first!

Let’s give the Federal Reserve a little competition by re-chartering a state bank in every state to hold all state tax revenues and fees as deposits and use the fractional reserve system for our own benefit to make loans to the citizens of that state. The interest earned going back to the state budget to relieve the taxpayer burden or increase services.Bring back taxpayer-owned state banking! Break up the money monopoly of the Federal Reserve cartel.

And let me also repeat my endorsement of Ben Bernanke. As I said, I’m glad Obama has reappointed Bernanke “because the Fed chair has done so well.” The audit is just one of the many things pushing against the Fed. Bernanke ties the net around all of the miscreants rather than having the spotlight redirected on a new chairman of the banking cartel. The reappointment nails Obama and Bernanke to the same crowd. R.I.P.What’s a cartel? As G. Edward Griffin explains it referring to those nine days on Jekyll Island when the representatives of the world’s leading banking consortia–Morgan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Warburg, and Kuhn Loeb–met in secret and mystery to create the blueprint for the Federal Reserve: “It was an agreement on the structure and operation of a banking cartel. The goal of the cartel, as is true with all of them, was to maximize profits by minimizing competition between members, to make it difficult for new competitors to enter the field, and to utilize the police power of the government to enforce the cartel agreement.”Has Bernanke succeeded in his loyalty to the cause? You bet he has.

I wish Teddy Roosevelt, trust buster, was president. Then he could go after the banking cartel.

Obama, “Change we can believe in”? LOL. Bernanke is pure scum. He and Geithner are the lowest forms of life, pretending to be working for the people, while working for the banksters who are looting are nation. These hoodlums are dishonest and stupid. At least Paulson was dishonest and smart (just look at the way he held up Congress for the TARP money without hearing hardly a wimper back)-the man had real talent.

GREEN SHOOTSYES ALL IS WELL IN THE HOUSING MARKETS (WAIT A MINUTE-DON’T YOU USE LUMBER TO BUILD HOUSES?)CHICAGO, Aug 25 (Reuters) – Lumber futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange closed mostly lower on Tuesday amid pressure from reports of slow cash trade, while the discount to cash limited downside and made for choppy trade at times.* Futures continued to trade near the six-month low posted in September and contract low set in November on Monday.* Cash markets continue to show slow demand for lumber despite talk of improvement in the economy.* New home prices were up slightly in June and single-family home sales are expected to be higher in July, but that has not improved demand for lumber that much, traders said.

The Veterans Administration death book, “Your Life, Your Choices” that the Bush Administration pulled, has been re-instated by Obama healthcare and is “currently undergoing revision for release in VA.”It’s a 54-page guide to help the wounded/depressed/ill or elderly under V.A. care to choose death over life, if in their opinion, a lessened quality of life warrants it. It’s to help them decide if they or a loved one is a “vegetable,” or burdensome to the family, or say, if walking or getting around gets too difficult, life is worth living.In short, the booklet encourages death. This is government health care.The point is that some people don’t want to be coaxed into dying, particularly someone who’s been in a war, maimed and/or depressed. When servicemen are low, no one has the right to do this to them, to encourage them to die. That’s why this little book’s being called a “death book,” because of its similarity to the Obamacare death panels.If the government will encourage servicemen to die, it will encourage anyone to die. And, eventually, there will be no choice.Some people say they don’t mind assisted suicide. But surely the rest of us should have a right not to agree and to reject it. What many people don’t understand is that “assisted suicide” never ends there. It leads to euthanasia. The real reason behind the people who push for death panels is their interest in thinning the population of people who are undesirable to them. Now it’s the people who cost too much, i.e., the old or wounded veterans who are getting too expensive. In a few years, it will be the people who are not of the right religion, or the right race, or the right political party, or who live in a bad part of the country. Next, it will be the people who talk back, or who are causing trouble, or who are against the state.In Holland, the old people there suffer their ills in silence at home. They are afraid to go into the hospitals—where euthanasia is openly practiced. They fear they will never come out again.The breaking story of the V.A.’s death book is a hot item. There’s a transcript of the “Death Book” Debate on “FOX News Sunday” (August 23, 2009) With Chris Wallace.”In the debate, JIM TOWEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, said: “My problem with the document, Chris, is that the author of it is a proponent of assisted suicide. He’s way out there on that issue. And the V.A. has been using this. A new directive just came out in July, urging providers to refer patients to it. So in my view, there should be a balanced treatment. And this is a slippery slope that kind of makes people — when you look at the document, it makes people feel like they’re a burden and that they should do the decent thing and die.”Wallace later asks TAMMY DUCKWORTH, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF VETERANS AFFAIRS, who refused to debate at the same time with Towey: “I want to ask you about the worksheet, page 21 in the V.A. booklet. You’re a hero who, despite severe injuries, lives a full life, but you have to get around some of the time in a wheelchair yourself. Do you have any problem with the V.A. asking elderly veterans whether life is worth living if they have a disability, if they live in a nursing home, if they’re unable to shake the blues?”When Wallace got no definitive answer he tried again: “… why would a question — I can understand questions about if you’re in an irreversible coma, do you want us to pull the plug. But why — as I asked Mr. Towey, why would you even have a question in a — in an end-of-life counseling book about if you’re in a wheelchair, if you’re living in a nursing home, does that make life worth living?”Typical of government, after several more attempts by Wallace, Duckworth never did give an answer.http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,541820,00.htmlHere are some excerpts from “Your Life, Your Choices: Planning for Future Medical Decisions” which can be found at:http://www.ethics.va.gov/YLYC/YLYC_First_edition_20001001.pdfPeople have very different notions of what it means to be a “vegetable.” Here are some more examples:· ‘You sit in a chair and don’t do anything all day.’· ‘You can’t read anymore.”· ‘You’re just a body with some life in it.’Questions to consider:Do you think Tom’s parents kept him alive long enough? Too long? Why do you feel this way?What if Tom were 69 instead of 29? Would it make a difference? Why?Do you share Mrs. Park’s views about when she wouldn’t want treatment to prolong her life?For you, is there such a thing as unacceptable quality of life? Where would you draw the line?Do you agree with Mrs. Ruiz’s decision to send her husband to the hospital? Do you think she followed his wishes?Here’s a sample of the kinds of questions that are answered in the Resources section:· What makes life worth living?· What if someone you love needs a feeding tube? What are the pros and cons?· What can you do to keep the courts out of these advance care planning decisions ?What makes your life worth living? Check one: Life like this would be 1) difficult, but acceptable 2) worth living, but just barely 3) not worth living 4) can’t answer now:a. I can no longer walk but get around in a wheelchairb. I can no longer get outside—I spend all day at home.c. I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being.d. I am in severe pain most of the timee. I have severe discomfort most of the time (such as nausea, diarrhea, or shortness of breath).f. I rely on a feeding tube to keep me alive.g. I rely on a kidney dialysis to keep me aliveh. I rely on a breathing machine to keep me alive.i. I need someone to help take care of me all of the time.j. I can no longer control my bladder.k. I can no longer control my bowels.l. I live in a nursing home.m. I can no longer think clearly—I am confused all the time.n. I can no longer recognize family/friends.o. I can no longer talk and be understood by others.p. My sitution causes severe emotional burden for my family (such as feeling worried or stressed all the time).q. I am a severe financial burden on my family.r. I cannot seem to “shake the blues.”s. Other (write in):Instructions : To help others make sense out of your answers, think about the following questions and be sure to explain your answers to your loved ones and health care providers.If you check “worth living, but just barely” for more than one factor, would a combination of these factors make your life “not worth living?” If so, which factors?If you checked “can’t answer now,” what information or people do you need to help you decide?Personal and spirtual beliefs:I believe that it is acceptable to consider the financial burden of treatment on my loved ones when making health care decisions on my behalf.In Weighing pros and cons of treatment for different chances of recovery:Imagine that you are seriously ill. The doctors are recommending treatment for your illness, but the treatments have very severe side effects, such as severe pain, nausea, vomiting, or weakness that could least for 2-3 months. I would be willing to endure severe side effects if the chance that I would regain my current health was: high (over 80%), moderate (50%), low (20%) very low (less than 2%). Yes. Not sure. No.Feelings about quality of life: My life right now is just fine; My life right now is difficult, but acceptable; My life right now is worth living, but just barely; My life right now is NOT worth living.Communicating Your Wishes:Your Vision of a Good DeathOrgan DonationFuneral Arrangements.

From the last thread (which lasted all of a couple of hours).

“A combination of higher official indebtedness and monetization has the potential to yield the worst of all worlds, pushing up long-term rates and generating increased inflation expectations before a convincing return to growth takes hold.” – Professor R. (my emphasis).

Finally Professor, I hear it from you! We’re talking about inflation expectations in a world that knows nothing but inflation. How long does it take before the inflation is expected? Not long, I think. It’s inflation, the crucifixion of savers, that has brought us out on that risk ladder to make unwise investment rather than amass retirement SAVINGS. It’s inflation, the Keynesian manipulation of monetary policy, and the expectation of inflation that has brought us to this. Well, it works for the BANKSTARDS, don’t it? They get theirs up front! These guys in their ivy-league towers (which includes Bernanke) don’t get it. These things don’t exist in isolation. The “narrow path” that must be walked between stag-deflation and stagflation is mined by exogenous factors. And if you think the world’s interests are aligned in traversing that path you must be dreaming! It’s a long shot at best.ptm where are you? I can use some help.Professor, I hope you can do something about your publication schedule here. Some mediocre posts languish for days and solicit comments that make me nauseous and terrific posts like your damned if you doare gone before they have time to be seen.@ Miss America, stay on it. Ask questions at Zero Hedge. Those are traders. If there’s anything to it they may dig it up.

I’m becoming much less tolerant of impertinent, ignorant, bull shit posts like this.

Sounds complicated. There was no pay wall when I tried.More to the point, did Miss America read this NYT article from January?MA – someone did supply you with what you requested several threads back. Are you just getting this info. 8-months after the fact?What spurred you to post your original request on this matter the other day?

… If any European country seems out of place in today’s Europe, stranded in another historical moment, it is Belarus under the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. Yet while Lukashenko prefers to ignore the Soviet killing fields in his country, wishing to build a highway over the death pits at Kuropaty, in some respects Lukashenko remembers European history better than his critics. By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.Belarusian memories of this experience, cultivated by the current dictatorial regime, help to explain suspicions of initiatives coming from the West. Yet West Europeans would generally be surprised to learn that Belarus was both the epicenter of European mass killing and the base of operations of anti-Nazi partisans who actually contributed to the victory of the Allies. It is striking that such a country can be entirely displaced from European remembrance. The absence of Belarus from discussions of the past is the clearest sign of the difference between memory and history.Just as disturbing is the absence of economics. Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic development. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning…

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

Waiting for Economy Roubini Can Believe in Means Missing RallyWaiting for Economy Roubini Can Believe in Means Missing RallyAug. 26 (Bloomberg) — Making money on the thinking of Nouriel Roubini isn’t what it used to be.The New York University professor, who in 2006 foretold the worst financial unraveling since the Great Depression, has yet to say the economy is worth investing in again. “There is a big risk of a double-dip recession,” wrote Roubini, also known as Dr. Doom, in his column in the Financial Times this week.Anyone attempting to apply Roubini’s wisdom to stocks may be forgiven for missing the biggest rally since the 1930s as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 52 percent in six months. While Roubini said in March the advance was a “dead-cat bounce,” that it may “fizzle” in May and warned in July that the economy’s “not out of the woods,” the MSCI World Index was posting a 58 percent gain, the largest since it began in 1970.“We’re looking at a bull cycle in phase one,” Laszlo Birinyi said in a telephone interview yesterday. Birinyi was the top-ranked Dow Jones Industrial Average forecaster for most of the 1990s on PBS’s “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.” “No one wants to come out and say, ‘This is a bull market.’ Everyone’s just dancing around the term,” he said.The S&P 500 added 14 percent since Westport, Connecticut- based Birinyi Associates Inc., which manages $350 million, said on May 20 that a bull market had begun, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Roubini, who forecast in October 2008 that the U.S. was in a recession that would last 24 months, said on March 9 that the index might fall back to 600. It has risen to 1,028 since then.$4 Trillion GainedAbout $4 trillion has been restored to U.S. equity markets since March following better-than-forecast corporate profits and signs of an improving economy. More than 72 percent of the S&P 500’s companies beat analysts’ average estimates for second- quarter earnings, matching the highest proportion since Bloomberg began tracking the data in 1993. The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has risen four consecutive months.Roubini’s July 2006 warning about the financial crisis protected investors from losses in the S&P 500’s worst annual tumble in seven decades. He also correctly warned investors to avoid stocks following the steepest advances in 2008.On Dec. 12, he said U.S. stocks might fall 20 percent after the S&P 500 gained 17 percent in three weeks. The index lost 23 percent through March 9, 2009. During an 18 percent jump in the index between Oct. 27 and Nov. 4, Roubini warned the S&P 500 might reverse course and lose 30 percent. It dropped 28 percent through March.‘Understand the Market’He may have missed this year’s bull market because Roubini isn’t focused on stocks, according to Birinyi.Roubini has “done a very good job on the economy,” Birinyi said in an interview Aug. 24. “Our approach is to try to understand the market and not try to do much more than that.”Jonathan D. Goldberg, a New York-based spokesman for Roubini, said he wasn’t available to comment because he’s on vacation.Roubini, 51, wrote this week in the Financial Times that the economy may worsen again even after it stops shrinking this year. The global contraction will bottom in the second half of 2009, and the recession in the U.S. won’t be “formally over” before the end of the year, he said.The forecast was a reiteration of Roubini’s call for an 18- to 24-month contraction that he made in October 2008. The recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee.‘Fizzle Out’Roubini told Bloomberg Television on May 13 that the stock market’s rally “might fizzle out,” citing expectations for weak growth in earnings. On March 9, he said it was “highly likely” the S&P 500 would fall to 600 or below because of plunging profits, an accelerating contraction in the global economy and a deteriorating outlook for banks.The index reached a 12-year low of 676.53 that day and has since climbed for almost six months. Reports on industrial production, housing starts and car sales, along with comments from the Federal Reserve that the economy is “leveling out,” helped boost equities in the world’s largest economy.In July 2006, Roubini predicted the financial crisis that led to $1.6 trillion in credit-related losses and writedowns. He forecast a “catastrophic” meltdown in February 2008, leading to the bankruptcy of large banks with mortgage holdings and a “sharp drop” in equities. Since then, Bear Stearns Cos. and Merrill Lynch & Co. were taken over, American International Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. required government bailouts and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for the world’s biggest bankruptcy. All the companies were based in New York.Surging to 1,700Birinyi, 65, who spent a decade on the trading desk at Salomon Brothers Inc. before founding Birinyi Associates in 1989, said on May 20 that the S&P 500 may reach 1,700 by 2011, shifting from his April 13 call that the market had risen too much “by almost every measure.” In October 2007, he told investors to avoid bank stocks, saying bad loans and lower revenue from underwriting would damp earnings. The S&P 500 Financials Index then plunged 82 percent through March 6, 2009.“Both of them just have a pretty deep understanding of the history of economic and business cycles,” said Eric Teal, who oversees $5 billion as chief investment officer at First Citizens Bank in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Roubini has just had more of an academic background, whereas Birinyi has been much more in the spotlight managing money and working in capital markets.”Growth ForecastsThe U.S. economy has contracted four straight quarters. It will expand 2.2 percent during the third quarter and 2 percent in the fourth, before growing 2.3 percent in 2010, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.Roubini, who received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1988, was a member of Yale University’s faculty until joining NYU in 1995. He started his consulting firm, Roubini Global Economics LLC, in 2004, providing subscribers access to written and broadcast commentary and archived data. The firm’s 1,300 institutional clients include asset managers and hedge funds, as well as investment banks and universities. Roubini doesn’t invest any money on behalf of customers.“There’s a lot more weight behind pundits who put their money where their mouth is,” said Jack Ablin, who oversees $60 billion as chief investment officer of Harris Private Bank in Chicago. “Where I get up and pay attention is when I see someone who’s been bearish go bullish.”http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aLMAMxHyS_ps

d, @ ‘managing perception’.that statement is revealing.” ..Yet there is a space between the rock and the hard place. It is not a big space, but it is there.Governments will have to manage perceptions. Today investors remain willing to bankroll federal spending without any clear or firm indication of how the fiscal crisis – and it is a crisis of extraordinary proportions – is going to be dealt with. That won’t last.”….i take it out of context and will take it further..and read ..just,.”..a space between the rock and the hard place. It is not a big space, but it is there.Governments will have to manage perceptions.”and one more time…”Governments will manage perceptions.”.comment: no they won’t, they can’t. that woulddepend on them having credibility capital that theyhave already squandered. so where will they get thisnew found credibility to manage perceptions? no!anyway, intelligent free adult people don’t have someone manage their perceptions for them, especiallynot a cultural authority, but, this is the crux ofit and has been the story from the beginning.perceptions, government and the markets; and whoor what is in control?in animal “husbandry”, and i hope i’m not usingthat term incorrectly or indelicately, i have heardit is essential to control the perceptions ofcattle as they are led to slaughter; for their ownwelfare of course. it reduces suffering..the other idea that should bear upon this discussionis that the people, individuals are the government.the government exists as nothing more than an aggregation of the individuals. this should implythat we manage our own perceptions and as far asthat goes it should not take too much effort asnature has developed a system whereby we merely haveto open our eyes and see the world, be quiet and listen.someone will say it’s not so simple in the contextof overblown financial bubbles and failed industriesetc. o.k. so how much lying do we have to do toourselves and each other to make pigs fly? tell me.and how do we manage to perceive the flying dead pig?and how do we get people who speak foreign languagesto see it too? balliwood? hollywood and neverland,it all comes back to michael jackson and being putdown by your personal medical liaison. which brings me to maddoff. they should let him run the fed fromhis cell, before they fake his death and move him tonew zealand. gotti did it, bernie could too, orat least let him consult and advise. untapped talentfloundering i say.and then there is the kernel of genius in our foreignpolicy as it intersect with industrial production..look see at this here..Cluster bomb’s ‘humanitarian’ alternativeby Mark Rutherford(Credit: Textron)http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10302167-42.htmlAs with landmines and napalm, cluster munitions are decidedly politically incorrect, and there is a concerted international effort to ban them. Problem is, they’re highly effective, and countries that actually fight wars, like the U.S. and Russia, are loath to give them up.However, a “humanitarian” version of the “cluster bomb” may head-off some objections to their continued production, or at least provide cover for those who want to keep them in the inventory. Billed as safer alternative to cluster munitions, Sensor fuzed weapons (SFW) contain independent self-destruct features based on altitude, time elapsed, and a battery “time-out” that shuts down all functions if no targets are detected within minutes of deployment, according to manufacture Textron Defense Systems. (Video).don’t you feel better knowing how the best andbrightest spend their time and talent in pursuitof turning their genius into a business. i recentlyheard someone arguing that the value added to societyis being eroded as these individuals attentions, not to mention integrity, arebeing, partially because of economic contraction/collapse, diverted to financial matters.. or, doctors, lawyers, indian chiefs are now alljust struggling or failing businesses. perhapsjust a mistaken perception?.so we need a two party system to both supportthe sale, use and justification of this productionand then a party to demand humanitarian aid to the victims of the employment of the devices..did you ever think they could come up with ahumanitarian cluster bomb! manage perceptionsindeed..one troubling thing is that we have abandoned theintellect entirely along with any derived principles, in favor ofexpediency and comfortable perception ( that wouldbe bullshit, outright lies, treachery and bestiality )and what is even better, we don’t see it and better,even than that, we do not care as our perception,morals, thoughts, time and desires are all beingmanaged under one systemic guise or another orboth.yet there is the internet, or interweb as i prefer,so managing perceptions requires the resources ofmore than the governments, i think the bankerswill have to chip in and the media, in fact, we will all have to do our part for the thing to take off and fly. perceptions in bubbleville. ?.so i would say that space between the rock and thehard place where perception is managed is betweenyour ears and in your heart and no one has a right to violate that, ever. no sane person would reallyever even try but they will try and then fail.the people who would manage others perceptionsand the people who would have their perceptionsmanaged are not going to right any wrong or fixanything that is broken as they are busy in denial. me thinks out loud.i wish n.r. never used that term and i apologizein advance for repeating it but it needs to bedissected.

