What a mess!

End result: a near total loss for everyone involved, except the secured creditors of course, who will now get pennies on the dollar, or perhaps even par, for their claims when all is said and done.

 

Sadly, in many ways Hostess is now indicative of that just as insolvent larger corporation, the USA, whose insurmountable balance sheet liabilities will be the eventual catalyst for its collapse, but only once the Income Statement and the Cash Flow sheet join in. For now, the Fed provides the flow needed to avoid the day of reckoning, but everything ends eventually.

 

In the meantime, what the Hostess story will hopefully teach the always gullible public, is that nothing is ever black or white, and there are numerous shades of gray in every story: even one in which an “evil” PE firm is unable to come to resolution with labor unions, despite the man in charge of it all being a prominent democrat. Because when it comes to money other things such alliances, ideology and certainly politics are always, always, secondary. Sadly, ever more Americans will be forced to learn this lesson the hard way.

Megan McArdle on stealth food price inflation.

This is sounding worse and worse.

Oculus of the Pantheon, a photo by Michael Tinkler on Flickr.

Yay, I get to teach the Pantheon today! This is the best picture I’ve ever taken there.

House Republicans Find Corzine Guilty of MF Global Collapse, Missing Funds; Democrats Refuse to Endorse Findings

Pretty horrifying. Either Jon Corzine (former governor of New Jersey and senator) and his company stole lot of money or it didn’t. Shouldn’t be a partisan question. But it is.

Buffy, holding a gun to an officer’s head: Stay back, or I’ll pull  William Burroughs on your leader here.

Xander: You’ll bore him to death with free prose?

Soldiers all look clueless.

Buffy: Was I the only one awake in English that day? [sounding out every syllable] I’ll kill him.

I have seldom been so thankful for a canceled lecture!

The Classics Department’s annual lecture was to have been tonight, but the speaker is seriously ill and could not travel. I hope she makes a good recovery . . . but we would be exiting the Library just about now into a LASHING rain and making our dampened way to a restaurant downtown.

Meanwhile, I’m home, dry, and warm. Thank Heaven for small mercies.

Not EVERYTHING has worked. I’m proud, though, to have bought none of these – even an iPod sock!

Salovey, who is 54 and lives in New Haven with his wife Marta Moret, came to Yale as a graduate student in 1981 and has three decades of academic and administrative experience at the university. He is the only president in the history of Yale who has served as the chair of an academic department, as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as dean of Yale College, and as provost.

Maybe a good thing – but you know, it can be dangerous, too.

Japanese Maple American Flag, a photo by Michael Tinkler on Flickr.

Down the block from me.

. . . and it may close down! Will the private water company seize the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for back fees?

First visible snow flurry.

First slow-cooker meal (yum, by the way).

But I do dislike waking up earlier because of a government decision to change the time.

. . . many, many leaf blowers. But the leaves are all soppy! Who would be doing that? I may just go for a walk to investigate.

. . . it was leaf blowers. I guess the Presbyterians were desperate to get the leaves up before it might snow. Because you know, it might.

Research crippled at NYU by allowing lab animals to drown and specimens to come to room temperature the hard way.