What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[busybody..]

Market strategist: Policymakers are “one-dimensional, short-termist, bereft of courage”




Nomura market strategist Bob Janjuah has just released a market analysis so flush with memorable lines that it was difficult to choose which to highlight in the headline. The Blaze chose a different quote: “Why are our leaders trying to resurrect communism?” And The Daily Caller yet another: “Markets are so rigged by policymakers that I have no meaningful insights to offer.”

Janjuah is known for being bearish, but this might be his most depressing analysis of all. Here he is on the failure of policymakers to learn any meaningful lessons from 2008:


First, I am simply stunned that our policymakers seem so one-dimensional, so short-termist, and so utterly bereft of courage or ideas. It now seems obvious that in response to the financial crisis that has been with us for five years and counting, we are being “told” to double up on these same policy decisions. The crisis was caused by central bankers mispricing the cost of capital, which forced a misallocation of capital, driven by debt/leverage, which was ultimately exposed as a hideous asset bubble which then collapsed, destroying the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of relatively innocent people. Well now, if you listen to the latest from Bernanke and Draghi, it seems that the only solution they can offer up is to yet again misprice the cost of capital, in the hope that, yet again, through increased leverage/debt, we are yet again “greedy” enough to misallocate capital, which in turn will lead to yet another round of asset bubbles. Such asset bubbles are meant to delude us into believing that we are now “richer”. When – as they do by definition – these bubbles burst, those who have been suckered in will realise that their “wealth” is instead an illusion, which in turn will be replaced by default risk.

Secondly, I have clearly underestimated the ‘market’s’ willingness, nay desperation, to go along with this ultimately ruinous policy path. Personally, I think this is extremely worrying – the number of clients who tell me that they know they are being forced into playing a game that will end in disaster, but who feel they have to play along and who hope they will get out before it turns, is a depressingly familiar old tale. Some such folks hang onto the idea that Draghi/LTRO changed the asymmetry of risk from deeply negative to positive. Yet even these folks know that printing more money/more liquidity/more debt/more leverage is not a viable solution to our ills, and in fact will mean true supply side reform and the search for true competiveness and sustainable growth will be further cast aside, as the focus will be on the “easy gains” to be made in markets.

In other words, we’re doomed.

 

[richard_daily]

I traveled farther than any of the "thinkers" here from dedicated Socialist to Libertarian.



I'm not the one who never considered the other side of the coin...

Quoted for sheer hilarity.

 

[richard_daily]

See, that doesn't really cut the mustard.

Especially considering that the Nazis weren't socialists... and WW2 was over before AJ was born.

 

[eyer]

Nothing can change until players like you, bb, finally start walking the walk and stop playing the game...

...the game is what your reference is alluding to (no matter if it's the market here, or all the other aspects that are already almost past redemption, too). The game has been fixed for so long now, it's almost completely cultural - and once it does become completely cultural, there's no possibility of any change(s) then.

Terrorism only thrives because of funding; without the funding, it naturally dissipates back down to a single loon from time to time we read about in the papers...

...corrupt, tyrannical government is subject to the very same natural law: take away the funding for it, and it naturally settles back down to the limited form it was constituted to be.

Problem is there're so many players who are addicted to the comforts and securities of the game that they continue to hope that things can get better...

...and that foolish notion from that comfort zone is what temporary shields their vision while everything becomes so much worse.

The game has become so culturally ingrained that almost everyone now accepts it as the primary provider of all the carrots....

...and the very last thing a lemming will do is anything that removes that carrot before him.

That's all liberty is waiting for to be revealed now: are there enough left to reject the game's carrot, no matter what the consequence(s)...

...and if there are and they decide so, then the game will get so, so much tougher on them, and the lemmings who love their carrots no matter the provider will even be charged to overtly start going after the rejectors, too

But that very change in culture will provide the actual hope that is needed that change is still possible today.

Gotta stop funding the game, bb...

 

[mercury14]

I traveled farther than any of the "thinkers" here from dedicated Socialist to Libertarian.



I'm not the one who never considered the other side of the coin...

Nobody believes you. These pathetic attempts to appeal to yourself as an authority because "you've been there" crack me up though.

 

[mercury14]

Roger L. Simon
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/02/21/lucky-barack/?singlepage=true

Gotta love these articles. Conservatives whining about how Wall Street is all wrong... Obama is going to destroy the economy any minute now. Investors just don't know it - only Republicans do!

I guess we're supposed to think that Republicans are not investors. They all sat out when the stock market put on over 6000 points under Obama because they were just throwing their money away...