Already done – in North Dakota as I recall.I understand that CA is looking to do this very thing.

They are not SCUM!They believe in what they are doing. They have a “savior” complex – something that comes with what is known as a psychological inflation. Rootless to any meaningful relationship with God – they themselves are now said God. Like this they thrust upon the rest their misguided HOPIUM policies. Remember – whatever is at the top surrounds itself with the same ilk.They believe they should try to eradicate evil in all forms – man made or not.I am not sure what has happened to Roubini – he seems to me to have an appetite for risk that goes beyond being objective. The first time I heard about him was on Charlie Rose. He was fresh, vital, telling it like it is. Glad to see that some continue to do this like Mark Faber below. I would have expected something like the following from the professor – not this pulling of the punches that are so clearly not deserved. Suffering is a good thing – it helps everyone make better choices. To reward the criminal elite is just way beyond the pale of good judgment in my opinion. But I know that Roubini will call a spade a spade as this “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” plays out. I just wonder where the line is in the sand for him – when does he throw in the towel and say “it is hopless” this entire business model is bankrupt and devote his energies to CHANGE WE CAN COUNT ON! This is why I like Marc Faber – he keeps his eye on the ball and calls it like it is. Never blinks.Some points from Marc Faber’s Audio

USA Deficit in 2010 to hit $2.5 TrillionNo increase in interest rate in USA – Fed can’t allow itMust Control USA SpendingGet rid of lobbiesGet rid of 50% of all government jobsGet rid of 50% of all members of congressBush I thought was bad but now you have a president who thinks he knows everythingFuture:Total collapse of World Wide Financial system is ahead of usCould happen in a year, 5 years or 10 years – but it will happenWill lead to the end of the capitalistic system as we know itChina will eventually implodeWill lead to war as nations try to distract populations.

Your distinction is pertinent and necessary. Are you saying that when NR predicts W or double-dip he is referring to the investment economy? the stock market ??

Your distinction is pertinent and necessary. Are you saying that when NR predicts W or double-dip he is referring to the investment economy? the stock market ??

Why only 50% of Congress, and which 50% at that?

Yes to all Medic said here.I would add – be sure to have a signed legal medical directive on file in several places – one that clearly spells out your desire for end-of-life care. That way, while you are still in your right mind, no one can argue with what this ill, depressed person really wanted.Further if you get in an accident that puts you on a course to be a vegetable – then it is nice to have such a directive that limits any extraordinary measures at life prolonging.Oregon has I believe a good start at rationing health care. It is a good starting point.I am like a lot of folks who are getting all wore out from people who choose to smoke, do drugs, etc. and then ask the rest to pick up the tab.I’m also not very tolerant for women having eight babies at a time and then let CA pick up their tab.

Wow! I have a fan! Dude, you saved that? I guess I must really piss you off huh? I can’t even begin to tell you how much sleep I’ll lose over that tonight.Clearly I’ve touched a nerve for you and whichever of your delicate sensitivities it’s tied to, I shall remain ignorant of because you, instead of discussing anything, resort to attacking me.Hey man, whatever makes you happy. You liked Reagan – I thought he was an ass; you supported Bush – I find he was only half as bright as my cat; you are clearly religious and me, not so much. We’re different – I get it. But that does not mean that options that are not right for you personally should be off the table for me.Just as I’m sure you don’t understand or condone homosexuality, atheism, any religion other than Christianity, etc. – you want the rest of us to have your same beliefs and your set of “morals” – well too bad. It does not work that way.Why don’t you put some effort into something that makes you feel better – perhaps you could purchase some books on tape for the GWB library…….BTW – I am always impressed by the “guest” moniker – how very brave of you to come at me that way.

FT:That is the beauty of being one of any number of anonymous “Guest” posters…SWK

and your comment is equally stupid whether you hid behind anonymity or not. Moron.

g

Howard Dean’s canidacy ended because he went “ahhhrrg”. Do you really think Teddy Roosevelt would survive in today’s media?

Teddy Roosevelt = Ron Paul + Bernie Sanders

Conservatives love it when the government takes your grandma’s house in a reverse mortgage program to pay medicare.Conservatives love it when a bank forecloses on your house in a bankruptcy that results from a medical emergency.Conservatives delight in the misery of people who can’t get insurance coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

Restoring our Financial Sovereignty | Information Clearning HouseA NEW MONETARY SYSTEM | By Nikki Alexander March 19, 2009PrologueWhen Benjamin Franklin was called before the British Parliament in 1757 and asked to account for the prosperity in the American colonies. He replied, “That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”It was the struggle for financial sovereignty that precipitated the American Revolution when the (Rothschild) Bank of England forced the colonies to give up their Scrip and intense poverty followed.That war never ended.Throughout their political lives Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson fought off the European bankers who intermittently controlled the nation’s money supply through privately-owned banks. When Abraham Lincoln issued ‘greenbacks’ that deprived private bankers of their monopoly control of the nation’s money supply he was assassinated. The European bankers battled for more than a century to establish a private central bank in the United States with the exclusive right to print their own paper notes and exchange them for government debt. They succeeded in 1913 with The Federal Reserve Act, a coup that authorized a private cartel to create money out of nothing, lend it to the government with interest and control the national money supply, expanding or contracting it at will. Representative Charles Lindbergh called the Act “the worst legislative crime of the ages.” Fifty years later, President John F. Kennedy defied the central bankers when he issued debt-free Treasury Notes. He too was assassinated.The Systemic Usury ParasiteIn 1913 our sovereign authority to create interest-free money was unconstitutionally transferred to a transnational private banking cartel that has systemically infected our economy with a staggering national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars. Eighty-five cents of every dollar is now consumed as “interest” by the systemic usury parasite, draining its host of vital resources and collapsing our economy in bankruptcy.Ours is not the only nation to succumb. Why rob just one bank when you can rob a whole nation? And why rob just one country when you can rob them all?The usury parasite has infected 170 countries, feeding itself through the central bank syndicate, a shareholder-owned consortium of private banks, headquartered in Switzerland at the Bank for International Settlements. Created in 1930, BIS obscures its transactions with an astounding array of legal immunities that prohibit any form of oversight or intrusion.[i] It functioned as a Nazi money laundering operation in World War II.[ii] Today it serves as the cashier’s window for the global casino.[iii] Each central bank member has an exclusive monopoly on its government’s monetary system, with the power to create public debt and expand or contract the host’s economy at will. Coordinating their monetary policies with each other through the BIS, the central bankers meet behind closed doors, appoint their own governors and set their own rules. Their books are not subject to audit by the governments that host them. The IMF and World Bank are tentacles of this parasite that strangle governments with insurmountable debt, forcing these nations through “structural adjustment” policies to rob their taxpayers, slash social programs, transfer public assets to private owners and sell the nation’s treasures to transnational predators at fire sale prices. Government treasuries are the parasite’s host. Flushing the global economy of this systemic disease begins with understanding how a central bank debilitates its host with suffocating debt.Although governments have inherent authority to create their own money, they borrow it from central banks, with interest. A central bank fabricates paper money and credit by “lending” them into existence, in return for treasury bonds of the host government ~ taxpayer IOUs. This “money” has no pre-existing value in reality and is conjured up through accounting entries. It is literally created out of nothing. The central bank first “lends” these accounting entries to its own investment banks and then to downline commercial banks, with interest. The commercial banks then lend nine times the amount of their borrowed accounting entries held “in reserve.” This nine-fold multiplication of borrowed accounting entries, described as “fractional reserve banking,” creates massive inflation of the money supply which devalues the currency. Borrowers further expand the money supply when they pay back these accounting entry credits with compound interest that multiplies exponentially. More money must be fabricated to pay this interest. Thus, all “money” that enters circulation is actually debt contrived by accounting entries. Every fiat dollar is an IOU from a borrower to a lender. A debt-based monetary system can never achieve equilibrium because compound interest that multiplies exponentially overwhelms the money supply. Escalating interest eventually reaches staggering proportions and causes systemic collapse.Organized CrimeToday the nation is essentially bankrupt and hoping Barack Obama’s team of Wall Street advisors will forestall economic collapse. This expectation is equivalent to hoping that Al Capone will make our streets safe. Obama’s economic recovery team is a Trojan horse filled with the same Wall Street racketeers that infected the global economy with a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, using deliberately deregulated mechanisms.[iv] They have successfully held the nation hostage with a universal credit freeze and threats of systemic collapse if trillions of dollars in ransom demands are not met. But why would our government agree to double its public debt to save crooked financiers and reckless gamblers from bankruptcy? Why would our government re-victimize taxpayers who did not participate in this global fraud and whose investments, retirement savings, pension plans and real estate values have already been eviscerated by these swindlers? The answer is that the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Board have historically represented a parasitic crime syndicate, not the host government and its taxpayers.The racketeers who bribed members of Congress to deregulate Wall Street, could not have held our nation hostage without collusion from the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Board. These monetary “authorities” represent Robber Barons, Inc. ~ the crime syndicate that ransacks government treasuries through the central bank system (IMF/World Bank/BIS),[v] investment banks and private equity firms (JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Salomon Smith Barney, Goldman Sachs and Carlyle).[vi] Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a Goldman Sachs CEO, is also a Board Governor at the IMF. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers’ Harvard team organized the looting of Russia, stripping one trillion dollars from Russia’s struggling economy and shifting state-owned assets to private owners. Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary and successfully completed Rubin’s repeal of Depression-era laws that protected public assets from Wall Street fraud. A former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Rubin joined CEO Sanford Weill at Citigroup to fully embrace the benefits of deregulation. Rubin’s Citigroup pooled bogus loans as AAA securities and sold them as collateralized debt obligations. Larry Summers championed the deregulation of financial derivatives, ensuring the globalization of losses from those securities. With $2 trillion in toxic assets, Citigroup fraud has metastasized to 100 countries making it too infectious to quarantine (“too big to fail”). Rubin protégés advised Obama that taxpayers should be held liable for $306 billion of Citigroup’s junk loans.[vii] Rockefeller owns Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, two of the investment banks that own the Federal Reserve. Paul Volcker, the head of Obama’s economic advisory team, is the Rockefeller banker whose policies under Reagan ignited the strongest political protests in the history of the Federal Reserve.[viii] Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner,[ix] is an IMF Director, BIS committee Chairman, ex-president of the Federal Reserve and a protégé of David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.If it doesn’t govern, it isn’t a government. What is masquerading as government is a crime syndicate with a flag. The US Government is an instrument of organized crime, alternatively described as the Octopus, the Washington Consensus, the Shadow Government, Wall Street, the Round Table (Bilderbergs, Trilaterals, Council on Foreign Relations, Royal Institute of International Affairs), and the New World Order. There is nothing new about this Underworld Order. The sordid criminal record of this syndicate dates all the way back to European “colonizers” and operates through the Morgan-Rockefeller-Rothschild banking dynasties, American, European and Asian “royal” families, “philanthropic” foundations, advisory councils and transnational corporations. Pillaging the earth at gunpoint, syndicate families have amassed fortunes from drug trafficking, slave labor, weapons, blood diamonds, banking, gold, oil and genocide.From the very beginning of America’s fledgling republic these international gangsters surreptitiously gained control of the banks, railroads, oil and vital infrastructure, using a maze of corporations, offshore banks and holding companies that disguised foreign ownership of national resources.[x] During the 19th and 20th centuries this syndicate secured private ownership of vital infrastructure and natural resources worldwide by engineering both covert and overt wars, crushing democracies and installing brutal dictators. They financed Trotsky, Lenin and Hitler, using syndicate members within the US Treasury and Federal Reserve to protect “their” international assets. Thomas Lamont, a self-described fascist, was the JP Morgan banker who represented the US Treasury at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles negotiations. He personally raised $100 million to finance Benito Mussolini. William Boyce Thompson, director of the New York Federal Reserve traveled to Russia to undermine the Russian Revolution, ensuring that railroads, banks, oil and vital resources would remain in private hands.[xi] Thomas McKittrick, Rockefeller’s Vice Chairman of Chase National Bank, was the president of the Bank for International Settlements during World War II, coordinating Nazi money laundering operations.[xii] Hitler was armed and financed by Anglo-American corporations that provided the money, oil, weapons and extermination gas used for genocide.[xiii] Allen Dulles, a Wall Street attorney, negotiated their contracts. As CIA director, Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State) continued to brutally suppress every democratic uprising that threatened syndicate control over international assets. Across the globe democratically elected leaders were deposed or assassinated that dared to return natural resources to their rightful owners.General Smedley Butler is best remembered today for his oft-quoted statement in the socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935: “I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested…. Looking back on it, I felt I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.” [xiv]Financial TerrorismAuthor Bernard Lietaer, a former central banker, writes in “The Future of Money:””Your money’s value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stock markets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the “real” economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-95, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system.”These emergencies are also the hallmark of the transnational crime syndicate manipulating the global economy through financial terrorism. Collapsing healthy economies with currency speculation, fabricated debt and naked short selling, these vultures have swarmed across the globe devouring the assets of one nation after another with coordinated “privatization” schemes. The US is their current victim.Instead of allowing a handful of corrupt Wall Street investment banks to implode from well-deserved bankruptcy, the Swindler Bailout engineered by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve extorts trillions of taxpayer dollars to pay off the gambling debts of racketeers, reward criminal CEOs for fraud, finance acquisitions to devour healthy banks and to further consolidate syndicate banking monopolies. Taxpayer loans could have been directly issued to victims of predatory lenders to stabilize the housing market and “bailout” funds could have been directly injected into the REAL economy. Instead, the confiscated wages of American workers were transferred to corrupt investment conglomerates and their foreign creditors. Tim Geithner plans to use confiscated American wages to create a “bad bank” to purchase toxic waste. Fed-Treasury gangsters serve the syndicate, not taxpayers. Crippling national debt from illegal wars, Swindler Bailouts and Obama’s “stimulus” lay the groundwork for classic IMF “structural adjustment” of the American economy, permanently stripping citizens of their remaining assets, health care protection and confiscated wages held in trust by the Social Security Administration. This premeditated Grand Theft is the prelude for national insolvency and subsequent sale of the nation’s assets to transnational pirates.[xv]Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman, and Board Director at the predatory Bank for International Settlements, used the standard Rockefeller-Rothschild blueprint for engineering the US financial collapse: deliberate expansion of cheap credit to inflate the web of debt and entice rampant speculation followed by sudden constriction of credit to violently contract the economy. A tactic used by Rothschild’s Bank of England to rob its colonies, this violent contraction catalyzes waves of foreclosures, bankruptcies and layoffs that force sellers to accept pennies on the dollar for their assets. Alternatively described as Milton Friedman’s ‘Shock Treatment’ and Henry Kissinger’s formula for “making the economy scream,” this psychopathic financial terrorism is often accompanied by death squads to bring a nation to its knees.

A read for EVERYONE!:The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma‏

Do you think we’ll hear from this “sage” when it all capitulates?Another thing that these folks don’t admit is that their insider business, along with all the money they sweep up, actually drives the very markets that they pretend that they are merely “forecasting.”

And that’s when they tell folks that they should work hard and ‘compete’.Classic fascist dogma. And I really do wish that there was an alternative expression to use, but there isn’t.

Here’s an even better idea. Instead of revenues flowing to DC in the form of taxes that are then “revenue shared” with the states, why not have the states do all the tax collecting and then pass along what they see fit for the Feds to operate.That would actually be consonant with the Constitution. Heaven forbid!

the cause of the suffering in one word: humankind.

