I agree they should be broken up but the issue for me was the criteria, i.e. percentage of GDP. I'm not sure if that was so great. I was thinking Volcker Rule, reinstate Glass-Steagall and a heavy rein in derivatives was in order, then maybe revisit it with things like the normal monopoly break-ups that worked on AT&T. Problem there is Microsoft Anti-trust, once Bush was in office, magically "went away". Of course technological advances made Microsoft mute, although AT&T squished a lot of technological advances.
Anyway, I would have voted for it but it's not as bad to me as the derivatives gutting and now the Fed audit gutting.
The audit the Fed amendment might be on today, as well as the amendment to break up the banks based on percentage of GDP. So spreading the info around isn't too bad of an idea.
then, the "dow crash" is an unanswered question happening right now.
I think online, real time data is a fantastic idea and view, but as I'm sure you are aware, macro economic raw data and not introducing bias and so is a subject area of expertise and frankly, most people do not know what GDP means never mind understanding raw data collection and statistical omissions, bias. They cannot understand seasonal adjustments for instance.
I try to add little definitions and so on in these overviews for regular folks. But hell, the White House is using Google trends lately, so getting a discussion going to make sure all are statistically valid seems to be needed.
i.e. does Google has a higher IQ user base than bing? ;) (I like Google over Microsoft, so of course I would say this one!)
Thank you for your welcoming message. I will pull together an exposition on our methodologies and make a separate post on the subject as soon as today's craziness has passed ...
The site is right in the middle of major upgrades, but there is a user guide, over to the right, under your navigation, which shows you how to format links (URLs) and also how to post images, i.e. graphs. Raw links in posts is a no no, but on this site are all sorts of tools and helpers so people can "struggle less" with post formatting. You can always email me for help on this. We're supposed to be writers and looking at economics, not webbies, but that's still fundamentally the nature of the blogs, gotta know about 5 formatting tags or know how to use a WYSIWYG.
I wouldn't claim that GDP was "half empty" or "half full" for Q4 2009 GDP was all about inventories, so in other words, I saw, at least Q4 2009 GDP numbers being a burp, vs. reflecting real economic growth via investment, exports and even our never ending, debt ridden consumer.
Here are the Economic Populist GDP reports (with graph-o-rama, courtesy of the fabulous St. Louis Fred2 Fed).
What exactly is in your indexes? Is it all real-time online data and are you capturing B2B online data? i.e. how are you collecting your sources (you can be vague, general description) and are your normalizing them? (i.e. 20% of all raw materials manufacturing is online purchase, therefore, skew the error rate by 80%, or get a normalized data path of the trend and normalize to that?) I would claim most B2B probably isn't online, then I would suspect PCE online is biased towards more affluent as well as disposable income. i.e. people do not buy gas and food online that much, whereas they do buy durable goods, but then it's going to be biased and even potentially regional.
But that depends on where you are collecting your raw data from.
Which leads to another point, if Visa/MC can know exactly what kind of beer I bought at what time, where I drank it and how long it took. i.e. behavioral market me as well as add that intel to my credit score...
then one would think we could get our government to ravamp a lot of statistics and start collecting raw real time data.
Google knows what I do since I'm online all day and probably even knows the timing of my bathroom breaks and meals due to online data. (yes folks, it's big brother, big time!)
The biggest area that I find so skewed, so "missing" is employment statistics, esp. when they get into the occupational ones, the underemployment areas and the fact they are counting foreign guest workers on temp. Visas as well as illegals in those statistics, which obviously biases it if you're looking for data on the U.S. workforce.
I think capturing online, real-time data, getting very specific, detailed transaction data and using algorithms and databases to analyze it....is really something the government agencies need to consider architecting and incorporating. Some of their results lag an entire year!
San Diego's pension plan has a $2 billion deficit. To help fill the deficit the city plans to shift responsibility for some of the gap to the employees.
There are protests by the public workers unions today over this.
But whose fault is it really that the pension has a deficit? Uh, isn't it Wall Street, the big banks who lost the money gambling with it on derivatives?
