Heading below 8000...

• The Dow just keeps sinking, and this morning dropped below 8000 for the first time since 2003 before rebounding a bit to the 8200-range around noon. What does this mean? For one, it means folks want the bailout to happen sooner than next month. Duh. But it also means that the "confidence crisis" is still happening, and Bush's speech wasn't much of a roadblock.
• To illustrate just how stupid people have been: While the rest of the country is waving their arms, running in circles and shrieking "Fire!", Warren Buffet made $8 Billion last month and overtook Bill Gates as the world's richest man. Intelligence, patience, foresight. And he supports Obama.
• Paul Krugman, meanwhile, continues to assure us that we've booked passage on the bus to Beelzebub. His solution? The Soros Plan I highlighted here last week - though we can't call it "The Soros Plan," because "Soros" is a toxic name in reep political circles, and this is going to require bipartisan agreement to get done. I have an idea: Let's call it The Buffet Plan! Anyway, here's Krugman:

  What he should have proposed instead, many economists agree, was direct injection of capital into financial firms: The U.S. government would provide financial institutions with the capital they need to do business, thereby halting the downward spiral, in return for partial ownership. When Congress modified the Paulson plan, it introduced provisions that made such a capital injection possible, but not mandatory. And until two days ago, Mr. Paulson remained resolutely opposed to doing the right thing.

  But on Wednesday the British government, showing the kind of clear thinking that has been all too scarce on this side of the pond, announced a plan to provide banks with £50 billion in new capital — the equivalent, relative to the size of the economy, of a $500 billion program here — together with extensive guarantees for financial transactions between banks. And U.S. Treasury officials now say that they plan to do something similar, using the authority they didn’t want but Congress gave them anyway.

• And lastly on the economic front, Sammy Brittan at the Financial Times begs and pleads for John Maynard Keynes to rise from the dead and save us all from our own stupidity. TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, SAMMY! You've been spouting laissez-faire deregulatory corporatist nonsense for years, and this is the natural end product. This is what you get when you remove oversight and transparency in the name of big, bigger and biggest business and put the fox in charge of the henhouse. Let me say it in no uncertain terms: This crisis must be the end of Friedmanite economists being taken seriously in the financial world. Anyone with a Chicago School or Berkeley Mafia resume has to become persona non grata, or we'll just end up in the same place yet again. And Sammy, you can shove this quote up your ass:

  May I end on a personal note? Some friends and colleagues ask if I have not been guilty of trying to dethrone Keynes in favour of Friedman. Not so.

And in other news, I'm happy to report that the state of my birth has become the third, after Massachusettes and California, to legalize gay marriage. It's about time.