this, from cramer, says it all....

Of all of the cockamamie, unbelievable, totally disingenuous statements from this administration -- and there have been a ton of them -- the one that stands out as the most ridiculous is the "no authority to bail out Lehman" statement. Oh, except the "it didn't matter much anyway" statement, which is total nonsense.


First, Lehman changed the world. It caused the buck to be broken. It caused massive runs on banks around the world. It caused confidence to be lost overnight. Most of all, it ended the "moral hazard" nonsense. You never heard that phrase again because it's clear that Lehman was "punished."

Let's go over this. No one wanted to buy American International Group (AIG - commentary - Cramer's Take) -- no one at all, fewer than kicked the tires on Lehman. So we bought it. We don't know what we bought with it. We know that it has cost us almost $200 billion.

That's fine?

Second, every serious person in finance knows this. I talk to a gazillion people, including many people who were in the room, and they all say the same thing: The Treasury and the Fed didn't get the ramifications. They had the ramifications. They had them.

They did nothing.

Third, their actions after, AIG, Goldman Sachs (GS - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Morgan Stanley (MS - commentary - Cramer's Take) all indicate they knew they made a mistake, but because they won't own mistakes -- mistakes such as wiping out the Freddie Mac (FRE - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Fannie Mae (FNM - commentary - Cramer's Take) preferreds, another dumb idea -- we are stuck with a government in which we have no confidence.

So what does Paulson do? He comes on the air, and he tells us what happened as he sees it, something that smacked more of fiction than fact. And then, he tells us nothing about what could happen and his goals? What the future might look like? Hope? Confidence?

No. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Random musings: Amazing that we heard there was an auto deal, which is at the fulcrum of the next thousand points, and it was wrong. Totally wrong.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.