Not much to say about this chart. How many times can I beat a dead horse. We are being ruled by a bunch of incompetents. These people have absolutely no experience in the private sector. These people have never had jobs where success mattered. They have lived off the public troth their entire lives.
To make matters worse, they are almost all trial attorneys, that is to say, people who have skills in one specific area that has no application in real life. Only a fool would trust a trial attorney to manage an economy. These people went into law for the specific reason that they sucked at science and math in high school. Now they manage a $14 trillion economy.
Parasites.
The little businessman doesnt have a shot.............
ReplyDeleteHow Public-Sector Unions Brought The State To Its Knees
The economy is struggling, the unemployment rate is high, and many Americans are struggling to pay the bills, but one class of Americans is doing quite well: government workers. Their pay levels are soaring, they enjoy unmatched benefits, and they remain largely immune from layoffs, except for some overly publicized cutbacks around the margins. To make matters worse, government employees—thanks largely to the power of their unions—have carved out special protections that exempt them from many of the rules that other working Americans must live by. California has been on the cutting edge of this dangerous trend, which has essentially turned government employees into a special class of citizens.
http://tinyurl.com/ylbtkrf
Courting Convulsion
ReplyDeleteDisclosure: I'm not one of the economists that Mr. Krugman talks to (nor am I an economist). But it's sure interesting to know that the ones palavering with Mr. Krugman imagine that that the US can possibly return to an economy based on the fraudulent securitization of reckless debt. Does Mr. Krugman think that the production housing industry can resume paving over the nether exurbs with half-million-dollar houses (to be bought with no money down loans by the sheet-rockers working inside them)? Does he think all those people receiving cancellation notices from their credit card issuers are in a position to flash their plastic at the Gallerias this Friday? Or ever will be again? Is he perhaps misusing the term "recovery?" After all, that is generally taken to mean resuming a prior state, which is, in turn, presumed to be a healthy prior state. Is that what the economy of the past decade was? And, incidentally, what exactly is a "consumer?" And why, at the highest levels of journalism in this land, do we refer to citizens that way? As if the American people have no other purpose except to buy things? Or is that the only way an "economist" can imagine them?
We are seeing a comprehensive failure of leadership in every sector and every level of American life - in politics, business, banking, education, news media, medicine, and the clergy. All are determined to pretend that we can somehow continue the habits and behaviors of the pre peak oil era. They are all unwilling to face reality, and are all engaged in mutually supporting each other's dangerous fantasies.
If we don't attend to the transformation of American life by downscaling our activities and changing the way they are carried out, and re-localizing them, we will see our society disintegrate - and I use the word "dis-integrate" with purposeful precision. Everything will come apart - our political arrangements, our households, our health and well-being.
It's important to remind readers that so-called "capitalism" is not to blame. Capitalism is not an ideology. It refers to a set of laws governing the disposition of surplus wealth. There is going to be surplus wealth somewhere in the years ahead, even if our living standards fall substantially, even under the strictures of peak oil. All the communist experiments of the 20th century produced some kind of surplus wealth. All of them were subject to the phenomenon of compound interest. What matters in the disposition of capital are the rules created for accumulating and deploying it. In the USA the past two decades, we ignored the rules, repealed some of the critical laws, and failed to enforce the existing ones so that, when faced by the historic circumstances of peak oil, we allowed fraud and swindling to run wild - just at the moment when we should have taken the most care. That is why our money system ran off the rails.
http://tinyurl.com/yjeocwm
Federal Reserve Endorses Communism for the Wealthy
ReplyDeleteThere has been little or no clawback of the ill gotten gains from the people who caused the problem, but escaped with 100s of millions of dollars; there has been endless subsidies for the banks, but little hard-to-swallow medicine for the banking system.
My pet theory is that all of the anger about Health Care Reform is misdirected rage at the corrupt Bailouts. I don’t want to get too Continental on you, but the conversation in Europe I encountered repeatedly was the sheer perplexity at why people are protesting health care coverage for all. One fund manager said to me in Berlin, “You give trillions to rogue bankers, yet you have 40 million uninsured American. Why is that?”
My answer: I haven’t the foggiest idea why.
http://tinyurl.com/ylcby95
No fresh start in Afghanistan according to Ullrich Fichtner of Der Spiegel.
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/yjbjng3
See, HAMP Really Was A Scam
ReplyDeleteOh wait - they can't - there was no "or else" put into the law enabling HAMP, was there? Just looked again - nope - no criminal or civil sanction in there for banks who are allegedly "required" to do these things.
I repeat: A law without a punishment for failure to comply is no law at all - it is nothing other than a scam and a fraud perpetrated by the government to make you "feel good" while in fact doing exactly NOTHING.
http://tinyurl.com/yh2gf72
“Virtually non-existent … particularly in this [era].” This phrase comes from the head of President Obama’s OMB transition team. Bo, an Obama Democrat, believes that Geithner represents the epitome of Obama appointees. President Obama’s other appointees are far worse than Geithner. That is an extraordinary indictment of the administration.
ReplyDeleteBo’s indictment is compelling, but his logic proves a deeper failure. There is no reason to restrict his indictment to “the last two years.” The senior managers’ and directors’ failure did not begin with the recession. They failed throughout the expansion of the bubble, the backdating of stock options, after-hours trading, the collapse of the auction rate securities market, the “epidemic” of mortgage fraud by lenders, the massive scandals of the Enron and Worldcom era, and the savings and loan debacle. The financial sector has been in recurrent, intensifying scandals for decades.
