Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

After visiting both the candidates websites (McCain on Taxes, Obama on Taxes), I found a lot more details on the Obama website about taxes than I found on the McCain website. Obama also has a Detailed Tax Plan (pdf) posted, while no such beast was easily found on McCains website. There is even a nice little calculator that shows me that Obamas plan will cut my taxes by $1800 while McCains will cut them by $60. However it remains to be seen if any of this actually happens.

Even though it seems that Obama will cut taxes more than McCain in general, Obama’s taxes will add about a trillion (yes that’s correct) less to the deficit than McCain according to CNN

This mornings news is that Wachovia is now being merged with Wells Fargo for an approximate price of 7$ in an all stock swap where each shreholder gets about 0.19 share of Wells Fargo in exchange for each share of Wachovia.

Here is what I think is happening. How do you get someone to accept a bad deal? By presenting another option that is so bad that the bad deal looks good. In this case the other really really bad option was the Wachovia-Citi-Fed deal and that was presented to us so that we accept this other bad deal by Wells Fargo. I say Wachovia shouldn’t settle for anything less than 10$

Continuing my previous post on the citi-wachovia deal and some comments from me and others on that post at seekingalpha, here is what is known so far.

At the end of the year we will get proxy statements and will be able to vote on the deal. I sure as hell am not voting for it unless something significant changes about the deal. As it stands, Citi paid just over $14 billion for Wachovia’s assets that it plans to takeover. 12 to the Feds and the rest to Wachovia and the Feds brokered this deal. Citi also agreed to cover puto $42 billion in losses on Wachovia’s mortgage portfolio. Anything above that the Fed will cover. But the Citi CEO also stated that the losses will not go beyond $42 billion. What the hell is the Fed being paid $12 billion for then? Why is that not being paid to Wachovia? This is like robbing us Wachovia shareholders and paying the Feds for absolutely no plausible reason.

Another reason why this is seriously robbing us blind is that the deal was done with Citibank, which has not reported profits for a long time. It has problems of it’s own. Wachovia is an great bank with stellar customer service and I’m afraid Citibank will ruin all that. The golden west portfolio is what is the problem with Wachovia and if the Feds really want to solve this problem and want $12 billion in return I would radther have Wachovia pay them $12 billion to take over the entire Golden West portfolio than this strange deal. Also that monstrosity called Citibank will just become a bigger one. If you would have asked anyone before this deal – which bank do you think is in bigger danger of collapsing Citibank or Wachovia, IMHO most people would have answered Citibank.

In fact a lot of people were betting on Wachovia surviving, one prime example being Fidelity, who bought 70 million shares of Wachovia. Wachovia insiders have continuously bought stock so even they didn’t expect this to happen.