Um, if Shrub doesn't get his $700b blank check, *THEN* he's lost control.  Having his cronies get a 25-percent spike in the price of a barrel of oil in a single day (even if it came down slightly) was the plan all along.

Well, if it got any lower than it has been lately, they'd have to really lower the gas prices. 

"Brother, can you spare $30 million? - for my bonus?"

"Will quit for a $50 million bonus!"

What happened to the party of "personal responibility" and "values?"  These guys should be in jail, and their assets should be taken and used to help fund the bailout.

EXECS CRASH & EARN

LEHMAN 'ELITE' TO GET BIG CUT OF $2.5B PAY POT

By CYNTHIA R. FAGEN and MARK DeCAMBRE

Top executives at Lehman Brothers' New York office, who were at the helm during history's largest corporate bankruptcy, have been guaranteed the lion's share of a $2.5 billion bonus pot.

Lehman had "walled off" the fund, telling buyer Barclays Capital that it couldn't use the money for anything but severance payments or bonuses.

In bankruptcy court, British-based Barclays said it will use the cash to retain Lehman's most valued employees - particularly eight key directors.

Those "elite eight" also have been guaranteed $10 million to $25 million salaries for two years.

The most wanted include longtime execs Michael Gelband, the bank's global head of Capital Markets since June, and Eric Felder and Hyung Soon Lee, global co-heads of Fixed Income, positions both men were promoted to this month, the Sunday Times of London reported.

Gelband lives in tony Short Hills, NJ. Felder lives in a plush West Village pad and owns two Ferraris and a Land Rover, Department of Motor Vehicles records show.

The platinum payout will go to executives who rode the collapse of the nation's fourth-largest investment bank. In the past year, the company's stock price dropped from $68 a share to as low as 21 cents, and since June 2007, the bank has laid off 6,000 workers.

It has more to do with traders realizing that in order to pay for the lender bailout the dollar will have to be devalued (meaning legitimate traders, not to mention oil producing countries, will lose money as long as oil is based on the dollar) than with speculators.

 Look for OPEC to start talking about valuing oil on the Euro as a group, as opposed to individual nations as we've seen in the last few years.

BushCo is good to it`s friends. What a bunch of whinners, you are not patriotic if you don`t support BushCo, you don`t see them whinning... God bless BushCo.

Threatened by a "financial tsunami," the world must consider building a financial order no longer dependent on the United States, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Wednesday.

The commentary in the overseas edition of the People's Daily said the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LEH.P: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) "may augur an even larger impending global 'financial tsunami'."

The People's Daily is the official newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, and the overseas edition is a smaller circulation offshoot of the main paper.

Its pronouncements do not necessarily directly reflect leadership views, but this commentary by a professor at Shanghai's Tongji University suggested considerable official alarm at the strains buckling world financial markets.

China's central bank earlier this week cut its lending rate for the first time in six years, a move analysts said was aimed at bolstering the economy and the battered stock market.

"The eruption of the U.S. sub-prime crisis has exposed massive loopholes in the United States' financial oversight and supervision," writes the commentator, Shi Jianxun.

"The world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States."

Hmm...There's guy in Venezuela that has been saying that for a while.