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

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

When Bernanke speaks at the Fed’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming, meeting on August 26, he could conceivably launch a real shock-and-awe stimulus program. If you go back a year, when Bernanke first announced QE2 at Jackson Hole, sources tell me that the original debate over the quantity of bond purchases had a $2 trillion balance-sheet expansion on the table. Inflation hawks beat that number back to $600 billion. But now the rest of that $2 trillion — or $1.4 trillion — could conceivably be on the table for a new QE3 announcement by the Fed.

A new round of Fed bond purchases would likely be aimed at pinning long-term interest rates down as much as possible. In other words, the Fed will be buying 10-year paper and maybe even 30-year paper to get those yields down even more (10-years are currently around 2 percent). The idea would be to reduce the attractiveness of government bonds and get investors into riskier assets like stocks, or perhaps even new-business and venture-capital start-ups where potential yields look even more attractive. There may even be some job-creation in all this.

Plus, the Fed’s potential Jackson Hole shock-and-awe program could include the removal of the 25-basis-point Fed payment on the $1.6 trillion excess bank reserve now on deposit at the central bank. If the banks no longer earn a safe 25 basis points, they might conceivably lend more.

And if long-term rates come down as per Bernanke’s target bond purchases, mortgage rates might come down even more to the benefit of future and current homeowners.

Politically, inside the Fed, three regional bank presidents dissented from the unprecedented Fed decision to keep its target rate down for two more years. But the inner circle of Fed power — Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and William Dudley — has enough votes from other Fed board governors and reserve-bank presidents to jam through almost any shock-an-awe it wants. All this could be announced formally at the next Fed meeting on September 20, but Bernanke himself is likely to let the cat out of the bag in Jackson Hole toward the end of this month.

The trouble with all this is that it didn’t work the last time with QE2, and it will have no permanent effect on the slumping economy. Targeting bond yields and printing more money simply distorts asset prices throughout the financial markets. We’ve seen this movie before. And it didn’t play well. The Fed’s shock-and-awe risks another round of dollar depreciation. It’s part of the message of skyrocketing gold prices right now.

Larry Kudlow
NRO

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

So just how stupid was it to buy gold back in 2007?




U_D? thoughts...?


You google, I'll wait. Hey, did you destroy anybody's family today or has everyone at your place of employment learned that you don't have their back?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

S&P said cut $4 trillion of of the deficit over 10 years. You're calling it my responsibility to prove that they really meant what they said? What?

Of course that's can't be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt because they'd still be free to downgrade us no matter what. But it would be highly odd for them to downgrade after taking their recommendations. Since you think the S&P was lying why not take it up with them?

So, you're dropped the raising taxes claim.

You could not back it up and cannot admit you are wrong, so you simply move the goal posts.

I get that. I grok...

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

...

Once Pelosi got the purse, nobody had our backs...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

What does a political regime do when its philosophy doesn’t work and is leading to ruin? It can’t scrap the philosophy, which is its raison d’être and the basis of its power. Were it to chuck the philosophy, its core constituencies would abandon it. So instead it blames those who have most cogently pointed out the defects of the philosophy. It calls them liars and haters. The strategy is evidently one of desperation, and a confession of the bankruptcy of the regime in question.

In the waning days of the East German state — the German Democratic Republic — East German Politburo apparatchik Hermann Axen persuaded Erich Honecker to embrace an “our-critics-are-liars-and-haters” strategy. Communism in the late summer of 1989 was a joke, but it was at the same time the raison d’être of the SED, the ruling Communist party. Without it, a lot of bureaucrats would be out of a job. Axen was one of these. “A dirty wave of hate and great lies is breaking over the GDR,” he declared on September 10, two months before ordinary Germans brought down the Berlin Wall in the name of political and economic freedom.

Flash forward to 2011. The Democratic party in the third year of the Obama presidency is in trouble. The administration’s policies are rapidly becoming a joke. One can quibble about the best label for those policies — Keynesian big-statism, tax-and-spend liberalism, socialism lite. What is not in doubt is that the policies have failed to help the economy and are leading to ruin. But the Democratic party can’t abandon the policies because its foremost constituencies, the public-sector unions, are dependent on them.