 

[koalabear]

The poverty rate has risen from 12.5 percent to 14.3 percent over the last two years, with nearly 44 million Americans living on a subsistence income or less. And over the last few years, the percentage of Americans in the middle-brackets—the "middle class"—has gotten smaller, while the portion in the lower brackets has gotten bigger. That's the wrong kind of socioeconomic mobility—downward.

There were 10.6 million unemployed people when Obama got elected. Today there are 14.8 million. And for every job opening, there are 4.6 applicants, up from 3.8 two years ago.

So Oblamer has helped the rich, he claims to hate, and not the poor.

 

[busybody..]

The poverty rate has risen from 12.5 percent to 14.3 percent over the last two years, with nearly 44 million Americans living on a subsistence income or less. And over the last few years, the percentage of Americans in the middle-brackets—the "middle class"—has gotten smaller, while the portion in the lower brackets has gotten bigger. That's the wrong kind of socioeconomic mobility—downward.

There were 10.6 million unemployed people when Obama got elected. Today there are 14.8 million. And for every job opening, there are 4.6 applicants, up from 3.8 two years ago.

So Oblamer has helped the rich, he claims to hate, and not the poor.

so whats your point?

 

[koalabear]

so whats your point?

Russia can have the oil.

 

[koalabear]

oops.........

Dow tops 13,000 for 1st time since 2008

http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?symbol=%24US%3AINDU&width=298&height=160&c1=3&ce=0&cf=0&d2=0&d3=0&d4=1&d5=0&e8=1&legend=0&banner=5&af=2&palette=2

 

[Sean Renaud]

Pardon me, but a record high for a certain date is a record high. It's illogical to argue otherwise.
Good to know there are all these other reasons why gas prices are so high and it's not the president's fault. So many people didn't understand that four years ago. Of course, back then the economy was a bit livelier and supply and demand was a big factor.
Demand has never caught back up, Middle East turmoil is nothing new, and if speculators can make a killing on oil whenever they want, why do they ever stop? It seems silly to blame the president for high gas prices, except that he loves them.

It's not illogical to argue otherwise. It's like claiming Obama pals around with terrorists. Terrorist kill people. That's what they do they suicide bomb, the gas trains, they send out anthrax. They kill people. Bill Ayers is a vandal. The only person his terrorist act ever hurt was his dumbass friend. Not saying he's a good person but I am saying words have meanings in our society that are based on our current culture. Not the dictionary. If I came out and claimed that you and I are in a gang you'd call bullshit even though we clearly qualify.

There were a lot of reasons why things got out of hand under Bush. Not a lot of people actually blamed Bush however, that's mostly Republican revisionist history. The Left largely claimed that it was Peak Oil and China's exploding demand and the Right thought it was that we weren't drilling enough. Remember Drill baby Drill?

This level of turmoil in the Middle East is a new thing. Sure they usually get in shouting matches but usually each country actually has a functioning government that is in control of the population. They might be raping and killing the population for shits and giggles but they are clearly in control.

And of course the President doesn't like high gas prices.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Everything the Left does must be purely theoretical because they deny all label and definition...

I/Obama am/is not:

A Marxist
A Socialist
A Fascist
A Progressive
A Leftist
.
.
.

rosco went so far yesterday as to call him a virtual Republican...

Obama is a Marxist! Is not! You're denying all labels and definitions!

 

[Beco]

Dow tops 13,000 for 1st time since 2008

http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?symbol=%24US%3AINDU&width=298&height=160&c1=3&ce=0&cf=0&d2=0&d3=0&d4=1&d5=0&e8=1&legend=0&banner=5&af=2&palette=2

4 more years.....

 

[mercury14]

What about "Pro-Terrorist"? Anyone know why that label never stuck?

 

[Disgustipated]

What about "Pro-Terrorist"? Anyone know why that label never stuck?

Because that idiot posting as Karen Kraft got shamed into not posting anymore.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I don't think anybody to the Right of me save Colonel Hogan (and honestly I'm not always sure he's to the Right of me) are advanced enough to experience shame.

 

[patrick1]

The poverty rate has risen from 12.5 percent to 14.3 percent over the last two years, with nearly 44 million Americans living on a subsistence income or less. And over the last few years, the percentage of Americans in the middle-brackets—the "middle class"—has gotten smaller, while the portion in the lower brackets has gotten bigger. That's the wrong kind of socioeconomic mobility—downward.

There were 10.6 million unemployed people when Obama got elected. Today there are 14.8 million. And for every job opening, there are 4.6 applicants, up from 3.8 two years ago.

So Oblamer has helped the rich, he claims to hate, and not the poor.

