We Can Have Our Freedom...

The sad saga of the US banking system continues even if the convulsions of the past 8 months have seemed to ease. The investing environment seems to change as officials in government and at the big banks keep changing the rules. There have been several articles of late documenting the Fed and Treasury's role in the Bank of America take over of Merrill Lynch last fall. The evidence so far is quite damning and at the very least we know that there is at least one rat lying and perhaps all of them are rats.

A good summary of the latest can be found from Bloomberg of which the last line reads: We can have our freedom. Or we can have our systemically failure-prone financial institutions. We probably can’t have both.

I'm not sure our future is quite that bleak, but I'm also not ready to call the bottom of this market. For sure the economy is still contracting based upon employment and other indicators, but the question remains whether the stock market has seen its lows.

This kind of BS with ex-bankers calling the shots lends no confidence to the markets, and without evidence of real reform, I can't see a sustainable rally.