Please stop posting this nonsense. Really.

Somewhere over the horizon one hears the beating of the blades of a black UN helicopter. They are coming for you.

Thank you. How funny. I didn’t even notice it.

The headline was Durable Orders Increase, but buried in the article is the fact:”Orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, a key measure of business investment, dropped 0.3 percent.”Not sure why aircraft orders are rising. It seems to me that business travel and consumer budgets are going to be under stress for a long time.

That would be SSA. His initials are SWK.

My last two bills here in California were 535.00 and 549.00. Lots of days around a 100 degrees. Let see how long this contunues…. Inflation is roaring on the basics like Energy, Food, Utilities…. Deflation is roaring on Shit we dont need.We are so screwed!!!!!!!!!!We Can’t Afford To Pay For ElectricityJay Yarow|Aug. 26, 2009, 9:43 AM|1Record heat in Texas is driving the price of electricity through the roof, according the Wall Street Journal.Texas relies heavily on natural gas for electricity, so it was anticipating a decline in bills, since gas is so cheap now, but a number of above 100 degree days has caused prices to soar, as everyone cranks the air conditioning to cool down.According to the Journal’s story “roughly 8% of households are delinquent with utility payments.” So the utilities are lettting people pay 25% now and 75% later.The USA Today, also has a story along these lines today, saying that power is getting shut off because consumers can’t afford to pay their bills:ComEd, which supplies electricity to 3.8 million customers in northern Illinois, says it has disconnected more this year than last but declined to provide specifics. The utility saw a 14% increase in bills 60 days late in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, spokeswoman Kim Johnson says.Piedmont Natural Gas, which has 1 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, disconnected 9,039 North Carolina customers from November 2008 through February 2009, up 68% from the same period a year earlier. “The economy’s having an impact,” spokesman David Trusty says.Public Service Electric and Gas, which has 2.3 million customers in New Jersey, has seen a 20% increase so far this year in customers at least two months behind, says billing director Victor Viscomi. This year, 30,000 more customers received financial assistance. Unemployment and foreclosures are growing, Viscomi says, and “bankruptcies are up approximately 30% among customers.”At Arizona’s Home Energy Assistance Fund, requests for help with utility bills are up 40% from last year, program manager Katie Morales says.

Hello PB&J…As far as I had seen, no one had tied the JPM Chase withdrawel to the Bear Stears connection.I’ve not seen that anywhere???I wrote an article and submitted it yesterday… but the folks at RGE haven’t gotten it up yet.Hopefully, we can have a stationary platform to research this from. (which is why I wrote the article)In addition, I contacted the folks at Zero Hedge. Maybe they will be interested in it??? (Thanks FreeTibet)All the best,Miss America

so we sold 625 thousand car under this program over about 4 weeks.lets see without it we were selling approx 750K cars a month since the crisis began last fall (Down from 1.35 million a month in early 2008). so wihtout the program we wouldve sold 750K. My guess is at least 1/2 the cars on the program wouldve been bought without the program. and those that did buy because of the program can now be taken out of the people who were going to need to buy a car sometime in the next year. Also a lot of the people buying the cars were folks who really didnt the car, have money and jsut took advantage of the Credit. so what it does it mean, back to 750-800k levels of sales, possibly even lower and more trouble ahead for the auto mfrs.Was the program succesful, i suppose so, but it didnt fix anything and i sure hope that those who bought the cars can afford the payments or 3 billion in the program could turn into 3 billion in losses down the road.Auto Industry Braces For Hangover After The ‘Clunker’ PartyBy Dana HedgpethWashington Post Staff WriterTuesday, August 25, 2009As the U.S. government’s popular “Cash for Clunkers” program shut down officially at 8 p.m. Monday, it left behind mounds of paperwork and empty lots at dealerships across the country.This StoryAuto Industry Braces For Hangover After The ‘Clunker’ PartyRecession Road: Where the Clunker Stands TallOver the weekend, an onslaught of customers descended on dealerships, hoping to take advantage of the offer, which allowed consumers to trade in their gas guzzlers for a voucher worth up to $4,500 toward a new vehicle. In back offices, accountants and other dealership workers sat at their computers until the wee hours of Sunday morning, uploading their applications to the government’s Web site.The online system was slow and crashed several times, forcing transportation officials to extend the deadline until noon Tuesday for dealers to submit their paperwork.AutoNation, the country’s biggest car dealership chain, stopped accepting clunker program trade-ins over the weekend because it was concerned about getting in all of the paperwork on the more than 12,000 deals it did. The company processed 1,600 sales on Friday night alone, and employees worked in shifts at offices in Dallas throughout the weekend.”This is the jump-start to a gradual recovery,” said Marc Cannon, a spokesman for AutoNation.Transportation officials said 625,000 transactions, worth $2.58 billion, had been submitted as of Monday morning.The Obama administration declared the program a success. An estimate issued Monday by the White House Council of Economic Advisers said the program is projected to boost U.S. third-quarter gross domestic product by 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points and create 42,000 jobs by the end of 2009.Many auto industry analysts and dealers expect sales volumes to fall now that the program is over. They worry that many people who took advantage of the program were merely accelerating purchases they would have made later in the year.If that’s true, the premature sales could hurt automakers, which increased production in the third quarter to replenish clunker-depleted inventories that had already grown low because of factory shutdowns over the summer.

Same Game, Same Mistakes, No has learned a thing. Only thing now, Average Joe American will be on the hook for more, while the banksers dump and run for cover.The Next Credit Bubble Is NowAre you ready for a replay?By Heidi N. MooreAugust 25, 2009 – 1:07amMortgage-backed securities—and the bankers who loved them—wreaked havoc last year, helping to pitch us into the deepest downturn since the Great Depression. Are you ready for a replay?Gird your loins. The signs are growing that there’s a new Wall Street gold rush under way—for those complex bundles of mortgage loans that fueled banks’ profits between 2005 and 2007. This year, prices for mortgage-backed securities are rocketing as federal stimulus dollars flood the market. But the difference with this “boom” is the center of gravity has shifted: from giddy, cowboy bankers to the Federal Reserve. The Fed is so eager to save banks, create a demand for these securities, and stabilize the housing market that it’s taking troubled loans and mortgages onto its own books. The problem is the Fed may be in well over its head.The Fed is cleaning up the old mortgage securities in the market—mostly old residential mortgage loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But it will soon be on the hook for new ones, too, as troubled commercial mortgages are expected to fail en masse in a crash. The institution has already received $2.3 billion in requests to buy commercial mortgages. Indeed, investors are so eager to dump their commercial mortgage-backed securities on the Fed that they have spurred an outcry against Standard & Poor’s, which has said it may tighten its ratings requirements to keep the more problematic loans out of government hands. Put simply, the holders of such securities don’t want anything to stand in the way of getting on the federal gravy train.Both types of assets are creating a shadow boom in unworthy debt, based on the same excessive leverage and questionable financial judgment of the last credit bubble. Plus the Fed is making some of the same mistakes as banks did in 2005-07. The banks forgot they were in the “moving” business-of underwriting mortgage-backed securities—and got into the “storage” business of keeping those securities on their books. That’s where the Fed is now. It has not yet articulated an exit strategy to dump up to $800 billion of mortgages from its balance sheet.And if you thought U.S. banks holding all those sketchy mortgages was a bad idea, wait until you see what happens when the center of our country’s money supply is saddled with bad debt. The Fed could bail out the banks; no one can bail the Fed out.It’s partly a matter of sheer dollars. The Fed has dug itself in deep, spending $64 billion over the last four weeks and $741 billion this year as it plans to purchase $1.25 trillion of securities backed by agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.At the same time, prices for some residential mortgage-backed securities have jumped 40 percent or more this year to as high as 85 cents on the dollar, even though 9.24 percent of all U.S. mortgages are now delinquent. Analysts have warned that mortgage prices are overvalued. And when about one in every nine is heading for delinquency, buyers have to question the quality of all the bundles they are buying, no matter how highly rated. That is especially true as fewer and fewer homeowners manage to catch up on missed payments. Fitch Ratings, for instance, found that only 6.6 percent of homeowners holding prime loans managed to catch up on late payments as of July. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “That compares to an average of 45% for the years 2000 through 2006.”While the mortgage market is getting worse, the Fed is getting in deeper. In fact, the Fed never owned a Fannie-or-Freddie-backed mortgage before 2009 and now controls about 15 percent of that market, according to Credit Suisse (CS). No wonder Fannie and Freddie shares pitched precipitously upwards in Monday trading, by as much as 50 percent.. Perhaps investors are getting wise that the agencies are in for a long and very lucrative ride as the federal government supports their debt.Plus, the Fed’s buying spree has attracted the attention of investors looking to cash out on mortgage-backed securities: Everyone from Beijing to veteran investors is getting in on the action. Financial firms are forming real estate investment trusts—or pools of capital that buy mortgages-to buy distressed mortgages fast. Investors like hedge fund Third Point entered the market with a $160 million investment in the second quarter and quickly made a $20 million profit. John Costas, a former UBS employee who founded a fund that nearly took down the Swiss bank with bets on subprime mortgages, has just started a new firm to trade mortgages again. Of course, what Wall Street wants is a replay of the early 1990s, when savvy buyers of troubled mortgage-backed securities made a fortune by holding onto the toxic assets until the market came roaring back.But the Fed should be driving a harder bargain instead of paying richly enough to create a boom. Not surprisingly, the hype for mortgage-backed securities is all in classic bubble language: Wall Street is just happy to have some business to do. Analysts goad on “vulture” investors in distressed mortgage securities by predicting returns of “several hundred percent” for savvy buyers who jump into the market now. Like many bubbles, however, those returns won’t last forever. Eventually, supply and demand will fall out of whack again.If the Fed wants to save banks and consumers by buying these securities, Wall Street is happy to play along. This boom will be hard to stop—and impossible to regulate—because it is spurred by the Fed. On the surface, everyone wins: Banks get to dump some bad assets and gain fees for selling them to the Fed. The Fed gets to enact a stimulus that helps the banks and gets the mortgage markets moving. Politicians can be delighted that Fannie and Freddie are getting some love, because they lend to consumers and that in turn wins votes. But, as we found out during the last boom, something that feels great at first can feel terrible later.

READ THE BELOW AND CONSIDER THAT WE WERE BUILDING 1.5 MILLION LESS THAN 18 MOTNHS AGO. THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IS WRITTEN TO EXPLAIN WHY HOMEBUILDER STOCKS ARE SURGING….What a joke….What BS this this typs of reporting is….. The HOMBUILDERS are BANKRPUT and DEAD MEN Walking!!!!!U.S. New Home Sales Jump 9.6%, Most in Four YearsBy Shobhana ChandraAug. 26 (Bloomberg) — Purchases of new homes in the U.S. jumped more than forecast in July, adding to signs that the economy is rebounding from the worst recession since the 1930s.Sales increased 9.6 percent, the most since February 2005, to a 433,000 annual pace, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. The number of houses on the market dropped to the lowest level in 16 years.The gain in sales, together with rising purchases of existing homes and steadying prices, indicate the housing slump may be ending as Federal Reserve efforts to thaw credit and the Obama administration’s first-time homebuyer incentives lift demand. Job losses and mounting foreclosures mean any rebound in construction may be limited.“The housing market is bottoming out,” Conrad DeQuadros, a senior economist at RDQ Economics in New York, said before the report. At the same time, “it’s not going to turn around very quickly.”Homebuilders’ stocks surged after the report, with the Standard & Poor’s Supercomposite Homebuilding Index gaining 2.7 percent as of 10:06 a.m. in New York. The broader S&P 500 Stock Index was little changed at 1,027.78. Benchmark 10-year Treasury yields were also little changed, at 3.43 percent.Economists’ ForecastsEconomists forecast new home sales would rise to a 390,000 rate, according to the median of 71 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from 365,000 to 420,000.Last month’s pace was the highest in 10 months. The Commerce Department revised June’s reading up to a 395,000 rate from a previously reported 384,000.The median price of a new home decreased 12 percent to $210,100 from $237,300 in July 2008. Sales of new homes were down 13 percent from a year earlier.The jump in sales was led by a 32 percent surge in the Northeast. Purchases increased 16 percent in the South and 1 percent in the West. They dropped 7.6 percent in the Midwest.Builders had 271,000 houses on the market last month, down 35 percent from July 2008 and the fewest since March 1993. It would take 7.5 months to sell all homes at the current sales pace, the shortest time since April 2007.Home sales are responding to policy efforts such as an $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers, the Fed keeping its benchmark interest rate near zero and central bank purchases of mortgage-backed securities to free up funding for housing loans.Bernanke RenominationChairman Ben S. Bernanke, who led the biggest expansion of the Fed’s power in its 95-year history in order to stem the economic slide, was nominated to a second term as chairman yesterday by President Barack Obama. In a speech last week, Bernanke had said that “economic activity appears to be leveling out.”“The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” Bernanke said on Aug. 21 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The recovery will be “relatively slow at first.”Risks to a sustained rebound include a jobless rate that’s forecast to reach 10 percent by early 2010 and a surge in mortgage foreclosures. By driving down prices, distressed properties compete with new houses, hurting construction.Even so, the industry’s crisis is abating. The S&P/Case- Shiller national home-price index, released yesterday, rose 2.9 percent in the second quarter from the prior three months, the first increase since 2006 and the biggest in almost four years.Existing HomesExisting home sales advanced in July to the highest level in almost two years, boosted by lower prices, buyer incentives and near-record-low borrowing costs, data from the National Association of Realtors showed last week.While accounting for only about 7 percent of the housing market, new-home purchases are considered a timelier indicator because they are based on contract signings. Sales of previously owned homes, which make up the remainder, are compiled from closings and reflect contracts signed weeks or months earlier.“We’re likely not to experience a lot of downside from here,” Pulte Homes Inc. Chief Executive Officer Richard Dugas said last week. It could remain a “tough environment for a while,” he added.Pulte this month completed its purchase of Centex Corp., the first large combination of publicly traded homebuilders since the housing recession began.

What Would Be Involved in an Audit of the Federal Reserve? – Part FourWhy changing the laws to allow full auditing the Federal Reserve is so vital to the interests of all Americans. | American Banking News | 08/24/09As I mentioned in the last article, don’t be fooled when supporters of not having the Federal Reserve audited assert it is audited all the time. The facts and existing laws directly contradict that and reveal the Fed only has to release mostly irrelevant data that bears little resemblance to what’s really going on behind closed doors.The data which really matters is protected by existing anti-auditing laws which keep the important decisions and actions of the Fed shrouded in secrecy with absolutely no oversight and accountability.A lot of you reading this may respond or think that while this is interesting and sounds right for any person or organization which has too much power, “why should it matter to me?”The answer to that question is the key to why the Federal Reserve must be audited.Let’s first look at what has been happening over the last year or so with the outrageous bailouts of banks.The bailouts of the banks weren’t only outrageous because the poorly managed banks were wrongly kept from failing when that is exactly what should have happened. If that would have been allowed, the bad banks would have failed and the solid and well-managed banks would have ended up taking them over and we would have had a stronger banking system as a result.Many people get confused about this because of the effective but stupid idea that the banks were “too big to fail.” That’s really a lie for the reasons stated above; another bank would have stepped in and assumed the deposits and acquired the healthy assets. That’s how banking and business is built to, and should work.What an audit would reveal is that the big banks were close to being insolvent near the end of 2008, and in fact were close to declaring bankruptcy. In response the Fed swooped in and saved them, propping up their puppet leaders while allowing close to 100 banks to fail. In other words, Bernanke and the banking cartel scratched each other’s backs at the expense of other banks.This is important to learn by consumers and the general pubic because it’ll show that this is what determined the gigantic bailouts which resulted in unprecedented transfer and creation of dollars to these chosen companies, while others received nothing.The practicalities of this was the exchange of Treasury debt, which is a marketable product, with toxic debt with the largest banks in the country at face value; an outrageous action taxpayers in the United States will pay for for a long time.So why is this important to us other than the exorbitant debt all Americans have now inherited, which is bad enough? It will reveal the soft underbelly of the banking system in America, but even more important, it will reveal the individual banks within that system which are extremely weak.What will happen if that data are revealed? Individual investors will take their money out of the weak and failing banks and put it into what they feel is a safer bank. Now we’re getting into the real battle going on with the Fed audit, and what and why data are attempted to be kept secret and hidden by Bernanke and the Federal Reserve.Along with most Americans, members of Congress, for the most part, don’t understand what’s going on with the Federal Reserve and the consequences of their monetary policy. So when the crap hits the fan, they’ll suddenly be introduced to the fact that overall the banking system is build on a weak and shifting foundation that is in danger of collapsing. I don’t think Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve would appreciate that very much, and neither would the gigantic American banks being propped up by them.While that would be a public relations nightmare and disaster, that would be secondary to the inevitable failure of gigantic American banks which would experience a deserved bank run which would effectively end their corporate existence. This is the real fear Ben Bernanke has and why he is trying everything within his power to ensure an audit doesn’t happen. There are other reasons, but this is the key one that really keeps Bernanke up at night.Now let’s examine quickly what we’ve talked about before in this series, and that is the assertion of Ben Bernanke that Congress could appear to be interfering with monetary policy, when in fact the U.S. Constitution requires them to.This is a smokescreen by Bernanke obviously, but it’s not just one smokescreen, it’s a couple smokescreens at the same time.The first smokescreen is the Congressional one, which is so easily refuted that you must wonder why it was brought up in the first place. It’s possible that Bernanke is just ignorant, but it’s probably more than that. What he’s really afraid of ultimately is the free market; in other words, he doesn’t want Americans to find out which banks are weak and ready to crumble, so consumers are the ones to determine their fate by no longer doing business with them through the removing of their capital.The Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and the huge Wall Street banks know who really determines their fate, and that’s those who voluntarily choose to do business with them. In response, they all work together to keep those very depositors from getting the needed data to make the best decision with their capital for themselves.Here’s the end of the reasoning behind why we should care about the auditing of the Federal Reserve: we have no idea if our capital is safe in the banks we do business with. The data to make that determination is at this time legally being kept from us by laws made to protect big banks.So for all of us as consumers, the reason we must insist that the bill introduced by Ron Paul – HR 1207 – is brought out of committee and voted on and passed.At this time the strategy by Barney Frank and its opponents is to keep it locked up there so politicians can say they were on board with it but it wasn’t released out of committee.The truth on that is this: all the members of Congress have to do is vote for the bill to be released from committee in order for it to be voted on the floor to get it passed.This is important so all of us can force the rascals to go on record and let us know if they’re representing us. Politians know they’ll pay for that vote, so aren’t making a lot of waves to make the vote happen…http://www.americanbankingnews.com/2009/08/24/what-would-be-involved-in-an-audit-of-the-federal-reserve-part-four/

