He went heavy into the stock market two weeks ago before this crash hit. He's been buying on the way down. He has publicly said the US will not enter a recession and the stock market is a safe long run bet. He owns substantial positions in Wells Fargo and in Moody's, which means he took a big hit today because the banking sector was one of the worst performers, and he has to justify Moody's decision to maintain the Aaa rating at a time when all the publicity is on S&P, their arch rival. He was a prime beneficiary of the 2008 bailout, being given a private first look at all the assets for sale, so he is very closely identified with the authorities who are not looking too good at the moment. Despite calling derivatives time bombs ready to go off, he has a massive derivatives portfolio that just caused him to be downgraded today by S&P, so he has now lost his precious AAA rating.

I would rate him very unhappy with S&P and someone with an ax to grind. In fact, from what I read in Wall Street publications, people are realizing that he never speaks publicly without an agenda and an understanding that he can move markets. The interesting thing is, as people get to understand his motives better, his ability to move markets is waning considerably.

... the more descriptive term, depending on context, is 'global capital' -- NOT 'Wall Street'.

Of course, in some contexts, the term 'global markets' is appropriate, but that sounds 'rightist' or 'neo-liberal' or 'globalist'.

"President Obama tried to reassure global markets today." -- BBC's North America news broadcast, 8 August 2011.

NOT "President Obama tried to reassure Wall Street"!

The BBC spin was, on the face of it, ridiculous ... you can't reassure markets anymore than you can reassure the weather. President Obama's intent was to reassure global capital ... but to use the term 'global capital' would have been politically incorrect. Corporate media likes to maintain the fiction that the real important stuff is still being run from New York by 'our' guys, that is, 'Wall Street'.

I think 'Wall Street' is an antiquated myth, unless it refers to the financial part of the FIRE lobby in Washington, D.C., but then why not call it what it is?

We have not quite reached the point where there is no such thing as the 'U.S. economy,' but have we not reached the point where there is no such thing as 'Wall Street'?

Hmm. . . sounds scary. I wonder if the NFL season will be affected? Surely the Home Shopping Network will be OK too. . . right? I know the economy's tough. . . boy, I'm glad I bailed on getting that stupid engineering degree and now have a stable job as a free-lance therapeutic dog masseuse. I need some bracing-up after those worries so I think I'll drive my 2-ton, 7 passenger SUV 3 miles to get a $4 half-caff, caramel macchiato. I just wish I'd stop getting those calls about my late payments on the SUV and my college loans. Well, I know things are bad for SOME people but riots? What are those English and Greeks thinking about? But the TV experts tell us that it's only a few malcontents so not to worry. I'm in good shape and nothing like that could ever happen here. Everything will be fine.

Is reference to CIS "Center for Internet Security" or maybe to CSIS "Center for Strategic and International Studies"?

CSIS has had some interesting stuff about Russia and Eastern Europe, and I understand that it's closely associated with the U.S. government (not that that would make it reliable).

BTW: do you consider CIA demographic webpages to be accurate? As long as you look at the source details and sometimes adjust accordingly, I have assumed them to be.

Here is an article that i wrote a while back that is similar to yours.

Hope you like it.

http://hotbedinfo.com/2011/06/top-10-similarities-between-the-fall-of-ro...

He's banned due to very obvious reasons, but the #1 sacrilege on this site is posting bogus research or statistics to claim your agenda or belief is "true". That's AEI, Heritage, CIS, La Raza, Compete America or even NBER. Anyone who puts out bogus claims, manipulates data and especially mathematical equations is banned.

I focus heavily on these various spin lobbyists and agenda people because most people cannot do basic ratios, much less read a mathematical labor economics equation with 20 variables and calculus.

So, a white paper with fiction is given and then people who have no idea that it's full of lies wave it around in the air as if it's truth.

Sorry people, they can lie with statistics, graphs, numbers and maths and I see it all of the time.

Anybody who could read mathematics for example, would know the entire concept of a CDS is based on faulty mathematics. The Copula is not designed for "many to one" relationships, the math requires a 1 to 1 data input value to be valid.

Anyone at all in Government bother to say "hey, that's invalid mathematics, we cannot allow these to be used". Hell no.

This site was founded on the idea that we should plain look at the data, the facts, for ourselves and analyze. Corporate sponsored, or special agenda sponsored, so called "think tanks", along with some seriously corrupted Academics, who spin with data and mathematics to claim some agenda they have is "good", disgust me. It's completely opposed to the once America value that one should be objective in any research and let the conclusions write themselves. i.e. it used to be sacrilege to fudge your data and results.

Now that same behavior which would have gotten you shunned by any scientific community is not only entering the scientific community (see pharmaceutical clinical trials!), but is routine in the soft sciences, such as public policy and economics.

One can go on FAUX news, a complete concrete brain, never an objective fact will enter into it, and run 24/7 statistical lies and upside down economic theory.

It's a lie, it's misleading and it's one of the things I believe is destroying the U.S.

Since when is it ok to just make up stuff to say some conclusion you believe? Since when can one just claim I believe as a rational for economic agenda?

It's absolutely stone age.

In China, they have a super economics architecture team of 20 and almost all of them used to be engineers. They don't put I believe in anything. They have 5 year plans, executed with precision.

Over in the United States we have people making up charts, graphs and even fictional mathematical equations to claim up is down and left is right.

Undergraduate history majors can see the correlation between Rome overextending its resources through war and subsequently falling into decline. Personally, I'm just waiting on the Grand Universal Crawfish (i.e. so many people default that the banks can no longer go after them), when I will promptly stop paying bills and engage in black market trade.

