Who can honestly say he isn’t enjoying this financial crisis? It has unhorsed cavalier fund managers …it has turned the masters of the universe into servile waiters…it has made Nobel Prize winners look like morons. The rich…the proud… the pompous…the vain…the incompetent…Wall Street - surely there is a God…an ‘invisible hand’…giving them all a whack on the head!

And there are the regulators too! Under their very noses the biggest scams in history went unnoticed. America’s SEC alone - to say nothing of the countless other cops on the financial beat - had 3,371 employees playing the piano in 2006. If you can believe it, not a single one of them noticed what was going on in the back room. Even after rummaging through Bernard Madoff’s back office twice in the last three years, they still didn’t know. They must have been like pets watching an orgy…with no idea what to

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h1 style="text-align: center;"bRichard Fuldbr //b/h1h2 style="text-align: center;"bspan class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"Lehman Brother CEO Richard S. Fuld Jr./span/b/h2br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/17/timestopics/fuld-190.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 144px; height: 182px;" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/17/timestopics/fuld-190.jpg" alt="" border="0" //aNew York Magazine recently wrote up a very lengthy article on Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers who is blamed for driving the firm into the ground earlier this year. Here is a short excerpt from the article:br /blockquoteOn June 11, Richard S. Fuld Jr., CEO of Lehman Brothers, sat down to lunch with a half-dozen of Lehman’s senior investment bankers. Since the fall of Bear Stearns in March, Fuld had been struggling to keep “the mother ship,” as Fuld liked to call his firm, from taking on water, but with little success. The stock was sinking quickly. In just a few months, Lehman had given back ten ...

"It is not just a few investment decisions that are being corrected, it's the delusions of an entire generation." says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning. What's happening is "a huge anti-bubble is forming ... a financial whirlpool marked by exaggerated thrift, debt destruction and sweaty-palmed investors."

"The world's financial, monetary and economic system is in ruins," says Ed Steer in Casey Research. There's so much bad news it's difficult to know where to start. The silver lining is gold and silver prices look set to explode...

Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc.’s (LEH) risk of a potential takeover soared today (Tuesday) as its stock nosedived to its lowest level in almost a decade. Once the fourth largest Wall Street investment bank, Lehman has seen its market capitalization shrink from over $47 billion at its stock’s 52-week high of $67.73 down to just $5.6 billion at today’s new 52-week trading low of only $8.00 per share. By 12:40 p.m. in New York, Lehman shares had recovered slightly to trade at $8.99, down over $5 for the day with a decline of almost 40% on reports that negotiations for a capital infusion from state-controlled Korea Development Bank (KDB) had ended without plans for investment. Korea’s Financial Services Commission refused to confirm that talks with Lehman had ended, but the report was enough to send Lehman shares into a tailspin....