The stock market has gone up by 280 points so far today, fueled by FASB’s vote to relax rigid mark-to-market accounting rules, which require financial institutions to value assets at their current fire-sale prices, and magnify boom-bust economic cycles.

The market may also be getting a boost from the Senate’s earlier vote undercutting the Obama Administration’s proposed $2 trillion cap-and-trade carbon tax, which would impose burdens on the economy akin to Herbert Hoover’s disastrous 1932 Revenue Act at the beginning of the Great Depression.

The market’s…

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“Nobel Prize-winning liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz points out that the Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s plan to have the government subsidize investments in ‘toxic assets’ creates a serious moral hazard: Private investors will pocket any gains, while the federal government promises to cover virtually all potential losses: ‘Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people.’”

It’s the London Telegraph that’s reporting this, though. U.S. newspapers are too busy running puff pieces about Barack and Michelle Obama — and describing critics of…

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People who have actually read the fine print of the Administration’s trillion-dollar toxic asset buy-up program don’t like it. One calls it “pure plunder.”

Both liberals like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, and conservatives like Chris Stirewalt, sum up the program as “Heads I win, Tails the Taxpayers Lose.”

Others argue it provides “public subsidies” for hedge funds that don’t need them, and for “zombie banks” that ought to be shut down to cut the taxpayers’ losses.

Even Harvard business law professor Lucian…

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