Wanna know how fucking good we have it here in the States? Friend of mine has been chewing my ear off with European stocks because he believes the Euro is about to go up again. One of his long positions was in a Spanish bank (POP/BPESF) that basically just got nationalized. Get this, after months of diffusing the fact that the bank had virtually no cash, the Spanish Minister of the Economy, the ECB as well as Spain Central Bank auditors; just dropped the hammer on everyone at 1AM last night, triggering a banking-system safety mechanism/protocol by which they effectively took control of the bank for about 2 minutes and then carried out a highest-bidder "auction," which ended in about 2 seconds with the sale of the bank to another Spanish bank (Banco Santander-SAN) for the symbolic price of €1. All in the name of banking-system preservation.
My friend wakes up this morning only to find out that the 450,000 shares he bought for $ 1 back in November are worth $0.00. Bank was worth $ 35.00 back in 2007.
The whole episode is such a farce that the buying bank, which "supposedly" did everyone the favor of buying a decrepit bank with 40 billion in stale real estate assets (a business-bursting inheritance, or so they claimed,) and are about to hit SAN shareholders with a capital expansion, went up 2%.