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.

Taking the plunge...

• The NYSE dropped below 10,000 for the first time since 2004. We're down almost 600 points, and it's not even noon. Good times. Here the WSJ highlights that this is quickly becoming a global crisis, with the EU seeing a wave of bailouts and the state taking control of private institutions similar to the past month here.
  
• TheHill has news that Obama has launched a website highlighting McCain's involvement with the S&L crisis of 20 years ago. For those of you who don't know, Johnny Mac was censured by the Senate for taking bribes from shady developer Charles Keating in exchange for getting federal regulators to back off. McCain and the other four senators - all democrats, incidently - were known as "The Keating 5." Here's the website and a 13 minute video...
• Obama is winning the ground game, according to the Post:

  In the past year, the rolls have expanded by about 4 million voters in a dozen key states -- 11 Obama targets that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 (Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) plus Pennsylvania, the largest state carried by Sen. John F. Kerry that Sen. John McCain is targeting.

  In Florida, Democratic registration gains this year are more than double those made by Republicans; in Colorado and Nevada the ratio is 4 to 1, and in North Carolina it is 6 to 1. Even in states with nonpartisan registration, the trend is clear -- of the 310,000 new voters in Virginia, a disproportionate share live in Democratic strongholds.

• We're not spending as much as we used to according to the Times. Gonna be a rough winter.
• And in a preview of what's to come, Great Britain is experiencing a bit of a butterfly effect when it comes to the banning of short-selling, which is illustrative of just how much of this crisis is actually on paper as opposed to commodities based. Make no mistake: This is the end product of a 35 year Friedmanite counter-revolution, and we could end up looking very much like Chile sooner than later. Read Naomi Klein's excellent book Shock Doctrine for an in-depth (and prescient - she wrote this thing 18 months ago) look at our economic situation.
• Let's hope that everyone reading this has enough money to take care of their elderly relatives should McCain win, as he's going to be gutting Medicare and Medicaid. Do they really not care about winning Florida? Christ, I could write this campaign ad.
  

Sorry for not bringing the funny, but this shit is depressing.

EDIT: Ok, here's some happy - Obama is winning Georgia right now according to the number-smiths over at 538. Excellent.