Bubble, Bubble Toil & Trouble

SoftTortureTanking
MercVille


It's everywhere.

All this talk about 'The Bubble'.

The Economist, the Report on Business, The Vancouver Sun....

Heckfire, even Billmon has had his say about the thing.

But yesterday, at an event that was the antithesis of all things business, I found myself sitting beside a financial wizard-type guy that actually knows what he is talking about.

And this is what he said:

'It's not a bubble until it bursts.'

Which, of course, means less than nothing at all, at least in historical terms.

But as Goose Gossage, who deep down was always a pure numbers man, once said while sitting in the Oakland Airport Hilton Hotel Bar late on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1993:

'History is hard to know, what with all the hired crap out there.'

Which is neither here nor there.

Because the Goose is long gone and I have never been back to that bar again.

Which is just another way of saying that these days the future really is now.

And this very weekend people are still plunking down $700K for two bedroom bungalows with less than nothing down and a gossamer thin credit line that leads straight into the guts of a huge, collective hot air-filled balloon hidden in the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

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But, unlike the North American real estate market, there is one bubble that has apparently well and truly burst already.

And that is the one labelled 'Torturers For Hire':

"CACI International Inc., one of the companies that provided interrogation services for US forces in Iraq, said yesterday that profit for fiscal 2006 will be slightly below Wall St's average estimate....

Shares of CACI, whose main business is creating secure networks for the US government, fell 7% yesterday.....

'Things have been a little bit slow,' said Jack London, CACI chief executive officer, when asked about contract awards on a conference call. 'Generally it's not a matter of losing (contracts), it's a matter of nothing happening.'.....

Multiple investigations into CACI employees' practice at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had slowed the company a little last year, Mr. London said, but had no material impact looking ahead.

'The silver lining was that we went through a number of investigations and reviews and came out from that wire-brushing as being an absolutely stellar performing organization, that was clean as a whistle in terms of its internals," he said.


Which is a crying shame, for the greedheads at least.

After all, what's the world coming to when you can't meet the street's expectations with clean-as-a-whistle electroshocks, waterboards, naked, excrement-smeared pyramids, and genital seeking attack dogs anymore?

And as for that Dick Durbin.....

He sure was full of crap, right?

Historically speaking that is.

Of course.


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And no, I am not making this stuff up. Although I am not entirely sure if the Goose actually said those exact words or if I just stuck an old HST rant into his mouth on that boozy afternoon oh so many years ago. I was invited into that bar, and fleetingly sat and drank just outside of Mr. Gossage's inner circle, by a guy who was at that precise moment in time a short-lived mop-up man for the Chicago White Sox.

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