If I posted this comment on DK, I'll bet I would have gotten a troll rating. That's the problem with that site, beyond it's not an economics site, but a political one and if the economics fit, oh that's great too. ;)
If someone says something that isn't in the political mantra du jour, they are attacked.
This is why EP is so insistent on sticking with facts and let facts, statistics, the economic theory speak for itself.
(Yes I have an account on DK and am in good standing and so on, have posted many times on the site).
That reminds me. During the height of the housing bubble, I saw perfectly cool and swell houses torn down in order to build a bigger house all the way to the sides of the lot. Gone were the trees and gorgeous green lawns. In their place was this glorified McMansion, all about making more money. If you can imagine this very livable, beautiful home, with lots of glass windows to watch the yard birds and lots of warmth, very functional home replaced with this sterile, McMansion and no real yard, grass, trees with this carbon copy drywall and carbon copy floor plan, you'll get what I mean. It turns what was a real home into a commodity, I mean physically you could tell the difference.
The question in the prior post asked how we possibly accumulate stuff
"
How is it that we have a politico-economic system in which the government’s explicitly stated goal is to entice people to take out loans for houses and cars they don’t even need? 150 million cars on the road and we must keep buying new ones? Millions of vacant housing units and we need to build new ones? Homes so full of Chinese junk that half of it goes into off-site storage, and we need to shop more? For whose benefit?
Ever heard of debt-slavery? How about feudalism?
"
Sure it leads to a feudal society. But the 'needs' are false. Nobody can use the horsepower, the extra clothes, all those rooms in big houses. Not to mention the proliferation of every conceivable bit of trash and gadgets we all 'got to have'.
Our system will proliferate false needs, repressive tolerance in direct proportion to the accumulation of surplus capital and wealth of the ruling classes. All the
income and wealth distribution studies over 100 years prove
this point empirically.
Before Veblen, Marx and Engels both identified the 'sub-proletariat' as 'counter-revolutionary' along with the idle rich. The marxists had a hard time explaining aristocrat revolutionaries, because many of aristocrat revolutionaries Lafayette, Jefferson, von Steuben, worked at least making revolution.
The line between idle and non-idle rich is difficult to draw. In some ways you can make the case that an equity investor class, really works, or loses money. A debt investor class is definitely non-working and reactionary.
Next Top Model or Biggest Loser, Mega Power Ball, Casinos, the uncontrolled flow of drugs, legal and unlawful have their correlate in Finanz-Kapital insanity everywhere.
No its not CT. Everything that goes down, happens with a wink and a nod, they surely do let it happen. This stuff was well analyzed 40 years ago by writers like N.O. Brown and H. Marcuse. The idea is that the incredible bummers, the disasters and even the seduction of destructive not-so-fun hedonism, is all very well tolerated.
The purpose of the tolerance is repression. The hand of repression is lightest in the First World but heavier in say, Greece and heaviest in the Third World where it is War Machine vs armed resistance.
Real liberation as discussed on the fringes of the left and the right (true libertarians are amazingly like the far left), can only promise freedom from the hand of repression. There are no promises of 1950's prosperity and all the cold wars, McCarthy scares, racism, and arms races that go along.
Economics and politics are both about choices, as Aristotle said.
i
that your posting on DailyKos received much attention.
(I'm on the road right now, and have been at Jon Larson's home in the Minneapolis suburbs. Jon has written a nice description of the NAMES model engineering show in the Detroit suburb of Southgate, and included a very nice video of some of the incredibly well crafted exhibits. And yesterday Jon and his friend took me out on the expanded stretch of the Mississippi River known as Lake Pepin. It was my first time sailing, and almost everything that could go wrong, did. About the only things we didn't do were spill some fuel and blow up the boat. Jon provides details.)
Anyway, I posted this as a comment on DailyKos, and will add it here as well. I've been reading Thorstein Veblen's 1904 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. (The full text of the book has been made available online by Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org.)
