American equity markets are showing steep losses this morning with the focus returning to the financial sector over the broking house downgrade of the big banking concern, Citigroup.

Goldman Sachs has issued an analyst report suggesting Citigroup might be forced to write off an additional $15 billion on its mortgage investments.

--------------

Gus: fantastic... write off another 15 billions... I'm sure there are financial geniuses, in the vein of our brilliant Costello, heading banks like Citigroup — but it appears they sorta kept their eyes off the ball. Asleep a bit... Like our own Pete, swinging the breeze on a hammock. The Subprime fizzer is exclusively tied to greed. The Australian trade deficit — when we should enjoy a surplus — shows an average (compare to those of the banks) mismanagement from our own government, despite the "surplus budgets" that have stolen essential moneys from hospitals, from education and from other public services...

From around 12 per cent under Whitlam, the interest rates shot through to 22 per cent something under John Howard treasureship. It took a few years for the Hawke government to bring they down again, and after a short rise up to 18 per cent under Paul Keating — the world economy was in overdrive and full of shonky "entreprenoors" including our own Skase on skates — Paul brought the interest rates down to 6.5 per cent... Now our dancing rattus, always ready to crow about sumpthin' claims that under Labor the interest rates were higher... blah blah, discounting his pitiful effort at the beginning of the 1980s, and now interest rates being higher than when he took the PeeM-ship from Keating...

Get rid of John Howard. And Costello...

Mr Howard has disassociated himself from the alleged activities of people connected to Liberal MP Jackie Kelly who is retiring from her western Sydney seat of Lindsay.
....
"I condemn it, I dissociate myself from it. It's no part of my campaign and the party has acted promptly to deal with it.
...

"I react when I believe something wrong has occurred. I don't think you can mistake the words I have used. I have made my position very clear.

"This is no part of my campaign. It is no part of the Liberal Party's campaign. I don't want anything to do with it."

-----------------

Gus: Promptly?... Only when being forced to.... But Mr Howard's "part of his campaign" is to instill fear in the electorate, such as making false, or edited claims about interest rates under previous Labour Government. The toon at the top is more accurate than his adverts... I feel that Mr Howard is worried that his government's defeat could show the dirt that has been accumulated under his seat, and the seats of all his cronies... Including the stench of a war that was sold to the public on a lie.

------------------- 

"Well Howard wasn't "all right". He has turned out to be the most divisive prime minister in our history. Not simply a conservative maintaining the status quo, but a militant reactionary bent upon turning the clock back. Turning it back against social inclusion, cooperation at the workplace, the alignment of our foreign policies towards Asia, providing a truthful and honourable basis for our reconciliation, accepting the notion that all prime ministers since Menzies had: Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and me [Keating]: that our ethnic diversity had made us better and stronger and the nation's leitmotif was tolerance. Howard has trodden those values into the ground."

____________________

Throw John Howard out. 

The FBI is investigating 14 companies related to the subprime mortgage crisis for "accounting fraud, securitization of loans and insider trading, among other areas."  

The agency "is looking into allegations of fraud in various stages of the mortgage process, from companies that bundled the loans into securities to the banks that ended up holding them."