Robert has mentioned lately that traffic has been picking up here at the Economic Populist. More and more people are starting to pay attention to what is being published on this site. But who could have expected this? A visit from a card-carrying apologist for the Bush administration!

Liberals consider that we've earned a wing if someone bothers to come by and attempt a rebuttal using right-wing arguments. You get two wings if the attacker uses charts from either the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation. Robert is better equipped than I am to explain the peculiar brand of specious reasoning and data manipulation that constitutes "research" at these two distinguished members of the right-wing propaganda program.

But then - to be told we have pathological Bush hatred, and that we must "get over it" when it comes to the 2000 election - why this is the Holy Grail of liberal abuse. I use to have a boss who specialized in buying up other companies and finding "synergies" that would travel straight to the bottom line. This was corporate speak for being able to fire lots of people, and naturally he was well-loved by Wall Street. He would travel to the newly conquered subsidiaries or divisions, bodies littered all over the place, and he would tell the remaining staff there - "Just get over it." It was, and I imagine still is, his favorite phrase. It was all of a piece with the right wing encouragement to "move along, nothing to see here", which is always to be found when there definitely is something to see there - something unpleasant and uncomfortable for those who love to extol the beauties of the free market, and the noble contributions corporations and wealthy people make to American society.

We have an example right here, when Paladin tells us that the top 10% of all wage earners paid 70% of all income taxes as of 2008. Well that certainly sounds noble, until you realize that the top 10% own more than 70% of the nation's wealth, and that they specialize not so much in "earning a wage", as they do in earning dividends and achieving capital gains. It is at this point that we are encouraged to look aside - there is really nothing to see there - especially the part where the top 10% have managed to exclude most capital gains from the greedy hands of the tax man.

I do hope Paladin stays around here - sans the Heritage Foundation tables. Paladin will find that the "far left", or whatever we are at the Economic Populist - have our fair share of "Obama hatred", or whatever you get when one feels betrayed by the person you actively supported for higher office. Our colleague Michael Collins has been writing lately about what happened to Obama and why, and I hope he will publish further insights. They will surprise Paladin, because one of the peculiar things about the far right / far left divide is that the two sides of the spectrum are beginning to meet up more and more on certain issues. I, for one, am as alarmed about the parlous state of federal government finances as any Tea Party patriot. As I put it in something I wrote recently - when you are borrowing $100 billion every month in fresh money, you are effectively creating another Department of Homeland Security each month, because that is its annual budget. Something is deeply wrong with that picture, and a day of reckoning is inevitable.

I just wish the Tea Party people wouldn't play around with the good faith and credit of the United States - which after all is (or was) a legacy bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents, who expected we would have the common sense and discipline to maintain those standards. Alas, we do not, certainly not when one side of government takes the whole Congress and economy hostage, and refuses to offer up the slightest access to the wealth and income of the top 10% of wage earners.

I do hope Paladin is not one of those people who are erecting moats and castle walls around the wealthy and privileged so that they can continue to avoid contributing to this country in their quest for oligarchical heaven on earth. If Paladin were one of those people who would join us in insisting that everyone in this country contribute their fair share in consideration of the wealth and income they have enjoyed by virtue of the laws, the courts, the political system, and all the other infrastructure that allows wealth to beget further wealth - if Paladin were to join us in this effort, why that would be something that would definitely worry somebody. That is because it is in somebody's interest that the right and left not talk to each other, lest we discover common ground that would be very dangerous for the powerful and wealthy who benefit from Americans attacking Americans, throwing their Heritage Foundation charts out, only to be met with New York Times graphs. That fight between the far right and the far left is just as useful to some people as pathological Bush or Obama hatred, and that fight makes it a lot easier to manipulate people into "moving on" and "getting over" our grievances, which by and large are about the same things.

This article has so many gratuitous assertions and outright lies that it's hard to know where to start. Maybe a few bullet points would help keep things short and to the point:

• The Clinton Budget Surplus Myth - notice the figures in the matrix below (source- US Treasury website):

Fiscal Year	End Date	Claimed Surplus	Public Debt	Intra-gov Holdings	Total National Debt
FY1997	09/30/1997		$3.789667T	$1.623478T	$5.413146T
FY1998	09/30/1998	$69.2B	$3.733864T $55.8B	$1.792328T $168.9B	$5.526193T $113B
FY1999	09/30/1999	$122.7B	$3.636104T $97.8B	$2.020166T $227.8B	$5.656270T $130.1B
FY2000	09/29/2000	$230.0B	$3.405303T $230.8B	$2.268874T $248.7B	$5.674178T $17.9B
FY2001	09/28/2001		$3.339310T $66.0B	$2.468153T $199.3B	$5.807463T $133.3B

Although Clinton paid down the Public Debt, he did it by increasing Intra-govt holdings, mostly by using excess Social Security funds generated by the incomes generated by the dot-com bubble. A large percentage of the tax revenues during that period were from capital gains taxes, again from the dot-com bubble.

• The claim that Bush's deficit spending amounted to more than all his predecessors combined is patently false - but it certainly applies to the current occupant of the white house. The effects of Obama's uncontrolled entitlement spending combined with his administration's complete economic incompetence are the reasons for our AA+ rating.

• After the Bush Tax Cuts were enacted, the "rich" actually paid a greater percentage of all income taxes than before. The top 5% of wage earners (income over $159,619) paid 58.7% of all income taxes, and the top 10% ($113,800) paid 70% of all income taxes collected (based on 2008 figures). Source - IRS.gov

Three years into Obama's first term shows us the results of his policies - it's his economy and there's no way a reasonable thinking person can blame Bush for the current mess and still be in touch with reality. This pathological Bush hatred has really become old, especially the part about the 2000 election. Gore lost EVERY recount that was conducted - get over it.