In Chapter Eight – "Industrial Exemption and Conservatism," Veblen explains how the leisure class (the rich, ruling class), by its nature and by it very existence, makes a society conservative. This, of course, contradicts all those who just a year and a half ago were trumpeting the message that the 2008 Presidential election proves the U.S. is not a conservative country.
First, Veblen explains that there is a deeper, more fundamental reason that the leisure class resists change beyond the preservation of their vested interests.
The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic situation of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon the members of this class. They are not required under penalty of forfeiture to change their habits of life and their theoretical views of the external world to suit the demands of an altered industrial technique, since they are not in the full sense an organic part of the industrial community. Therefore these exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from any theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class in the cultural development. When an explanation of this class conservatism is offered, it is commonly the invidious one that the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present conditions. The explanation here put forward imputes no unworthy motive. The opposition of the class to changes in the cultural scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an interested calculation of material advantages; it is an instinctive revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of doing and of looking at things--a revulsion common to all men and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances. All change in habits of life and of thought is irksome. The difference in this respect between the wealthy and the common run of mankind lies not so much in the motive which prompts to conservatism as in the degree of exposure to the economic forces that urge a change. The members of the wealthy class do not yield to the demand for innovation as readily as other men because they are not constrained to do so.
Veblen then explains how the leisure class "enforces" conservatism in the rest of society.
The aversion to change is in large part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any given change will necessitate; and this solidarity of the system of institutions of any given culture or of any given people strengthens the instinctive resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought, even in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance. A consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the solidarity of human institutions, is that any innovation calls for a greater expenditure of nervous energy in making the necessary readjustment than would otherwise be the case. It is not only that a change in established habits of thought is distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted theory of life involves a degree of mental effort--a more or less protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's bearings under the altered circumstances. This process requires a certain expenditure of energy, and so presumes, for its successful accomplishment, some surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily struggle for subsistence. Consequently it follows that progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.
From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable degree of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle to any innovation.
You have to hand it to the Greeks. At least when someone tries to force a shit-sandwich down their throats they are out in the streets in force.
Here we just listen to the MSM's latest propaganda piece on the "recovery" and walk around in a trance, eagerly waiting for the next trash-tv episode of America's Next Top Model or Biggest Loser. Strikes or taking to the streets is unheard of except for the lunatic fringe tea partiers. We just smile and roll over like lambs while our banks and government work together to fuck us out of our jobs, savings, and dignity.
This is what I've been saying for a while - reacting to a loss in economic security by trying to get rid of economic security for other workers is ludicrous.
Anti-solidarity is not a winning strategy. Firing teachers by the tens of thousands just means higher unemployment.
Detroit has and had the option of Chapter 9 bankruptcy where they could have just not paid those bills you talk about but it would also void the union contracts. Lord forbid they do either and give some relief to the taxpayers there. The system though does not represent the majority of voters. It represents the wealthy AND it represents powerful unions. The only powerful unions left are federal, state and municipal unions. Where does that leave the rest?
They just borrowed $250 million rated at junk status with no financials given out and the threat of Chapter 9 looming. Lowering debt by borrowing at a higher rate what a unique idea. Well they have to meet their current obligations because well they have to.
Municipalities have been forced to look for higher and higher yields through more risky financial vehicles because of their debt levels and contractual promises. Everyone was on board with that till the market collapsed because those vehicles gave everyone what they wanted. The vehicle ran out of gas now its the car salesmans fault 100%?
No one wants to talk about the fact that two thirds of the stimulus funding last year which everyone will pay back went straight to state and local budgets mandated to be spent on education and medical costs. It completely insulated the education and medical sectors from the downturned economy last year. Now that its been spent things haven't changed so where is the money coming from?
Tax the rich? I'm all for it so why didn't it happen?
We had 60 democrats in the Senate with a fillibuster proof majority and they didn't have the cohones to raise taxes on the wealthy and raise tariffs to help labor here so we are reaping our just deserts here if anything. If it didn't happen then, guess what, its not happening. Those people do not represent the average taxpayer.
