Well, the reports are in, January lost 598,000 non-farm jobs; 274,000 of them were in manufacturing. So how does Wall Street react? The DOW has been up 160-180 points all morning. What gives?

Monday, our Treasury will announce the Obama administration's plan for the remainder of the TARP money... and the rumor is this; Geinther intends to follow through with a true TARP purchase of troubled assets. Wall Street is obviously betting that Geinther can pull it off... even after Paulson's team confessed that they couldn't. I think it would be fair to say that none of the other candidates for Treasury Secretary would have the NYSE up 2% this morning. The basic premise of the Paulson plan is that the Treasury does not have to sell the asssets; one part of that includes the ability to rework the loans that they purchase: providing relief to homeowners. But the problem was simple; how to price the securities; Wall Street bundled and rebundled and there is no transparency ... it is not just a can of worms, it is a lake of worms... but Wall Street believes Tim can handle it. Make no mistake, no one can do it piece meal, what eever plan Tim comes out with on Monday will be a wholesale effort to purchase large chunks at a time; literally clean out balance sheets at bank after bank. You've got a quarter trillion at your disposal and you've got to buy three trillion in assets... I guess Wall Street feels the banks are ready to unload big time.

Meanwhile, be aware of what Paulson did to us... out of the quarter trilllion dollars (240 billion) he invested in preferred stock in Wall Street banks, as much as 78 billion has been lost already. You might recall my posting that we would lose our collective asses on those stock options; and that wasn't hard to predict: it was a given, but to lose 30% of it already.... does anyone else feel that what Paulson did was criminal in nature? The current Treasury administration is investigating, I expect to see convictions. Don't forget the huge seperate investment of Treasury money into citigroup... citi was a dead bank walking and their stock continued to plummet; most of our losses are due to citi... well, this morning, credit rating agencies driopped citi bonds another three notches... they are toast. 85% of commercial credit cards in America are banked at citi... all of that business will be broken up and gobbled up by the other banks. FDIC will be up to their eyeballs covering citi deposits and frankly, if you have a deposit at citi, now is the time to run to the bank and withdrawal everything... am I advocating a run on that bank? you betcha.... run, don't walk.

We've lost four million jobs since the recession began (Dec 2007), we lost over one million in just the past two months, the president introduced his economic team headed by Paul Volker and they both basically told Congress to get scared at the numbers and get his stimulus package passed. When Paul confirmed it, you knew the authority in his voice.

Glancing at the board, Wall Street is rallying, the DOW is up 230 points on the worst job news in over 30 years. go figure.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has canceled leases for energy exploration on 77 parcels of federal land in Utah, confirming that this White House is indeed a Small Oil administration.

The previous administration, which was not beholden to environmental special interests and seemed to understand the importance of energy, had released 130,000 acres of largely uninhabited — and uninhabitable — land for oil and gas exploration.

Some of the parcels are in or near the Green River Formation, an oil-rich region in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming that has the largest known oil shale deposits in the world, holding from 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of crude.

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"Even a moderate estimate," says the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory, indicates 800 billion barrels are recoverable. That amount alone makes the Green River Formation stock "three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia."

The now-off-limits parcels not in the Green River Formation also hold "vast amounts of domestic, clean energy," according to the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States.

Democrats and Republicans both talk about energy independence, but one seems to do all it can to make sure the U.S. doesn't achieve it. !!!!!

That party lectures a lot about renewable and alternative energy but is hostile to cheap and readily available fossil fuels.

Oil is back down to $40 / barrel... who the hell is going into shale ????

The report showed that the Treasury got the worst deal on second-round investments in American International Group for $40 billion and Citigroup for $20 billion under special aid programs tailored for the two institutions.

For each $100 spent on these two companies. the Treasury received securities worth $41, the report concluded.

It was lost <at> injection. The price gap disappeared on day one.

We've only lost more since. Much more.

The oil companies are already abandoning the rigs en masse, without any help from Interior.