And this is all on a Sunday. I’m guessing a whole lot of brokers, traders, and Wall Street types will be at the office way early tomorrow. Or maybe they’re already there now.

DOW futures are down almost 3% as I write this and there should be a tsunami of selling tomorrow, driving down prices.

But let’s not forget there’s a human side here. Too many blameless people will get mangled by this ongoing financial train wreck..

One report said employees were walking out of Lehman today (Sunday) crying, angry, dazed, their jobs and retirement funds vaporized. Would it be that only the fat cats got singed when capitalism has a crisis. But that’s not what happens. Lehman employs janitors, cooks, secretaries, clerks, etc. too.

I’ve been making it a point to post on financial blogs (as well as here) when someone screams that what’s happening is socialism that, no it’s not, it’s plutocracy.

And a very scared government that sees a number of other train wrecks about to happen too.

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This from Alan Greenspan, whose Ayn-Rand-influenced, anti-regulatory, easy money policies at the Fed were a primary cause of the current financial crisis. He of course, takes no blame for any of it. Life is so simple when you are an extremist ideologue and convinced of your inerrancy.

Yes, I’m blogging a lot about this. But the multiple collapses of major financial institutions is not business as usual, and will impact all of us. Banks will close. Loans will be even harder to get. Companies will have layoffs or go under. Pension funds will take big hits, municipalities too, as they park money is supposedly safe investments too. Hey, Fannie and Freddie used to be considered the safest of the safe for investing your money. Now their stocks go for less than $1.

Unlike other businesses, financial institutions do enormous amounts of trades and agreements with each other. That’s what has people scared. The counter-party risk. If Lehman goes down, those trades no longer have anything backing them on the Lehman side. I believe that Merrill, who is also wobbling badly, has $4 trillion in such trades. Yes, trillion.

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Barclays and BofA have bailed out of any attempt to salvage Lehman Brothers. Special trading sessions are happening now so other firms can try to net out their exposure to Lehman in advance of an expected bankruptcy filing before open of market on Monday.

The big stumbling block was the refusal of the federal government to provide any guarantee against Lehman debt and the refusal (or inability) of any bank to put money into Lehman.

No one really knows what the repercussions of this will be, except that this is a seriously big deal.

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It is, however, incredible that, despite 6 months having passed since Bear Stearns hit the rocks, there still is no special resolution regime for investment banks in the US. The US Secretary of the Treasury and the responsible parties in the US Congress should be taken away and shot after a fair trial for this dereliction of duty.

While desperate plans are being made now in New York to somehow save Lehman from collapsing catastrophically, stacked up behind them are Washington Mutual, Wachovia, AIG, and Merrill, all of whom are having extremely serious financial problems.

That an Op-Ed in the Financial Times should pointblank say Sec. Paulson is guilty of dereliction of duty is, obviously, quite extraordinary.

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The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Sounds like jury nullification to me! That’s “the process whereby a jury in a criminal case effectively nullifies a law by acquitting a defendant regardless of the weight of evidence against him or her.”

Spread the meme. Juries can render existing laws null and void.

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