And so the Democratic leadership has settled on the Hermann Axen strategy. “Our-critics-are-liars-and-haters.”

In January, Rep. Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.) compared Republican opponents of the health-care law to Joseph Goebbels. “They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels,” Cohen said. “You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing. . . . The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it — believed it and you have the Holocaust.” (Cohen later issued a lame apology.)

As the case for the administration’s policies crumbles, the Democratic leadership is amplifying its Axen-style rhetoric. Vice President Biden has accused tea-party Republicans of “acting like terrorists” in the debt-ceiling negotiations. (He later said that he was misquoted.) On Monday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the tea partiers “tyrants,” and last week Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) accused the Tea Party of propagating a big lie. He urged the media not to give “equal time or equal balance” to tea partiers because their view “is not factual.”

This is good news. The “our-critics-are-liars-and-haters” trope has a limited rhetorical appeal. It is typically trotted out when a regime no longer has either a persuasive case for its policies or a language with which to make that case and win back the middle-of-the-roaders who have turned against it. The regime is forced to do what it can to reassure and reanimate its ever more apathetic base. When a regime finds itself in so unenviable a position, the odds are good that it will fall.

Michael Knox Beran
NRO

 

[unregistered]

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Its bears repeating till silly minds get it: THERE AINT GONNA BE NO RECOVERY TILL PEOPLE GO BACK TO WORK. AND FULL EMPLOYMENT DONT MEAN GOVERNMENT JOBS FOR EVERY LAWYER AND SOCIALIST WORKER.

Building desal plants is useful work cuz it creates commonwealth, ditto for byuilding hydro-electric dams, pulling snags outta rivers, building garbage burning power plants, dredging harbors, building reservoirs, and replacing every piece of shit firetruck, dump truck, ambulance at the city motor-pool.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Amen brother.

Pass the plate, Ah need some change...


Brother Johnson:

"We know that the number of government jobs has been increasing steadily, and that the number of applicants is increasing still more rapidly than the number of jobs. … Is this scourge about to come to an end? How can we believe it, when we see that public opinion itself wants to have everything done by that fictitious being, the state, which signifies a collection of salaried bureaucrats? … Very soon there will be two or three of these bureaucrats around every Frenchman, one to prevent him from working too much, another to give him an education, a third to furnish him credit, a fourth to interfere with his business transactions, etc., etc. Where will we be led by the illusion that impels us to believe that the state is a person who has an inexhaustible fortune independent of ours?
Frédéric Bastiat

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

So just how stupid was it to buy gold back in 2007?

U_D? thoughts...?


You google, I'll wait. Hey, did you destroy anybody's family today or has everyone at your place of employment learned that you don't have their back?

You were buying gold back in 2007, a year before anyone on the "right" even admitted there was a recession? Yeah, I believe that. When the NBER announced in December 2008 that the recession had begun in December 2007 those on the "right" were in complete denial. I'm relatively sure that you were right there with 'em Cap'n. Of course, you could link one of your posts from 2007 to prove your assertion. I'll even apologize for saying now that you're full of shit. But I won't hold my breath waiting.

As for your ignorant comment there at the end. I didn't destroy anyone's family. He did that all on his own. Unless you think I should look the other way when I catch someone, repeatedly, sleeping when they're being paid to work. My employer would disagree. See, they label that sort of behavior as theft.

You sound just like he did. It was his co-worker's fault for calling him repeatedly on the radio, alerting me that he was MIA. Again... It was my fault for catching him sleeping and doing exactly what I told him I would do if it happened again.. It couldn't be his fault for you know, sleeping on the job or anything. I'm supposed to ignore my job and what? Grab him a blanket and a couple of pillows to make sure he's comfortable? It was his third strike, fourth if you count the first time when I warned him and didn't document it. I feel sorry for what HE did to his family. All I did was my job.

So I'll tell you again, Go Fuck Yourself douche-bag.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

My my, so downright neighborly today.

