He either looks "surprised" or "evil". Not sure which.

"I am a free-market Republican," Kashkari said" Translation: I believe in tax-payers bail-outs. His new job is Cash-Carry to the rich and crooked. Other than the spelling, his sir name is quite apt.

Great pick! I could sure use another stimulus check about now.

What's up with the Lex Luthor/Dr. Evil look?

If he's taking chemo, then I understand the bald look (and hope he's able to beat it). But otherwise, I'm assuming a 35 year old guy can still grow hair. Am I wrong to think like that?

The voluntary bald look seems like a rather severe response to male pattern baldness, that's all I'm saying.

What if he treats the taxpayers like he treats his hair follicles?

What's up with the Lex Luthor/Dr. Evil look?

Paulson pattern baldness.

The FIX is in...Can't America SEE this???? That thief-gangster Paulson has 557 million of his own dough wrapped up in Goldman. This is par with Cheney and his group of Mafia...and don't leave out the worst President in US History George W Bush Jr and the dots he connected. We thought Clinton hit it rich walking out of that White House....oh my frigin god. These guys are skating with billions. Bush will not have to do any speaking tours, he has it in the bag. Can't speak worth a shit anyway. Hope his plane crashes going back to Crawford. ASSHOLE.

Surely it's not a coincidence that his name is pronounced "Cash Carry."

He's going for the "voluntary bald look" because he can't grow hair on top. With a cue ball, he gets noticed for his striking look.

Without it, he's just another schlub on the street.

That guy has a true case of the "creepy eyes"

Wasn't he in the the Mummy or Scorpion King?

One of my best friends growing up was almost entirely bald by the age of 20. He opted for the cue ball look. It works much better on him than Mr. Kashkari.

At least he used to be a rocket scientist.

The guy looks exactly like an American Bald Eagle.

I see a remake of "West World" in his future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1t3aVqZd4U

I'd rather be bailed out by Captain Picard.

It's the same Dr. Evil look sported by creepmasters Schmidt and Chernoff and aspired to by John (just dodged a bullet in Iraq) Negroponte.

As Arlo once said, "When three people do it . . . they may think it's an organization" and beyond that they may think it's a movement.

I think they're giving themselves away.

Let's start where all Economists start, with an assumption: It is possible to isolate out ideological belief as to the superiority of public versus private ownership and control of the means of production.

After which: One can then isolate on the single distinction of distributed, diverse decision making versus decision making by an ever decreasing number of number of experts . . . until there is but one.

The conclusion is inescapable that reliance on fewer decision makers is both more inefficient and more wasteful.

More:

If everyone follows the same cookie-cutter approach to assessment of risk then it could be likened to having just one single variety of corn that is universally vulnerable to Southern Corn Leaf Blight.

"Yet only a tiny amount of hybrid corn seed was lost to the new disease that summer, so no alarms were sounded. Whatever it was, the new malady was probably a freak occurrence that would most likely die off over the winter. Diseases like that were one of the 'normal' consequences of doing business with nature." (Follow the link to see where it leads.)

I favor diversity.

Let's not forget that it was not government insurance of deposits per se that was the cause of bank failure (such as Lincoln Savings & Loan) but the rapid injection of brokered deposits . . . leading to too much money chasing after too few investments of limited value.

Sound familiar? Too Much Money . . .So Little Time . . . With A Predefined Set Of Beneficiaries.

I would not deliver a single dollar to any financial institution that has not yet cleaned up their own private house. They must first shed themselves of their toxic sludge, at their own expense. (It works for sites such as abandoned gas stations.) But then again, if they survived that then they would not need the public gifts.

One can think of the derivatives (and valueless insurance, privately guaranteed at the time it was offered) as like the Teledyne Wah Chang sludge ponds in Millersburg Oregon.

It is the derivatives that are the financial toxicity. Trying to find value in them would make the same sense or nonsense as a project to go to the Umatilla Chemical Depot and retrieve the contents of the now-moved Teledyne Wah Chang sludge ponds and extract value from them. Someone could always say that it would create jobs, some jobs, and they would always be right . . . but still be wrong in context and in aggregate.

The derivative toxic sludge is so great in size that it can swallow up the entirety of the M2 (minus M1) measure of money supply. It is a virtual black hole ("blight?") comprised of paper obligations by one private party to another private party. The immediate "crisis" is that any effort by the FDIC to support banks (or any other indirect cover of FDIC related obligations to depositors) will be siphoned off from the intended beneficiaries (the depositors) to cover the government-designed sludge recovery effort.

The evolution (in the biological sense) of the financial system cannot progress unless the financial institutions with a failed business model are allowed to close. They made their own private choices. They are not like a child that is born without a limb or missing some random chunk in their DNA chain, beyond their own individual choice. We need to allow the rare mutant money managers that have spurned the derivative gimmickry to survive and prosper. It is like spotting a single disease resistant plant. Capitalism need not be some sort of belief system or ideology, rather it can be just an observation of reality of survival of the fittest, of the fittest business model (regardless of private ownership and control versus government ownership and control of the means of production) to meet the needs of consumers.

Would you take your limited public resources and allocate it to Teledyne Wah Chang to engage in a sludge recovery effort just so that they could prove that there is (and was) value in it? (The sludge.) Even a Communist government economist that tries to mimic the genuine benefits, the ideological benefits (individual incentives to innovate and do useful stuff), of Capitalism would be embarrassed by such folly. The question is not the one that has been presented to us of: "The most efficient process to recover and process toxic sludge." Rather the question is to isolate the sludge so that it does not interfere with valid and vital business operations, or vital life support systems.

Goldman Sachs has apparently found a useful idiot to peddle their particular brand of "hybrid corn." Commingle insured deposits with wild financial ventures so as to give an excuse to be covered, to claim to be saving the depositors.

"He says he came with the promise that he was going to 'use technology to eradicate hunger and poverty in the world.'"

The combination of idiocy and religious zealotry seems to be a potent formula for guaranteed failure.

Proof:

If Bank of America were closed down immediately and the federal government were to give cold hard cash to ALL the depositors would this pool of money be immediately available to remedy the so-called "credit crisis?" Of course it would. It is just that the banks that still contain toxic sludge that would be treated like a leper. If you instead give it direct to Bank of America where will it go? To support the growth and spread of blight.

I want a nice clean list -- a very short list -- of FDIC covered institutions that are free of toxic sludge.

Absolutely unbelievable:

"'I am a free-market Republican,' Kashkari said"

Perhaps he would genuinely believe that I am possessed . . . or merely suffering from the effects of consumption of bread made from ergot infected rye.

I like the following blog post title (if you read this far you can surely go read more . . .):

The Loophole the Size of the Universe.

There is a serious misallocation of the limited public resource of confidence in the US Dollar. The classic cure is a rise in interest rates, to account for the risk. Flooding the market with dollars to prop up assets prices is ultimately counter productive and ineffective.