Here’s NAR’s latest game, to boost consumer ‘confidence…’House Sales and Mortgage Applications – Something Doesn’t Add Up by Chris Martenson 08/23/09I was not a good father today.Instead, I engaged in laboriously hand-entering data to satisfy a question that has been bothering me for a while.The issue that was worrying at me was the apparent discrepancy I’d mentally noted between the happy-happy increase in existing home sales, as reported by the NAR last week, and what I remembered from the MBS mortgage application releases.But who could be sure?Perceptions can be tricked and need to be tested and subjected to fact-based inquiry.Confounding things, the Mortgage Banker Association (MBA) application reports are notorious for changing their reporting methodology, most recently (during the past 3 weeks) dispensing with reporting of an absolute number in favor of a simple percentage change. Where, for example, the number used to change from 1000 to 1100, it is now only reported as having changed +10%.After a few weeks, who can remember what +10%, -4%, -3%, +12% is supposed to mean? I certainly can’t.At any rate, this shift to a percentage basis altered a convention that went back several years. Now we only get to read the weekly percentage and yearly changes, without the confusing benefit of an absolute number to guide our perceptions. So for those without the time or the inclination to dig through the data, it is what it is.For me? The only way to resolve this was to obtain all the base data, hand-enter it into a spreadsheet, and see what was up.Well, this is what’s up:Where the NAR recently reported a gain of +5% in existing home sales for July09/July08, the reconstructed MBA report shows a -22% decline in purchase applications over the same period (in stark contrast to their misleading recent release, which spoke of a yr/yr gain, but was actually referring to a blended gain that included the highly volatile refi apps):Where the MBA most recently said that purchase applications have been “trending up,” I am at a loss to see the period of time to which they are referring. I’ve boxed in 2009 for reference, but it is difficult to make a case for “trending up” unless one decides to begin randomly at some point after March.Note that the data I have is all seasonally adjusted and straight from the MBA, so I doubt we are referring to different data.At any rate, I am simply not in a position to believe that purchase applications are down 22% yr/yr while total sales are up 5%+. This would imply that nearly a third of all national sales are cash-on-the-barrel.Sorry. No way. Somebody here is lying.Somebody Not At all Reliable. However, I will retain my judgments – for now.http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/house-sales-and-mortgage-applications-something-doesnt-add/25714

Some dealers already had pulled out of the cash for clunkers program; they got the clunkers but they didn’t get the cash… by the way, those ‘clunkers’ weren’t just rusty ol’ junkers, they could be old Audis, BMWs, Acuras, even a zippy 1997 Lexus SC 400 coupe or a luxury 1998 Mercedes-Benz M-Class sport-utility…Some dealerships drop Cash for Clunkers program early |baynews9.com| 08/22/09BAY AREA (Bay News 9) — Despite the success of the Cash for Clunkers program, some local dealerships have already dropped out of the program.Dealers, such as Autoway Ford, say Cash for Clunkers is a big success. But concerns about reimbursement have them pulling out of the program days early.”It’s doubled our sales rate overnight, said Andrew Dunton, general managers of Autoway Ford. “That’s why we’re almost out of inventory.”But for every clunker parked at the dealership, comes hours of waiting and frustration trying to submit the application to the government program’s web site.So far the world’s largest auto group has only received about 2 percent of the money it’s owed by the government…http://www.baynews9.com/content/36/2009/8/22/511784.html

this from The OregonianThe logjam has created cash-flow problems for some dealers who have waited weeks to be repaid, at a time when many feel stretched thin from the long recession.These are dealers that have just come off some of the worst years, said Ted Davis, general manager of Wilsonville Honda, who has yet to receive payment for deals dating back three weeks. Cash flow is a substantial problem.In addition, some dealers worry that rebates denied by the government will leave dealers holding the bag, long after the customer has already driven off the lot.Under the program, people can scrap older gas guzzlers for up to a $4,500 voucher toward a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle. Dealers front the money and wait for the government to approve the deal and send them a check. But if an application is denied, it’s up to the dealer to recoup his up to $4,500 loss.The fear is that you send a customer off with a new car and then the rebate is not honored by the government, said Greg Remensperger, executive vice president of the Oregon Auto Dealers Association. The dealer is out the money even if they get the car back because its no longer a new vehicle and doesn’t have the same value…

Doug Kass: 10 Reasons Why The Market Has Likely Peaked For The YearAugust 26, 2009 by Joshua M Brown“I am less confident as a decade of hocus-pocus borrowing and lending and 35-to-1 leverage at almost every level in both private and public sectors cannot likely be relieved in the great debt unwind over the course of only 12 months.”-Doug Kass, August 26th 2009Doug Kass has made some tremendous calls over the past few years from his The Edge column on TheStreet.com. Not least of which is his “Generational Lows” call, in which he picked the stock market’s bottom 2 days in advance back in early March.He has gotten more bearish of late and this morning, he’s made another big call that should not be ignored.His opinion is that the optimism over a recovery has gotten way ahead of itself in light of what the mechanics that have driven the rally actually are.Below are ten items that he thinks will weigh on the economy and Wall Street for the balance of the year:My view remains that it is different this time. Again (now for emphasis), the typical self-sustaining economic recovery of the past will not be repeated in the immediate future for 10 important reasons that will weigh on the economy and markets like the governor that controlled the speed of the Good Humor truck I drove when I was in my teens during the summer:Cost cuts are a corporate lifeline and so is fiscal stimulus, but both have a defined and limited life.Cost cuts (exacerbated by wage deflation) pose an enduring threat to the consumer, which is still the most significant contributor to domestic growth.The consumer entered the current downcycle exposed and levered to the hilt, and net worths have been damaged and will need to be repaired through higher savings and lower consumption.The credit aftershock will continue to haunt the economy.The effect of the Fed’s monetarist experiment and its impact on investing and spending still remain uncertain.While the housing market has stabilized, its recovery will be muted, and there are few growth drivers to replace the important role taken by the real estate markets in the prior upturn.Commercial real estate has only begun to enter a cyclical downturn.While the public works component of public policy is a stimulant, the impact might be more muted than is generally recognized. There may be less than meets the eye as most of the current fiscal policy initiatives represent transfer payments that have a negative multiplier and create work disincentives.Municipalities have historically provided economic stability — no more.Federal, state and local taxes will be rising as the deficit must eventually be funded, and high-tax health and energy bills also loom.I do not make market calls of my own on this site and I also make it a point never to subscribe whole hog to any one pundit’s views (keeping in mind that Kass is bar none my fave in the game). I should also note that his cautious outlook is not yet another growl from a perma-bear, as he’s been consistently flexible throughout this period.And he’s been a hell of a lot more right than he’s been wrong.Even as you play both the long side and the short side of this market, ignore these factors at your own risk.

Brad Pitt Loses His Title as the Most Dangerous as McAfee’s Third Annual Report Reveals the Riskiest Celebrities to Search on the WebMcAfee, Inc. Names Jessica Biel the Most Dangerous Celebrity in Cyberspace for 2009SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 25, 2009 – Jessica Biel has overtaken Brad Pitt as the most dangerous celebrity to search in cyberspace, according to Internet security company McAfee, Inc. (NYSE:MFE). For the third year in a row, McAfee researched Hollywood’s glamorous stars and pop culture’s most famous people to reveal the riskiest celebrities on the Web. McAfee’s latest report found that searches for Barack or Michelle Obama posed a lesser threat compared to others.Fans searching for “Jessica Biel” or “Jessica Biel downloads,” “Jessica Biel wallpaper,” “Jessica Biel screen savers,” “Jessica Biel photos” and “Jessica Biel videos” have a one in five chance of landing at a Web site that’s tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other malware. Searching for the latest celebrity news and downloads can cause serious damage to one’s personal computer.Every day, cybercriminals use celebrities’ names and images, like Kim Kardashian and Rihanna, to lure surfers searching for the latest stories, screen savers and ringtones to sites offering free downloads laden with malware.Beyonce – Number Two for Two Years CountingPop music phenom Beyoncé maintained her number two position for the second consecutive year, setting McAfee’s record as the overall most frequent, highly-ranked celebrity in the top five.Young Hollywood – Just as Dangerous to Search as They Are FamousYoung Hollywood starlets (and popular tabloid subjects) Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale and Lindsay Lohan all edged out Heidi Montag and Jessica Alba who appeared on last year’s list. They also ranked higher than other young personalities including “Twilight” stars Robert Pattinson (#30) and Kristen Stewart (#20), the Jonas Brothers (#23), Taylor Swift (#16), Lauren Conrad (#25) Vanessa Hudgens (#17) and Zac Efron (#21).Beware of Dangerous DuosHollywood stand outs Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie have more in common than their appearance and successful careers – they tied as the eighth most dangerous celebrities on the Web. Newlyweds Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen appeared nearly side-by-side in the fourth and sixth positions, respectively, proving that hackers target those who are most in the headlines.Who’s Safer: The ObamasSurprisingly, the U.S. President and First Lady are not among the most risky public figures to search; Barack and Michelle Obama ranked in the bottom-third of this year’s results, at #34 and #39, respectively.McAfee compiled its third annual list using McAfee® SiteAdvisor® technology for celebrity names that produce the largest number of risky sites and overall risk percentage, when searched on the Web. The top 15 celebrities include:Position Celebrity1 Jessica Biel – Major buzz about her figure and high-profile relationship with Justin Timberlake makes Jessica Biel an easy target for spammers and hackers. When “Jessica Biel screensavers” was searched, almost half of the sites were identified as containing malicious downloads with spyware, adware and potential viruses.2 Beyoncé – Beyonce tops the MTV Video Music Award nominee list and McAfee’s results as the most frequent, highly-ranked celebrity. Inputting “Beyoncé ringtones” into a search engine yielded a dangerous Web site linking to a distributor of adware and spyware.3 Jennifer Aniston – Hollywood’s favorite leading lady should be searched with caution. More than 40% of the Google search results for “Jennifer Aniston screensavers” contained nasty viruses, including one called the “FunLove virus.”4 Tom Brady – The New England Patriot seems to attract many fans who want a free download of the athlete in action, but not the Trojan that comes with it, as identified by McAfee SiteAdvisor technology.5 Jessica Simpson – Jessica Simpson is as dangerous to search online as she is famous. Searching for “Jessica Simpson videos” can mislead unsuspecting surfers to sites with potentially damaging downloads.6 Gisele Bundchen – The world’s highest-paid supermodel is a popular target for cybercriminals. A search for “Gisele Bundchen photos” can direct users to red-ranked sites that breached browser security in McAfee’s tests.7 Miley Cyrus – Cybercriminals are using Web sites related to Miley Cyrus’ image to link to other harmful sites containing spyware.8 Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie – Both tabloid fixture Megan Fox and American icon Angelina Jolie resulted in an equal number of risky download Web sites, proving cybercriminals are in the business of capitalizing on the world’s most famous faces.9 Ashley Tisdale – The “High School Musical” star is a popular search term when it comes to searching for screensavers. A host of screensaver Web sites contained numerous malware-laden downloads.10 Brad Pitt – Appearing in the top spot last year, Brad Pitt fell towards the bottom of this year’s list, resulting in a few less, but just as dangerous, red and yellow-ranked Web sites.11 Reese Witherspoon – Risky Web sites were identified when searching for “Reese Witherspoon” and “Reese Witherspoon photos” promoting free files with hidden malware.12 Britney Spears – McAfee SiteAdvisor technology found a single site promoting free Britney Spears wallpaper that was embedded with more than 50 potentially infected downloads.13 Rihanna – Free Rihanna ringtones are some of the most sought after, but some shady vendors mislead those who subscribe by gathering and selling their personal information.14 Lindsay Lohan – McAfee SiteAdvisor flagged Lindsay Lohan screen saver sites as offering a combined 50+ free screen savers infected with Trojans, viruses and spyware.15 Kim Kardashian – The biggest reality star in recent months is now susceptible to Internet lurkers too. A search for Kim Kardashian wallpaper and screen savers generated numerous downloads veiled with malware.“Cybercriminals are star watchers too – they latch onto popular celebrities to encourage the download of malicious software in disguise,” said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs. “Consumers’ obsession with celebrity news and culture is harmless in theory, but one bad download can cause a lot of damage to a computer.”http://newsroom.mcafee.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3554___________________________________This is interesting. I have a virus. It occurred immediately after a Guest here asked me for a citation to the story that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden had ordered Google to reveal the name of a blogger who called Liskula Cohen–a Canadian-born model best known for her appearances in fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and Cleo–an ‘old hag.’ I found a link, and in so doing I instantly found a virus. Every time I now pull up a new Microsoft Word document, the story reappears on it and I have to clear it. My punctuations and spacings–questions marks, quote marks, colons–are sometimes skewed. I am no expert, but it looks to me that that’s what’s happened.The link I posted to is on the « Roubini interview on National Public Radio » (August 19) at 2009-08-23 22 :51 :50, i.e., Business News Around the World that linked to « Mashable » (those double arrows are my « new » double quote marks). P.S. Don’t try the link, nor would I try searching Cohen’s name.

Thanks for the clarifying reply MA. The article(s) that have been written do not allude to a BSC connection as you say.What I am wondering is what leads you to speculate that there might have been? Was JPM not capable of these shenanigans on its own?

It’s hard to do a downright proper GD II when so many average Americans have surrounded themselves with the accoutrements of an upper-middle class lifestyle. Large-screen flat panel tv’s, granite countertops, luxury sedans, McMansions, give me a break. How can you possibly compare this air-conditioned excess to the desperation of someone selling apples from a horse-drawn cart to make a living?

So … any old copies of the video “Kindergarten Cop” by Arnold?!! Maybe he could autograph them or something … try to raise a little more money for the state. PeteCA

Roubini,You get what you deserve for supporting Bernanke. Yes, all of your economic predictions for this year SHOULD have come true. But there is Bernanke ramping up the market daily through its back door operations (see Zero Hedge). DON’T YOU REALIZE WHO HAS SCREWED YOU OVER? IT’S YOUR BUDDY BERNANKE.

1) About money supply expansion:Howard Katz wrote:”You have probably been taught that the responsible way to handle your economic affairs was to work hard, be thrifty and invest safely. This is what the old timers did, and it worked for them. When they reached 65, they were able to retire.Assume an average wage of 30 oz. of gold per year. Saving 15% of that means saving 4½ oz. per year. At the end of a 49-year working lifetime, you have saved 220½ oz. of gold.So, the man who saves 220½ oz. of gold will, after 49 years at interest at 5%, have 220.5 x 4.25 = 937 oz. of gold. That is, you saved 220½, but you have 937. So here you are at age 65 with 937 ounces of gold in the savings bank. You can stop working, continue to draw interest on your capital, and you will receive 5% x 937 oz. = just shy of 48 oz. of gold per year. In other words, you can stop working and receive 50% greater salary than you did when you worked.This was a wonderful system. It no longer exists, but it is very important if you want to know what to do with your wealth today and how to survive in the modern economic climate….Under Keynes’ influence, the U.S. started printing money in 1933 Since that time the U.S. money supply has multiplied by a factor of 80 (from $20 billion to $1.6 trillion) while the population multiplied by 2.3. (Per capita money supply multiplied by 35.).But the point is that, if a person tried to save money in the U.S.A after 1933. in the manner that was done in the period 1788-1933, he found that, as his money accumulated from the interest, it lost its value from the depreciation of the currency. Using the official government CPI, the saver (in safe instruments) gained no real value between 1933 and 2009. His buying power was just the same. In effect, Keynes was successful. He did not stop the payment of interest. But he did stop the payment of real interest.What does this mean for you and your economic plans? It is very simple. In general, you cannot retire. If you save your money and invest it safely, as was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, you do not accumulate real interest. The currency depreciates just as rapidly as your interest accumulates, and you are back in the Middle Ages when it was forbidden to pay interest and no one retired.”—————–2) About bailouts: (with more money supply expansion)Matt Taibbi wrote:”organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy”NR on his previous post comment:”This is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets.”I ask “Who helped to socialize bank losses” ?Is this the answer?NR on this post: “Mr. Bernanke deserves to be reappointed. Both the conventional and unconventional decisions made by this scholar of the Great Depression prevented the Great Recession of 2008-2009 from turning into the Great Depression 2.0.”Is this the conclusion?Lets socialize the losses of bankers or you will have a Great Depression 2.0.——————Stiglitz wrote on his book on Macroeconomics that the price of bread was one of the causes of the French revolution.So thatFED, better to pay attention to the bread.

Pete- You missed my tirade a few weeks ago on Walmart, dollar stores…. lol

It’s called a Society and we have to put up with everyone’s bad habits, bad genetics, etc. Are you going to begin policing everyone’s diet, too?