You attempt to impugn my integrity or work ethic and you'll get the same morning greeting.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You were buying gold back in 2007, a year before anyone on the "right" even admitted there was a recession? Yeah, I believe that. When the NBER announced in December 2008 that the recession had begun in December 2007 those on the "right" were in complete denial. I'm relatively sure that you were right there with 'em Cap'n. Of course, you could link one of your posts from 2007 to prove your assertion. I'll even apologize for saying now that you're full of shit. But I won't hold my breath waiting.

As for your ignorant comment there at the end. I didn't destroy anyone's family. He did that all on his own. Unless you think I should look the other way when I catch someone, repeatedly, sleeping when they're being paid to work. My employer would disagree. See, they label that sort of behavior as theft.

You sound just like he did. It was his co-worker's fault for calling him repeatedly on the radio, alerting me that he was MIA. Again... It was my fault for catching him sleeping and doing exactly what I told him I would do if it happened again.. It couldn't be his fault for you know, sleeping on the job or anything. I'm supposed to ignore my job and what? Grab him a blanket and a couple of pillows to make sure he's comfortable? It was his third strike, fourth if you count the first time when I warned him and didn't document it. I feel sorry for what HE did to his family. All I did was my job.

So I'll tell you again, Go Fuck Yourself douche-bag.

I told you that when the Democrats were elected to the Congress that the shit was about to hit the fan and you chose to believe your salvation was at hand...

Yeah, you couldn't give a poor working stiff some warning, you just wanted POWER over his life...

You are sad, pathetic, and deluded.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

I told you that when the Democrats were elected to the Congress that the shit was about to hit the fan and you chose to believe your salvation was at hand...

Yeah, you couldn't give a poor working stiff some warning, you just wanted POWER over his life...

You are sad, pathetic, and deluded.

So no link then? Why am I not surprised..

Power over other people's jobs comes with the territory of being in management. It's why the company pays me, to make sure that those who work with me are doing their jobs. Should I apologize for doing what I'm paid to do?

Just how many times, in your opinion, should I have ignored his sleeping on the clock while others had to pick up his slack? Just how much should I allow someone to steal from my employer before I report them for it? Obviously four strikes isn't enough.

I don't expect any real answers from you Cap'n, as your position on this isn't rational or ethical in the least, but personal for some reason. I can only guess that you were canned from a job for your own bad performance and still blame the person who reported you, just like my former employee does me.

Since my suspicions are likely true, I'll give you a big Go Fuck Yourself from whoever it was who fired you too.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Yeah, just another guy needing a handout now...



No sympathy, he had it coming and you were the hammer of GAWD!

Of course, he might have been losing sleep to to some personal tragedy or something like that, you could have talked to him, but what the fuck, he's the government's problem now, not yours; of course, I'm sure you would have begged for mercy, another chance...

If you want a link, go fucking find it. You've seem to believe I was buying gold all along these past few years, hammering my stupidity at not believing in the markets and Democrat fiscal policy and now suddenly, you want to say "PROVE IT?"

But, when we were talking about privatizing 1% of Social Security, what was the Democrat line? oh, I remember, you cannot believe in, or trust, THE STOCK MARKET!!!

While Standard & Poor's downgrade of US government debt has triggered the plunge in the stock market, the underlying cause behind the stock market's sharp decline is loose monetary and fiscal policies that have badly damaged the ability of the US economy to generate wealth. Historically, fluctuations in monetary liquidity have preceded fluctuations in the S&P 500 stock-price index. The recent visible strengthening in the growth momentum of monetary liquidity will be of little help to the stock market if the pool of real savings is stagnating or, worse, declining.

http://mises.org/daily/5544/Where-Is-the-US-Stock-Market-Heading

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The trigger that apparently caused the market meltdown was the ever-so-slight suggestion from Standard & Poor's that the US government's fiscal health might not be all it's cracked up to be.

This was not a case of the little boy noting the emperor has no clothes. It is more like the little boy suggesting that the emperor's clothes, while beautiful, might have been more carefully tailored to suit the imperial dignity. Hysteria followed, and the entire Obama cult called for the kid to be stoned.

Finally the emperor himself spoke in defense of his raiment. That's when the market crashed.

But the downgrading of a government's debt from AAA to AA+ can only have triggered a market avalanche if the truth is in fact much worse, and most everyone knows it.

S&P doesn't have clean hands, of course. It holds a government monopoly, wants higher taxes, and rated those crazed housing bonds AAA. But imagine, for just a moment, that US government debt were rated in the same way that municipal bonds or regular corporate debt are. Imagine that government bonds, like normal bonds, carried a default premium. Imagine, in other words, that the Federal Reserve were not in a position to pay everyone from welfare recipients to banksters with newly created money.

Under such actual market conditions, federal debt would not be rated as AA+. It would be worth even less than junk bonds. In fact, it wouldn't even qualify for a market rating at all, because it would be utterly worthless: and the institution that issued it would be in default, and the whole rotten apparatus of the state would be seen to be bankrupt at its very core, in every sense.

We know this for one simple reason: there is no way that the government can fund its debt on taxes alone. There would be a revolution in this country in a heartbeat. And, probably, the entire American empire, domestic and foreign, would come crashing down, along with its banking and monetary systems.

If this actually happened, there would be no more "ongoing negotiations" about the budget and the debt. The cuts would be swift, extreme, gigantic. The federal government would have to behave like state governments, balancing the budget year to year. There would be no more plans for fake cuts in the planned increases, gradually phased in over ten years. The federal government would face actual market discipline. The S&P downgrade is only a slight taste of what would follow.
...

Of course, the whole theory that the government can stimulate through control and robbery is wrong and counterproductive. It only ends up rewarding government and its friends while the rest of us suffer. If we ever get out of this depression, it will be because government is forced to stop this nonsense, and the economy is really stimulated by taking a meat axe to the planning-spending-inflating apparatus.

This is the underlying reality that informed traders understand. The whole system is being propped up by the power to print, and by that power alone. No matter how many miracles some people think that paper money can accomplish, there is an underlying realization that the whole system is a hoax.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
http://mises.org/daily/5547/Day-of-Reckoning

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The other shoes are dropping...

A college degree once looked to be the path to prosperity. In an article for TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy writes, "Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe."

But the jobs that made higher education pay off during the inflationary boom, kicked into high gear by Nixon waving goodbye to the last shreds of a gold standard, came primarily from government and finance.

In 1990, 6.4 million people worked for federal, state, and local governments. By 2010, that number had grown almost 6 times — to 38.3 million — with many of these jobs being white-collar.

In 1990, the financial sector was less than 7.5 percent of the S&P 500. By 2006, this sector had grown to 22.3 percent of the S&P, and that year the financial sector constituted 45 percent of the index's earnings.

"Prices and wage rates boom," writes Mises.

Everybody feels happy and is convinced that now finally mankind has overcome forever the gloomy state of scarcity and reached everlasting prosperity.

In fact, all this amazing wealth is fragile, a castle built on sands of illusion. It cannot last. There is no means to substitute banknotes and deposits for nonexistent capital goods.

Times have changed.

Last week, HSBC Holding Plc announced plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2013. The job cuts will affect "support staff where we believe we have created an unnecessary bureaucracy in this firm over a number of years," HSBC chief executive officer Stuart Gulliver said.

Goldman Sachs plans to cut 1,000 positions. Bank of America is laying off 1,500 employees and closing 600 retail branches.

At the same time that banks are trimming their fat, according to a Labor Department report released earlier this month, from May 2010 to May 2011 local governments shed 267,000 jobs and state governments 24,000. Local government employment in May, at 14.165 million jobs, was the lowest since July 2006.

An increase in the amount of real savings, which induces a fall in the interest rate and a lengthening of the production schedule, increases an economy's productive capacity, creating genuine growth brought about by the investment in higher-order goods such as factories and other production assets.

Conversely, easy, cheap credit fools entrepreneurs into believing that society's collective time preference has fallen, enticing them into investing in higher-order goods, such as land, factories, and the like — when in fact the collective time preference hasn't changed, and the demand for higher-order goods is merely a mirage. The result is booms and busts rather than genuine growth.

College degrees are similar to what the Austrians call higher-order goods. It's thought that a student will gain knowledge and seasoning in college that will make him or her more productive and a candidate for a high-paying career. The investment of time and money in knowledge pays through higher productivity and is translated into higher income. Higher education is the higher-order means to a successful career.

PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, questioning the value of higher education, tells TechCrunch,

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus.

The excesses of both college and homeownership were always excused by a core national belief that, no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Doug French
Mises.org

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Yeah, just another guy needing a handout now...



No sympathy, he had it coming and you were the hammer of GAWD!

Of course, he might have been losing sleep to to some personal tragedy or something like that, you could have talked to him, but what the fuck, he's the government's problem now, not yours; of course, I'm sure you would have begged for mercy, another chance...

If you want a link, go fucking find it. You've seem to believe I was buying gold all along these past few years, hammering my stupidity at not believing in the markets and Democrat fiscal policy and now suddenly, you want to say "PROVE IT?"

But, when we were talking about privatizing 1% of Social Security, what was the Democrat line? oh, I remember, you cannot believe in, or trust, THE STOCK MARKET!!!




http://mises.org/daily/5544/Where-Is-the-US-Stock-Market-Heading

*yawn*
That "poor guy" brought what happened to him on himself. If you had been paying attention instead of being blinded by your own personal animosity you would know that I HAD talked to him about it, several times (Four strikes). Because being caught sleeping on the clock is one of the "deadly sins" (My employer considers it theft), he should have been fired the FIRST time. Being who I am the first time I gave him slack, no documentation, the next two i documented only that he was taking a break in an unauthorized area (he was hiding in a storage room) along with a warning the second time what would happen if I caught him again. He ignored all of those warnings. As per your usual M.O. you would rather make uninformed assumptions and assign beliefs to your ideological "enemies".

He may be unemployed now because of his own behavior, but he's been replaced with someone now OFF of unemployment who (hopefully) doesn't think that he's being paid to sleep. I feel sorry for his family because of the position he has put them in. But I can't be expected to ignore my job like he did, and put my family at similar risk.

I'm sticking with you having some personal axe to grind here.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Mr. Compassion is back...







... *sniff* *sniff* so very touching...

Did you talk to him or at him because as we all now recognize, all we ever get from you is the latter...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Oh, looky at the futures!




We're back at the level where you started bragging on Obama!

 

[busybody..]

For Mr O'Fendy



As you know, your COHRT, who is ALSO

OHFENDED by me and my use of "words" and NOT offended by WORDS THAT KILL........started a thread about riots coming to the US

We all KNOW what he really meant, dont we? Cause BUSYBODY has been sayin this for a while now

I wrote something to him in that thread, that is for YOU as well, O'Fendy

Feel free to IGGY me...........



READ........

Mr LUSTDOPIA!


We have on MSNBC

One Al Sharpton, I call him NIGGER, you wont call him that, because YOU believe that WORD diminishes conversation, indeed stifles conversation and detracts from valid points

He is calling for RESISTANCE, we all know what that means,

DONT WE?

how dare WE all sit by and let that on TV....when for all intents and purposes its a call to war

A war BY WHOM on WHO??????????????

If Sharpton, cannot be called what he is, A NIGGER, if his people, BLACK or WHITE can not be called what they ARE

NIGGERS

Then we are lost

You have your way of doing things, and passivity has shown itself to be the DEATH KNELL

I have mine

Indeed

Admit it or not

WE ARE ALL BUSYBODY!

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

U_D, you know what I love about your morality?



You advocate for stealing indirectly from your employer by the force of mob action, but then get your panties all wadded when someone steals a little bit directly as an individual...



I see the June trade deficit widened.

Wow, is that a lagging indicator, or what?

 

[koalabear]

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn233/koalabear_photo/8162503c.jpg

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

U_D, you know what I love about your morality?

You advocate for stealing indirectly from your employer by the force of mob action, but then get your panties all wadded when someone steals a little bit directly as an individual...

Leave it to you to try to equate paying taxes to theft out of one side of your mouth, then defend actual theft out of the other. But you question my morality, when actually you're questioning my ethics, of which apparently you have none.

So tell me Cap'n Hypocrite, how many times should I have warned the guy before I did what I should have done the very first time? How often should I have risked my job, my family, to protect someone who obviously didn't value his?

I still think you're nursing an old grudge here..