I hadn’t ever heard of this until today. After reading it, I have to ask myself, just who are the 3 Congressman that voted against this bill and how in the world could they possibly justify it?
Those three Congressmen, btw? Paul Broun and Tom Graves of Georgia, and Ron Paul of Texas.
Subprime just got the ball rolling. The resulting credit crunch, and recent commercial paper (which is where money markets invest) interruption hasn’t helped. If Warren Buffet believes that Paulson’s TARP will prevent a meltdown and subsequent bank run, I say go for it. After all, anyone who has turned a 15 fold profit over the last 18 years must know more than other folks. If only I had a $135,000 to buy a share.
Granted, scrapping the entire banking system and replacing it would be a better solution, but I’ll take what I can get for now. Plus, if the Treasury values the toxic CDOs appropriately, taxpayers may eventually actually profit from the deal, similar to how the RTC did after the S&L crisis in the 80’s.
Yes, I like Wikipedia links.
After all the stress I’ve had the last two months, I will be thrilled to close on our new home in ten days. As if loan issues weren’t enough, Thursday was my first 13 hour day at work, debugging a sporadic e-mail receipt problem which turned out to be a problem with Cisco’s latest PIX firmware. For reference, Sendmail logging a “421 4.4.1 collect: I/O error” means you need to turn ESMTP fixup on the PIX. The network team owes me a beer.
On the less stressful side, the little one has been toddling around the apartment, though she refuses to budge unless she’s clutching my fingers. Watching her walk, stumble, and get right back up makes the stress melt away.
On Monday, I thought for sure I had somehow managed to avoid the wrath of the dreaded rotavirus that had plagued the little one just a few days before. Ah the sense of humor viruses have. The stomach flu hit me late Monday night, and continued for nearly 24 hours. It felt awful to call in sick on my second week at my new job, but I’m sure they wouldn’t have wanted me there.
The little one is still sick, though now primarily a residual head cold. Fortunately the weekend is soon approaching.
Friday night I took Lulu for a walk around 11pm. When I got back, Christi was in the little one’s room – in the 15 minutes I was gone, she had woken up sick, been given a quick bath, then gotten sick yet again. She seemed to settle down around midnight, and we all caught some sleep.
Saturday, grandpa and aunt Ruth came over to watch her while Christi and I went to the home inspection. The inspection went pretty much as expected, so aside from some final negotiations, we’re on track to close on March 13th. While at the inspection, we took some photos of the house.
Saturday night, the little one got sick again just after dinner. Then again at midnight. Sunday morning, she was settled down, but listless and lethargic. She slept most of the day, but fussed quite a bit the whole day. I’m ready for my weekend to start now.
We’ve been in Chicago a week now, and I swear it must snow every day. Not the kind of heavy snow Virginian’s see (on the rare occasion it actually snows there), but rather a light snow which blows about for hours but hardly sticks to anything. And although 20 degrees here certainly feels colder than in Virginia (perhaps because I’m walking in it for 15 minutes to work instead of the short jaunt from the car to the house or office), I think I rather like this fourth season people seem to be calling “winter”.
I started my new job on Monday and have been pleasantly surprised. The recruiter made CIG out to be a mad house where everyone works 18 hour days and sells their soul to the company. Although I can’t speak for the hours their front office personnel put in, it seems as though their IT department runs like any other hard working IT department. The company seems to care less about titles and management and far more about getting things done, and as such, I’m looking forward to what lies ahead.
To make things even busier, we put a contract on a house in Evanston on Sunday, and negotiated a final price of $527,500 by 11pm Tuesday. We have a home inspection slated for 10am Saturday morning and are still working on loan approval (since our house in Virginia is still for sale). Here’s to hoping that by Saturday everything will have worked itself out so that we can close on March 13.