Though I get most of my in-depth commentary on business and technology from blogs, I augment that with mainstream news headlines and alerts. I often extract the implied sentiment of headlines to get a tone of the markets and the economy, and this becomes part of the prism through which I view news, events and my activities. Lately the headlines have been pretty grim, and increasingly so as the global financial crisis bleeds into the real economy. Normally I associate depressing headlines with a contrarian opportunity to act, but at this point I believe the headlines do not yet discount the difficulties we will encounter both economically and militarily over the next 12-24 months.
Consider the top Breaking News headlines from Bloomberg.com, 2:30pm Eastern yesterday afternoon:
Breaking News
This is what I take away from these headlines:
Seeing the chinks in "Teflon Hank's" armor. Hank has made big mistakes with TARP. He had the wrong plan, communicated it poorly and, as a result, sharply undermined his own credibility with Congress and the American people. That said, he was in a difficult position, made decisions that I believe were done with the best of intentions and changed course when he realized he was wrong. And for this he deserves credit. However, now that he is no longer Teflon Hank, he has to work extra hard to educate Congress on how and when TARP funds should be used. He is being bombarded on all sides by special interests and getting pressure from every faction in Congress. Had he done a better job of planning and communication upfront it would be much easier to manage the current situation, but this not the way it played out. What should have been a surgical strike of deploying massive funds into key areas (e.g., cleaning up busted bank balance sheets a la Good Bank/Bad Bank and developing a sensible mortgage restructuring solution, NOT opening the U.S. taxpayer's checkbook to virtually any bank that wants a capital cushion, money that will sit idle and not be used for capital formation) will invariably turn into a free-for-all.
