Well, stocks closed up over 400 points today. Dammit, how dare they take my entertainment away like that.

gillen must be devastated.

In other news, someone joined USA 2020 as a member of the "American Nationalist Party". Not sure what that is, exactly, and a Google search has turned up nothing. I'm assuming it's his own creation, but hopefully it's not as creepy as the name sounds. It almost sounds like a name some neo-Nazi organization would pick.

Oh, and I received two comments on the design of the USA 2020 site with some very glowing praise, so that's been a nice part of the day.

EDIT: OK, he cleared it up and the party is not in fact a hate group. Whew. I hate jumping to conclusions, but so many neo-Nazi groups have mis-appropriated the term "nationalist" that jumping to conclusions was all too easy.

In one of the most bizarre and frankly unbelievable tales of high finance intrigue I've ever heard of, a rogue trader at a French bank is accused of somehow having racked up losses totaling $7.2 billion. There now seems to be a belief that his trades may have worsened the fall in European financial markets that prompted the Federal Reserve to enact an emergency three-quarter point reduction in interest rates earlier this week.

No word on how a relatively junior computer whiz kid may have been able to pull this off without anyone noticing. What seems to be known so far is that he somehow managed to either cover his trades for a period of time or blatantly tampered with the computer system to cover evidence of what he was up to. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any indication that he made a dime personally from any of this.

When you think about it, its rather worrisome--to say the least--that one rogue corporate employee near the bottom of the hierarchy could manage to cause enough chaos to nearly derail world financial markets. Its a perfect illustration of how absolutely insane our financial system really is. Wall Street big-shots might have the luxury to be able to think of it all as just a numbers game, but it seems to me that they take an appallingly cavalier attitude toward the potential mismanagement of huge amounts of the world's financial resources. And meanwhile, the rest of us have actual bills to pay.

In one short word: Oops!

Historical Note:

If anyone thought they recognized the subject line as a quote famously attributed to former US Senator Everett M. Dirksen (for whom the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington DC was named), research from the Dirksen Congressional Center suggests that it is questionable whether the senator ever coined that particular phrase--though he would have certainly endorsed its meaning. The Center does note that there is room for doubt, since they do not have the entirety of Senator Dirksen's public comments over the course of his long career.