By early 2006 – roughly four years ago – “everyone” agreed “we were headed to a cliff” and that the banks’ “major loans” were “nuttiness of epic proportions.” An industry, whose claimed expertise is the sophisticated evaluation of risk and value, universally failed to come remotely close to valuing either. As Bo emphasizes, these were massive errors. These managers got immensely wealthy because – not despite – their willingness to make hundreds of thousands of loans that were certain to crash and burn as soon as the bubble ceased to inflate (which it did in 2006). Bo knows them, and Bo says that every independent (sic) director betrayed their fiduciary duties to shareholders. Every senior officer at the major banks failed. Bo portrays them as incompetents, cowards, and moral failures.
http://tinyurl.com/yadguou
December 2, 2009
ReplyDeleteThe Democratic electoral routs in NJ and VA may be precursors of an approaching seismic political event, but the warning may not yet be loud enough to get through the cocoon that surrounds the Obama White House. For reasons known only to the President, he has so far ignored the wise counsels of people like former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and FDIC Chairman of Sheila Bair as to how to fix the problem with the zombie banks. Restructuring and recapitalization is the way to get banks lending again to the real economy and, perhaps, save President Obama's presidency from disaster. But so far the President prefers the counsel of the banksters, led by Bernanke, Dimon and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
The President is a "team player" in the language of the banksters, meaning that they tell the White House what policy is acceptable. A measure of Wall Street's brazen contempt for the public interest is shown by the large banks, led by JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, as they fight even the most modest attempts to curtail their risk taking and increase transparency over the private markets for unregistered derivatives. And Ben Bernanke is at least tacitly supporting the large bank position in the legislative debate as he defends the role of the Fed is supervising these very same large banks.
http://tinyurl.com/2cmt7p
Searching in Vain for the Obama Magic
ReplyDeleteNever before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.
One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama's speech would be well-received.
Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond "enthusiastically" to the speech. But it didn't help: The soldiers' reception was cool.
http://tinyurl.com/ya4woyk
This is a complete joke...anyone that voted for change has lost
ReplyDeleteRatigan Grills Propaganda Queen Christina Romer, Demands Windfall Profit Tax Clarity, Gets Blank Stare Response
http://tinyurl.com/yc73psm
Probitas laudatur et alget
ReplyDeleteFlashForward: What Obama's sellout costs us
ReplyDeleteAll eyes are on the Senate, on Bernanke's confirmation. Myopic senators never saw the mosaic. But Obama's the decider. And Bernanke is his biggest blunder in Taibbi's brutal flash forward: "Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked .... Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a 'moral hazard' creeping over his administration ... Obama has pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our fault, for thinking he was different."
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/flashforward-what-obamas-sellout-costs-us-2009-12-08?pagenumber=1
http://tinyurl.com/yd8kted
GOP Makes Deal w/Banksters to Thwart Regulatory Reform
ReplyDeleteThe implication seems fairly clear: banks were being warned that if they negotiated with Durbin on cram-down, they were risking GOP support on regulatory reform. That the banking industry would take such a stance isn’t entirely surprising, when one considers the narrow financial interests that influence theindustry. But the willingness of the GOP leadership to, apparently, use regulatory reform as a cudgel to pressure banks is illuminating of the horse-trading process that occurs behind the legislative curtains. At the very least, it shows just how stacked the deck is against passing consumer-oriented reforms.
http://tinyurl.com/yzddor2
Emergency Jobless Insurance Claims Surge By Most Ever In Prior Week
ReplyDeleteThe number you won't hear mentioned anywhere in the Mainstream Media: 327,729. That is how many people shifted to Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs in the last week alone, hitting an all time record high of 4.2 million! So as everyone is focused on the benign picture of initial claims in the last week which was "only" 474,000, the number of people rolling off continuing benefits has exploded and is now a stunning 592,579 only in the last two week. Look for this number to keep going into the stratosphere as the 6 month continuing claims cliff keeps getting hit by more and more people who are unemployed and keep looking not only for believable change, but actual jobs to go with it.
http://tinyurl.com/y9sgabn
Wonder how much?
ReplyDeleteObama's Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout
Matt Taibbi on Obama's Economy
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rollingstone.com/videos/player/31163379
Your stories of loan modifications that don't happen
ReplyDeleteYour anger and your confusion come through clearly.
I don't get really any good calls or emails about loan modifications. It intensifies every time I write a story about the issue. Such as, today.
Let me share a few of your stories:
This morning, I heard from a man in foreclosure in Broward who was hauled out of the shower by a call from his lender, but after an hour on the phone, he could not reach a human being to figure out what he needed to do. His loan servicer is HomeEq.
A caller in Boynton Beach says after 14 months of trying, he has been denied a modification. He says his wife at first was said to make too much money then too little. He's received nothing in the mail responding to his application. If he didn't keep calling the bank, he'd have no information. "We don't want to join the ranks of the foreclosed," he said.His loan was from Washington Mutual and now is being handled by JP Morgan Chase.
A lady in Palm Beach county says her daughter was told to stop paying her mortgage in order to qualify for a modification. Then she was denied the modification. So she tried a short sale. Bank lost the papers. "They won't give my daughter a loan modification and they won't do a short sale. What is going on with the banks?? I don't believe for one second that people are not sending in what they need. I have had case loads of 500-600 people and never lost anything," she wrote. Her lender is Wachovia.
A borrower in Plantation who says his bank told him he won't qualify unless he falls behind on his payments. That's not true, according to the Making Home Affordable Program's rules published on its web site. "But have you heard of anyone who has gotten a modification who was still making payments?" he asked. His lender is Wells Fargo.
A mortgage broker says it took ten months for his lender, Citi, to respond to his inquiry on his own home loan. In addition, he says, "We cannot find a single person who was with WAMU that is getting modified. I know an elderly disabled woman in Pompano who is going to have to file for bankruptcy because they will not work with her. She is the epitome of what the program should target."
http://blogs.trb.com/business/columnists/brackey/blog/2009/12/i_dont_get_really_any.html