You obviously don't know anyone that works for a state or local government. You also haven't been reading the newspapers.
County government workers have been taking pay cuts across the country. Where they aren't official pay cuts, there are furloughs, which are pay cuts by another name.
Those darn middle-class teachers are making too much money. As long as they can afford those fancy, used Volvo's and high-styling rent on a condo, then they deserve what they get.
It's people like that, working class people, that is bringing down America. We need our teachers dressed in rags and eating cat food. Only then will our kids get the education they deserve.
hummm, imagine that, not one union has allowed a pay cut, or pay adjustment to meet the children's needs. Seems everyone else has to pay, but the administrators and teachers. Hummmm, basic economics?
We're getting what we deserve. For an untold number of years, we continued to permit school districts to spend, spend, spend rather than live within their means. We felt that if we could live outside our means, then our school districts can as well - after all, if I have a nice place in a nice neighbourhood, then surely our local schools can be nice as well.
We didn't force the districts to plan well or to plan for a financial disaster. Sure, we approved funds for "disaster plans" - tornadoes, snow storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc - but we never considered a "financial disaster plan". We agreed with the general law that "you spend what you have been provided by the local gov't; if you don't spend it, you lose it next year". As the districts got more funds, we forced them to spend it rather than think ahead. This is a STUPID policy and everyone knew it, but we bought it hook, line, and sinker anyway.
Now we're paying the price for our arrogance and greed. Let it all fall. We're in a mess that has only 2 options - Either the Fed Gov't bails us out or we let it fall to a manageable level. The latter is the ONLY real option that will work, otherwise, the Fed Gov't goes much deeper in debt. This is what businesses have done - they cut, did layoffs, outsourced, moved locations, etc until their cuts combined with their income led them to a point where they can afford to live within their means.
But once again our arrogance and false belief that we're better than we are, will cause the Fed Gov't to bail us out yet again. Companies seem to believe that "throwing money at a problem" will solve it - apparently Gov't believes the same. Eventually money runs out; and we're very close to this point. The Fed Gov't has already created a crater the size of China in our finances; eventually China WILL swallow us whole. We've already lost all moral authority with China and most other countries - once we surrender our financial souls to China, then we lose what we have left. Integrity is critical to a person, to a company, to a nation; it defines a nation. We surrendered ours for the almighty dollar and now even the USD is less than 2 cents parity with the CAD. We're losing our finances, we're losing any moral authority that we can use to convince nations like China to increase human rights, and now we're losing our Integrity.
That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger - but yet we're afraid of failure so we'll do anything we can to cling to something so we can't use the "f" word (failure). We need to fail, so that we can grow stronger.
According to one of those links 70% of Arizona's state budget is going towards education (k-12 and university spending) and 20% goes to Medicaid. Where does anyone think the cuts are going to come from?
Close to 90% of anyone's k-12 education budget goes to payroll and benefits for labor and the other 10% is 'not labor'.
So once again while the average joe has had their wage earning ability slashed by government policies favoring overseas labor, education and medical sectors have benefited from enormous government support through funding and policies. Education and medical spending have been the fantasy sectors of our economy for 40 years now aside from Wall Street which is in a world of their own.
Last year most of the stimulus money was used to protect nearly all these favored sector jobs while the 'other economy' went 10-20% underwater. What is the actual unemployment number for out of work municipal, state or federal employees versus the private sector? I'm sure that number is kept and I'll bet its damn low. There is next to nothing going on in the private sector for stimulus this year either and not much for the government this time around either. Excuse me though if I don't shed a tear to see the rest of the people who live and pay taxes here faced with the same situation as the private sector went through and is still going through.
One community school system near me bought 50 professionally installed large screen LCD TVs with their stimulus money last year and this year they are crying poverty and want increase far beyond last years inflation rate. You know that government stat that states what percent costs rose last year. How did that childs story about the ant and the grasshopper go again?
I'll wager many if not most of those teacher layoffs even go through. The layoffs have to be announced now by law they usually never take place.
In an era of declining wages and declining real estate values the government cannot raise taxes to continue business as usual. Raise taxes on the unemployed? Print more money? (can't because our debt ceiling is too high already and while they aren't admitting it you will see that these huge borrowing binges are for the most part over).