These figures are inaccurate.

The poverty rate is most recently (2010) 15.1%, a figure of 46.2 million. The figure quoted by koalabear is for 2009.

His figure for unemployed is for Jan 2011. The latest figure for 2012 shows a drop to 12.8 million. The ratio of unemployed people to job vacancies is on a downward trend to 3.9 in Dec 2011.

The changes since Obama came to power are of course greatly influenced by the recession that was already under way in 2008.

 

[fair_warning]

Quoted for sheer hilarity.

It could also be quoted for ambiguous meaning/intent.
Is he saying he has made an intellectual journey starting as a dedicated Socialist, to arrive a Libertarian?
Or does he believe he is a greater thinker than anyone else here - on the topic of Socialism - Libertarianism?

 

[mercury14]

It could also be quoted for ambiguous meaning/intent.
Is he saying he has made an intellectual journey starting as a dedicated Socialist, to arrive a Libertarian?
Or does he believe he is a greater thinker than anyone else here - on the topic of Socialism - Libertarianism?

He did none of that. He can't even articulate a left wing position without engaging in one of his absurd straw man arguments. He just wants you to believe he used to be a liberal on order to sound more like an authority.

He's also not a libertarian, just a garden-variety Republican who realizes that the GOP has a number of indefensible positions. And by calling himself a libertarian he thinks he can shield himself from criticisms of the Republican Party's actions.

 

[RightField]

And this is the Democrat position.....

Obama's Agenda Looks Like Faith, Not Reason
By Peter Morici

Rick Santorum’s assertion that President Obama’s agenda is not about the quality of life or jobs but “some phony ideal. Some phony theology” may not be an appropriate characterization of his religious views. However, it is an accurate description of what is wrong with the hard left in American politics, and the thinking that drives domestic policy in the Obama Administration.

Too often liberal policies are based more on faith than reason—often those are premised on assertions having little foundation in facts or modern economics. Consequently, the President advocates or imposes solutions that make the nation’s problems worse, and when confronted with disappointing results he often tells us what he believes, without offering the data and logic that brought him to those conclusions.

Regarding the financial crisis, the President assigns blame to the lack of regulation. The facts are banks got into trouble making loans on real estate assigned inflated values to borrowers who could not repay. Loans were bundled into bonds and sold to investors. When not enough unwitting fools bought bonds, the big Wall Street banks put unsold securities into offshore special investment vehicles (SIVs), whose potential losses were not supposed to be a claim on bank capital. Other firms, like AIG, sold insurance to against potential losses on bonds without sufficient assets to back up that protection.

When the loans and bonds failed, it turned out those SIVs were indeed a drain on bank capital, and Citibank, AIG and others needed bailouts to avoid the complete collapse of bank credit available to the economy.

All this was a massive accounting fraud, something big public accounting firms were supposed to catch in audits of banks but didn’t—a failure Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, passed in 2002, were supposed to avert.

The solution imposed by Dodd-Frank is to ban propriety securities trading by banks and impose burdensome lending regulations on surviving community and regional banks, who were more victims of the bubble than malefactors in the crisis.

Proprietary trading had little to do with instigating the mess, and profits from trading actually helped big banks rebuild balance sheets more quickly. And now onerous regulations have hamstrung community and regional banks and are forcing them to seek buyouts by larger Wall Street banks, who caused the crisis and have little interest in lending to small and medium sized businesses that create jobs.

When faced with resulting problems, the President explains he is saving the country from unstable growth of decades past. Yet, economists of all stripes refer to the twenty years prior to the crisis as the “Great Moderation,” owing to exceptional stability in economic activity and employment not before experienced in U.S. history.

President Obama persistently preaches solar, wind and other alternative technologies will make America energy independent and sustain economic superpower status. Yet, any reasonable reading of the prospective economic viability of these technologies, and assessment of the likely transition of the automobile industry to hybrids and electrics, indicates the nation will remain significantly dependent on petroleum for at least the next two decades.

Yet, with oil above $100 a barrel handicapping the U.S. economy, the President imposes regulations that all but shut down deep water drilling in the Gulf and other off-shore locations where the real potential for new American oil supplies lie. Instead, he plows money into projects like Solyndra that independent financial analysts predicted would likely fail.

Americans pay at least 50 percent more than Europeans for health care, often with less satisfactory outcomes, because the federal government pays for more than half of health care, but does not impose price and access controls as effective as those in Europe.

Obama Care simply doesn’t fix what’s broke, but instead raises taxes to provide more subsidies and imposes more mandates on businesses. Any economist will tell you subsidies and mandates to purchase a product raise its price—health care is no exception.

