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Tears For Fears - Head Over Heels

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Daily Show: Mitt Romney Erupts

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Help me out here, for I’ll admit I am immensely dense on such things, but, are they saying here that a large part of America’s economic woes are directly related to Societe Generale trader, Jérôme Kerviel’s actions?

Over the next several months, his chagrined employer alleged Thursday, Kerviel used his inside knowledge of the security system and his brazenness as a futures trader to pull off one of the largest banking frauds in history, ringing up losses of more than $7 billion for Societe Generale.

The trader hid the massive fraud “using extremely sophisticated and varied techniques,” Societe Generale Chairman Daniel Bouton told reporters Thursday. Bouton and other bank officials had little explanation for Kerviel’s motivation, except to say he appeared to have acted alone and to have made no personal profit, instead creating losses through successive transactions of buying dear and selling cheap.
[...]

The disclosure of the losses was the latest shock to world financial markets as they struggle to recover from a massive sell-off earlier in the week linked to problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market. Some analysts suggested that high-volume sales by Societe General on Monday as it secretly liquidated Kerviel’s tainted investments contributed to the global market drops that led the U.S. Federal Reserve to counter Tuesday with an interest rate cut of three-quarters of a percentage point. (emphasis mine)

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With the recent arrival of MLK Day, it’s time once again for doctrinaire conservatives to pretend that liberals are racists and if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he’d be a conservative. Think I’m kidding? Check out this year’s assessment of such rhetoric by Mister Leonard Pierce of Sadly, No! Meanwhile, Rick Perlstein provides some welcome historical perspective on past opposition and this attempted appropriation. (Roy has a slightly different take.)

Of course, if conservative pundits had any integrity, they’d also have called out Jonah Goldberg for his noxious piece of disingenuous, revisionist crap, Liberal Fascism, weeks ago, and Goldberg himself would have actually responded to the “serious” criticism he claims he welcomes. Not content to level the ludicrous accusation that progressives are the real descendents of fascists, Goldberg recently accused them of being the real racists, as well. It’s all the more striking given that Goldberg works for the National Review, which had a long history of supporting segregation (and check out the vintage Goldberg Roy linked in the post linked above).
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