Another Day

Somehow the Knights of Columbus at the West Dundee parish got their hooks into our friend, Louie and appointed him treasurer. He's had a busy month, selling corned beef sandwiches at Irish fest at St Catherines, then selling roasted ears of corn at Dundee's tradition fest. This weekend it was Tootsie roll sales. Louie's been calling members to line up volunteers, making sandwiches, nursing the corn roasting machine through a long weekend, and hitting the street with boxes of vintage tootsie rolls. I called him last night and he was happy to report a very successful day which concluded at the toll booth with a captive market of homeward bound commuters. Standing there in the rain, he said, he had the sympathy thing working for him. What a guy.

He's the kind of small businessman that we've relied on in the past to keep plugging away with enery, inventiveness, and courage fed by desperation to begin to turn the economy around when things were most dire. I hope Louie and guys like him can do it again. But with banks continuing to cut credit to small businesses these fellows are growing more discouraged.





The news in general, and the financial news in particular has been "optimistic" about our economy. It invokes the mood of survivors in a lifeboat pulling away from the sinking Titanic, with people floundering in the freezing water all around, and hearing the orchestra still playing on the ship's deck.

As I've said before, my greatest disappointment in Obama has been that he's left the Goldman Sach cabal members in hight positions at the Fed and Treasury. I guess in preinauguration briefings they levelled with him about now bad things really are, and persuaded him that to avoid a cataclysmic melt-down he should leave the banking system in their expert hands and give them trillions of dollars to try to cover their losses and generate some market profits which would reestablish confidence in the banking system - hopefully for a period sufficient to allow other stimulative measure to begin to generates some positive results. Anyone who has had their confidence in the banking system restored in the last six months hasn't been doing any banking. On a happier note, the big Jamokes are still getting their seven figure bonuses

I wonder what they told him about UFO's.

I bought a CAR (Avis) put the other day, and the stock dropped about 6% the next day. ISLE is down a lttle bit each day. I said earlier in the week that the index (DJIA,S&P) charts dont appear to be alarming, but a lot of stocks are dropping after approaching the high end of their trading ranges, so I'll try to make few bucks short term, while waiting to see if the market keeps falling.