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CPI for November 2009
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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Audit the Fed Under Attack
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Turkey Day OMGs
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Unemployment 10.2% for October 2009
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CPI for November 2009
- 14560 reads
US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 183406 reads
CPI for March 2011
- 11357 reads
Audit the Fed Under Attack
- 30236 reads
Turkey Day OMGs
- 8221 reads
Unemployment 10.2% for October 2009
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The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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What a yo-yo but which direction it will finally take is seemingly anyone's guess.
I'm fairly certain delusions of QE3 are affecting markets.
"The main reason the Chinese are among the world’s greatest savers, after all, is that each and every one of them know there is nothing there to catch them if they or their family fall victim to any of life’s vicissitudes"
WRONG WRONG WRONG!
The main reason is the industry policy that intently supress consumption, that is negative deposit rate to rob depositors to susidise exporters!
How come IMF can predict 12th Five Year Plan's sucess without figuring out the underlying factor behind China current business model!
Funny.
@anqinglaowang
Anthony Harrington: "Rebalancing, in the sense of moving from being export driven to having a much higher domestic consumption component, is something that it is far harder to say than it is to do. The Chinese authorities can, of course, decree anything they want, but that doesn’t always mean that their decrees will play out in the way that they expect."
from 'Chinese government gets its pulse taken by the IMF over housing bubble' on QFINANCE.com
http://www.qfinance.com/blogs/anthony-harrington/2011/08/10/chinese-gove...
Awww what a shame. The left is name calling the right for having millions of outsider money shipped in while it tried to downplay their own donors. And of course, all their donors were clean and reverent on the books. That's okay though, everyone is entitled to their political opinions. That's like the Waukesha county non-story. Only losers of elections care about their legitimacy until they are exposed. This goes for MSNBC, Fox and CNN.
I guess the unions weren't hurting after all to bus in all those people and pay for Al Sharpton and the like to speak. Not much difference from the Tea Party, are they?
Supposedly Goldman Sachs to others are "reading in-between the lines" on the FOMC statement and are believing the Fed will do QE3. This is because there were 3 dissents and also the "reserve" for "additional actions".
I don't quite buy it because the Fed clearly says they are watching inflation. If things went deflationary I can see it, but I think Wall Street wants this so badly so they can profit, they are seeing things.
Greenspan loved cryptic guessing but Bernanke, I've felt is much more straight forward.
Traders man, the stuff they think and of course that changes in a nano second, as the indexes move up and down.
There's the never-ending swinging from fear to greed and back to fear and so on.
In between greed and fear, there's the wide open range of UNCERTAINTY.
The Uncertainty Industry in Las Vegas and Macau seemed to be doing just fine even as New York and Hong Kong markets tanked.
Excerpted for review purposes from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (August 9, 2011), Business Section:
Seems like we've heard the phrase "casino capitalism" lately. Go figure.
Please keep the essays coming Mr. Roberts. Thank you.
I think for one they should make medical school 100% state subsidized. The requirements are also absurd, you have to have a 4.0++++ GPA, yet some foreigner can pop over as a resident with god knows what GPA and training.
That's absurd and squeezes out Americans. Then, walking out of Medical school with I think it's now above $150k in student loans forces them to, right out of the gate, go for the most $$ they can get. The length of time is also horrific.
So, if they subsidized education and training, at least that's one problem knocked out and assuredly the investment versus the return are great. i.e. $200k investment, $1 million in reduced costs, more family docs, interns available type of ratio and still that MD would easily make 6 figures and be more than comfortable financially.
The real problem is that labor has nowhere else to go. The one party-two-party system has no competition. No matter who wins, the financial elite wins and labor loses. Perhaps it is time for a credible socialist alternative -- not the 19th century crazies that made Stalin possible, but people with a conscience who believe it immoral to allow people to starve so others can be mega-rich. In this country, we punish the poor because people hate the government -- the irony is that it may be the poor who hate the government as well as the rich who hate the government (at least the part that taxes them). When I get fund-raising appeals from candidates who are themselves rich and who are part of the SOP (Same Old Plutocracy), I feel no compunction at saying no. There are few candidates who make sense for America (Kucinich comes to mind), but I will not vote for Obama, nor will I vote for the SOP candidate. Will someone real please step forward and reclaim the party of FDR, so I can at least vote?
There are a lot of trading/financial sites publishing "fast analysis" on what the hell just happened. Frankly, I don't know.
If I find out something that isn't elsewhere I'm write. For now, I'm wondering about automated, flash trades cascading on levels. Something like 73% of all trades are flash, or automated, operating from software, and trading on levels, triggers.
I don't see how the Fed can basically announce, guess what, we've got a 6 year recession and have the stock market take off like a rocket.
Treasuries also imploded an the entire VIX jumped 120%.
There is a trend among primary care physicians to start VIP plans where the wealthy patient put down a fixed annual premium, like $1500. None of the worries of dealing with insurance companies. But you pay this $1500 premium, per member, $6000 + emergency, plus clinical testing, it gets pricey.
