Jim Kunstler with another load of financial offal to tide you over the weekend. Excerpt:

There's also no guarantee that the Fed rate cuts will rescue any big banks, investment houses, or hedge funds. Sooner or later, to either meet redemptions or admit losses, they'll all have to roll out those mortgage-backed securities, CLOs, and other fraudulent items currently hiding in their books, and ask the world what they're worth paying for.

The world will answer by wrinkling its collective noses at the odor emanating from these bundles of financial offal, and that will determine whether some of these outfits stay in business or sink into the mire of financial history.

For some of these outfits, like Bear Stearns, their fate looks already sealed. It was one thing for Bear Stearns to sponsor two loser hedge funds. The reason hedge funds are unregulated, by the way, is because in theory they are only patronized by extremely wealthy clients who are presumed to know what they are doing and whose choices are thought to not require regulation.

But when Bear Stearns turned around a week after their funds tanked and blew a raspberry at these investors by saying "we registered these operations in the Cayman Islands where your lawyers can't touch us, so fuck you" — when Bear Stearns did that, it took the short-end benefit of blowing off some legal fees over the long-term prospect that no one in their right mind would ever invest in a Bear Stearns fund ever again.