Lehman Brothers

In an extraordinarily important article today The Constitutional Moment Arrives, Stirling Newberry observes that

The key question is this: the American tax payers just bought the banking system. We are going to pay, with interest, upwards of three trillion dollars for it. A relative bargain actually. The question is what we are going to do with it now that we own it.

Mondays are traditionally rough, as the first day of the week after a two-day break, but today promises to be a real rough and tumble kind of day. First up, while we catch up on Saturday news of Sarkozy limbering up for judo lessons from Putin, the thought occurs that there would be much less bloodshed in the world at large if global leaders had to engage directly in battle with each other instead of sending armies railing against each other and devastating cities and civilians in the process... Once we've had a moment or two to chew the fat on that concept (and ponder how a McCain-Palin matchup would do on the world arena, knowing that a Cheney-Bush tag team would likely try to put a heavily armed Veep on a bicycle built for two, driven by a Prez known for careening wildly out of control), we can move on to the next battlefield: US and world financial markets...