So if they are not going to raise taxes or increase tariffs then what is going to happen to the average worker? I'm not talking about teabaggers making over $250k either. The average worker here makes about $44k a year per capita. The squeeze is on - lower wages, higher cost of benefits and higher taxes for mandated costs. The average taxpayer sees the only thing they have any control over is local taxes. Hence municipal costs get broken out and looked at. Thats natural. The costs are rolling downhill and falling on property owners - thats whats happening nationwide.
Obama is in league with the big banks and the Fed just the opposite of what I voted for so I just don't expect anything postive on financial reform or jobs except as presented by the media. Change we can believe in? The biggest lie ever perpetrated on me anyway by a politician.
The entire system is FUBAR and designed to pit us against each other - I agree but its not as cut and dry evil on one side and the good guys on the other as presented. Thats a fairy tale.
that's news to me. But it's possible. As you can see from the graph, they were primarily sold the rigged CDO (which is a bond), so even if they had some CDSes, each one pays out on one CDOs (or is assigned the default swap to some underlying derivative), so it's possible that wasn't enough to cover their losses due to the rigged game. I think the graph is going off of just the Abacus CDO at the heart of the SEC lawsuit. So, maybe you're reading about their overall derivatives losses vs. just this one?
But realize the posts on EP are picked up by Google news, so we try to keep all posts with questions answered, more like articles, whereas the comments are the wild west. I guess I need to put up more "Must Reads" and make it clear those posts are open threads for any sort of discussion.
I'm working on a major site upgrade so I'll do that but be aware that when it comes to writing up blog or forum (Instapopulists) on this site, the quality standards are are high as we can muster. The reason is I saw we've become an authority, a reference, so better be right because of that! Nothing worse than incorrect or misinformation. We get enough of that one from cable and the MSM.
Hello Robert,
Thank you for the input.....Even if the above is 100% right (I have a lot of reservations)....the question remains how did IKB lose thatone billion Dollars?
I am told that IKB sold CDS protection to GS which in turn sold that CDS to Paulson?
Instapopulists should be more like articles, in spite of their shorter length or when they are macro economic EI analysis/postings.
I'm fixing your post to answer your question with an image.
EP is kind of confusing, to get used to what's ok, how it works and so on, so I suggest writing comments first and reading the FAQ, user guide and so on to get the system down.
I agree they should be broken up but the issue for me was the criteria, i.e. percentage of GDP. I'm not sure if that was so great. I was thinking Volcker Rule, reinstate Glass-Steagall and a heavy rein in derivatives was in order, then maybe revisit it with things like the normal monopoly break-ups that worked on AT&T. Problem there is Microsoft Anti-trust, once Bush was in office, magically "went away". Of course technological advances made Microsoft mute, although AT&T squished a lot of technological advances.
Anyway, I would have voted for it but it's not as bad to me as the derivatives gutting and now the Fed audit gutting.
The Banksters to me are operating as a cartel.
The audit the Fed amendment might be on today, as well as the amendment to break up the banks based on percentage of GDP. So spreading the info around isn't too bad of an idea.
then, the "dow crash" is an unanswered question happening right now.
I think online, real time data is a fantastic idea and view, but as I'm sure you are aware, macro economic raw data and not introducing bias and so is a subject area of expertise and frankly, most people do not know what GDP means never mind understanding raw data collection and statistical omissions, bias. They cannot understand seasonal adjustments for instance.
I try to add little definitions and so on in these overviews for regular folks. But hell, the White House is using Google trends lately, so getting a discussion going to make sure all are statistically valid seems to be needed.
i.e. does Google has a higher IQ user base than bing? ;) (I like Google over Microsoft, so of course I would say this one!)
Robert:
Thank you for your welcoming message. I will pull together an exposition on our methodologies and make a separate post on the subject as soon as today's craziness has passed ...
