Black Like Sunday

Good morning, your country is money fucked.

Today is going to be one of the bleakest days ever in Wall Street's history - you know it's bad when a tech / culture site like Boing Boing even grabs the lead item from the WSJ:

The American financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. faced the prospect of liquidation, and Merrill Lynch & Co. agreed to be sold to Bank of America Corp. The U.S. government, which bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a week ago and orchestrated the sale of Bear Stearns Cos. to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in March, played much tougher with Lehman. It refused to provide a financial backstop to potential buyers. Without such support, Barclays PLC and Bank of America, the two most interested buyers, walked away. Late Sunday night, Lehman said it intends to file for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Here's more on insurer AIG's related meltdown, and here's the article from which the preceding graf was ganked: Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters, Merrill Is Sold, AIG Seeks to Raise Cash. Greenspan today characterized this as a "once-in-a-century" crisis. Referring to smaller regional institutions most vulnerable to consolidation -- commercial banks, not the troubled investment banks at the center of this news cycle -- an investor quoted by CNBC predicts "a thousand banks will close" in the coming months. Exciting! We're gonna get totally hosed!

Links? Yeah, we got more:

Wall Street awakes to 2 storied firms gone
Lehman says filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Fed moves to deal with financial crisis
Bank of America agrees to buy Merrill for $50 bln
AIG plans major restructuring, according to report

And if we're going to talk about Black Sunday, we got to talk about Cypress Hill and that very same bad mofo of an album. Because this awful news makes you want to get high, because we're about to reach a new low.