopefully we are quickly coming into the trough, but if we try to make it a peak we find out that it will become one, and will sink deeper.
Tell your representatives to let the market correct itself now, so it doesn’t correct itself in a much more drastic means in the future.

I have been an advocate of the “push the medium” campaign since its infancy, a campaign in which the advertisement interacts with the medium that is used to display it.

A new “Wario World: Shake It” advertisement form Nintendo has received a record number of view for the amount of time it’s been up. Check it out.