Rick Davis
Consumer Metrics Institute
The site is right in the middle of major upgrades, but there is a user guide, over to the right, under your navigation, which shows you how to format links (URLs) and also how to post images, i.e. graphs. Raw links in posts is a no no, but on this site are all sorts of tools and helpers so people can "struggle less" with post formatting. You can always email me for help on this. We're supposed to be writers and looking at economics, not webbies, but that's still fundamentally the nature of the blogs, gotta know about 5 formatting tags or know how to use a WYSIWYG.
I wouldn't claim that GDP was "half empty" or "half full" for Q4 2009 GDP was all about inventories, so in other words, I saw, at least Q4 2009 GDP numbers being a burp, vs. reflecting real economic growth via investment, exports and even our never ending, debt ridden consumer.
Here are the Economic Populist GDP reports (with graph-o-rama, courtesy of the fabulous St. Louis Fred2 Fed).
What exactly is in your indexes? Is it all real-time online data and are you capturing B2B online data? i.e. how are you collecting your sources (you can be vague, general description) and are your normalizing them? (i.e. 20% of all raw materials manufacturing is online purchase, therefore, skew the error rate by 80%, or get a normalized data path of the trend and normalize to that?) I would claim most B2B probably isn't online, then I would suspect PCE online is biased towards more affluent as well as disposable income. i.e. people do not buy gas and food online that much, whereas they do buy durable goods, but then it's going to be biased and even potentially regional.
But that depends on where you are collecting your raw data from.
Which leads to another point, if Visa/MC can know exactly what kind of beer I bought at what time, where I drank it and how long it took. i.e. behavioral market me as well as add that intel to my credit score...
then one would think we could get our government to ravamp a lot of statistics and start collecting raw real time data.
Google knows what I do since I'm online all day and probably even knows the timing of my bathroom breaks and meals due to online data. (yes folks, it's big brother, big time!)
The biggest area that I find so skewed, so "missing" is employment statistics, esp. when they get into the occupational ones, the underemployment areas and the fact they are counting foreign guest workers on temp. Visas as well as illegals in those statistics, which obviously biases it if you're looking for data on the U.S. workforce.
I think capturing online, real-time data, getting very specific, detailed transaction data and using algorithms and databases to analyze it....is really something the government agencies need to consider architecting and incorporating. Some of their results lag an entire year!
See why we need EP? The other side. Mish is pointing to San Diego Sues its Pension System to Shift Responsibility for Deficit from Taxpayers to the Employees (Shedlock is IMHO a conservative but one that tries to stick to facts more than most).
There are protests by the public workers unions today over this.
But whose fault is it really that the pension has a deficit? Uh, isn't it Wall Street, the big banks who lost the money gambling with it on derivatives?
If I posted this comment on DK, I'll bet I would have gotten a troll rating. That's the problem with that site, beyond it's not an economics site, but a political one and if the economics fit, oh that's great too. ;)
If someone says something that isn't in the political mantra du jour, they are attacked.
This is why EP is so insistent on sticking with facts and let facts, statistics, the economic theory speak for itself.
(Yes I have an account on DK and am in good standing and so on, have posted many times on the site).
That reminds me. During the height of the housing bubble, I saw perfectly cool and swell houses torn down in order to build a bigger house all the way to the sides of the lot. Gone were the trees and gorgeous green lawns. In their place was this glorified McMansion, all about making more money. If you can imagine this very livable, beautiful home, with lots of glass windows to watch the yard birds and lots of warmth, very functional home replaced with this sterile, McMansion and no real yard, grass, trees with this carbon copy drywall and carbon copy floor plan, you'll get what I mean. It turns what was a real home into a commodity, I mean physically you could tell the difference.
is disheartening to be sure. On the other hand, watching a nation-state potentially collapse isn't too swell.
Egypt is rumbling now. It seems they are having massive inflation to the point the poor are starving while working 3 jobs (foreshadow?).
EP isn't an extension of DK.
