I agree and Corzine while minor in comparison to the financial crisis has to be the most "insider" off the hook there ever was.

This is why at the end of this article I suspect this is all to push up the settlement fine. This won't even make it to trial and it's civil so no one will go to jail.

In the DOJ filing, executives are left anonymous and called by letter, executive A, B, C.

The guilty are named. Even when there are memos, emails, witnesses, paper trail and even corporate strategic documents nobody goes to jail.

Business wants foreign workers to technology transfer and labor arbitrage. Last CIR in 2006 2007 didn't even really offer a "pathway to citizenship" due to the structure, it was an illusion, all to flood the U.S. with STEM and other degreed workers.

Kurtz, you should try the Instapopulist for outrages like this. Click on rich text editor to pull up the WYSIWYG editor and the chain icon is a way to format links.

There is a complete disconnect between D.C., Wall Street and real life in America economically. The reason, in part, Federal government jobs have way better benefits, retirement, wages is due to unions. There are more unionized workers whereas the private sector unions have been decimated. It matters, it really does for job security. Federal workers shouldn't be chastised for keeping good jobs, more the private sector should be condemned for their never ending race to the bottom on wages, labor, jobs, benefits and retirement. They squeeze workers to improve their quarterly profit statements and make sure their executives get multi-million dollar bonuses.

Four months is a long time to be without a paycheck. It does sound too low considering how bad the job market really is. I find the press ridiculous for even the official unemployment rate is way too high to be acting like this is over. More, for the last two years, the job additions are more close to maintaining population growth that really creating jobs.

I also agree, the politicians are completely corrupt and touting "middle class" when they helped destroy the middle class is most irritating. Probably one of the most offense things, to see rhetoric trying to claim up is down, black is white for U.S. labor. Both parties, when it comes to the regular people do this spin, seemingly in a race to perfect their propaganda as an agenda!

The comments are now threaded and heavily dynamic. I personally have to have threaded comments to follow the discussion. When clicking on individual comments to read they should automatically display for you now as well as the page should stay open once you click the comment section display.

Update: There are still bugs in the comments, working on a fix. The idea is to have dynamic comments, yet if one wants to read an individual comment from the recent comments list, or the various rss feeds, that particular comment is automatically displayed and then one can open the rest surrounding ones. It works for replies at the moment, but not for top level comments. The rest stands on your input. The idea is to make comments easier to read and follow yet not cause this massive super long page that one must scroll through to read them all.

Update 2: Oh so sorry, comments were supposed to stay open after replying to a comment and they were in test. I wonder if I should have written this from scratch instead of taking some code that wasn't working and trying to fix it at this point. Sorry, hopefully will have a new version in the next couple of days.

Please be the guinea pigs, click about and let me know what problems, irritants and whatever you think about the comments. Easy discussion is critical to EP and if these fall short just let me know.

The "recommend" gray button on the right, please consider using. After a while the plan is to have comment du jour is a special box and that would be the comment with the most recommends. That little box actually records all of the recommendations so we have highlight awesome commentary.

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The comments finally at least have the major bugs fixed. There were no working AJAX comments code available. In Drupal open source, all of it would throw errors and not function. I took the least spaghetti code one and rewrote it to function in a manner I thought usable plus fixing the outright coding bugs. Beyond testing for security issues I didn't do much design/cross platform testing. Bottom line, please let me know if something is not working or just ridiculous.

Yeah, let's say it, because that's all that matters to the elite. And for those that think that red vs. blue matters, wake the f up. It's elitism vs. you, it's 1% vs. you. Are your children or siblings jumping right into consultancies, network news, business, Wall Street? Of course not, this is the really real world where merit means jacksh*t and connections and corruption and profits above your fellow Americans is ALL.

Read the local news. Those "unattended" and "suspicious" deaths that are happening with increasing frequency since 2007, they are suicides. Your friends, your neighbors, etc., in a land with 20%+ of the population experiencing unemployment for more than 3, 4, or 5+ years of unemployment, what do you think would happen? Jesus, what do these people with IQs of 100 in Congress think would happen (if they think between collecting payoffs)? And for those that blame the red or blue, save it, they both love the misery because they owe their allegiance to the corporate/bankster masters wherever they reside (e.g., see Morsi/Lockheed deal - military-industrial complex says what). The Gilded Age Redux - only in 2013, it's more corrupt. Mark Twain would be silenced by a drone brought to you by a defense contractor that loves both Democrats and Republicans and pays millions to both parties because the Founding Fathers would love 24/7 surveillance and bombs in America and overseas (probably not). USA 2013! AWESOME!