You are so right. The question is, taking into account degrees of scale, whether the bailout of financial institution was just as bad…or even worse.I am getting very nervous…not so much about the market…I sold out almost two years ago and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole…but whether I will have to…gulp..start acquiring gold and silver. Made preliminary inquiry to Northwest Territorial Mint.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601015&sid=aq6uoNsCFcpIthese public officials are all Bernie Madoff. scumbag.

“Not to overstate the obvious, but I really think that the last paragraph of the article might be the reason that everyone should read the entire article – especially in light of all that is happening now.”Grim possibilities. What a nightmare.I appreciated the article.Thanks

ex VRWC, Thank you for using plain language :<DSo, if my integrate your wisdom here:All of the bailouts/ins, TARP, PPiP, FED facilities, intentional non-rescues(i.e. Lehman), Govt backed/led Chapter 11′s, etc. were organized and applied to backstop the investment economy.The threat of economic collapse used to brow-beat Congress and the populous into printing and allocating exorbitant and extraordinary monies was soley referring to the collapse of the investment economy.Do I have it right? Care to add anything??

Hey, I get insulted (well not really) and I’m the bully because I tell “Guest” we don’t all have to be like him……..Novice – find someone else to bother.

I bought a bag of halfs from them and they were junk. A lot of thin (worn) Walking Liberties.Since then I have been buying BU Kennedy halfs off of Ebay for about the same and am much happier with the silver.

Another example of why we are so screwed…. No one wants to REALLY FIX THINGS!!!!!!!!1Utilities Don’t Want You To Have A Solar Panel On Your RoofJay Yarow|Aug. 26, 2009, 3:24 PM|16The rooftop solar business is booming as more Americans look to cut energy costs, go green, or just spend money on a cool conversation piece. As great as this is for homeowners hosting dinner parties, it’s bad news for utilities who are losing out on business Newsweek reports.Utilities are very set in their ways. The only way to distribute electricity, as far as they’re concerned, is from one centralized location out to the masses. Allowing home owners to plunk panels on their roofs is a foreign, disruptive concept. So, they’re fighting it:In some cases, utilities are actually taking direct steps to thwart rooftop solar. Two weeks ago in Colorado, the state’s biggest utility, Xcel, tried passing a surcharge on homes and businesses using rooftop solar power. The rate hike would’ve generated $180 million, $55 million of which was slated to help fund Xcel’s newest coal-fired power plant, the Comanche Unit 3, due to come online this fall. The public went ballistic, and with pressure from Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter, the proposal was eventually shelved. In early July, New Mexico’s biggest utility, PNM, filed an official request to dramatically reduce incentives for businesses and homeowners to install solar panels, and is now fighting with state lawmakers over whether it has the right to exclusively own solar panels systems hooked up to its grid. During California’s last legislative session, Southern California Edison, which serves 13 million residents, pressured a Palm Springs assemblyman to pull a bill he’d introduced that would allow the city of Palm Desert to pay solar users for the excess power they generate….It’s not hard to understand why a big utility might not like the idea of homes, businesses, schools, and even government buildings being covered in solar panels. If every building in America is generating its own solar energy, that throws a big wrench into their business model. It’s why utilities have historically been opposed to solar power, say solar’s advocates. But as most states have passed renewable-energy standards recently, mandating that a certain percentage of their energy come from renewable sources, utilities have become reluctant players in the solar game because, frankly, they have no choice. Rather than get on board with rooftop solar, though, utilities decided to do what they do best: build a centralized system of large power plants, and make money by charging customers for taking power off the grid. While large-scale utility projects do hold the promise of generating massive amounts of electricity, so far they’ve delivered precious few new sources of electricity, as dozens of proposed projects are languishing in the application process. Building the thousands of miles of new transmission lines these projects require not only costs millions, it’s fraught with red tape: zoning and permitting regulations, and issues like eminent domain, as lines are strung across both public and private property. Read the whole thing →It’s pretty clear that the government needs to focus on transforming our power business and its operations as much as it does on developing new alternative energy technologies.

This criticism of Professor Roubini. is ill-founded. His conclusions about policy direction, about bailouts, stimulus and praise for administration officials and Chairman Bernanke have been at best off the mark. However, those are not the areas that made Nouriel Roubini famous. He is famous for his prowess and truth telling about domestic and foreign market developments. When he discusses Lehman, Merrill, JPMorgan, etc., his are not the actions of a man who has a stake in their success or failure. Rather his analyses carry the sincerity of laying out the truth as he sees it, regardless of the outcome. He is a straight shooter, usually right on the mark.This chorus of recovery is completely out of hand; their recovery is generated only by bailed out financial institutions running up the DOW with absolutely no significant recovery factors that have to do with the real economy. Perhaps the most obscene statement made regarding the economy comes from the cheerleaders for Wall Street. And that statement is that we may have a “jobless recovery.” Just who do these crooked, double dealing, thieving financial people think they are, that they can first take the public’s money, second put the public’s money in their pockets, third take the public’s jobs and their investments, and fourth, tell them that they, the public, have recovered?And if these abuses aren’t enough, some of these greedy cheerleaders now turn on our professor because he dares to suggest that a double dip recession could be a possibility.All of these people are in one big huge tent and it’s called stock sales.They are attacking anybody who questions the size of “recovery.” Their whole lives depend on the market, so much so they’ve become dishonest. These charlatans would sell their souls for a market recovery. They remind me of used car salesmen—who gently rub the rust on a dented junker and tell you that it was owned by a little old lady and for sure there’s about 20,000 miles left on the tires.Could it be some of these critics are hyperventilating because Roubini’s starting to question some of their exit policies?So beware of politically biased advertising and criticism, primarily by those who want to sell stocks, including those in the business and financial media and the economists who get government and corporate grants and money and support, and media access. These are desperate times involving desperate men, many of whom are completely insolvent. IMO, Nouriel Roubini was and continues to be the most accurate barometer of economic climates, both at home and abroad.Sondra

Speaking of cycles and socio-economic destruction ad continuum:The peaks and troughs of the socio-economic cycles, not just Volker’s ‘Business Cycles”, are created through exacerbation by the human entity or in other words, we can either rise above our self destructive preferences or wallow in the cave of ignorance. It is really that simple.We ask the wrong questions – We prioritize the wrong issues and We assume the incorrect fundamentals, and then we saturate the air space with post mortem which really nobody is interested in – far better to create our own indicators that conform to our beliefs.How many socio-economic cycles during the past ~2000 years of “civilization”?Where has every cycle taken “civilization”?And where is the trend rushing towards?Surely it is the time to learn from the errors of our whole socio-economic system and not that time to wallow in denial, ignorance and arrogance.Do not the facts point towards future consequences?Ahhh, you say, the Cave is so warm.Ho hum

Obama, Pelosi, Geithner Co’s run away spending will cause run away deficit and debt. dollar be doomed.

i prefer a yacht, nice cabin, lotsa books,hopping from (isolated) island to islandmy own blue lagoon

Nice article.LB are you around? This looks like a probable scenario, one possible implementation of your proposed fraudolent scheme similar to the one that produced the S&L crisis. Please give a comment. Thanks

Uncle Gregor Samsam | Sudden Debt 08/26/09One morning, when Uncle Gregor Samsam woke from troubled dreams, he found himself denuded of all his weapons and munitions. His vast armies were no longer in uniform and did not acknowledge or follow any of his orders. His own currency, which he used to buy a huge array of imports and maintain an enviable lifestyle, was no longer accepted by his trading partners who, instead, demanded valuable goods in exchange.”What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream…The illusion of global power can become a “Metamorphosis” of harsh reality very quickly, indeed. Just ponder the abrupt extinction of The Bug, genus Sovieticus and the collapse of its associated aphids, once crawling madly about its anthill.And presently we have come to an extremely difficult choice for Messrs. Obama and Bernanke: Should they (a) quickly restore fiscal and monetary sanity, albeit at the cost of prolonging the economic contraction and its deflationary pressures, or should they (b) continue to pump “air” dollars (windhandel) into a world that is increasingly questioning their worth as a global storehouse of value.This is no small matter, for it is the ability to issue readily accepted dollars into the global economy that has allowed the United States to maintain its empire and a very high living standard, despite astonishingly foolish behavior from its leaders. This became very clear during the eight years of the Bush II administration, with such astonishing pronouncements as: you’re either with us or against us, go shopping, etc. The world did not completely disavow the dollar then because it believed that Americans would eventually see their error and shift to a more rational course*. Perhaps that’s another reason why Mr. Obama was greeted with enthusiasm and hope from the entire world, financiers included.The time has come for us to show the world that we mean business, that we mean to put our actions where our (very big) mouths are and to keep our promise that we shall make good on the flood of IOUs we so recently issued. I, for one, would rather see a policy of radically shifting our economy towards the German or Danish model, with all the associated pain this would entail for the present generation, rather than bequeathing my children with the ruins of a collapsed Dollar Empire.The time to act is now and the way forward is known: get as far away as possible from debt-induced maxi-consumerism and, instead, save to invest in a rationally sustainable economy. Create alternative energy sources and networks, transportation systems, organic/responsible farming, arrest environmental destruction.Otherwise, I fear, choice (b) may result in a Kafkaesque nation: Amerika.________________________________________________________________* “You can always trust the Americans. In the end they will do the right thing, once they have exhausted all the other possibilities.” Winston Churchill.http://suddendebt.blogspot.com/

Great Article!

I have a New Social Order.Since the purpose of living in America is no longer to pursue individual civil liberties (because they Cost Too Much), but for sanctimonious people to punish Bad Personal Habits in Other People, here’s how to implement that.First of all, my neighbor will be in charge of monitoring my Personal Bad Habits on a daily basis and reporting same to the Federal Bureau of Reporting Bad Personal Habits. My other neighbor will be in charge of monitoring his/her bad habits, and so on. Simple. All of us will spend our days monitoring our neighbor 24/7 and reporting on his/her Bad Personal Habits. Because everyone knows that if you engage in Bad Personal Habits, you Cost Too Much.If I am a smoker, I will simply be taken out to the nearest landfill and shot. Smokers are the scum of the earth and should not be allowed to live. Same for drug addicts, prescription drug abusers and alcoholics. They Cost Too Much.If I am, like two-thirds of the American population, overweight by 25 pounds or more, I must adhere to the National List of Approved Foodstuffs. Never mind who gets to decide what’s on the List. Someone who knows a lot will decide what is “good” for me. My Reporter will dutifully record each item I ingest and if it is not good for me will send it in to the Federal Bureau of Reporting Bad Personal Habits. The Federal Bureau of Good Personal Habits will be notified to start delivering approved meals to me. If I don’t lose weight or develop diabetes or heart disease, I will be thrown out onto the street to die because I Cost Too Much.If I’m driving my car without wearing my seatbelt and am in an accident, no hospital for me, because I knew better and chose not to adhere to a Good Personal Habit. I engaged in a Bad Personal Habit and Cost Too Much.If my child falls from a tree and breaks his arm, no treatment for him because I told him it was dangerous to climb that tree and he did it anyway. He Costs Too Much.If I’m a baseball or softball player and develop a rotator cuff injury, no health care treatment because I knew that that type of injury was possible in that profession, so Too Bad, So Sad. I Cost Too Much.If I’m whitewater rafting and fall out of the raft and injure myself, no treatment because I knew that was a dangerous activity. I Cost Too Much.If I’m a woman and am walking anywhere by myself and get raped or mugged, no health care treatment for me because I knew it was dangerous to go anywhere by myself and anyway, I was asking for it. I Cost Too Much.If I’m elderly, I’m to be taken out to the Back Forty and shot because everyone knows elderly people just generally Cost Too Much.While we’re at it, we should just go ahead and euthanize all men. Since men, if they live long enough, WILL get prostate cancer, why not do away with all of them now? They Cost Too Much.If I have a beer after work and get in my car to drive home and am involved in an accident, no health care for me because I was drinking and driving and I knew better. In fact, anyone who drinks and drives engages in a Bad Personal Habit whether or not they’re involved in an accident. The potential is there to Cost Too Much. No more drinking alcohol. Ever.Every citizen of the United States of America needs to adhere to Good Personal Habits, all of which will be spelled out by the Federal Bureau of Acceptable Personal Habits. Any deviation will be punished with a denial of health care because it Costs Too Much.It is my business to know if you are engaging in Bad Personal Habits every minute of every day. If you drink too much, eat too much, don’t exercise enough to meet my standards or smoke, you are a Very Bad Person and need to be culled from the herd, the sooner the better, because you Cost Too Much.What you do in your personal life personally affects me, and yes it is my business, you have no privacy anymore, you have no choice but to toe the line as I’ve defined it, so dammit, start behaving before I report you.

Don’t forget about engaging in risky recreational activities such as mountain climbing, skiing, snowmobiling, boating, and jogging. Failing to look both ways before crossing the street, even if in a crosswalk, also qualifies as a Bad Personal Habit.

MichelleI understand your point about CDS, but don’t think Dougherty lost all credibility because he didn’t mention it as another precipitating factor on Sept 11, 2008. If anything, the disaster in CDS adds fuel to the argument that we’ve been massively defrauded. Bernanke refuses to this day to suggest reigning in the CDS purveyors.As for the $62 trillion in CDS as of 9-11-08–those contracts could have been voided–and probably many of them were effectively by the Fed’s purchase of worthless MBS and CDOs. There may actually be an even bigger problem with CDS today–we simply don’t know–and………the actions of the Fed are not available for us to audit………If you are not willing to address these, and the rest of Dougherty’s argument………I’m starting to wonder if you’re not just a stock market pumper.

A small correction: I’ve wire transferred money from a US bank to a Canadian bank, electronically. But, as noted, not everyone has accounts outside the US.Does anyone else wonder why this date, 9/11, for such a thing to occur? Subliminal messaging there perhaps?

WOW! Civil discourse! Great commentary, please keep it up!

Because the fleet is aging. Aside from retiring fuel-hogs, which is what a lot of airlines have been doing, they also have to replace machines that are simply wearing out. There are also more than a few firms and private individuals of means that realise that general aviation machines are a far more efficient and cost-effective way of getting around the land than wasting several hours going through the TSA’s nightmarish machine of terror at your not-so-friendly airline-oriented airport.

We Permabears here need to face the fact that we might be wrong. It could well be that all is rosy and that the world is saved.

OMG. The US really is totally screwed!

Nice article.But Obama did not lie to us when he promised us “change we can believe in.” At first I thought it was nothing more than campaign malarky, but since he has taken office he has systematic programme of changing the entire US system in ways I am sure few if any of us thought would be possible in our lifetime. After the past 8 months I can reasonably say we all can believe we are going to see change … the bigger question is whether or not it is change we really want.Be careful what you hope for!

You just now get this?After graduating from an Ivy and going to a WS Bank, and after running a public utility, the next best thing in the great gravy-train of life is to get a government contract. But just try to get one without actually having had one to start with, so of course you need to grease a palm or two. And once you are hooked into the machine, you will do anything to stay connected to that powerful money-drip.You can be the fodder over which these types walk, or you can join the party. But you do have a choice.Excuse me now, but my formerly ethical self needs to find a Corruption for Dummies handbook.

Speaking of what is missing:Risk.There appears to be a preference for the absolute. The absolute can never be attained by men as it is the kingdom of the feminine. (‘kingdom’ is correct in this sense)Ho hum

Speaking of treacherous leadership:* “You can always trust the Americans. In the end they will do the right thing, once they have exhausted all the other possibilities.” Winston Churchill.@ Guest on 2009-08-26 21:10:26Winston Churchill willingly and without hesitation, always and initially sacrificed Australian lives as “cannon fodder” – expendable and affordable – before everyone/everything else – as colonial bred cattle and sheep – so screw him! He was a war monger – born and bred – and a public schoolboy – as in Tom Browns School Days.George MacDonald Frazer sums it up well with Sir Harry Flashman and the Generals Danced at Dawn.Ho diddly hum

Case-Shiller, as I understand it, is matched pair analysis of single-family homes. It seems useful as a general barometer for the temperature of the market, with other facts and circumstances considered. I would view its recent positive print as a slowdown in the deterioration of the market or a stabilization, albeit one that may be short-lived.

