moronic rage

Tiabbi on Boehner but it's a general garment for the way people feel:

...here's the thing: In this age of greed-enabling bailouts and rampaging Tea Parties and coast-to-coast voter rage toward the entire political process, Congress in particular now ranks as one of the single most unpopular political entities on earth. Recent polls show that only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job performance of their national legislature — which makes our elected representatives even less popular here at home than, say, Al Qaeda is in Pakistan. (Bin Laden and Co. scored an 18 percent approval rating not long ago.)

Rage begets violence, the final refuge of the incompetent.



Thus idiots with guns kill innocents. Here or in Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan. The innocent suffer the rage of the incompetent over the system the idiots can't steal from as well as their well-tanned leaders.

Case in point: Naomi Prins says the vampire squid blows a social media bubble.

Facebook and Goldman Sachs unleashed a tech investing mania this week compared far and wide with the euphoric 1990s dot-com run-up. By arranging a $500 million private investment, at a staggering $50 billion valuation, Goldman at once delayed a Facebook public offering (now expected in 2012), prompted a likely LinkedIn IPO, and thrilled its clients, who clamored for a piece of Mark Zuckerberg's behemoth.

But for all the nostalgia for pre-IPO "friends and family" stock in Pets.com, the dot-com era comparisons are off base. Instead, Goldman's Facebook deal mirrors the subprime collateralized debt obligation deals that blew up entire companies, as well as crater-size hole in our economy. In fact, what Goldman just engineered might well be worse...

the Facebook phenomenon shows us that nothing has changed. Goldman again moved aggressively to get the business—investing $75 million into Facebook early, at a low valuation, through one of its hedge funds, in the same way it used to get CDOs rolling—again will rake in the fees (to the tune of $60 million—upfront) and again will pawn off the overvalued results to its clamoring clients, who don't have nearly as much information as Goldman.

If you're one of those investors, here's the deal in a nutshell: You get to buy shares, forking over 5 percent of any possible gains, on top of a 4 percent placement fee and a 0.5 percent expense reserve fee (so you're down 10 percent before the game starts) in a private company that doesn't have to disclose any pertinent financial information to you or any regulator for 15 months. For the privilege, Goldman gets its eight-digit windfall.

The rich Goldman clients aren't allowed out until 2013. But Goldman is.

...The rich Goldman clients who must pony up a minimum $2 million investment aren't allowed out until 2013. No exceptions. Ditto Facebook employees (although they were allowed to cash out about $100 million last year). But Goldman is. Whenever it wants "without notice to the fund or investors in the fund."

CDOs were private, unregulated, overvalued, disclosure-lite, fee-intensive deals. The Facebook deal is private, unregulated, overvalued, disclosure-lite, and fee intensive. CDOs sold like mad— until they didn't. That can happen here. At the end of the holding period, there may be no bid for Facebook shares anywhere near the price paid. Plus, by that time all the enthusiastic global users of Facebook may have dropped it for thenextgreatfad.com taking the advertiser money along with them.

The Facebook deal sucks so badly that one of Goldman Sachs' own funds didn't want a single share of it. Richard Friedman, who runs the money for past and present Goldman partners, among others, said, thanks, but no thanks. That should tell everyone something...

Assuming the bubble continues until the One is re-$elected or his Company-sanctioned replacement rides into Washington, the rage when it bursts will no more hit the target than the bullets of a gold-standard tea-bagger fired at an innocent child born on September 11, 2001.