The question in the prior post asked how we possibly accumulate stuff
"
How is it that we have a politico-economic system in which the government’s explicitly stated goal is to entice people to take out loans for houses and cars they don’t even need? 150 million cars on the road and we must keep buying new ones? Millions of vacant housing units and we need to build new ones? Homes so full of Chinese junk that half of it goes into off-site storage, and we need to shop more? For whose benefit?
Ever heard of debt-slavery? How about feudalism?
"
Sure it leads to a feudal society. But the 'needs' are false. Nobody can use the horsepower, the extra clothes, all those rooms in big houses. Not to mention the proliferation of every conceivable bit of trash and gadgets we all 'got to have'.
Our system will proliferate false needs, repressive tolerance in direct proportion to the accumulation of surplus capital and wealth of the ruling classes. All the
income and wealth distribution studies over 100 years prove
this point empirically.
Before Veblen, Marx and Engels both identified the 'sub-proletariat' as 'counter-revolutionary' along with the idle rich. The marxists had a hard time explaining aristocrat revolutionaries, because many of aristocrat revolutionaries Lafayette, Jefferson, von Steuben, worked at least making revolution.
The line between idle and non-idle rich is difficult to draw. In some ways you can make the case that an equity investor class, really works, or loses money. A debt investor class is definitely non-working and reactionary.
Next Top Model or Biggest Loser, Mega Power Ball, Casinos, the uncontrolled flow of drugs, legal and unlawful have their correlate in Finanz-Kapital insanity everywhere.
No its not CT. Everything that goes down, happens with a wink and a nod, they surely do let it happen. This stuff was well analyzed 40 years ago by writers like N.O. Brown and H. Marcuse. The idea is that the incredible bummers, the disasters and even the seduction of destructive not-so-fun hedonism, is all very well tolerated.
The purpose of the tolerance is repression. The hand of repression is lightest in the First World but heavier in say, Greece and heaviest in the Third World where it is War Machine vs armed resistance.
Real liberation as discussed on the fringes of the left and the right (true libertarians are amazingly like the far left), can only promise freedom from the hand of repression. There are no promises of 1950's prosperity and all the cold wars, McCarthy scares, racism, and arms races that go along.
Economics and politics are both about choices, as Aristotle said.
i
that your posting on DailyKos received much attention.
(I'm on the road right now, and have been at Jon Larson's home in the Minneapolis suburbs. Jon has written a nice description of the NAMES model engineering show in the Detroit suburb of Southgate, and included a very nice video of some of the incredibly well crafted exhibits. And yesterday Jon and his friend took me out on the expanded stretch of the Mississippi River known as Lake Pepin. It was my first time sailing, and almost everything that could go wrong, did. About the only things we didn't do were spill some fuel and blow up the boat. Jon provides details.)
Anyway, I posted this as a comment on DailyKos, and will add it here as well. I've been reading Thorstein Veblen's 1904 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. (The full text of the book has been made available online by Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org.)
In Chapter Eight – "Industrial Exemption and Conservatism," Veblen explains how the leisure class (the rich, ruling class), by its nature and by it very existence, makes a society conservative. This, of course, contradicts all those who just a year and a half ago were trumpeting the message that the 2008 Presidential election proves the U.S. is not a conservative country.
First, Veblen explains that there is a deeper, more fundamental reason that the leisure class resists change beyond the preservation of their vested interests.
Veblen then explains how the leisure class "enforces" conservatism in the rest of society.
You have to hand it to the Greeks. At least when someone tries to force a shit-sandwich down their throats they are out in the streets in force.
Here we just listen to the MSM's latest propaganda piece on the "recovery" and walk around in a trance, eagerly waiting for the next trash-tv episode of America's Next Top Model or Biggest Loser. Strikes or taking to the streets is unheard of except for the lunatic fringe tea partiers. We just smile and roll over like lambs while our banks and government work together to fuck us out of our jobs, savings, and dignity.
This is what I've been saying for a while - reacting to a loss in economic security by trying to get rid of economic security for other workers is ludicrous.
Anti-solidarity is not a winning strategy. Firing teachers by the tens of thousands just means higher unemployment.