The only taxes they could turn to would be a financial transaction tax that is dedicated to education costs or a VAT which will never happen. Tax financial transactions? We can't even charge them with criminal theft or obvious criminal fraud we are so much in their pockets so thats never going to happen.
That means live within the budget you have and make tough choices. Thats how its done.
Lets not forget the several trillion in underfunded state retirement programs nationwide either. Like thats going away anytime soon.
I remember many business articles in the late 70's and early 80's discussing how the US did not need to manufacture anything and that we would become a utopia of higher education and technology (they forgot to mention that the technology would be manufactured overseas and that we were turning out illiterates in record numbers) in the future.
Are they laying off any administrators? My understanding is administrators are making 6 figures, that's K-12 and universities are even worse and they have administrator bloat.
I don't see why they just don't plain let out of prison all those convinced of non-violent marijuana crimes, then reduce the sentences on some of these other non-violent drug crimes. My understanding there is a huge percentage of people in prison over this and in the big picture, I'm sure all of that space could be better used for white collar criminals.
I don't have any answers here. It seems public education is one massive bureaucratic nightmare generally.
If you can believe this, the Banksters are claiming if the Congress passes anything useful on reform, it will hurt the economy because "derivatives are so profitable".
when I first wrong up the GS Fraud, I made the same mistake, but so did almost all of the first news reports from the media! easy to do, we're so used to typing Hank.
Yes, John Paulson, not Henry Poulson and CDO as the vehicle
funding the mortgage pool. Before the pooling of mortgages
banks found money from any source wherever.
You are exactly right. The secret story behind the bubble is the collusion between rating agencies and investment banks. CDOs and CBOs were practically invented by S&P and Moody's structured finance units.
Flint MI and GM, Detroit is way too dependent on the auto evil empire and so on.
That said, in terms of foreclosure maps, one can see these high concentrations even down to town, county, that don't correlate to say manufacturing closing. I really hate to say this because I'm going to get a bunch of crap over it, but the maps almost imply a demographic situation. Oops, but seriously, Riverside, that SW corridor, Sacramento, Inland Empire, S. Florida and so on.
Writing a Flash transaction platform to take these "can't lose" bets?
Did you mean John Paulson? i.e. work for a hedge fund writing proprietary "trading platforms", or architecting out the actual trades?
Also, CMO for the 3 letter mnemonic disabled, means credit mortgage obligation.
On the Cayman's piece, that was one of the "features", is writing disclosures and prospectuses so long, so abstruse, so dinky tiny print and oops, we left out a few things, such as the damn CDO is rigged like loaded dice, is aok with those national laws. Another "offshore feature" to "attract capital and business".
The boom and bust is single-industry towns in the midwest, west and south. There are may service economy towns in the Sunbelt that suffered because housing is not seen the way classical economists from Aristotle through Smith saw housing (use value vs sales value).
Just before the Tsunami, a recruiter half my age wanted to know if I wanted a spot with Goldman, I declined and he rotated the conversation to Silicon Alley. The recruiter wanted to know what I knew about short selling and derivatives.
The 101 Course on Short Selling and Derivates needs to go out to the media soon. As a Hedge Fund, I get my CMOs from Hank Paulson's fund, don't let anyone know. I take a naked short against the CMOs in the Hedge Fund. A short means that I sell a security I do not own. I am liable for the value of the security at the time of the short sale. If the value of the CMO basket declines, my profit is equal to the difference between the value of the CMO and short sale debt I owe to my broker. If the CMO value increases, I have a loss equal to the difference in value of the security and the original short sale liability in my account. SEC reviewed that prospectus between AMC and Goldman and did not find disclosure of the Hedge Fund position. These facts are alleged.
SEC Acts going back to 1933-34 are "clear". You must disclose any facts which may be material to an informed reasonable investor. Let me know when you find one. But AMC will be considered informed and even knowledgeable. So AMC should be entitled to the facts of Goldman's hedge fund position. Even if the investor throws the prospectus in the trash and never reads it, the plaintiff lawyers will jump on the absence of disclosure. Again, all this assumes facts 'not held in evidence' as they say.
Key here is that the Hedge Fund transaction precedes. The transaction hand is quicker than the eye of disclosure. Maybe Goldman wrote the prospectus first, and never knew or bothered to ask? Blankfeind was personally involved with Tourre in the details of all the housing paper according to NYT.
