I don’t stand with those who held out when everyone else is making sacrifices ... A group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.In a few words, the hedge funds were banking on the fact that everyone else would make sacrifices, with several firms demanding "twice the return that other lenders were getting."
1. The representatives who sponsored the anti-trade bill, Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley (pictured above) were both Republicans.No wonder Alan Specter left the Republican Party. How do you defend this level of ignorance?
2. The President who signed the anti-trade measure into law in 1930 was Republican President Hoover Hoover (how can you get this wrong?).
3. FDR's administration worked to reverse the effects of "Smoot-Hawley" with the Reciprocal Trade Act of 1934 (which set the stage for one of the institutional pillars in the post-war Bretton Woods trading order, which brought trade roaring back).
I find the NY Times' title for the article rather interesting too: "After Pause, Wall Street Pay is Bouncing Back" ... Look, Wall Street isn't bouncing back. Wall Street is sucking the American taxpayer dry, and laughing all the way to the bank (which might be a more appropriate title). But if we're going with the actual title it should read, "After Pause, Wall Street Pay is Bouncing Back Because of Government Bailouts, Taxpayer Money, and Government Guarantees" ... 
... They think they've lost elections because they haven't shouted the crazy loud enough (more teabagging please!), or because their insults just aren't as effective anymore (let's try "fascist" now!). So they stick to their old loser policies, from their pathological defense of the ultra wealthy, to their clinging to doomed opposition to gay marriage. And as for leadership? Well, who better to defend the status quo than the status quo?For a party that thinks that they need to get back to their roots and/or that they lost their way under Bush because they weren't conservative enough, I'd have to say Markos Moulitsas is on to something here.
Into that breach has entered Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Joe the Plumber to provide the philosophical underpinnings of the GOP. For the party that could once depend on the intellectual prowess of William F. Buckley, this has certainly been a downgrade. As their public face, if they could dig up Ronald Reagan and prop him up at RNC headquarters, they would. Instead, the Palins and Jindals jostle and compete for who can be the most ridiculously regressive. But for a party that predicates its philosophy on distrust of change, it looks like this leadership vacuum is best filled by old retreads -- Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove.
1. New Revenue is coming from buying into a government-managed money markets full of low interest rates that have led to new mortgage contracts. This means new income streams.In a few words, cheap government money, new "clean" clients from failed institutions, TARP guarantees, and FDIC backing are driving the "recovery" of the financial institutions. The reality is their accounting offices are simply reporting the good news of having free money and government guarantees dumped on their laps.
2. New "Unimpaired" Assets are coming from acquiring the "good assets" of failed banks and other collapsed financial institutions. These assets were essentially granted with government guarantees (like the guarantee of absorbing "legacy assets" that are essentially the toxic garbage banks don't want).
3. New Money and Other Guarantees are coming from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that currently puts the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for trillions of dollars.
4. FDIC Low-Cost Funding for acquiring firms that the government will (or already has) assume(d) losses on.
In the field of economics one of the arguments that gets thrown around rather loosely is the idea that Adam Smith, the patron saint of modern capitalism, was a big proponent of allowing individual market players do as they please. Proponents of this perspective tell us that allowing market players to operate freely in markets is what Adam Smith believed would create harmoney and the greater good. It's the keystone behind Smith's book The Wealth of Nations, so we are told.Adam Smith first coined the term “The Invisible Hand” in his important book “The Wealth of Nations.” With this term he was trying to capture the idea that the marketplace would be self-regulating. The basic principle of the invisible hand is that though we may be unaware of it, an unseen hand is constantly prodding us along to act in line with what’s best for the whole economy. This means that when this invisible hand exists, when we all pursue our own interest, we end up promoting the public good ...This interpretation of Adam Smith misses why he used the "invisible hand" to convey a message about markets, and what capitalism's intellectual godfather actually said about the negative affects of markets.
$2.5 billion of revenues came from lower market value of its debt thanks to a fall in credit quality. That was a common pattern of last year, when quite a few investment banks, Lehman in particular, marked down their debt, showing a corresponding increase in income.Do the math. $1.6 billion - ($2.5 billion + 1.1 billion) is not a positive number. This is especially not good since it looks like the bank stress tests are proving to be garbage.
The bank posted a number of one-off gains:$704 million from the sale of a remaining stake in a Brazilian credit card processor, and $360 million in reversals of reserves (part for a litigation, the rest relating to an audit).
The bank posted negative earnings per share.
According to this story, Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress's eyes.