PC physicians have had Medicare/Medicaid rates frozen since 1997 by HHS,private insurance, Medicare/aid. The money is going to the top of the private insurance companies and specialists, who demand ever more exotic treatments and drugs and equipment. More and more cannot afford $12,000 per year for private insurance
and Medicare/Medicaid is vanishing while the States cut back. Corporate plans contributing 80-90% of premiums 10 years ago, contribute 10 to 20% or none at all.
Well, most people are not in unions and blind support when you're right, blacks have depression level unemployment rates, ALL of their economic gains since civil rights as a group have been wiped out and you can bet they will probably vote for Obama 98%.
The real problem is we have NO CHOICE! It's corporate corrupt puppets vs. economically depraved and insane (GOP field).
We need someone sane to either challenge Obama in the primary or run as an independent.
You know it's bad when Donald Trump makes the most economic sense and that is the situation today.
I agree with you the AFL-CIO should not pour money into Presidential campaigns. They should just locate the key candidates who really would try to do something and then lobby for legislation. It's just a waste of union dues and effort.
Interesting, you list all the forces working ‘against’ the middle class and none working for them – which is typical and significant. Nobody talks about the provable ‘elephant in the room’ – AFL-CIO. That is the only organization that can server as a counter force. And yet, the president of AFL-CIO Trumka is already campaigning for Obama. And, unbelievably the president of the nation teachers union (can’t remember the name (NEA?) has also endorsed him. Obama did nothing nothing to support teachers in Wisconsin and New Jersey.
Similarly, no group is getting hurt more than African-Americans and they also blindly support Democrats especially if they are Black.
I don’t cry for the middle class. They got the government and economy they want. AFL-CIO and African Americans could form a Labor Party in the morning. Unless and until they do, they will treated like an abused wife who refuses to leave her husband
If you want to write up a post pointing out the real tax rates, refuting this inane stuff but he was banned immediately for this is the same sort of lies/spin one sees from GOP operatives, FAUX news and I suspect he's a lobbyist plant or paid comment spam person or something, but assuredly not interested in discussing real facts, figures, ratios from this one comment.
The real battle lies in saving social safety nets. That's the never ending attack and on the U.S. middle class. It's quite true Medicaid/Medicare, health care costs will break the bank but what's not true is why. It's costs, not benefits and they already blew it in tackling the system in "Obamacare".
We have not only the Tea Party but Wall Street, IMF foaming at the mouth to destroy social safety nets in the United States.
S&P seems, in part, motivated, to demand this government "reform" entitlements, which is codespeak for reduce or get rid of....
instead of going after the reasons why the United States pays three times more than other industrialized nations for health care.
Like a litmus test, we have Paladin saying we have 70 Ordinary Income brackets on Federal Income tax! Reagan made that 70% Bracket go away in 1981. The maximum personal income bracket is 35% and 14% for capital gains. (This is how Buffett pays a lower rate of tax than his receptionist). Hedge fund managers, pay their tax at the 14% rates by converting all ordinary income to capital gains. Receptionists pay 28%.
I would like Palladin and the rest, to answer this puzzle. Why did the economy boom in 1950 when tax rates for corporations were at the expropiratory rate of 90% with the Excess Profits Tax? GDP in 1950 grew over 10 percent, likewise PCE and Fixed Investment, all over 10 percent.
There is no contradiction between Buffet's buying and a reversal of the already started 'correction'. The market can go way up while we suffer much more. Captialism in its brutal, degrading, decrepit form in this time is all about pain and the blood sport.
Every manager in this economy manages 'costs' - a euphemism for the bread going into our mouths. Every manager knows he gets richer not in spite of our poverty, but because of our increasing poverty.
If I am wrong, I am not where I am. In an IT concentration camp, overseen by the Kommandants right out of Schindler's List, just waiting to take another shot.
If I am wrong, I would not be the oldest, the best skilled, and the only person doing IT work, in my shop,
born in this country. And every where we look and go
the story is repeated.
Shiller discussed "dacadizing" 40 quarterly GDP numbers, which would put Greece's debt burden at 15% after one decade...
"And if they habitually decadalized GDP, multiplying the quarterly GDP numbers by 40 instead of four, Greece’s debt burden would be 15%."
-Shiller
...Not four decades.
Shiller points out that, in the case of Greece, if you "decadized" the debt over 40 years, the Debt-to-GDP ratio would be 15%, a figure the Greeks could be expected to pay.
-Debt Deal Delusions: Debt to Gross Domestic Product Ratio
Well we can always count on our "deeply disappointed" congress people to "hold hearings" on anything that's a major news item. They will give and record their "opening statements" and send copies back to the local Rotary Club.
Meanwhile, last Thursday Huffington Report carried a Reuters article from Milan saying that:
“Italian prosecutors have seized documents at the offices of rating agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's in a probe over suspected "anomalous" fluctuations in Italian share prices."
Big difference between "holding hearings" and "seizing documents".
As said Capt. Renault in the great classic 'Casablanca' (starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman) --
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
Even more shocking to think that the game is rigged or that there are some playing partners.
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