How Bernanke failed usAugust 26, 2009 | 6:15 am LA TIMESWhile much or most of Wall Street seems to believe that Ben S. Bernanke deserves a second term as Federal Reserve chairman — even if the reasoning is of the devil-you-know variety — veteran economist Stephen Roach makes the case that Bernanke is responsible for much of the mess he’s now being paid to clean up.”It is as if a doctor guilty of malpractice is being given credit for inventing a miracle cure,” Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, wrote in the Financial Times after President Obama renominated Bernanke on Tuesday. “Maybe the patient needs a new doctor.”Roach lists three strikes against Bernanke, whose reappointment must be confirmed by the Senate:— While a Fed governor from 2002 to mid-2005, Bernanke was a cheerleader for Chairman Alan Greenspan’s view that the central bank shouldn’t be in the business of fighting asset bubbles by, say, tightening credit to deflate them. “On this count, he stood with his predecessor — serial bubble-blowing Greenspan — who argued that monetary authorities are best positioned to clean up the mess after the bursting of asset bubbles rather than to pre-empt the damage,” Roach says.Is there anyone left out there who believes that we’re better off because the Fed allowed the housing bubble to inflate to such absurd proportions?— Bernanke supported the “global savings glut” defense of the 2001-2007 U.S. debt explosion. That defense held that America’s borrowing binge was in large part the logical result of the unprecedented wealth sloshing around the global financial system, much of which landed here. Roach argues that adherents of the glut defense in effect “exonerated the U.S. from its bubble-prone tendencies and pinned the blame on surplus savers in Asia.”— Bernanke had little interest in fulfilling the Fed’s role as a regulator of banking-system excess. “The derivatives’ explosion, extreme leverage of regulated and shadow banks and excesses of mortgage lending were all flagrant abuses that both Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Greenspan could have said no to,” Roach says. “But they did not.”Overall, Roach asserts, Bernanke “lacked the foresight and courage to resist the most reckless tendencies of the era of excess. The world needs central bankers who avoid problems, not those who specialize in post-crisis damage control.”An editorial in the Wall Street Journal also takes Bernanke to task for America’s recent bubble trouble, but doesn’t argue against a second term.The Journal, though, wonders how Bernanke will get policy right in the economy’s post-rescue phase, assuming the Fed’s rescue works:”Everyone loves a central banker when he’s flooding the economy with money, at least while the mania lasts. But Mr. Bernanke will sooner or later have to say no to the political class. This is something he has never done, and already there are signs in China and the edges of the dollar bloc of new asset bubbles. Mr. Bernanke has also tended to be a domestic central banker, ignoring the Fed’s larger role as steward of the world’s reserve currency.”His money-withdrawal task will only be harder because of the Fed’s extraordinary forays into fiscal policy and credit allocation since the crisis began. Mr. Bernanke has taken the Fed deep into picking winners and losers by industry (mortgages, student loans) and even companies (GMAC). The Bernanke Fed has also become nearly an arm of the Treasury by endorsing a spendthrift stimulus and by directly buying federal debt for the first time in a half-century.”– Tom Petruno

More shoddy reporting. the number drops a few thousand and its a sign things are getting better…The only way for Compnaies to keep profits up in liue of declining demand and consumption is to keep cutting jobs. NO JOBS is here for a longtime…Initial Jobless Claims in U.S. Decreased Last Week (Update1)By Shobhana ChandraAug. 27 (Bloomberg) — Fewer Americans filed claims for jobless benefits last week, another sign the economy is pulling out of the worst recession since the 1930s.Applications fell by 10,000 to 570,000, a higher level than forecast, in the week ended Aug. 22 from a revised 580,000 the week before, Labor Department data showed today in Washington. The total number of people collecting unemployment insurance fell to the lowest level since April.Companies’ staff cuts are easing as government stimulus measures help stabilize the housing and manufacturing industries. At the same time, a rebound in hiring will take longer to occur, restraining the consumer spending that accounts for about 70 percent of the economy.“The labor market is improving,” David Sloan, a senior economist at 4Cast Inc. in New York, said before the report. “The economy is returning to growth, but employment and consumer spending are going to remain weak for some time.”Economists forecast claims would fall to 565,000 from a previously reported 576,000, according to the median of 41 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from 540,000 to 580,000.A separate report from the Commerce Department showed the U.S. economy contracted less than forecast in the second quarter as a jump in government spending and smaller cutbacks by consumers helped mitigate a record plunge in inventories.No RevisionGross domestic product shrank at a 1 percent annual rate from April to June, the same as estimated last month, the department said today in Washington. The report also showed corporate profits climbed by the most in four years.The jobless claims report showed the four-week moving average of initial applications, a less volatile measure, dropped to 566,250 last week from 571,000.

You know things are bad when they start making comparisons like this:Obama and Bernanke= ONE TERM PRESIDENT… they are both Average in inteligence and lack total understanding of the problems facing Avergae JOE American and our economy.Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, like Ronald Reagan, has decided to keep a Federal Reserve chairman after what at the time was the longest recession since the 1930s. Unlike Reagan, Obama probably won’t get a strong recovery, or the political boost that it brings.Under Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, the economy grew at a more than 7 percent annual rate for five straight quarters following the 1981-1982 recession. Reagan, after reappointing Volcker in 1983 and declaring “it’s morning again in America,” won 49 of 50 states in the following year’s election.Obama is putting his trust in Ben S. Bernanke ahead of time, nominating him to a second four-year term even though the recession isn’t officially over. Growth is forecast to average just 2.2 percent over the next year, according to a Bloomberg News survey of economists this month.

August 26, 2009The Devil We KnowPeter SchiffAyn Rand wrote, “when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.”America is not doomed, but the fellows in Washington are pushing for that outcome. It seems that all the characters that encouraged this financial crisis are being rewarded, and Ben Bernanke’s re-nomination is no exception to this rule. He was on the Board of Governors when Alan Greenspan grew our bubble economy. Known as ‘Helicopter Ben,’ Bernanke was the most vocal supporter of low interest rates to combat the bogus threat of deflation, even if it meant dropping cash from helicopters. He succeeded in his aim – as it is hard for prices to decline while the money supply is growing by double digits.Of course, much of that new money went into speculative bubbles, first in tech and then real estate. When the misallocation became too great to ignore, the credit markets froze and leveraged institutions started failing. Now, Bernanke says that he doesn’t want to preside over another Great Depression. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want another Great Depression; he just doesn’t want to preside over it. His plan seems to be continuing to print money so that the depression isn’t apparent until after he leaves office. However, while Greenspan was able to get out of Dodge, Bernanke will probably not be so lucky, as his reappointment virtually guarantees that he will be in the middle of the action when the bullets start to fly. Left to clean up his own mess, Bernanke will soon regret not quitting while the going was good.Bernanke is being praised for avoiding a collapse in the financial system. While he has forestalled some short-term pain, he has in turn forsaken long-term gain. The ‘green shoots’ that set the pundits alight are nothing more than the direct effects of massive monetary expansion. What we have is nominal growth in the unproductive service and consumption sectors. In short, Bernanke is being praised by the drug addicts for not cutting them off. But the thing about addiction is that the longer you stay hooked, the more deadly the withdrawal.What this country needs is a Fed Chairman that is immensely unpopular, backed by a courageous President. Under Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan, this model proved effective at avoiding a complete economic collapse in the early 1980′s. In case posterity’s resounding approval has clouded anyone’s memory, Volcker was vilified and threatened with impeachment at the height of that crisis. Reagan’s decision to stand behind Volcker allowed the Chairman to persevere. It has never been popular to be responsible. Only after the markets settled and the country experienced twenty years of prosperity was history’s final judgment made about Volcker.Greenspan undid the painful sacrifice we made in 1981. He grew a bubble in tech stocks and then refused to allow the economy to restructure after it burst, instead inflating a real estate bubble in its stead. Meanwhile, federal spending ballooned, along with unfunded liabilities and guarantees that distorted the capital markets. The Fed created moral hazard because the government assumed that any excessive debt would be monetized. When push came to shove, Bernanke did exactly that, perhaps even hiding his intervention by buying Treasuries through intermediaries. In doing so, he allowed our elected officials to avoid making the politically costly decisions that would have prepared the country for future growth.To get a sense of Bernanke’s ultimate legacy, look no further than Argentina. Though many of the rich and powerful had moved their savings abroad, a currency collapse wiped out the middle class in that historically prosperous country. Is such an outcome worth the short-term comfort of avoiding the severe but temporary pain of unemployment and mortgage defaults?Bernanke’s re-nomination is a politically safe decision for President Obama, and at least Bernanke is a devil we know. However, this lack of a ‘change’ for the better should squash any ‘hope’ for a genuine recovery. If the Bush years were as bad as the Democrats claim, then it is curious that they are mimicking and magnifying the same mistakes. No one has been held accountable for a financial crisis that the professors, pundits, and politicians told us would not come. All the same players are running the game, always changing the rules so they stay on top. Real ‘change we can believe in’ would be a return to our roots in the rule of law and a system of sound money – but it’s hard to stay grounded when you’re throwing money from helicopters.

A Voice Of Reason On House PricesHenry Blodget|Aug. 27, 2009, 7:16 AM|1One truism about market forecasting is that those who say they know don’t.This applies not only to the stock market, in which smug analysts are currently scoffing at one another over whether we’re headed for a v-shaped recovery or Great Depression 2, but the housing market, in which analysts are either certain we’re bottoming or seeing the mother of all head fakes.The smartest analysts, meanwhile, know they don’t know. But they still have opinions. And the reasonable, informed opinions are worth listening to.One of the reasonable voices on housing is Calculated Risk, who thinks prices have further to fall. Here’s a snapshot of his reasoning:I’ve seen story after story today suggesting the bottom is in for house prices.This isn’t like 2005 when it was almost certain that prices would fall, and fall sharply. Now we are much closer to the bottom than to the top in prices (for some metrics, see House Prices: Real Prices, Price-to-Rent, and Price-to-Income)In some areas prices have probably already hit bottom – like some non-bubble areas, and some bubble areas with significant foreclosure activity.But I think many areas, especially the mid-to-high priced bubble areas, there will be further price declines. I’m not as certain as I was in 2005, but I think these price declines will drag down the Case-Shiller indexes – and I don’t think the price bottom is in.I do not have a crystal ball, but …It seems there are many more foreclosures coming. Some of this depends on the success of the modification programs, but the Q2 MBA delinquency report shows a growing number of homeowners in the problem pipeline.And the Fitch report yesterday suggests few of these delinquent homeowners will cure.That seems to mean rising foreclosures, and more distressed inventory. The MBA Chief Economist Jay Brinkmann thinks foreclosures will peak at the end of 2010.Historically prices bottom about the same time as foreclosure activity peaks. Maybe it will be different this time – maybe the modification programs will significantly reduce foreclosures – maybe prices will bottom before foreclosures peak … but I’ll go with the normal pattern.And on the demand side, there has been a surge in first-time homebuyer activity. There was significant pent up demand from potential first-time buyers who were priced out of the market in 2004-2006, and then were afraid to buy as prices fell. But demand from these buyers will probably wane later this year, even if another tax credit is enacted.Just like the “cash-for-clunkers” demand declined after the initial burst.For mid-to-high priced homes, there are few move-up buyers (or so it would seem since so many low end homes were distress sales). Right now the months-of-supply in many of these areas is well into double figures, suggesting further price declines.And on unemployment: most forecasts are for unemployment to rise into next year some time. Historically house prices do not bottom until after unemployment peaks. That seems especially likely now since so many homeowners are underwater. Once again I’ll go with the normal pattern.Also looking back at previous housing busts (like I did earlier today looking at the early ’90s) there are usually some months during the bust with increasing prices. So no one should expect every month to be negative during the bust … especially are prices get closer to the bottom.I could be wrong – this isn’t as certain as in 2005 – but I don’t think house prices have bottomed. If I’m proven wrong, I’ll be the first to admit it.See more on housing at Calculated Risk >

Chignos,It’s Dougherty’s failure to even mention CDS as a major precipitator in last fall’s financial meltdown that leads me to believe that his agenda is to paint a sinister and clandestine operation orchestrated by the Fed and Treasury. Absolutely, I agree that there have been many failures and lack of regulation has been a big one, but to publish an article without even a mention of CDS makes me question if he really knows what was going on last fall and earlier this spring.I’ve been called a Wall Street pimp and now a stock market pumper. I understand why you might say that, but I can assure you, my intentions have always been genuine and sincere yet I am getting thrown under the bus for doing so. My motivation? I, like many here, are concerned about potential future inflation and our ability to continue to stay ahead of it, if it arrives, are few. I own gold but it doesn’t pay me anything. I need something more that will boost my overall portfolio, and as a value investor I look for opportunities that may give me that boost, while at the same time sharing what information I have that may also benefit all of you. Some posters have taken my advice and made some money and I have congratulated them. I am not envious or jealous of others’ good fortune and would like to see others benefit as well. I can see that my altruistic intentions have been misread, and will think thrice before ever posting any potentially gainful investing advice in the future.

with all the Tax payer debt and toxic assets on the books of banks and companies… I highly doubt we are wrong, not to mention the NO JOBS problem.

Bush was an idiot and so is Obama… We elect people not qualified to do the job, but instead those who have the money to get elected in spite of thier qualifcations or lack of them.

And it is just bad statistics … it is difficult to say with any statisitical significance that the actual number is above, below, or dead on either 570,000 or 580,000 … moreso if you count the fact that numbers are constantly revised.This is not news, it is just noise. If you listened to static on an AM radio long enough, you might hear an equally compelling statistic.

True about nosie and Stats, but what is reality is unemployment is not abating!

“The currency depreciates just as rapidly as your interest accumulates, and you are back in the Middle Ages when it was forbidden to pay interest and no one retired.”"Huh? Katz has a screw loose. Point taken on 15% savings, etc. but ‘no one retired’ in the Middle Ages because less than 5% lived to 65! What a ridiculous talking point!

Oh joyous day!!!

No Michelle, do not stop. Please keep posting from a long time lurker who values your insight.

These crooks are united. The mortgage crisis is not only an economic issue, it is also a political issue.Obama brought Chicago-mob politics to Washington, and with him the mob’s use of ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). He used both as a grassroots activist movement to force banks into bad loans —planting the seeds of today’s fianancial mortgage meltdown.Barack Obama for years worked with ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and still does, abusing the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘subprime’ loans to often uncreditworthy customers by using intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion. Now he’s using his power as ‘president’ to force taxpayers to make these loans good at the bank. And he’s making taxpayers back more ‘loans’ using Freddie and Fannie who now issue 9 out of every 10 new mortgage loans.According to Investor’s Business Daily: ‘Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by ACORN to train its community organizers and staff in methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers’ homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism.’The Chicago Tribune described the group’s agenda as ‘affirmative action leanding.’Obama also helped ACORN get funding. When he served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground Activist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its activist agenda.A former White House staffer writes in The American Thinker that after ACORN took over the House Banking Committee in 1991 for two days to protest efforts to scale back CRA, Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank 1994 suit against red-lining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.

The Good Dr. has a new piece up at Forbes, and it’s the best I’ve seen from him for awhile.http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/26/stimulus-recession-fiscal-monetary-liquidity-taxes-opinions-columnists-nouriel-roubini.html

Can someone explain AIG to me? How much of it do we (taxpayers) own?

I was just thinking that there is a great deal of risk in the Nikkei index right now. I would not be surprised to see it drop substantially over next few months, and also would not be surprised by a crisis in Japanese bonds (i.e. soaring interest rates). I am not implying that Japan is alone in this financial crisis, but they are on the cutting edge.PeteCA

Helicopter Ben has basically done one thing: drop billions/trillions to 0.1% of the population (financial elite) while 95% of Americans in foreclosure have received NO HELP! I don’t know what (myopic)view NR is taking here (he initially made a huge deal about the moral hazard of allowing privatization of gains and socialization of losses)when he supports Bernanke, but ultimately, the dam is going to break and it will be the 99.9% who suffer.

Grateful Guest,Thank you for your kind comment.

Which socialists are you referring (who say capitalism doesn’t work)? Please provide their quote, if you can.

Whatever downside there is, losses and liabilities, that’s what we own.

79.9%time to sell, no?

That is an interesting chart – because it shows that the foreclosures have been dominating for a long time now. Not surprising, since a significant fraction of prime mortgages in this country are now underwater – home owners owe more than their house is worth. Foreclosures on prime mortgages are now an increasing write-off for the banks.My guess is that those people who are buying right now may fit one of these categories: (1) Looking for deals on condo’s and townhouses, (2) Worried that interest rates may soar in the future – so looking for low-interest 30-year loan now, or (3) Frustrated about paying high taxes while they are renting.Nevertheless, the “increase” in buying is hardly enough to offset the huge supply of unoccupied homes on the market right now.PeteCA

My compliments. In the midst of misinformation from every direction, I’m glad to have your very sensible comments.

Bankrupt Auto Parts Suppliers Seek $100 Million In Executive Bonuses | Mish 08/26/09In every corner, greed continues to amaze. Please consider Bankrupt suppliers seek exec bonuses:A growing number of bankrupt auto suppliers are seeking court approval to pay tens of millions of dollars in bonuses to key executives, as they shed employees and cut costs.Some of the bonuses have come under sharp criticism from General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co., as well as the trustees named by the Justice Department to monitor bankruptcy cases.”Considering the condition of the automotive industry and the adverse effect on auto suppliers, it is unclear why payments are even needed to retain employees who may have limited options to find employment elsewhere,” said Diana G. Adams, the U.S. trustee in objecting to a plan by Lear Corp.Southfield-based Lear, which is in the process of cutting costs by $350 million, won approval Tuesday to pay $20.6 million in bonuses to 29 execs.Congress rewrote the bankruptcy code in 2005 in an attempt to prevent executives from rewarding themselves during bankruptcy, while rank-and-file workers make significant sacrifices.Yet Visteon, which sought bankruptcy protection on May 28, wants to give bonuses of up to $80.1 million to top execs — as much as 250 percent of base pay, for some of them.Ford, in court documents, said it “cannot see how, in a market with mass layoffs, salary reductions and bonus program curtailments occurring daily, anyone can justify a bonus program of $80.1 million when job retention should be enough.”And Northville-based wheel producer Hayes Lemmerz International Inc. wants permission to pay more than $10 million in bonuses, including as much as $6.7 million to its top five execs.Just Friday, however, Hayes proposed canceling its retiree health and life insurance coverage for households covering 2,200 families.Hayes has proposed creating a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, which would allow retirees who are ineligible for Medicare to keep coverage at a cost of $900 to $2,100 a month. Hayes would contribute as much as $4.8 million over four years to cancel its accrued liability of $147.5 million. (end)That last paragraph takes the cake. Hayes would “allow” retirees to keep medical coverage for a mere $900 – $2,100 a month from a “voluntary beneficiary association”. How generous.Apparently that kind of creative thinking entitles Hayes executives to receive $12 million in bonuses. In the Visteon case, the bankruptcy judge is balking.If I was a bankruptcy judge, I would award bonuses of zero for any company with enough gall to ask for millions in bonuses for the very executives that drove the companies into the ground.Hays, Lear, and Visteon say bonuses are necessary to keep key executives. I suggest there is not a single key executive at any of those companies.Mike “Mish” Shedlockhttp://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