The FBI has pursued him relentlessly for the past two and a half years. Agents have raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they've been questioning Tamm's friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life. Tamm has resisted pressure to plead to a felony for divulging classified information. But he is living under a pall, never sure if or when federal agents might arrest him.And just who is Mr. Hamm? Meteor Blades at Dailykos tells that this was a "guy whose uncle and father were FBI agents, who led the Young Republicans when he was at Brown University and who had a stellar career at the DoJ until he decided to expose the criminal behavior of the government he served ..."
Exhausted by the uncertainty clouding his life, Tamm now is telling his story publicly for the first time. "I thought this [secret program] was something the other branches of the government—and the public—ought to know about. So they could decide: do they want this massive spying program to be taking place?" ... If somebody were to say, who am I to do that? I would say, 'I had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.' It's stunning that somebody higher up the chain of command didn't speak up."
If the telecommunication companies that helped the NSA to violate the law could be immunized with Obama's vote last year, if the Obama administration is reluctant to prosecute former Bush officials for their alleged crimes, and if the president and the attorney general recognize that illegal wiretapping is an intolerable offense against the Constitution, then it is long past time to lift the burden of investigation from Thomas Tamm. Let the government acknowledge what by now is obvious. No fair-minded jury would convict him, and none ever should.I hope he gets his life back.
... Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan ...While there's plenty of ancedotal evidence, it's more pensive than informational. If you get the time, it's worth the read.
... Murderous gunfire claims many more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets. But all the expressions of horror at the violence and pity for the dead and those who loved them ring hollow in a society that is neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything about it.
Lenders nationwide are sitting on hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes that they have not resold or listed for sale, according to numerous data sources. And foreclosures, which banks unload at fire-sale prices, are a major factor driving home values down.Why is this important? Because there's a mountain of adjustable rate mortgages ready to blow through our collapsed (still collapsing?) real estate market over the next few months.
In a few words, the president's $75 billion home loan rennegotiation program is/was absolutely necessary. The problem we have is with the banks. Which brings us back to what I've been advocating for some time, nationalization 
Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.Incredibly enough, it gets better.
In Georgia, poor people who cannot pay off fines — plus a monthly fee to the private company that collects the payments — are often sent to jail for nonpayment, according to Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights. In 2006, the center sued on behalf of a woman who was locked up in Atlanta for eight months past her original sentence because she could not pay a $705 fine.Yes, holding people in jail because they can't pay their debts is supposed to be unconstitutional (Art. I, Sec. 8: mandates "uniform Laws on the subject of Bankrupticies"). How we got to this point is a mystery to me. I know who I need to call to ask about this. I should have some informed commentary on this by Saturday.
I ended up at a firm that targeted talk radio listeners - the kind of working class white Americans who keep Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in business, people who worked hard to keep our plants running and our department stores staffed and our school children taught. We did good business charging competitive fees and getting low rates for them, even when their credit was a little slow, or their debt to income ratios were slightly out of whack, or they were a few points shy of meeting government loan guidelines ...After discussing how some of her colleagues gamed the system, first by building crummy homes, then getting into the "rehab" business to fix the crap they built, our mortgage broker tells us how she began to see the internal rot in the system ...
The handful of truly awful loans I've done were pretty much the borrowers last resort. The highest interest rate I've ever closed a deal on was at 12% on $250,000 for a white family who were going to have to move out of the house they were leasing from a builder if they didn't get a loan - with the tax liens they had, it was amazing that anyone funded it at all. Dozens more prospective clients, practically all of them African American, walked away from low interest rate deals I put together for them because their friends were all getting cash back at closing from the guys who peddled the 2 year ARM's with the teaser ratesPut another way, the industry actively promoted and peddled "too good to be true" loans - which offered cash back - knowing full well that the people they were lending to were already on shaky financial ground. As anticipated, many of the loans failed, when adjustable rates jumped, or because people walked away from shoddy homes, or because they lost their jobs. The result has been predictable: Boarded up houses, lenders with toxic assets, nobody willing to purchase collapsing homes in bad neighborhoods, etc.
But the bankers aren't moving [the houses]. It is as if the poison in the toxic assets are like snake venom that has slowly begun to paralyze their ability to move in the right direction. Now if it was me who knowingly stepped into a cage full of rattlesnakes, and then got bitten, when someone came running with the anti-venom to save my life, the way the Treasury Department has, I wouldn't hesitate in taking it.The end result of our taxpayer funded bailout is that bankers are dragging their feet on negotiating new terms and write-downs because they can. Now that money is in the pipeline and very few of them fear for their jobs, they can afford to sit and wait. Our mortgage broker has this to say ...
But our nation's bankers have decided, now that the swelling has stopped from all the bites they've taken from their own brand of exotic mortgage derivative snakes, snakes they grew themselves, that they aren't sure they want to take the anti-venom, which in this case is participation in the TARP program that practically pays companies who actually have money to take these loans off their hands.