Damn you Bill of Rights, how dare you stand in the way of PROFITS and selling out America's national security to foreign nations!

And the best part about it all is if someone wrote Republicans are awesome and the bestest bestest, that would get 1 million hits. And Democrats are the bestest bestest, same. And the Kardashians are the bestest bestest, same. Shut the lights off on the way out.

If the media spouts trash and government lies, and the government ignores the problem because its controllers want it that way and pay the politicians to do as their told (which runs counter to what the populace wants), I'm guessing an ever-increasing number of people that live reality just don't put too much trust in anyone outside their own small circle of friends and family. Over a few years, it doesn't take a PhD in Sociology or History to figure out that breeds a whole lot of hate and distrust. It's like Saddam's PR man facing a camera and stating, "All is well, we're beating the enemy." Nope, reality at one's door is more compelling.

370k in initial claims does imply "moderate" hiring as in treading water hiring. I agree, the narrative by the press and especially politicians is to sweep the ongoing jobs crisis under the rug, along with the 20 million people suffering.

We don't cover initial claims right before the monthly unemployment report but also January is weird month for claims in terms of seasonal adjustment issues. This report is just so overweighted by the press in terms of economic indicators. They want it to be a real time short window indicator and it's just not as we repeatedly warn about.

I don't think we are too far apart on how we view the housing recovery. I view it as a dead cat bounce, even if it looks like all cylinders are firing in the housing market. I don't think housing bubbles allow for V-shaped recoveries. The experience in the US, but especially in Japan which had a similar bust-up in the 90s, is for housing prices to lie pretty much dead in the water after bottoming. They can bounce up 10%, 25% or more, but eventually they at least retest the lows. This can go on for as long as the bubble existed. In US terms, our blastoff year for the bubble was 1996 and it peaked in 2006, so 2016 ought to be the time when we retest the lows. From there you could see either more bottom churning for years afterward, or a very slow rise from the lows. If housing in the US were lucky enough at that point to achieve a slow rise like it did from 1945 to 1996, the rate of increase would be similar to that of the CPI. Lately that has been 2% or less. Bear in mind during this period that the appreciation in the capital stock kept up with the rate of inflation but rarely exceeded it, which means that housing was a loser as an investment when you consider maintenance and taxes over all those years. Of course, housing provided shelter and living accomodations, access to schools, nice neighborhoods, etc., so the homeowner was on balance well-compensated. If you paid off the home after 25 years, you had some nice capital appreciation to make you feel wealthy, even though on balance you might have done better putting all that money every year in Treasuries.

1996 was, not coincidentally, the year HELOCs took off. These transformed housing into a commodity that could be actively bought and sold without disposition of the actual property. The entire securitization craze, financed by Fannie Mae and made to look legitimate by MERS, was the icing on the cake that gave the bubble a firm foundation to grow. The question is, in 2016, will those favorable factors be put back in place to allow more rapid growth in housing than the CPI will permit? I doubt it, but to be sure, you need those things before you can postulate that the US can recreate the ten year bubble we just went through.

Watch out for the stock market. It is flashing multiple danger signals and investors are displaying extraordinary complacency. Something is about to bust open soon and I am not sure what it is. It could be one of the things on my list above or something different, but it will either be about the Fed or put the Fed in an impossible situation. Jumping off the sequester cliff might be just the thing to drag down the economy in a big way.

Another thing to consider, perhaps longer term when SHTF, is for a vicious cycle or feedback loop to be created regarding the Fed. The Fed could wind up sitting on $300 to $500 billion, or even more, of mark to market losses on its portfolio. It would technically be an insolvent institution, which would not disturb the market too much if the Treasury were willing to fork over cash to cover the hole in the balance sheet. But that just means more borrowing at a time when higher interest rates (which caused the Fed's losses) were signaling that the market was fed up with US borrowing. The alternative would then be to let the losses sit on the Fed's balance sheet for the next 20 years while the portfolio winds down. Here's where the feedback loop gets interesting. What does the Fed do about its Treasury portfolio? Does it demand repayment, causing the Treasury to borrow again? Does it agree to roll over the debt, buying replacement paper, which means the Fed is going to spend forever holding on to this debt? The point of this thought exercise is that there is no free lunch when the government buys its own paper. Looked at from a cash perspective, the Fed put cash into the banks to buy the paper. How does it get its cash back? It can't force the banks to buy the paper back again, so it has to force the Treasury to redeem the paper on maturity, which for the US will always mean borrowing more in the market since we don't have enough tax revenue to pay back the Fed. The $3 trillion portfolio, soon to be $4.1 trillion by the end of this year, will sit like a black hole for 20 years.