Here’s a novel approach to papering over a financial crisis in the making: arrest economists who are pointing out the impending doom.  According to the WSJ, that’s exactly what Latvia is doing.  How bad has the global financial system gotten people?!?!  And can you imagine if the U.S. were to engage in such silence-your-critics tactics?  Paul Krugman would be shitting his pants right now.

Fantastic article describing the roots of the current financial market meltdown by the one-and-only Michael Lewis in this month’s Conde Nast Portfolio. 

My favorite part (italics are my own):

But [Eisman] couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.