This gentleman says it all for me:

How to get my Nerd Vote

via BoingBoing

Paulson's Ultimatum

• Really great bit of journalism from The Times this morning about what happened in Paulson's meeting with The Nationalized Nine two days ago. It covers in brief not only what led to the meeting, but what happened in the meeting itself, who said what, and even the terms of the deal.
  

  Indeed, several of the banks represented in the room are in need of capital. And analysts said the terms of the government’s investment are attractive for the banks, certainly compared with the terms that Warren E. Buffett extracted from Goldman Sachs for his $5 billion investment.

  The Treasury will receive preferred shares that pay a 5 percent dividend, rising to 9 percent after five years. It will get warrants to purchase common shares, equivalent to 15 percent of its initial investment. But the Treasury said it would not exercise its right to vote those common shares.

• WSJ has what amounts to a companion piece to the Times article above.
• Ed Chancellor in the Financial Times draws the obvious comparisons to economic collapses of the past. And yeah, it's a *facepalm* bit of reading:

  Bank panics always have the same origin. “Every genuine business panic springs from the same root, which is rank speculation,” wrote one Victorian commentator. Thomas Tooke, the ­early 19th century merchant and author, ascribed the British crisis of 1793 to “a great and undue extension of the system of credit and paper circulation”. A year earlier, Thomas Jefferson, observing the first financial collapse in the independent United States, noted that “our paper bubble has burst”.

• Here's some fun bailout related news, it turns out AIG executives are complete dickheads. The NY Daily News has a story about four of them shooting up pheasants in England while Rome burned. Money quote:

  "The recession will go on until about 2011 - but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine," AIG honcho Sebastian Preil was quoted as saying.

  Preil wasn't the least bit embarrassed that AIG, which got its first $85 billion bailout from the feds last month, needed taxpayer money to stay in business. The hunting trip came the week AIG got a second loan of $37.5 billion.

• On the campaign trail, WaPo points out that Obama's cash advantage has gone a long way towards flogging McCain into submission. The 50 state strategy, which was once considered folly, has forced McCain to lay cash he doesn't have into markets where he didn't want to spend. So even if Obama doesn't win Indiana, Missouri, Nevada or North Carolina, his investments there have served their purpose by forcing McCain to take money out of even more crucial markets like Colorado, Virginia, Florida and Ohio. It's to the point now that Obama doesn't have to defend a single Kerry state, while McCain has to run the table on what's left as a potential toss-up.
• And finally, Time's Mark Halperin asks if McCain has what it takes to rattle Obama in tonight's third and final presidenial debate. I think it's much more likely that McCain loses his cool and starts shouting at the damn kids to get off his damn lawn than he actually lands a knock-out blow, which is what he needs to get him back into this thing. In other words, the last 20 days before the election should be a processional, not a sprint.
  

A good start

• BBC's round-up of the world press paints a hopeful picture for the world economy - reactions have been largely positive to this weekend's announced plans to partially nationalize both US and Euro banks - and a gloomy one for US pull, as there's schadenfreude from Ammann to Beijing over the Uncle Sam's eroding standing on the world stage.
• While the world reaction to this weekend's summit is "positive," I think it's fair to classify Wall Street's reaction as "positively ecstatic." Not quite 2 hours into the day and the Dow is up almost 500 points.
  
• Paulson has been totally broken by the senate democrats, it turns out: Today he'll be leading a 3 pm meeting about the implementation of the Soros plan, which King Henry was originally so strongly against. Shame it took the donks 8 years to find their balls, but better late than never.
  
• Speaking of the Soros plan: The man himself has a column in the Financial Times. Read it.

  This is how Tarp ought to work. The Treasury secretary should begin by asking the banking supervisors to produce an estimate for each bank, how much additional capital they would need to meet the statutory requirement of 8 per cent. The supervisors are familiar with the banks and are aggressively examining and gathering information. They would be able to come up with an estimate in short order provided they are given clear instructions on what assumptions to use. The estimates would be reasonably reliable for the smaller, simpler institutions, but the likes of Citibank and Goldman Sachs would require some guesswork.

• And finally in the world of finance, NY Times columnist and ad Hoc favorite Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics today.

  Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.”

• On the campaign trail things continue to look bleak for team McCain. The Post has him up by 10 points, 53-43, in their latest poll. Even more telling is what's happened to McCain's favorability ratings: They're sinking like a stone. And what's worse is that every time the country sees Obama they like him more, while every time the country sees McCain, they like him less:

  Nearly two-thirds of voters, 64 percent, now view Obama favorably, up six percentage points from early September. About a third of voters have a better opinion of the senator from Illinois because of his debate performances, while 8 percent have a lower opinion of him. By contrast, more than a quarter said they think worse of McCain as a result of the debates, more than double the proportion saying their opinion had improved. McCain's overall rating has also dipped seven points, to 52 percent, over the past month.

• Hilldog says that Barack is doing in the general what he struggled to accomplish in the primary: Sealing the deal.
• In the wake of all this bad news for McCain, Reep mouthpiece Bill Kristol says that the old man needs to Ctrl-Alt-Delete his campaign and just start over, starting with firing folks like Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis in an effort to "reclaim the moral highground." Which begs the question, "When did John McCain ever have the moral highground in this election cycle?"

EDIT: Well, this is what I get for not reading Bill Kristol more often. Turns out his column linked above is a total 180 from the advice column he wrote to McCain only last week. Glenn Greenwald does the honors of skewering Kristol.

That’s typical Bill Kristol — not only chronically wrong about everything, but far worse, completely incapable of acknowledging mistakes. He just suppresses them, pretends they don’t exist, and in that regard is the perfect face for the right-wing movement that is dying a painful, harsh and profoundly well-deserved death in front of everyone’s eyes.