Y'all know that the crap we're seeing with AIG is intrinsically related to Bernie Maddoff's ponzi scheme, right? If you're still not sure, check out Lucinda Frank's amazing scoop over at The Daily Beast : Maddoff Employee Breaks Silence:

The employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out-of-date computers and the old-fashioned dot-matrix printers that printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I've seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.”

He learned that those who staffed the 17th floor were less than knowledgeable, often uneducated, often appeared incompetent. “There was this one guy, who had worked there his whole life who generated the statements but he would often not get them out on time.”

Looking back, he speculates that the faked statements were essentially done manually. He thinks two people did research as to what a blue-chip stock historically traded for and a similar price was chosen and the fake trades entered into a computer, the statements printed out and sent to unsuspecting clients. “I wonder whether everyone’s statements were basically the same, just varied a bit, because if they weren’t that would be a lot of work for the employees down there.”

Dot matrixes? Are you kidding me?!?!?!

BTW, talk about 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon : He's one of Maddoff's victims!

Also of note:

Nouriel Roubini's The United States Of Ponzi:

Americans lived in a "Made-off" and Ponzi bubble economy for a decade or even longer. Madoff is the mirror of the American economy and of its over-leveraged agents: a house of cards of leverage over leverage by households, financial firms and corporations that has now collapsed in a heap.

Josh Marshall's Bigger than the both of us:

What is so damaging about this isn't the money -- which is almost trivially small compared to the many hundreds of billions we've already committed. The problem is what appears to be the president's mortifying impotence in the face of bankers and financiers who created the problem. The president speaks and acts for the federal government, which is to say, the American people, who have mobilized more than a trillion dollars and all powers of the state to repair the damage emerging out of the financial sector. And with all that, he's jacked up on a employment agreement between a company the government now owns and derivatives traders who sank the world economy and may quite likely be looking at criminal charges for their activities in the not too distant future?

Anyone can look at that and see that the equation of power and accountability is all screwed up.

James K. Galbraith's No Return to Normal: Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think.:

The chance of a return to normal depends, in turn, on the banking strategy. To Obama’s economists a "normal" economy is led and guided by private banks. When domestic credit booms are under way, they tend to generate high employment and low inflation; this makes the public budget look good, and spares the president and Congress many hard decisions. For this reason the new team instinctively seeks to return the bankers to their normal position at the top of the economic hill. Secretary Geithner told CNBC, "We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system."

But, is this a realistic hope? Is it even a possibility?

Gwen Robinson's The US dollar, the Norwegian krone and the ‘ugly contest’:

[...] the two major foundations which keep the dollar stable as the world’s major reserve currency are first, that the US is the largest economy in the world; and second, that it has the deepest and most sophisticated bond markets in the world (so there is somewhere to park capital reserves). “It takes time for alternative markets to grow and adjust to additional demand”, he noted.

Even so, it’s clear, as the FT reported recently, that countries such as China, which hold massive dollar reserves, are concerned, and that there is some interest in at least radically reducing dollar holdings if not shift out of the dollar as the reserve currency. And as we saw last week, moves by Switzerland to intervene in its currency - and fresh speculation that Japan may go the same route [...] has triggered much discussion within governments about forex holdings and safe-haven currencies.

On top of that is the point made by Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Jen this week, that plans to massively boost the IMF’s funds in order to channel aid to Eastern Europe could ultimately see the euro gaining substantial ground.

[...] Perhaps, as the FT’s currency correspondent Peter Garnham suggests on Thursday, Norway’s krone may emerge as the big, new safe-haven currency.

Here's the thing : If Wall Street goes down, so does New York City. We're fucked. As a city we will be massively screwed as Wall Street goes down in flames and bloodletting of workers and insolvent banks, insurance and trading companies continue. It is not just that we'll have less jobs. It's the city taxes and fees and needless to say the flow of consumer money that we will see vanish in a tidal wave instead of the trickle we've been witnessing for the past 18 months.

Which leads me to Michael Bloomberg : WHERE THE HELL WAS HE WHEN ALL OF THIS WAS GOING DOWN IN WALL STREET? As the owner of Bloomberg, one of the biggest financial data collecting services in the world, wouldn't he been privy to at least to a peek of what was going on? Pardon my Spanish but, ¡QUÉ CARAJO!

So let me be blunt : The collapse of Wall Street and NYC's "CEO-ELECT" inability to even see it coming should be fair play in the coming Mayoral elections ---and enough reason to get Bloomberg thrown out of City Hall.