my morning ritual consists of a bowl of something whole grain, a can of v8, and Harold Maass’ “The Best of Today’s Business” column on yahoo! finance. my favorite part of the column is the tag “a good day for… a bad day for… noted”. to my utter dismay september 30th’s noted: this is the last posting of the best of today’s business. thank you for reading, and good luck.

yahoo! finance… you’ve ruined the last good thing on your piece of crap site. your so called “expert opinions” are a bunch of recycled articles from a nonsensical blabber mouth by the name of orman… and a guy who thinks he knows everything about finance and making money when all he did was sell a book telling people how to get rich quick so that he himself could build a get rich quick franchise based on the books. what was his name again… kiyosaki? wait… no… kiyoSUCKY.

y! f, i knew you guys were stupid when you took the link to this column off of the front page last year. you must have gotten a ton of hate email since it went back up a week later. since then you’ve added even more unexpert experts to your list of pundits so that you can throw out even more litter on the information superhighway. i will be following peter weber and harold maass over to theweek.com for their individual articles and i am now in search of a new morning business summary. any suggestions?

despite the major market indices being more or less at the same level they were at last weekend, it was an insane week on wall street, leaving only two independent U.S. based bulge bracket investment banks standing. or… slouching. with lehman and ml falling this week to bankruptcy and a takeover and AIG taking a super-sized loan from bailouts ‘r us (read: the fed) you might have thought the worst was over.  you’d especially think that after the s&p jumped 4% after the announcement. but really the government has been putting spongebob band-aids over problems that equate to me taking a chainsaw to your arm.

shortly before i left the office on thursday i heard my COO step out of her office to exclaim “cox is speaking to congress! wsj.com newsflash!” when the british had just banned short-selling for the rest of the year, and your firm runs short and market-neutral hedge funds you can tell this means it’s going to be a LONG friday.

well, i call shenanigans! on principal i don’t personally short. it just feels like bad juju, but short seller’s have their place in the market.  if one of the missions of the SEC is to maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets i’m really not sure limiting market participants is “fair”, that you can call any trading done this week “orderly”, or consider your actions as moving towards “efficient”.  instead you alienate market participants that help bring RATIONAL valuations to the market.  shorting may not prevent a stock bubble, but sure as hell helps to keep prices sane.

FDR had “The New Deal”. secretary Paulson & Co have given us “The Raw Deal”. the market irrationally jumped friday morning on news that the government was planning to cover all the bad debt that banks had on their books.  wait, that sounds vaguely familiar.  kind of like this again, except it doesn’t just give banks the power to disguise their balance sheets for periods when they need to report… it gives banks the power to make the Fed’s balance sheet permanently look rather lehman-esque.

thanks a lot.  thanks to all the greedy bastard mortgage brokers who gave jumbo loans to people with no income and the investment banks that securitized and bought what was essentially investment-grade rated junk debt.  thanks to all you financially irresponsible americans for making it harder for EVERYONE ELSE to get a mortgage, or even a car loan.  and thank you america for NOT teaching them a lesson. laissez unfaire.

in an effort to maneuver the economy through the uncharted waters of our current credit crisis, the united states government has resorted to communism… er, socialism, but communism has a more pleasant ring to the ears (not to mention shock value).  on tuesday evening, the USSA/R bought out AIG in an $85 billion deal, with warrants that entitle the fed to 80% of the equity of AIG.  $85 billion for a company whose market cap at the end of business today was just over $5 billion.    the math is rough, but that’s like you going out and paying $40 for a loaf of Wonder Bread.

so who really owns AIG now?  YOU DO!!! (if you’re an american taxpayer).  we all do.  your uncle sam just took your money and bought stocks, or should i say, tried to catch a falling knife.  in the investment world we call these folks bagholders.  the ones that hold on to a stock that is surely headed under. so victoria, you are now a bag lady.  by the way, had AIG been bailed out over the weekend it would have only cost us $40 billion.  $20 Wonder Bread.  you’d probably pay $20 for a loaf of bread if you were dying from hunger… at $40 i’d probably just let myself starve.

in the process, treasury secretary Paulson ousted the current AIG CEO and put in his place former Allstate chief Liddy, who happens to be on the board at GS.  wait, didn’t Paulson come from Goldman Sachs?  i thought the connection purchasing was only done in China.  American International Group:  Comrad Paulson, surely you and your schemers could’ve come up with something less suspicious than “American International”.

and if you want a true sign of the times?  on tuesday the Reserve Primary Fund (not to be confused with the federal reserve), the nation’s oldest money market fund (MMF), “broke the buck”.  NUCKING FUTS!!! if you’re not familiar with money market instruments, they are touted as “cash equivalents” and are regulated under Rule 2a-7 to invest only in the highest quality short-term debt with the goal of preserving a share price of $1.00 and paying the rest out in interest.  the Reserve Primary Fund is priced today at $0.97.  this is only the second time in history a MMF has broken the buck, and only the first time a retail MMF.  to make matters worse, two other Reserve funds broke the buck as well.

so what happened?  i hope to answer that and more.  tomorrow i will cover how all this affects you and where you should put your money… i’ve been meaning to write about rollover IRA’s since so many of you have asked me in the past year.  friday i will revisit how our newly communist government made an example out of lehman bros. and recap the tumultuous week.  pretty much we all got screwed and we all got screwed a long time ago.  if you can’t understand this chart then you’re probably not alone.  the basic problem IS that most people can’t understand that chart and that is part of the financial engineering that is going on to mask how bad things really are.

our money is now stuck in a failing insurance firm whose balance sheet should be called an IMbalanced sheet.  this is on top of the bailout of Fannie and Freddie earlier this month where THE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS bought out mortgages, up to 40% of whom are set to default.  thanks a lot uncle sam.  i used to think you were my rich uncle.  now you’re just my lunatic uncle who we don’t even see at thanksgiving.  the fed launched a campaign to teach financial literacy on monday.  what a bunch of hypocrites.  your lose regulations got us here in the first place.  up yours, uncle sam, you commie bastard.