Detroit has and had the option of Chapter 9 bankruptcy where they could have just not paid those bills you talk about but it would also void the union contracts. Lord forbid they do either and give some relief to the taxpayers there. The system though does not represent the majority of voters. It represents the wealthy AND it represents powerful unions. The only powerful unions left are federal, state and municipal unions. Where does that leave the rest?
They just borrowed $250 million rated at junk status with no financials given out and the threat of Chapter 9 looming. Lowering debt by borrowing at a higher rate what a unique idea. Well they have to meet their current obligations because well they have to.
Municipalities have been forced to look for higher and higher yields through more risky financial vehicles because of their debt levels and contractual promises. Everyone was on board with that till the market collapsed because those vehicles gave everyone what they wanted. The vehicle ran out of gas now its the car salesmans fault 100%?
No one wants to talk about the fact that two thirds of the stimulus funding last year which everyone will pay back went straight to state and local budgets mandated to be spent on education and medical costs. It completely insulated the education and medical sectors from the downturned economy last year. Now that its been spent things haven't changed so where is the money coming from?
Tax the rich? I'm all for it so why didn't it happen?
We had 60 democrats in the Senate with a fillibuster proof majority and they didn't have the cohones to raise taxes on the wealthy and raise tariffs to help labor here so we are reaping our just deserts here if anything. If it didn't happen then, guess what, its not happening. Those people do not represent the average taxpayer.
So if they are not going to raise taxes or increase tariffs then what is going to happen to the average worker? I'm not talking about teabaggers making over $250k either. The average worker here makes about $44k a year per capita. The squeeze is on - lower wages, higher cost of benefits and higher taxes for mandated costs. The average taxpayer sees the only thing they have any control over is local taxes. Hence municipal costs get broken out and looked at. Thats natural. The costs are rolling downhill and falling on property owners - thats whats happening nationwide.
Obama is in league with the big banks and the Fed just the opposite of what I voted for so I just don't expect anything postive on financial reform or jobs except as presented by the media. Change we can believe in? The biggest lie ever perpetrated on me anyway by a politician.
The entire system is FUBAR and designed to pit us against each other - I agree but its not as cut and dry evil on one side and the good guys on the other as presented. Thats a fairy tale.
that's news to me. But it's possible. As you can see from the graph, they were primarily sold the rigged CDO (which is a bond), so even if they had some CDSes, each one pays out on one CDOs (or is assigned the default swap to some underlying derivative), so it's possible that wasn't enough to cover their losses due to the rigged game. I think the graph is going off of just the Abacus CDO at the heart of the SEC lawsuit. So, maybe you're reading about their overall derivatives losses vs. just this one?
But realize the posts on EP are picked up by Google news, so we try to keep all posts with questions answered, more like articles, whereas the comments are the wild west. I guess I need to put up more "Must Reads" and make it clear those posts are open threads for any sort of discussion.
I'm working on a major site upgrade so I'll do that but be aware that when it comes to writing up blog or forum (Instapopulists) on this site, the quality standards are are high as we can muster. The reason is I saw we've become an authority, a reference, so better be right because of that! Nothing worse than incorrect or misinformation. We get enough of that one from cable and the MSM.
Hello Robert,
Thank you for the input.....Even if the above is 100% right (I have a lot of reservations)....the question remains how did IKB lose thatone billion Dollars?
I am told that IKB sold CDS protection to GS which in turn sold that CDS to Paulson?
Instapopulists should be more like articles, in spite of their shorter length or when they are macro economic EI analysis/postings.
I'm fixing your post to answer your question with an image.
EP is kind of confusing, to get used to what's ok, how it works and so on, so I suggest writing comments first and reading the FAQ, user guide and so on to get the system down.
placing Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader in the same ballpark.
The world is erupting in many places because the light is beginning to shine on those hidden places. Places like the FRB.
I think the internet has allowed the light to grow in strength. People can post all the things that were, at one time, hidden from the masses.
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