Did you see this one? IMF. First they trimmed global losses from financial meltdown to $2.28 trillion, down half a trillion (these numbers are so huge this is just inconceivable)
then, they warned the biggest threat now is sovereign debt.
Honestly, I just don't know about the IMF, the World bank and their "agenda", but I'm sure in terms of "known money" as well as sovereign debt being a threat is real.
It seems Greece gets some sort of public relations band-aid, which hides the bleeding for a few days and then the wound becomes noticeable again and here we are.
meta tags are keywords. You had the title in the meta tags and that's not good because it goes into the database as search queries and also creates URLs from those tags.
Also, you need to format your links. Raw links are not acceptable in blog posts or Instapopulists.
Although Oregon has very high unemployment yet not as many home foreclosures. So, some of the foreclosures can be tied to "bubble" areas as well. I don't know the breakdown of bubble, vs. strategic defaults vs. good ole fashioned "I'm broke" because you shipped my job to China is.
I'm disgusted no criminal charges are happening against AIG, for what a rigged game. But yeah, this sounds like a great time to try to get some money back. That post, The Real Screw Job, still doesn't have that large of hits...
although frightening, it comes up 2nd in a Google rank when searching on "real screw job". Uh, where's all of the porno Google, or at least the slang definition?
I'm thrilled we come up so high in Google rank but I still find it scary in some cases. Stuff like CPI, GDP and so on, I'm sorry but the government websites should be pegged when doing a search on that and probably second should be wikipedia or something. Scary.
Anywho, from day 1 I have been completely outraged they made a 100% payout on those CDSes, PLUS gave the underlying CDOs, securities back to the same companies. Unreal!
DeFazio is one of my favorite representatives. He literally said on the House Floor "that's Bullshit!" on the original TARP passage debate.
I've been scanning Hank Paulson's book and it's so obviously a friend of my pal and this entire focus that of course GS and certain chosen ones, certain companies could not collapse...honestly I don't think he even realized it, his universe of elite selected CEOs is almost a mentality bubble but you can see the favoritism right there in the crisis narrative.
You obviously don't know anyone that works for a state or local government. You also haven't been reading the newspapers.
County government workers have been taking pay cuts across the country. Where they aren't official pay cuts, there are furloughs, which are pay cuts by another name.
Those darn middle-class teachers are making too much money. As long as they can afford those fancy, used Volvo's and high-styling rent on a condo, then they deserve what they get.
It's people like that, working class people, that is bringing down America. We need our teachers dressed in rags and eating cat food. Only then will our kids get the education they deserve.
hummm, imagine that, not one union has allowed a pay cut, or pay adjustment to meet the children's needs. Seems everyone else has to pay, but the administrators and teachers. Hummmm, basic economics?
We're getting what we deserve. For an untold number of years, we continued to permit school districts to spend, spend, spend rather than live within their means. We felt that if we could live outside our means, then our school districts can as well - after all, if I have a nice place in a nice neighbourhood, then surely our local schools can be nice as well.
We didn't force the districts to plan well or to plan for a financial disaster. Sure, we approved funds for "disaster plans" - tornadoes, snow storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc - but we never considered a "financial disaster plan". We agreed with the general law that "you spend what you have been provided by the local gov't; if you don't spend it, you lose it next year". As the districts got more funds, we forced them to spend it rather than think ahead. This is a STUPID policy and everyone knew it, but we bought it hook, line, and sinker anyway.
Now we're paying the price for our arrogance and greed. Let it all fall. We're in a mess that has only 2 options - Either the Fed Gov't bails us out or we let it fall to a manageable level. The latter is the ONLY real option that will work, otherwise, the Fed Gov't goes much deeper in debt. This is what businesses have done - they cut, did layoffs, outsourced, moved locations, etc until their cuts combined with their income led them to a point where they can afford to live within their means.
But once again our arrogance and false belief that we're better than we are, will cause the Fed Gov't to bail us out yet again. Companies seem to believe that "throwing money at a problem" will solve it - apparently Gov't believes the same. Eventually money runs out; and we're very close to this point. The Fed Gov't has already created a crater the size of China in our finances; eventually China WILL swallow us whole. We've already lost all moral authority with China and most other countries - once we surrender our financial souls to China, then we lose what we have left. Integrity is critical to a person, to a company, to a nation; it defines a nation. We surrendered ours for the almighty dollar and now even the USD is less than 2 cents parity with the CAD. We're losing our finances, we're losing any moral authority that we can use to convince nations like China to increase human rights, and now we're losing our Integrity.
That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger - but yet we're afraid of failure so we'll do anything we can to cling to something so we can't use the "f" word (failure). We need to fail, so that we can grow stronger.
According to one of those links 70% of Arizona's state budget is going towards education (k-12 and university spending) and 20% goes to Medicaid. Where does anyone think the cuts are going to come from?
Close to 90% of anyone's k-12 education budget goes to payroll and benefits for labor and the other 10% is 'not labor'.
So once again while the average joe has had their wage earning ability slashed by government policies favoring overseas labor, education and medical sectors have benefited from enormous government support through funding and policies. Education and medical spending have been the fantasy sectors of our economy for 40 years now aside from Wall Street which is in a world of their own.
Last year most of the stimulus money was used to protect nearly all these favored sector jobs while the 'other economy' went 10-20% underwater. What is the actual unemployment number for out of work municipal, state or federal employees versus the private sector? I'm sure that number is kept and I'll bet its damn low. There is next to nothing going on in the private sector for stimulus this year either and not much for the government this time around either. Excuse me though if I don't shed a tear to see the rest of the people who live and pay taxes here faced with the same situation as the private sector went through and is still going through.
One community school system near me bought 50 professionally installed large screen LCD TVs with their stimulus money last year and this year they are crying poverty and want increase far beyond last years inflation rate. You know that government stat that states what percent costs rose last year. How did that childs story about the ant and the grasshopper go again?
I'll wager many if not most of those teacher layoffs even go through. The layoffs have to be announced now by law they usually never take place.
In an era of declining wages and declining real estate values the government cannot raise taxes to continue business as usual. Raise taxes on the unemployed? Print more money? (can't because our debt ceiling is too high already and while they aren't admitting it you will see that these huge borrowing binges are for the most part over).
The only taxes they could turn to would be a financial transaction tax that is dedicated to education costs or a VAT which will never happen. Tax financial transactions? We can't even charge them with criminal theft or obvious criminal fraud we are so much in their pockets so thats never going to happen.
That means live within the budget you have and make tough choices. Thats how its done.
Lets not forget the several trillion in underfunded state retirement programs nationwide either. Like thats going away anytime soon.
I remember many business articles in the late 70's and early 80's discussing how the US did not need to manufacture anything and that we would become a utopia of higher education and technology (they forgot to mention that the technology would be manufactured overseas and that we were turning out illiterates in record numbers) in the future.
Well the future is here and this is the utopia.
I keep reading how the economy is in recovery. People here are still losing jobs, and there aren't any new ones. Now this!
Are they laying off any administrators? My understanding is administrators are making 6 figures, that's K-12 and universities are even worse and they have administrator bloat.
I don't see why they just don't plain let out of prison all those convinced of non-violent marijuana crimes, then reduce the sentences on some of these other non-violent drug crimes. My understanding there is a huge percentage of people in prison over this and in the big picture, I'm sure all of that space could be better used for white collar criminals.
I don't have any answers here. It seems public education is one massive bureaucratic nightmare generally.
If you can believe this, the Banksters are claiming if the Congress passes anything useful on reform, it will hurt the economy because "derivatives are so profitable".
when I first wrong up the GS Fraud, I made the same mistake, but so did almost all of the first news reports from the media! easy to do, we're so used to typing Hank.
Yes, John Paulson, not Henry Poulson and CDO as the vehicle
funding the mortgage pool. Before the pooling of mortgages
banks found money from any source wherever.
That's what the links says (or so I am told, because it is in Greek).
Update: Here's the translation.
If true, then the crisis has officially hit.
You are exactly right. The secret story behind the bubble is the collusion between rating agencies and investment banks. CDOs and CBOs were practically invented by S&P and Moody's structured finance units.
Flint MI and GM, Detroit is way too dependent on the auto evil empire and so on.
That said, in terms of foreclosure maps, one can see these high concentrations even down to town, county, that don't correlate to say manufacturing closing. I really hate to say this because I'm going to get a bunch of crap over it, but the maps almost imply a demographic situation. Oops, but seriously, Riverside, that SW corridor, Sacramento, Inland Empire, S. Florida and so on.
Writing a Flash transaction platform to take these "can't lose" bets?
Did you mean John Paulson? i.e. work for a hedge fund writing proprietary "trading platforms", or architecting out the actual trades?
Also, CMO for the 3 letter mnemonic disabled, means credit mortgage obligation.
On the Cayman's piece, that was one of the "features", is writing disclosures and prospectuses so long, so abstruse, so dinky tiny print and oops, we left out a few things, such as the damn CDO is rigged like loaded dice, is aok with those national laws. Another "offshore feature" to "attract capital and business".
The boom and bust is single-industry towns in the midwest, west and south. There are may service economy towns in the Sunbelt that suffered because housing is not seen the way classical economists from Aristotle through Smith saw housing (use value vs sales value).
Just before the Tsunami, a recruiter half my age wanted to know if I wanted a spot with Goldman, I declined and he rotated the conversation to Silicon Alley. The recruiter wanted to know what I knew about short selling and derivatives.
The 101 Course on Short Selling and Derivates needs to go out to the media soon. As a Hedge Fund, I get my CMOs from Hank Paulson's fund, don't let anyone know. I take a naked short against the CMOs in the Hedge Fund. A short means that I sell a security I do not own. I am liable for the value of the security at the time of the short sale. If the value of the CMO basket declines, my profit is equal to the difference between the value of the CMO and short sale debt I owe to my broker. If the CMO value increases, I have a loss equal to the difference in value of the security and the original short sale liability in my account. SEC reviewed that prospectus between AMC and Goldman and did not find disclosure of the Hedge Fund position. These facts are alleged.
SEC Acts going back to 1933-34 are "clear". You must disclose any facts which may be material to an informed reasonable investor. Let me know when you find one. But AMC will be considered informed and even knowledgeable. So AMC should be entitled to the facts of Goldman's hedge fund position. Even if the investor throws the prospectus in the trash and never reads it, the plaintiff lawyers will jump on the absence of disclosure. Again, all this assumes facts 'not held in evidence' as they say.
Key here is that the Hedge Fund transaction precedes. The transaction hand is quicker than the eye of disclosure. Maybe Goldman wrote the prospectus first, and never knew or bothered to ask? Blankfeind was personally involved with Tourre in the details of all the housing paper according to NYT.
Did you see this one? IMF. First they trimmed global losses from financial meltdown to $2.28 trillion, down half a trillion (these numbers are so huge this is just inconceivable)
then, they warned the biggest threat now is sovereign debt.
Honestly, I just don't know about the IMF, the World bank and their "agenda", but I'm sure in terms of "known money" as well as sovereign debt being a threat is real.
It seems Greece gets some sort of public relations band-aid, which hides the bleeding for a few days and then the wound becomes noticeable again and here we are.
meta tags are keywords. You had the title in the meta tags and that's not good because it goes into the database as search queries and also creates URLs from those tags.
Also, you need to format your links. Raw links are not acceptable in blog posts or Instapopulists.
Great site, I had no idea they had done this.
Although Oregon has very high unemployment yet not as many home foreclosures. So, some of the foreclosures can be tied to "bubble" areas as well. I don't know the breakdown of bubble, vs. strategic defaults vs. good ole fashioned "I'm broke" because you shipped my job to China is.
That would be a useful metric.
Bloomberg:
Anyone care to analyze where those came from, should be interesting.
I'm disgusted no criminal charges are happening against AIG, for what a rigged game. But yeah, this sounds like a great time to try to get some money back. That post, The Real Screw Job, still doesn't have that large of hits...
although frightening, it comes up 2nd in a Google rank when searching on "real screw job". Uh, where's all of the porno Google, or at least the slang definition?
I'm thrilled we come up so high in Google rank but I still find it scary in some cases. Stuff like CPI, GDP and so on, I'm sorry but the government websites should be pegged when doing a search on that and probably second should be wikipedia or something. Scary.
Anywho, from day 1 I have been completely outraged they made a 100% payout on those CDSes, PLUS gave the underlying CDOs, securities back to the same companies. Unreal!
DeFazio is one of my favorite representatives. He literally said on the House Floor "that's Bullshit!" on the original TARP passage debate.
I've been scanning Hank Paulson's book and it's so obviously a friend of my pal and this entire focus that of course GS and certain chosen ones, certain companies could not collapse...honestly I don't think he even realized it, his universe of elite selected CEOs is almost a mentality bubble but you can see the favoritism right there in the crisis narrative.
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