When critics opposed Obama Care, Jimmy Carter called them racists, and he was not alone in spewing such venom.

Among intellectuals, media personalities and senior policymakers that form the priesthood of the left, conservatives are not merely wrong but evil.

Beliefs over facts, assertions in place of reason, vilification of opponents—that looks a lot like religion—the worst kind.
Peter Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland School, and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

 

[phrodeau]

And this is the Democrat position.....

Obama's Agenda Looks Like Faith, Not Reason
By Peter Morici

Rick Santorum’s assertion that President Obama’s agenda is not about the quality of life or jobs but “some phony ideal. Some phony theology” may not be an appropriate characterization of his religious views. However, it is an accurate description of what is wrong with the hard left in American politics, and the thinking that drives domestic policy in the Obama Administration.

Too often liberal policies are based more on faith than reason—often those are premised on assertions having little foundation in facts or modern economics. Consequently, the President advocates or imposes solutions that make the nation’s problems worse, and when confronted with disappointing results he often tells us what he believes, without offering the data and logic that brought him to those conclusions.

Regarding the financial crisis, the President assigns blame to the lack of regulation. The facts are banks got into trouble making loans on real estate assigned inflated values to borrowers who could not repay. Loans were bundled into bonds and sold to investors. When not enough unwitting fools bought bonds, the big Wall Street banks put unsold securities into offshore special investment vehicles (SIVs), whose potential losses were not supposed to be a claim on bank capital. Other firms, like AIG, sold insurance to against potential losses on bonds without sufficient assets to back up that protection.

When the loans and bonds failed, it turned out those SIVs were indeed a drain on bank capital, and Citibank, AIG and others needed bailouts to avoid the complete collapse of bank credit available to the economy.

All this was a massive accounting fraud, something big public accounting firms were supposed to catch in audits of banks but didn’t—a failure Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, passed in 2002, were supposed to avert.

The solution imposed by Dodd-Frank is to ban propriety securities trading by banks and impose burdensome lending regulations on surviving community and regional banks, who were more victims of the bubble than malefactors in the crisis.

Proprietary trading had little to do with instigating the mess, and profits from trading actually helped big banks rebuild balance sheets more quickly. And now onerous regulations have hamstrung community and regional banks and are forcing them to seek buyouts by larger Wall Street banks, who caused the crisis and have little interest in lending to small and medium sized businesses that create jobs.

When faced with resulting problems, the President explains he is saving the country from unstable growth of decades past. Yet, economists of all stripes refer to the twenty years prior to the crisis as the “Great Moderation,” owing to exceptional stability in economic activity and employment not before experienced in U.S. history.

President Obama persistently preaches solar, wind and other alternative technologies will make America energy independent and sustain economic superpower status. Yet, any reasonable reading of the prospective economic viability of these technologies, and assessment of the likely transition of the automobile industry to hybrids and electrics, indicates the nation will remain significantly dependent on petroleum for at least the next two decades.

Yet, with oil above $100 a barrel handicapping the U.S. economy, the President imposes regulations that all but shut down deep water drilling in the Gulf and other off-shore locations where the real potential for new American oil supplies lie. Instead, he plows money into projects like Solyndra that independent financial analysts predicted would likely fail.

Americans pay at least 50 percent more than Europeans for health care, often with less satisfactory outcomes, because the federal government pays for more than half of health care, but does not impose price and access controls as effective as those in Europe.

Obama Care simply doesn’t fix what’s broke, but instead raises taxes to provide more subsidies and imposes more mandates on businesses. Any economist will tell you subsidies and mandates to purchase a product raise its price—health care is no exception.

When critics opposed Obama Care, Jimmy Carter called them racists, and he was not alone in spewing such venom.

Among intellectuals, media personalities and senior policymakers that form the priesthood of the left, conservatives are not merely wrong but evil.

Beliefs over facts, assertions in place of reason, vilification of opponents—that looks a lot like religion—the worst kind.
Peter Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland School, and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Exodus 23:1 Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness.

It means quit spreading lies.

 

[mercury14]

And this is the Democrat position.....

It's a straw man that you fell for, sucker.

 

[RightField]

It's a straw man that you fell for, sucker.

I think it's a straw man you fell for. Why would you believe anything that came out of this administration?

 

[mercury14]

I think it's a straw man you fell for. Why would you believe anything that came out of this administration?

I'm the guy that constantly goes to source data and links it here, bub.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Especially considering that the Nazis weren't socialists... and WW2 was over before AJ was born.

They just had Socialism in the name for shits and giggles...



:nods: