Fucking suck it, England. America is having its own baby now, with no help from anyone. Jenna Bush Hager confirmed the news by making awkward jokes about her pregnancy on the Today Show – the American equivalent of sending out a formal announcement from Buckingham Palace—this morning.
The child will be the first for Jenna and husband Henry Hager, whom she married in 2008. It will be the first non-secret grandchild for Laura and George W. Bush.
Because nothing on Today can ever be done in a normal way that leaves everyone feeling comfortable and relaxed, the news was revealed via a series of pre-planned spontaneous interruptions.
Savannah Guthrie kicked things off by starting to introduce Jenna's segment about remembering holiday traditions, but then cut herself off mid-sentence:
"Today contributing correspondent Jenna Bush Hager is here with some of the ways that we cele0-you know what, actually though, Jenna? I feel like we have a bigger story than that. Don't you? Do you have some news for us?"
Next an excited Jenna then to trip over herself in a carefully choreographed dance of words:
"I'm nervous and so excited to say that Henry and I are pregnant. Or, I'm pregnant."
As Savannah and Matt Lauer clapped for pregnant, Jenna's husband Henry Hager came out and presented his wife with what looked like a lovely array of funeral lilies and they both made stiff jokes about how he had "just picked them this morning." (Jenna dumped them on the table immediately.)
Then there was an awkward speakerphone call with George W. and Laura Bush. Jenna called her father "Popsicle" and said that he and her mother "actually have [her] cat right now" (?). Bush said he wants the baby to call him "Sir" or "Jefe," which he pronounced "Heffie." Jenna said she wants the baby to call him "Poncho." Everyone laughed at the funniness of words.
Then Jenna made a joke about how staged the call was and Matt's eyes shone completely black for a second because this brassy girl with the face of George Bush and the womb of Eve had just ruined the magic of television.
And then the segment ended. The baby will hit theatres this spring.
I feel bad for Jenna and Barbara. They seem like they're genuinely decent people, and are regularly involved in programs and causes that help people. It must suck tremendously to have a father who went down as one of the worst presidents in United States history, and who royally fucked things up for so many people. I'm glad they turned out better than their dad. I sincerely hope things go well for them. Congrats.
My heart just melts when another little white baby is going to be born American. This baby will have all the opportunities every American has when born here. Hopefully, the parents will raise it right and instill in it the work ethic it takes to make it in this wonderful country. It is a rough road ahead for this little one. One paved with obstacles and competition. In order to succeed financially and spiritually this little baby is going to have to overcome so much. Hopefully, it won't be held back by unions and other nefarious anti-American groups that want to get in the way of good old American hard work.
Good luck little baby! I hope you overcome all the societal inequities that you are bound to encounter and become a joyous and self-reliant American.
Jeebus. She is totally the lady version of "W". And also, what's the deal with lilies for weddings and celebratory stuff when it is a fuckin' death flower filled with woes and sadness?
I'm not sure who is worse out of these; Kate Middleton or Jenna Bush. At least with Jenna Bush though, my taxes don't go into paying for her ridiculously entitled and privileged lifestyle (i.e. unlike with Kate Middleton), so there is that crumb of decency.
Anyways, let's just hope there aren't any prank calls with this one.
A hedge funder is making noise about bringing down the salaries of executives at Morgan Stanley. Good. The government sure hasn't been successful at holding down corporate executive salaries, so maybe the market should work its magic—let hedge funds squeeze a few extra percentage points of profit in return for holding down the paychecks of the bosses of the banks they invest in. A worthwhile deal for the public. And a vindication of capitalism's mythical self-regulatory powers!
Of course, in order for big activist investors to go to all the trouble of harassing banks enough that they get their shit together, big activist investors will first have to invest in banks. And, for the most part, they don't want to. Why? Because, as this excellent new Atlantic story by Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger shows in painstaking detail, the information that banks provide about their own financial situation is widely assumed to be untrustworthy.
Some four years after the crisis, big banks' shares remain depressed. Even after a run-up in the price of bank stocks this fall, many remain below "book value," which means that the banks are worth less than the stated value of the assets on their books. This indicates that investors don't believe the stated value, or don't believe the banks will be profitable in the future-or both. Several financial executives told us that they see the large banks as "complete black boxes," and have no interest in investing in their stocks. A chief executive of one of the nation's largest financial institutions told us that he regularly hears from investors that the banks are "uninvestable," a Wall Street neologism for "untouchable."
