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CLEANING UP THE ROT….Atrios on the credit crisis:

CNBC just said what most aren’t: the reason why interbank lending rates are so high is because banks don’t trust each other. The reason they don’t trust each other is they don’t know how much and which pieces of big shitpile they own.

Yep. That’s why having the Treasury Department buy up all those toxic assets is probably a good idea. Recapitalization isn’t enough if it leaves banks still owning securities with values so variable that it’s too risky to lend to them anyway. We need to get that stuff off their balance sheets in order to make their financial position more transparent and we need to increase their capital base (which the Paulson plan accomplishes by paying above-market prices for the toxic sludge in return for a guarantee of equity down the road if the sludge eventually has to be sold at a loss). That combination has a better chance of working than either one alone.

And why is the toxic sludge so hard to value? Can’t we just make banks open their books and provide detailed information on all this stuff? Sure. But you’ve still got two problems. First, in the later days of the mortgage free-for-all, mortgages were packaged up with no documentation at all. So no one, not even the banks, knows for sure just how good or bad their mortgage portfolios are. Second, even if we knew that, their value would still depend on how much farther down home prices have to go. And that’s anyone’s guess.

So: get this crap out of the banking system, where it’s causing systemic rot. Recapitalize the financial industry. Get equity guarantees in return to protect against future losses. And then hold your breath and hope it’s enough.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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