WTF- when does it end? they are merciless in the pilfering…. And they exepect that this is good for consumer spending? this state is one big toilet…. They must think we all work for Goldman sachs, et, al… Stuff like this, killing education, selling state assests on Ebay and craigs, talk about gimmicks and scraping the bottom…Worst thing about it all for most Californians, unless you are unemployed or late on your mortgage, is that you you have NO CLUE at all what is happening to you, to your state and to your country…But soon you all will!!!!!!!!!Dont worry all you other states, your turn is coming in the next 12 months… What happens in California soon spreads to everyoen every where….Even higher taxes coming for CaliforniansLower brackets and reduced deductions mean yet higher payments to Sacramento for 2009.Higher taxes for 2009A taxing stateState seeks an even keel on taxesBy Shane GoldmacherAugust 27, 2009Reporting from Sacramento – While Californians are still feeling the sting of income and sales tax hikes signed into law earlier this year, now comes news that state tax authorities plan to take a little more from their pockets.For only the second time in 30 years, the tax board is lowering the point where each tax bracket begins, bumping many people into a higher category. At the same time, officials are cutting back some deductions. Everyone will pay more, even people whose bracket or income doesn’t change.The extra sums will total as much as $140 per family, on top of the increases previously enacted.Officials said the latest adjustments have been triggered by inflation, or rather the lack of it. This year, the state’s inflation index was a negative numberfor the first time since 1983. When the economy takes a deep plunge, so do tax brackets.The new changes apply to the 2009 tax year. Residents are already paying hundreds — even thousands — of additional income tax dollars under the quarter-point rate increase and other tax hikes approved in February as part of a budget deal.”Everything is going up, up, up,” said Othman Rabie, owner of a sandwich shop in downtown Sacramento. “And business is going down.”Back in February, state lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved a slate of temporary tax increases in an effort to balance California’s perennially out-of-whack books.In addition to the income tax rate rising 0.25%, the dependent credit was slashed by more than two-thirds. The vehicle license fee nearly doubled to 1.15% of a car’s value. The state sales tax climbed 1%.This summer, lawmakers and Schwarzenegger decided to withhold 10% more from workers’ paychecks starting Nov. 1 — an accounting scheme to collect taxes faster. Under another bookkeeping maneuver, individuals and businesses that make estimated tax payments will pony up more of that money sooner starting in the first half of next year.And some local taxes are on the way up. In Los Angeles County, a half-cent-higher sales tax approved by voters took effect in July to fund transportation projects.Under the latest changes, for a married couple filing jointly, the top tax rate of 9.55% now begins at $92,698, down from $94,110. Combined with the earlier increases, such a couple with two children, earning $100,000, will see their California income tax bill rise by 22.3%, or $716, according to the state Franchise Tax Board. Their tax would go from $3,208 to $3,924, factoring in a $110 drop in the standard deduction for joint returns.For singles, the top tax threshold has dropped from $47,055 to $46,349. This year, a single filer without children who earned $30,000 in 2008 and 2009 would pay 13.8% more: $617 instead of $542. The standard deduction for sole filers will fall by $55.The state automatically adjusts its tax brackets. They have moved in taxpayers’ favor for the last 25 years, with the amount of earnings required to kick people up a notch continually increasing. But that doesn’t salve the pain of the latest changes, said Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, the Republican vice chairman of the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee.”It takes more money out of the taxpaying productive sectors and scoops it into the government coffers at a time when taxpayers are already reeling,” DeVore said.It is unclear how much additional revenue the new brackets will yield for beleaguered state coffers; the state has not computed that yet, said Denise Azimi, spokeswoman for the tax board.Meanwhile, experts such as Ted Gibson, who was chief state economist under both a Republican and a Democratic governor, remind policymakers even modest tax increases affect the state’s financial health because they prompt people to further pinch pennies.”It will hamper the recovery a little bit,” Gibson said.Some taxpayers say they are worried about their very livelihoods.Martha Franco, 56, has struggled to keep open her family-run restaurant, Pepe’s Tacos in Azusa.”I average about $6 an hour [in receipts] and I’m open 12 hours a day,” she said, sitting in the empty establishment as her son mopped the floor around her. “It already feels like I’m just working to pay my taxes,” she said.Not everyone minds paying more to protect such services as education, healthcare and parks, though.An extra $100 or so, said Sharon Sugerman, a 59-year-old Sacramento resident who declined to give details about her job, “seems pretty reasonable to me.”shane.goldmacher@latimes.com

Let’s think a minute: the financial elite with their reckless greedy behavior of repackaging mortgages and leveraging them to obscene levels get bailed out by the taxpayers and still find ways to make profits and give bonuses while the rest of us (99.9%)are having to scrape the bottom of the barrel and dig into our own savings and retirement plans (what’s left of them) to pay higher taxes and higher education costs for our children.What’s wrong with this picture?! Costa Rica is looking better every day!

Good luck with your pursuit of this scenario, MA ! I hope it bears fruit (no pun intended).

As more of the pieces of this financial fiasco puzzle are revealed, I beginning to believe that indeed, this was the plan-they knew it would eventually blow up so they took the money and ran, except some of them didn’t quite make it to the exits in time. BTW, great to have you back, PeteCA!

Thanks … it’s good to be back here.Just so you know – I spent the last month overseas in Africa. I was working to help people in some of the largest ghetto’s … and poorest villages, on that continent. I have therefore been seeing firsthand exactly what is going on with people who are living on the “bottom rung of the ladder” as afar as survival goes in this world.I probably don’t need to tell you what you can already guess – their situation is very bad and likely to get much worse. As the global financial crisis bites into the pockets of households everywhere, it is hitting the “marginalized people” in the world worst of all. To be frank, I really don’t know what the solution for these people will be – it could well boil down to violent revolution. Regrettably, all too often their own corrupt governments are simply not providing any answers (and the excess greed from Wall Street has turned the tables on everyone!).Perhaps the most exaperating thing about the current situation is the explosion of gloval derivatives – I guess these derivatives have now surpassed the mark of one quadrillion dollars. This “derivatives fiasco” … and surely that’s what it is … is the greatest misallocation of economic resources that the world has ever seen. I do beleive that if this money had been invested wisely in long-term solutions for the world’s problems (new energy policies, better food production, new water sources) then our global system could probably have sustained itself.Unfortunately, I am worried that excessive financial greed has instead created conditions that could have very nasty implications as we go forwards. If I have a little more time, I will write a longer article about this on the forum soon.PeteCA

YES WE CAN RAISE INCOME AND PROPERTY TAX. WE CAN INTRODUCE NEW TAX AND RAISE TAX HIGHER AND HIGHER. YES WE CAN!!!

YES WE CAN 1+1=3. YES WE CAN.

It’s not really a question of right or wrong, but more a mindset of seeing for one’s self -what is- and distinguishing it from what others will have you believe -it is.-“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails”.

An immense wealth redistribution was already executed.Winners will have their bonus!Now the second phase:We the frogs can be cooked much faster.Money Supply expansion by Central Banks can become equivalent to 1 Mcal on the frog’s water.Search (google) for a monetary base chart – the M0 aggregate (coins, paper money, and commercial banks’ reserves) and you will discover how much FED injected on the banks. This injected money is a NEW money – to help “buying” bonds and trash from “insolvent banks” as Roubini himself likes to say.The problem is one of solvency, and not only liquidity.So that read below Murray Rothbard’s explanation about money supply expansion. Even if you do not agree with Austrians – sometimes they are a bit fanatic, the point, maybe a theorem is that “those who use the new money first are the main “privileged”. No doubt about this point!”The Fed and the banks are not part of the solution to inflation; they are instead part of the problem. In fact, they are the problem. The American economy has suffered from chronicinflation, and from destructive booms and busts, becausethat inflation has been invariably generated by the Fed itself.That role, in fact, is the very purpose of its existence: tocartelize the private commercial banks, and to help theminflate money and credit together, pumping in reserves to thebanks, and bailing them out if they get into trouble.”———————————-Suppose that a precious metal such as gold becomes a society’smoney, and a certain weight of gold becomes the currencyunit in which all prices and assets are reckoned. Then,so long as the society remains on this pure gold or silver”standard,” there will probably be only gradual annual increases in the supply of money, from the output of goldmines. The supply of gold is severely limited, and it is costlyto mine further gold; and the great durability of gold meansthat any annual output will constitute a small portion of thetotal gold stock accumulated over the centuries. The currencywill remain of roughly stable value; in a progressingeconomy, the increased annual production of goods willmore than offset the gradual increase in the money stock. Theresult will be a gradual fall in the price level, an increase in the purchasing power of the currency unit or gold ounce,year after year.The gently falling price level will mean a steady annual rise in the purchasing power of the dollar or franc, encouraging the saving of money and investment in future production. A rising output and falling price level signifies a steady increase in the standard of living for each person in society. Typically, the cost of living falls steadily, while money wage rates remain the same, meaning that “real” wage rates, orthe living standards of every worker, increase steadily year byyear. We are now so conditioned by permanent price inflationthat the idea of prices falling every year is difficult tograsp. And yet, prices generally fell every year from thebeginning of the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century until 1940, with the exception of periods of major war, when the governments inflated the moneysupply radically and drove up prices, after which they wouldgradually fall once more.We have to realize that falling prices did not mean depression, since costs were falling due to increased productivity, so that profits were not sinking. If we look at the spectacular drop in prices (in real even more than in money terms) in recent years in such particularly booming fields as computers, calculators, and TV sets, we can see that falling prices by no means have to connote depression.But let us suppose that in this idyll of prosperity, soundmoney, and successful monetary calculation, a serpent appearsin Eden: the temptation to counterfeit, to fashion anear-valueless object so that it would fool people into thinking it was the money-commodity. It is instructive to trace the result. Counterfeiting creates a problem to the extent that it is “successful,” i.e., to the extent that the counterfeit is so well crafted that it is not found out.Suppose that Joe Doakes and his merry men have inventeda perfect counterfeit: under a gold standard, a brassor plastic object that would look exactly like a gold coin, or,in the present paper money standard, a $10 bill that exactlysimulates a $10 Federal Reserve Note. What would happen?In the first place, the aggregate money supply of thecountry would increase by the amount counterfeited;equally important, the new money will appear first in thehands of the counterfeiters themselves. Counterfeiting, inshort, involves a twofold process: (1) increasing the totalsupply of money, thereby driving up the prices of goods andservices and driving down the purchasing power of themoney-unit; and (2) changing the distribution of income andwealth, by putting disproportionately more money into thehands of the counterfeiters.The first part of the process, increasing the total moneysupply in the country, was the focus of the “quantity theory”of the British classical economists from David Hume to Ricardo,and continues to be the focus of Milton Friedman andthe monetarist “Chicago school.” David Hume, in order todemonstrate the inflationary and non-productive effect ofpaper money, in effect postulated what I like to call the”Angel Gabriel” model, in which the Angel, after hearingpleas for more money, magically doubled each person’s stockof money overnight. (In this case, the Angel Gabriel wouldbe the “counterfeiter,” albeit for benevolent motives.) It isclear that while everyone would be euphoric from theirseeming doubling of monetary wealth, society would in noway be better off: for there would be no increase in capital orproductivity or supply of goods. As people rushed out andspent the new money, the only impact would be an approximatedoubling of all prices, and the purchasing power of thedollar or franc would be cut in half, with no social benefitbeing conferred. An increase of money can only dilute theeffectiveness of each unit of money. Milton Friedman’s moremodern though equally magical version is that of his “helicoptereffect/’ in which he postulates that the annual increaseof money created by the Federal Reserve is showered on eachperson proportionately to his current money stock by magicalgovernmental helicopters.While Hume’s analysis is perceptive and correct so faras it goes, it leaves out the vital redistributive effect. Friedman’s”helicopter effect” seriously distorts the analysis bybeing so constructed that redistributive effects are ruledout from the very beginning. The point is that while wecan assume benign motives for the Angel Gabriel, wecannot make the same assumption for the counterfeitinggovernment or the Federal Reserve. Indeed, for anyearthly counterfeiter, it would be difficult to see the point ofcounterfeiting if each person is to receive the new moneyproportionately.In real life, then, the very point of counterfeiting is toconstitute a process, a process of transmitting new moneyfrom one pocket to another, and not the result of a magicaland equi-proportionate expansion of money in everyone’spocket simultaneously. Whether counterfeiting is in the formof making brass or plastic coins that simulate gold, or ofprinting paper money to look like that of the government,counterfeiting is always a process in which the counterfeitergets the new money first. This process was encapsulated inan old New Yorker cartoon, in which a group of counterfeitersare watching the first $10 bill emerge from their homeprinting press. One remarks: “Boy, is retail spending in theneighborhood in for a shot in the arm!”And indeed it was. The first people who get the newmoney are the counterfeiters, which they then use to buyvarious goods and services. The second receivers of the newmoney are the retailers who sell those goods to the counterfeiters.And on and on the new money ripples out throughthe system, going from one pocket or till to another. As it doesso, there is an immediate redistribution effect. For first thecounterfeiters, then the retailers, etc., have new money andmonetary income which they use to bid up goods and services,increasing their demand and raising the prices of thegoods that they purchase. But as prices of goods begin to risein response to the higher quantity of money, those whohaven’t yet received the new money find the prices of thegoods they buy have gone up, while their own selling pricesor incomes have not risen.In short, the early receivers of thenew money in this market chain of events gain at the expenseof those who receive the money toward the end of the chain,and still worse losers are the people (e.g., those on fixedincomes such as annuities, interest, or pensions) who neverreceive the new money at all. Monetary inflation, then, actsas a hidden “tax” by which the early receivers expropriate(i.e., gain at the expense of) the late receivers. And of coursesince the very earliest receiver of the new money is thecounterfeiter, the counterfeiter’s gain is the greatest. This taxis particularly insidious because it is hidden, because fewpeople understand the processes of money and banking, andbecause it is all too easy to blame the rising prices, or “priceinflation/’ caused by the monetary inflation on greedy capitalists,speculators, wild-spending consumers, or whateversocial group is the easiest to denigrate. Obviously, too, it isto the interest of the counterfeiters to distract attention fromtheir own crucial role by denouncing any and all othergroups and institutions as responsible for the price inflation.The inflation process is particularly insidious and destructivebecause everyone enjoys the feeling of having moremoney, while they generally complain about the consequencesof more money, namely higher prices. But sincethere is an inevitable time lag between the stock of moneyincreasing and its consequence in rising prices, and since thepublic has little knowledge of monetary economics, it is alltoo easy to fool it into placing the blame on shoulders farmore visible than those of the counterfeiters.The big error of all quantity theorists, from the Britishclassicists to Milton Freidman, is to assume that money isonly a “veil,” and that increases in the quantity of money onlyhave influence on the price level, or on the purchasing powerof the money unit. On the contrary, it is one of the notablecontributions of “Austrian School” economists and theirpredecessors, such as the early-eighteenth-century Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon, that, in addition to thisquantitative, aggregative effect, an increase in the moneysupply also changes the distribution of income and wealth.The ripple effect also alters the structure of relative prices,and therefore of the kinds and quantities of goods that willbe produced, since the counterfeiters and other early receiverswill have different preferences and spending patterns fromthe late receivers who are “taxed” by the earlier receivers.Furthermore, these changes of income distribution, spending,relative prices, and production will be permanent andwill not simply disappear, as the quantity theorists blithelyassume, when the effects of the increase in the money supplywill have worked themselves out.In sum, the Austrian insight holds that counterfeitingwill have far more unfortunate consequences for the economythan simple inflation of the price level. There will beother, and permanent, distortions of the economy away fromthe free market pattern that responds to consumers andproperty-rights holders in the free economy. This brings usto an important aspect of counterfeiting which should not beoverlooked. In addition to its more narrowly economic distortionand unfortunate consequences, counterfeitinggravely cripples the moral and property rights foundationthat lies at the base of any free-market economy.Thus, consider a free-market society where gold is themoney. In such a society, one can acquire money in only threeways: (a) by mining more gold; (b) by selling a good orservice in exchange for gold owned by someone else; or (c)by receiving the gold as a voluntary gift or bequest fromsome other owner of gold. Each of these methods operateswithin a principle of strict defense of everyone’s right to hisprivate property. But say a counterfeiter appears on thescene. By creating fake gold coins he is able to acquire moneyin a fraudulent and coercive way, and with which he can enterthe market to bid resources away from legitimate owners ofgold. In that way, he robs current owners of gold just assurely, and even more massively, than if he burglarized theirhomes or safes. For this way, without actually breaking andentering the property of others, he can insidiously steal thefruits of their productive labor, and do so at the expense ofall holders of money, and especially the later receivers of thenew money.Counterfeiting, therefore, is inflationary, redistributive,distorts the economic system, and amounts to stealthy andinsidious robbery and expropriation of all legitimate property-owners in society.

speaking of absolutes and tendencies as men do primarilyrush in the direction of the feminine for mercy. mercy fromthe consequences of their own mistakes and making. tell me naturehasn’t provided for every contingency. genius we can only dream/wishto comprehend a fragment and would be blessed to be capable.empowered once again with natural and emboldened localcomfort and “satisfaction” to disregard any further considerationand once again embrace risk to breath, once again, outside the cavewhere foreign and fresh air circulates touched by elevations and energiesfew have imagined, yet, many have died in the climbing..so let us proceed … and maintain the existing paradigm as itoffers so much warmth and familiarity as to be the only possiblenon-alternative alternative, or, inevitable.(cave) but, will the oceanwant us today?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYftnVxRQ0.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cke0Ue4kmHQ&feature=related.Tom Waits Lyrics”Tom Waits The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”.The ocean doesn’t want me todayBut I’ll be back tomorrow to playAnd the strangels will take meDown deep in their brineThe mischievous braingelsDown into the endless blue wineI’ll open my head and let outAll of my timeI’d love to go drowningAnd to stay and to stayBut the ocean doesn’t want me today..I’ll go in up to hereIt can’t possibly hurtAll they will find is my beerAnd my shirtA rip tide is ragingAnd the life guard is awayBut the ocean doesn’t want me todayBut the ocean doesn’t want me today..The ocean doesn’t want me today……..and here is the other one……Make It Rain LyricsArtist(Band):Tom Waits.She took all my moneyAnd my best friendYou know the storyHere it comes againI have no prideI have no shameYou gotta make it rainMake it rainSince you’re goneDeep inside it hurtsI’m just another sad guestOn this dark EarthI wanna believeIn the mercy of the World againMake it rainMake it rainNight’s too quietStretched out aloneI need the whip of thunderAnd the winds dark moanI’m not AbelI’m just CainOpen up the HeavensMake it rainI’m close to HeavenCrushed at the gateThey sharpen their knivesOn my mistakesWhat she doneYou can’t give it a nameYou gotta just make it rainMake it rainYeah -ehWithout her loveWithout your kissHell can’t burn meMore than thisI’m burning with all this painPut out the fireAnd make it rainI’m born to troubleBorn to fateInside a promiseI can’t escapeIt’s the same old WorldBut nothin’ looks the sameMake it rainMake it rainGotta make it rainMake it rainYou’ve got toMake it rainYou got toMake it rainYou got toI stand alone hereI stand alone hereSingin’Make it rainMake it rainMake it rain….high ho, and this one….TOM WAITS lyrics – Hoist That Rag.Well I learned the tradeFrom Piggy KnowlesSing Sing Tommy Shay BoysGod used me as hammer boysTo beat his weary drum todayHoist that rag [3x]The sun is up the world is flatDamn good add..ress for a ratThe smell of bloodThe Drone of fliesYou know what to do ifThe baby criesHoist that rag [7x]………………angular repetitiveoblong and diverse melodic guitar..solo area…Well we stick our fingers inThe ground, heave andTurn the world aroundSmoke is blacking out the sunAt night I pray and clean my gunThe cracked bell ringsAnd the ghost bird sings and the godsGo begging here.So just open firewhen you hit the shoreAll is fair in loveAnd warHoist that rag [11x]…

Concentration of power, bad!