No big deal, just the planet Earth's most powerful financial institutions (which were recently bailed out by you and me and your mama) are considered by the most sophisticated investors in America to be so opaque in their dealings that the risk they pose is not worth their profit potential. Anything could be going on inside banks, in other words, and there's no real way to tell from the outside. Until they collapse, and come back to you, and me, and your mama, with their hands out. In the meantime, if they're doing well, they'll continue paying their executives huge sums.
Banks despise regulation, yet they expect to be rescued by the public when their bets go bad. This is a simple explanation of why "Too Big to Fail" financial institutions are now and will forever be bloodsuckers on the American public, until they are properly regulated. It seems insane that our legislators have not corrected this oversight, until you consider the fact that money buys legislative power in our political system, and the fact that banks have all the money. Then it makes perfect sense.
In the meantime, "wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America's gross domestic product," meaning that all of America's gains in productivity have helped out you, and me, and your mama not at all. Workers see no gains; investors, and executives, and bankers funnel all the gains to themselves. Until things go wrong, and the workers are asked to bail out the bankers again. It's not that complicated. It's a ripoff.
It doesn't seem like regulating the banks would be that hard:
1) Classify investments as low, medium and high risk and require greater reserves for all investments. Banks that fail to do this get fined or be forced to pay more to FDIC. Repeated failures would cause a shutdown and/or bar the executives from serving a management capacity at a bank for X years. 2) Don't let banks get too big to fail. If they want to set up multiple entities and share networks and technology, fine, but they'll need separate reserves, etc. 3) Limit the amount of money the Fed can loan them. That would prevent the current situation where banks borrow money at close to nothing and then invest it in T-bills.More »
This is why we should have never bailed out these banks in the first place. Doing that only encouraged their bad practices. They screwed up, and instead of having to go through bankruptcy they got off scott free. Now that we have labeled them as "too big to fail" they realize they don't need to change, and anytime they screw up they will expect the taxpayers to save them. We need to say enough is enough, and let the banks fail if they screw up. Sure it will be painful, but that is the only way to solve the problems and get the banks to enact meaningful change.
There was one half of a sentence in your posting that explained why large investors don't invest in banks.
"...until they are properly regulated"
Investors choose not to invest in banks for the fear of proper regulations will tie their hands of the ability to turn ample profits and return shareholder value, bro.
The whole issue of executive pay is such an incestuous cluster fuck. Executive pay is set by corporate boards who are stuffed with other executives and other "luminaries" like say, retired Congressmen and government officials. Government has an incentive to stay disinterested because of the implication that sweet board spots await once you "retire"... so executives vote to raise each other's pay. Must be nice.
[BTW, this same cycle is what's fueling the no-bid contracts and cost-plus contracts of the M-I complex]
So the government forced us all to deal with these bad institutions whether we want to or not by giving them our money, and that's somehow capitalism's fault? And the solution is to give the government more control? Makes sense.
Banks are well-known to be not palatable investments, because of the "black box" problem. If you for the moment ignore investment banks and just consider commercial banks, which primarily lend money and make their money on interest margin, the value of that bank resides primarily in the quality of its loans. And since no bank that I'm aware of publishes a list of its loans, the obligors, and the obligor credit quality, it's essentially impossible for an investor to make a fair value judgment of a bank's assets (its loans) by any means other than relying on the bank's accounting and willingness to disclose.
So in short, if you buy bank stocks, be prepared for surprises, if that makes any sense.
Read the new Taibbi, Rolling Stone, piece. Financial lies are now a codified part of American Capitalism. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
Everybody loves to bash banks. But no one wants to look at the reality of what goes on behind the scenes to make them work. You want to swipe your credit card at any little store in the middle of nowhere. But you don't want to know about the Sattelite uplinks and massive computer systems that are behind that instant approval you get back. Or the backup systems that have to be in place, in case the main system goes down, or needs maintenance. You want to still write checks, but you don't think about the machines and manual labor that is behind processing that check. The machines that read checks and debit the money from your account. They cost over a million dollars each, and no bank has just one.
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