Have a great weekend everyone; just don’t watch for more bank failures. This whole thing sucks.

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Washington Mutual Fails; Getting Sold Off To J.P. Morgan.

And yet another one bites the dust. However, at least for now, this one shouldn’t cost us a dollar in bailout money as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has bought them up without the help of the government. *Update - it might, according to the WSJ, as JP Morgan is not taking everything.This is the single biggest bank failure in history, with part of the reason being that the bank lost $16.7 billion in deposits since Sept. 15 - ouch. But under this sale, J.P. Morgan will assume Washington Mutual’s deposits and branches, and they should be able to avoid using money from the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund - which I am sure is quickly being depleted. For some reason the government is not helping J.P. Morgan pay for this acquisition, unlike the last bank they took over.

For those of you with accounts at WaMu, I found an article that might be of interest called “WaMu customers have little to worry about” that came out last week. While regulators and the news are sorting out the details of this sale, check it out to learn what could be happening in the coming days.

It is amazing how these banks are failing all in a row, and seemingly no one except for a few was that worried about it a few weeks ago. You telling me that the Fed and the Treasury didn’t see this coming from a mile away? And if they didn’t, why are we allowing them to organize and oversee the bailout?

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House Passes $630B Spending Bill; Pet Project Earmarks Galore Inside.

No, I am not talking about the bailout - I am talking about the spending bill that the House passed yesterday worth some $650 billion dollars that starts up October 1 to keep the government running. No one is really mentioning it because we are too focused on watching the economy collapse. While expenditures for defense were high as usual ($488 billion), one thing in the bill in particular caught my eye - a $25 billion dollar loan to the auto industry. Yep, we have now bailed out the auto industry - another private company that has no business receiving your tax dollars. But they did it anyway, on both sides of the aisle. And you know those earmarks everyone talks about? Well, this bill contains a crapload of them from Democrats and Republicans alike. Want to see a few of the 2,321 pet projects they are spending your money? Check it out, from Taxpayers for Common Sense…

Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) obtained $1,500,000 for the Presidio Heritage Center.

Sen. Stevens (R-AK) obtained $2 million for Hibernation Genomics, a project at University of Alaska.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) obtained $24.5 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center which has been criticized as redundant of existing facilities and for mismanagement.

Sen. Bond (R-MO) obtained $800,000 Pseudofoliculitis Barbae (PFB) Topical Treatment – this goes to ISW Group in St. Louis, MO, a privately held pharmaceutical company.

Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) and Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT) obtained $15 million for Waterbury Industrial Commons Redevelopment Initiative. The town hired a lobbyist that was Deputy Campaign Manager for Sen. Lieberman’s reelection in 2006 and Congress kicked in $15 million.

Sen. Shelby (R-AL) and Rep. Aderholt obtained $1.6 million for SAIC’s High Fidelity Virtual Simulation and Analysis program which uses simulation software to reduce the amount of time it takes a soldier to receive operational support in the field.

Sen. Levin (D-MI) obtained $1.6 million for Low Temperature Vehicle Performance Research at Wayne State University.

That’s all they have so far as they slowly work through the bill, but I am interested in seeing what else is in there…

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Friends Asking Friends For Donations - How Do You Handle It?

The other day, I got an email from friend I have had since I was a child asking for money for a cause they are involved in. We do not talk that often; maybe once every few months and generally about nothing all that important. But recently, his child was diagnosed with autism (at 3 years old) and they have gotten involved with Autism Speaks, the organization that works with families dealing with autism. And right now they have a fundraiser going on and they asked me to donate some money to their fundraising account. Of course I did, but it got me thinking about the etiquette of asking friends, family and co-workers for donations to causes that you are involved in.

When you ask someone you know for money for a cause close to your family, that person has to give the money asked for, right? How would you possibly get away with not donating to a cause your friend or family member is involved in? I think it would be impossible. I am not saying that you SHOULD want to get out of it; but rather that you don’t really even have a choice. Do you? Am I missing something?

Seems I am not the only one thinking about this, as I just came across an article over at Paid Twice where she wrote about school fundraisers and being asked to participate. While I would fully donate to any of my own child’s fundraisers (my wife is a teacher, believe me - they need the money badly), I am not sure I would donate to another child’s regular old public school.

My friend’s cause, autism, deals directly with their own kid - so I donated what I could at this point. But it did get me thinking about the etiquette of what you can ask for and what you shouldn’t ask for, and how people react to different situations. What do you guys think? Do you only give when it is directly related to a friend’s situation or your child’s school? Or do you give for any and all that come along? How do you decide?

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Signs That Indicate Our Economy Is About To Collapse.

A reader passed this along to me, and I am still waiting for the link to where it came from (if he did not write it himself; it was all that was in the email), but I found it to be pretty interesting and wanted to post it here. Seems someone that probably knows more than I do put together a list of indicators that our economic system is about to collapse and what we should be looking for. What do you guys think? I especially want to hear from those of you who know more about economics than I do (which, as little as it is, is still more than S. Palin knows. )

So, what do you think of this list?

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Dear Government: So Let Me Get This Straight…

Over the last X amount of years, the government has said that we were not in the business of handing out money to people who need it, as we are not a “socialist” nation and everyone is pretty muchon their own. They said that…

The poor should not get food stamps.

Parents should not get help to put their kids in a decent preschool program.

But yet we can hand out trillions to banks and companies that failed because of their greedy business practices? We can bail out homeowners who bought a house they could not afford? The fiscal conservatives in Congress that will say yes to this bailout no longer have their so-called “moral ground” to stand on when rejecting social programs that benefit the regular, tax-paying people of the United States. When they say it is OK for all of us to save companies that should be left to die, give million dollar payouts to failed CEO’s but not $1.00 more an hour for minimum wage workers, you really have to wonder about the humanity of these people.

You cannot have it both ways - oh wait, yes you can. My bad.

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