And who these days is carting away the most money? Last I checked, it wasn’t my local credit unions (like public utilities, also non-profit).

Good post to plug into the outlook.

g,how will the taxpayers pay the debt that accounts for thismarket recovery? jail time?

Thank you so much for coming back, Pete, and keep telling us like it is. Bless you for all your good works.

f,gabriel, accelerates. creating a moment of opportunity. also,jubilee of debt reduction. 1/2. angelic. the somber andslow to act in the market lose. welcome to the machine. the hellof mankind’s making. institutional theft by law and design tosolve the problem of unrequited credit. here we be. jubilee, butonly for the military. and their friendly bankers, see?

There was an article in the NYTimes today and it referenced an antitrust case in the 60′s where the Supreme Court ruled that the number 10 brewer, Pabst, could not combine with number 18 brewer, Blatz. It was like reading about life under the ocean, because it sounded like such a foreign world.

AND WE CAN SPREAD “DEMOCRACY” AT THE END OF A BARREL!

ROFLMA!

Bernie Sanders is for cap and tax, dozer. He’s a putz next to Ron Paul.

Yo Timmy,If you wanna “keep politics out of monetary policy”……………….. you should be in favor of going back on the gold standard.Timmy, you are a dimwit.

Just to balance things…President McCain Would Have A Huge Deficit Too

I think California taxpayers should take the State of California to court and make it prove its claim that inflation has decreased in the state. It has NOT. The inflation quotient must include a fair pricing of the basic necessities, not the unproven whims and selections of a numbers massager—of gasoline, heating fuel, air conditioning, electricity, water, garbage disposal, groceries, dining out, property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, health insurance, Medicare payments, prescription drugs, dental and eye care, house insurance, car insurance, life insurance, services based on an increased minimum wage, auto repair, home repairs, school and college tuition, banking fees, state fees and fines, credit card interest… And it must factor in reduced purchasing power, i.e., reduced wages, interest income, investment income, pension depletion, and a devalued dollar. A state of 37 million people should not be taxed at the whim of a falsified, arbitrary figure imposed by politicians for their own extravaganzas.The is arbitrary taxation and an abuse of the rule of law. And speaking of inflation, have these public bureaucrats forgotten that they just raised the state income tax rate and its sales tax rate? Is that not inflationary?A dishonest government is an enemy of the people and if that dishonesty cannot be resolved by justice, it must be redressed by a new Magna Carta confirming by law the people’s long-standing inalienable rights as free men—one way or the other.It was Ben Bernanke who calmly explained in a 2002 speech how “enlightened Central Bankers” can “cure” deflation in the price of goods in a modern economy. These are his exact words:“But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to…reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.”Well, he has done that very thing. And now he and the State of California wish to deny it.

I guess I would take the rapist, but only because I continue to have hope for change in which I can believe.

I seem to recall having education, healthcare, parks, police and fire protection, etc. when taxes were much lower. Hmmm. What has changed over the years??? Oh yeah, all that social welfare crap that was supposed to buy us social peace. How’s that working out for you, CA?You don’t have to answer that right away if you want to keep your heads down due to drive-by shootings.

Yeah, but even Hanoi Johnny would never dare to double down like the current regime.

Will lead to war as nations try to distract populations.>>This is a curious example of the bourgeois language of concealment. It is “nations” not their ruling classes who distract their “populations” as if nations are some disembodied Platonic essences.

SEC Chair: Derivatives key for probeshttp://finance.yahoo.com/news/SEC-chair-Derivatives-data-rb-2489840624.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=7&asset=&ccode=Schapiro told a Senate panel in June that inquiries were being “seriously complicated” by difficulties identifying derivatives investors and determining the size of their trades.Derivatives are financial instruments that derive value from an underlying asset. Credit default swaps, a type of derivative used to insure against debt defaults and speculate on a borrower’s credit quality, were central to the credit crisis that led to the global economic downturn.

You take up too much space.

I bet the banks would be doing even better with Phil Gramm as the treasury secretary…

Let’s sell it. Hire GS to place a few ‘choice’ CDS bets for us taxpayers with leverage and we could be out of this mess in no time. When the time comes to bail or let fail, we just look at our CDS positions and give the thumbs up or thumbs down to the deal. Like GS does now, only we’re playing too. Since Congress listens to GS instead of us, it will be the perfect cover. Just a new twist on survival of the fittest.

I wouldn’t have assumed anything different, but I’m sure now. It’s really not helpful to have your network disappear for 30 hours straight. Not if you want to do an extensive daily round of reading and writing. Still, a short stint at a loud bar with a working network did leave me with a question that I’ll pose to you. To find the answer, I might have had to do some digging, and obviously that wasn’t going to happen. And besides, I think it’s an interesting enough issue to invite some feedback from you. Do ponder it for a moment though.The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday titled Decade of Debt: $9 Trillion , which addresses the White House and CBO deficit reports that came out this week. The data look pretty grisly to me, and I definitely have the idea that the only reason they get underplayed in the media is that they deal with a future so conveniently far away the human eye finds an excuse for looking the other way. I also think that despite the fact that the numbers are real bad as they are presented, they’re still covered by a veneer of, let’s say, the kind of hedonistic arithmetic that makes GDP reporting so disputable. The overall picture as I see it reported is the familiar one of: this is troubling, but maybe “they” will find something in the meantime.Anyway, to get to that question: there’s a set of graphs in the WSJ article that looks like this:What struck me here is that about a year from now, GDP growth is projected as approaching 4%, while at the same time unemployment hovers close to 10%. In fact, unemployment and GDP both rise simultaneously for a while! And when I noticed that, my first thought was: I don’t think that is even possible. At least not in this situation. I think perhaps there may have been a short time in the US in the late 1930′s where you may have seen something similar, but I wouldn’t be too sure. Perhaps in the early 1940′s, but a war economy has its own set of rules.What do you think? Is it realistic to expect a 4% GDP growth with that kind of jobless numbers?There are of course always a few sidenotes that you must be aware of. First, somewhat curiously, Dennis Lockhart, the President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said yesterday that the real present US unemployment rate is not 9.4%, as officially reported, but 16%: Real US unemployment rate at 16%: Atlanta Fed President He’s talking about the difference between U3 and U6 numbers, of course. If people at his level start going public with this sort of claims, we could be in for interesting times. It would also sort of kill the question, because you’d have a hard time finding any serious voice insisting that GDP can grow at 4% while 1 in 6 members of the working age population can’t find a job.Another point that I think needs far more scrutiny lies in the other side of the deficit reports. That is, in principle government borrowing has no immediate negative effect on the GDP, while when the government spends the money it borrows, that spending does indeed have a positive effect. Most people who follow the economy are by now so familiar with this kind of trickery that it doesn’t surprise them anymore, but it still merits pointing out every now and then. The underlying principle is that the government can boost today’s economic numbers by in effect spending money that has yet to be earned, by generations that maybe even have yet to be born.The extent to which government interference influences the housing and mortgage markets is clearly enormous. If home prices were left simply to the markets, they would drop like boulders, which would drag down GDP numbers like there’s no tomorrow. There’s a report out today that claims second quarter GDP fell only by 1%, but that number has little meaning unless and until the effect of such government intervention is given the prominent place it should rightfully have. And when it is given that place, a 4% GDP growth in 2010 starts to look highly improbable. It’s in essence ridiculously bad accounting to pretend you can grow your economy by borrowing money from yourself. If you allow these accounting tricks, the more the government borrows, the higher the growth can be made to look.When my connection was down yesterday, I -finally- started reading Les Leopold’s “The Looting of America” (Read chapter 1). There is a graph in the book that affects the same issue. If you want to raise GDP with high unemployment numbers, you clearly need to dramatically raise productivity per worker. Leopold shows that productivity and wages rose together from 1947 and 1973, after which they disconnect. Wages today are below 1973 in inflation adjusted dollars, while productivity has indeed gone up a lot. Is that the answer we’re looking for? Or do wages need to rise to raise a GDP that depends for 70% on consumer spending?With all that in mind, my question should be clear, albeit perhaps a bit more challenging. Is it possible to grow your economy at a 4% rate when 10% of your population in unemployed?http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/08/august-27-2009-how-to-grow-your-gdp.html?ref=patrick.net

This is great. We the taxpayer will bail out all the smaller banks failing via the FDIC and then these giants pick up the meaty scraps. once they have crushed all the smaller banks then they will primed to screw us all…. They need to go away. They are INSOLVENT and fixing them by lettign them cherry pick the smaller banks is BS!!!!BEND OVER AVERAGE JOE AMERICAN – THATS A BIG BANK POLE BEING PUT WHERE IT HURTS…..Banks ‘Too Big to Fail’ Have Grown Even BiggerBehemoths Born of the Bailout Reduce Consumer Choice, Tempt CorporateDiscussion PolicyYour browser’s settings may be preventing you from commenting on and viewing comments about this item. See instructions for fixing the problem.Discussion Policy CLOSEComments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain “signatures” by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.By David ChoWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, August 28, 2009When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation’s leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.This StoryBanks ‘Too Big to Fail’ Have Grown Even BiggerOne Year After Crisis, “Too Big to Fail” Banks Have Grown Even BiggerThe Big Get BiggerToday, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.Read the whole articcle here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/27/AR2009082704193.html

Realistic? Sure. China has several hundred million unemployed middle-aged and older-aged persons in their hinterland, and they are alleged to be growing GDP well north of 4%As for the US, one could say that the serfs who still have jobs are turning the wheel longer and faster in the hopes of keeping their jobs.Is it likely? No. I think I’ve heard plausible cases made for 2% to 3%.

Overall take home pay for average Joe American is down 7% this year- gee I wonder why- how about higher tax creep and WAGE DESTRUCTION!

U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.U3: Official unemployment rate per ILO definition —>>> 9.4%U4: U3 + “discouraged workers”, or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.U5: U4 + other “marginally attached workers”, or “loosely attached workers”, or those who “would like” and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.U6: U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.If you use the U6 number, the United States unemployment rate is closer to 20%.

I’ll give you a frank answer to the question. What you are asking is legitimate. It’s my impression that people are generous and would like to help – but they don’t want to see their money wasted. From what I have seen, some relief organizations are doing a pretty good job overseas, and others are not doing a credible job at all.If you are looking for large non-profit organizations that are doing a very good job, then “World Vision” and “Doctors Without Borders” are both doing excellent work. I say that from the firsthand experience of having seen them working in the field.Let me be upfront and say that my own organization (The Missions Hotline) is a faith-based group. We are broad minded in our scope, ours is a 100% volunteer organization, and we have never lost even $1 of donations to inefficiency or corruption (both of which arerife in the 3′rd world). All food and meds have landed squarely in the hands of the people who really need them. But I don’t want to toot my own horn here … be in touch if you want to know more. Otherwise World Vision and Doctors Without Borders are really good. And there are many others who are doing good work – I have just picked a few choices that are getting the job done.PeteCAPeteCA

Nice post! Fed lends billions at 0% to the TBTFs, buys their toxic assets while allowing all others to sink or swim all leading to the obvious questions of who’s really controlling who and can this really happen in a democracy right under the noses of 350 million Americans?

You mean Obama’s promises… Lol… i should change my strategy and buy AIG stock… It’s not working for anyone, whether you voted for him or not… He could give a rats ass about 300 Million Average Joe Americans!!!!!!!!!

The following is from from: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article13047.html and is authored by Jim_Willie_CB.Banks are bracing for a new wave of commercial mortgage losses, of prime Option ARMortgage losses, and credit card losses. The delinquency rate of prime Option ARMs is now higher than subprime home loans!!Harken back to the summer 2007 when the hack USFed Chairman Bernanke called the bank crisis merely a subprime problem with upper limit potential for $200 billion in bank losses, and no risk of spilling over to the real USEconomy, and surely not the cause of any recession. Hack Bernanke has understood next to nothing in advance, all forecasts hopelessly wrong, but is a great manager of the Printing Pre$$ Operation. So he is loved. This hack now is due for reappointment to USFed Chairman post, his past failure the qualifications for future service. The same is true of Treasury Secy Geithner, whose failure at the New York Fed was his qualification for current service. Such is the nature of the great financial syndicate. The approval of Bernanke is sure to cause a major rift with the Chinese credit masters. Their wishes and warnings have been ignored. Their vengeance is next.The American perspective is almost always very limited in scope, due to chronic arrogance and delusions of grandeur. Their convenient parochial view tends to focus almost entirely within the United States, its bank leadership, its USFed monetary flexibility, its Wall Street syndicate influence, its federal tax latitude, its bank reserves management, and more. THE REAL THREAT TO US BANKS COMES FROM ENEMIES AT THE GATES, FOREIGN CREDITORS. The dangerous assumption made is that foreign creditors will remain firm and loyal. The arrogance extends from the continued belief that they have no choice, even if the trillion$ frauds on Wall Street occurred, even though such frauds were never prosecuted.The real threat comes from foreign creditors who must contend with challenges greater than ever experienced, such as:* Shrinking or vanished trade surpluses during global slowdown* Their own financial systems in tatters (banks, stock & bonds, currencies)* Vast regional construction booms gone bust (e.g. Dubai)* Numerous nationwide housing bubbles gone bust* Gathering storm from the need to liquidate insolvent banks* Reserves erosion due to over-weight in US$-based bonds* Systemic problems extended from a generation of USDollar reliance.

It’s now entrenched. And like a single (if that were even true) rotten apple in a barrel…The Metastasis of Moral HazardIt is now clearly a moral problem and the contagion is spreading fast.9/11 is once again approaching folks. Maybe “help” is on the way.

This will only fuel some conspiracy theories about whether Americans ever went to the moon…‘Moon rock’ in Dutch museum is just petrified woodhttp://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jgUR6kCStlEz2Q4WaUiaXKi6gyCgD9AB9TC81

AMSTERDAM — It’s not green cheese, but it might as well be.The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity.”It’s a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered,” she said. “We can laugh about it.”…

An important distinction Guest. The ‘market’ / ‘invisible hand’ that conservatives and corporate democrats believe is wiser than people who’re crushed by its unfettered injustice.The market that brings us global sweatshops and debt slavery in the name of profits.

Today, on Mish: Greater Than One in Four FDIC Insured Institutions are Unprofitable; Bank Problem List at 15 Year HighThe second quarter 2009 Quarterly Banking Profile has some interesting charts and facts that inquiring minds will be interested in.Insured Institution Performance· Higher Loss Provisions Lead to a $3.7 Billion Net Loss· More Than One in Four Institutions Are Unprofitable· Charge-Offs and Noncurrent Loans Continue to Rise· Net Interest Margins Show Modest Improvement· Industry Assets Decline by $238 Billion· The Industry Posts a Net Loss for the Quarterhttp://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

WAR, WAR, WAR! We live in such dangerous times that those developed countries with the largest populations, China, India and Japan, don’t seem worried or even concerned as they provide minimal manpower and financial support; yet, the weapon manufacturers make billions while U.S. citizens die and we foot the bill! What is wrong with this picture? How many times must Americans be duped before they wake up?!

Chignos,Did you read the article? The last paragraph is not my own, it was a copy and paste excerpt.The market isn’t as opaque as most believe, it’s just extremely large with many players located around the globe and the growth of financial innovation grew exponentially in a very short time. TPTB were blindsided and didn’t know just how large the global industry had grown, plain and simple.Just so you know, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories but I do believe in ignorance.

Great video, jess.Thanks

Another obfuscation by those who want to maintain the status quo.How many here would support agressive and expensive treatment of an elderly patient with severe dementia? Why would one not agree to supportive and paliative care when the patient becomes very ill?Common sense, man. Common sense.

“Taxes are for the evil rich to bear.”Boo-hoo … the injustice of it all.

You post nothing of substance – merely inflammatory garbage. No one is advocating that infants NOT be treated.Stop trying to scare people an start arguing with facts, not some obscure theory once discussed that you have now convinced yourself (and are trying to convince others) will dictate medical care and practice.Come on. I’m waiting……..

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-congress-benefits2-2009aug02,0,7524121.story“In 2008, taxpayers spent about $15 billion to insure 8.5 million federal workers and their dependents.”