To these lily-livered son of a bitches, the loans themselves are an abstraction. To many of us, try to do our damnedest to keep a roof over our heads, they are as real as the boarded up house across the street, and the one next to it that doesn't have any windows left, eyesores that might only need a little repair work and a reasonable price tag to get families moving into them.There's more. Read the article.
The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who'd rather be working full time, it's now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.Check out the rest of his commments on his blog here.
Summary: Sean Hannity aired a clip of President Obama's speech in France and claimed Obama was "blam[ing] America first." However, at no point during the show did Hannity note that immediately after the part he aired, Obama criticized "anti-Americanism" in Europe as well as Europeans who "choose to blame America for much of what's bad."
No other president has ever printed money and expanded the money supply with such abandon as Bush. This new money -- and therein lies its danger -- was not backed by real value in the form of goods or services. The measure may have had the desired effect -- the world economy revived, at least initially. And US consumption kept the global economy going for years. But the growth rates generated in the process were illusionary. The US had begun to hallucinate.From there, Steingart offers a quick panorama of what this means for America and the American consumer/taxpayer ...
The addiction to new cash injections was chronic. The US had allowed itself to sink into an abject lifestyle. It sold more and more billions in new government bonds in order to preserve the appearance of a prosperous nation. To make matters worse, private households copied the example of the state. The average American now lives from hand to mouth and has 15 credit cards. The savings rate is almost zero. At the end of the Bush era, 75 percent of global savings were flowing into the US [my emphasis].Whose to blame? Der Spiegel's Steingart starts with one of the stars of our spending and borrowing binge, Alan Greenspan ...
The president and the head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, knew about the problem very well. Perhaps the Americans even knew just how irresponsible their actions were -- at any rate, they did everything they could to hide them from the world. Since 2006, figures for the money supply -- in other words, the total number of dollars in circulation -- have no longer been published in the US. As a result, a statistic which is regarded by the European Central Bank as a key indicator is now treated as a state secret in the US.What Steingart is referring to here is the Bush administration's decision to discontinue publishing the figures for M-3 (total money supply, or demands on) back in 2006. Seriously, we're not sure how many dollars, or how the claim on dollars, stacks up (I discuss this in my book; Chps. 9 & 12).
But the change of government in Washington has not brought a return to self-restraint and solidity. On the contrary, it has led to further abandon. Barack Obama has continued the course towards greater and greater state debt -- and increased the pace. One-third of his budget is no longer covered by revenues. The only things which are currently running at full production in the US are the printing presses at the Treasury.I can't say that I disagree. But it really doesn't matter for the Obama administration because we're pumping so much money into the economy that markets will most likely stabilize and President Obama will win a second term. Inflation will no doubt follow, but that means the burden of our debts will slowly diminish.
At the summit in London, delegates talked about everything -- except this issue. As a result, no attention was given to the fact that the crisis is being fought with the same instrument that caused it in the first place. The acreage for cheap dollars will now be extended once again. Only this time, the state is also acting as the dealer, so that it can personally take care of how the trillions are distributed.
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“Taking on influential defense contractors will be tough.”See the entire article here
--President Barack Obama, March 24.
“Tough” hardly describes the battle that lies in wait for the President when he tries to make meaningful changes in defense contracting. More than 90% of the revenue generated by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon in 2008 came from defense contracts. For Northrop and General Dynamics, defense contracts accounted for more than 70%. Even Boeing, which dominates civilian aviation, depends on military work for half its revenue ...
When the President talks about reforming defense spending, these are the goliaths he's taking on. The entire defense contracting system is shot through with waste and abuse. Last year the GAO reported that 95 defense projects had overrun their budgets by $295 billion. The average delivery delay was nearly two years beyond what the contractor promised ...
This should be a ripe target for White House and Congressional cost cutters. Should be. But isn't. Why?Because defense contractors are adept at creating alternative political universes. Lockheed, for example, has subcontracted parts for the F-22 fighter plane to 1,150 firms in 46 states. Each one of those firms and the people in Congress who represent them is a lobbyist for building more F-22s. Last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates decided to halt the plane's production. But that decision hasn't yet stuck.
Working through its constituent congressmen and senators, and the communities, business and labor groups that would lose money and jobs, Lockheed is waging a furious campaign to build more F-22s ... We're talking here about a plane that so far has cost taxpayers more than $65 billion and has seen no service in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other combat. The F-22 was conceived about 30 years ago as a next generation fighter to compete with improved Russian Migs, which planners then assumed would be built as part of the continuing cold war. Then the cold war ended and the Russians cut back on military development ...
