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

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

More like bad timing on their part,MORON.

Nah, their commanding officer says "drive through this dry river bed for 30 minutes since there are too many IEDs in the road along side of it". Turns out that the enemy expected that and the river bed is also full of IEDs. That's how 19 year-old kids come to see me.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

I help troops who have brain and other organ damage from war. Fake job?

yes sure, and your company car is a A380. I got it

 

[koalabear]

Nah, their commanding officer says "drive through this dry river bed for 30 minutes since there are too many IEDs in the road along side of it". Turns out that the enemy expected that and the river bed is also full of IEDs. That's how 19 year-old kids come to see me.

That explains the second look of horror on their faces.

 

[mercury14]

Ask Obama how he feels about his new found historical legacy.

I think you should ask yourself why America picked a Kenyan Communist Negro named Hussein over your guy. Then when the economy is lame you still can't seem to pull ut ahead of him.

What's wrong with you guys? You can't ask for an easier shot at the presidency.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

That explains the second look of horror on their faces.

after years of play Gears of War on the Xbox, The Merc is a General. so we must show him some respect as that's the only Box he gets to play with

 

[mercury14]

after years of play Gears of War on the Xbox, The Merc is a General. so we must show him some respect as that's the only Box he gets to play with

And I returned to the USAF reserves last month as well.

Did you volunteer?

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

And I returned to the USAF reserves last month as well.

Did you volunteer?

Heaven forbid you'd have to get a real job, MORON.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

And I returned to the USAF reserves last month as well.

Did you volunteer?

so they let you fly, that A380 on the xbox, right?

 

[mercury14]

Conservative Americans ladies and gentlemen...




Three unemployed conservatives attacking a liberal for having a job. This is the weakest shit I've ever seen.

 

[koalabear]

Conservative Americans ladies and gentlemen...




Three unemployed conservatives attacking a liberal for having a job. This is the weakest shit I've ever seen.

A real MORON ladies and gentlemen.

 

[unregistered]

 

[busybody..]

Obama says America will be number 1 again

WE WERE, UNTIL 2008 and will become again when he is LYNCHED

 

[koalabear]

Outstanding speech, he will finish it in two weeks. Hopefully there will be a terrorist attack on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, then he won't have too.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I guess I'm on ignore...

Remember the thread and the demands, show us how any regulated industry has lost a single job! Show us the broken windows!!!

I admit, I cannot show you the broken window you wish to see, but I can show you how the rock is put into the hands of the regulated, another great example appearing this morning:

The amount billed by Debevoise & Plimpton to write a 17-page letter on a new rule intended to rein in risky banking — around $100,000 — would make most authors jealous.

That’s the fee just for parsing the proper definition of a bank-owned hedge fund. Longer and more complex regulatory missives, weighing in on who should be deemed too big to fail or how derivatives are traded, can easily cost twice as much.

These comment letters could save Wall Street banks billions of dollars if they help persuade policy makers to adopt a more lenient interpretation of the coming rules. And white-shoe law firms like Debevoise & Plimpton are cranking them out by the dozen.

Call it Dodd-Frank Inc. A year after Congress passed the broadest financial overhaul since the Great Depression, the law has spawned a host of new businesses to help Wall Street comply — and capitalize — on the hundreds of new regulations.

Besides the lawyers, there are legions of corporate accountants, financial consultants, risk management advisers, turnaround artists and technology vendors all vying for their cut.

“It is a full-employment act,” said Gregory J. Lyons, a partner at Debevoise, where a team of a half-dozen lawyers has drafted 30-plus comment letters in the last six months.

“The law is passed, but we are still reasonably early in the process,” Mr. Lyons said. “There is still a lot to be written.”

New regulation has long been one of Washington’s unofficial job creation tools. After the enactment of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the late 1970s, hundreds of lawyers and accountants were hired by companies to strengthen their internal controls. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 became a boon for the Big Four accounting firms as public corporations were forced to tighten compliance in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals.

Now, the Dodd-Frank Act is quickly becoming such a gold mine that even Wall Street bankers, never ones to undercharge, are complaining that the costs are running amok.

“It’s basically lawyers, hired guns and money,” said the chief financial officer of a major Wall Street firm, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “Everyone has an angle.”

No one yet is tracking all the money being spent to deal with Dodd-Frank (which in itself could be an entrepreneurial venture), but a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it in the billions of dollars.

And that’s not even counting the roughly $1.9 billion spent by companies lobbying on financial issues since the regulatory overhaul was first proposed in early 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The bulk of the lobbying tab was spent in the two years before Dodd-Frank took effect. Now firms are spending similarly eye-popping sums to comply with or battle against the rules emerging from the law. They are turning to existing companies that have started dedicated teams like the one at Debevoise & Plimpton, as well as start-ups like the Invictus Consulting Group.

When Kamal Mustafa founded Invictus in early 2008, few banks underwent routine stress tests to assess their financial health. Now, the new law requires the nation’s largest banks to conduct annual stress tests, while regulators are leaning hard on smaller lenders to take similar measures. As a result, Invictus’s business — dispensing advice on how to properly administer those exams — has taken off.

“You can stress-test all you want, but somebody has to validate the results,” Mr. Mustafa said. “That’s a massive opportunity.”

Regulators from seven states — including California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — have hired his firm, Mr. Mustafa said, and he is selectively signing up two to four new bank clients a month. Annual advisory fees start at $20,000 and can reach $100,000 or more.

With business booming, Mr. Mustafa said he planned to hire 40 to 50 former bankers in the coming months, almost quadrupling his current staff. And in May, Invictus established its first European outpost: a London office focused on overseas banks and regulators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/b...nts-and-lawyers.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Now, that cost of doing business gets passed on to the customer or to the markets by way of reduced investment. This make business expensive for everyone who has to do business with a bank, and this, then makes them less competitive.

The market only gains when we engage in money-pumping, the jobless rate remains the same, and we are now looking at a protracted period of a Depression cycle, for there is a business cycle and while you can eliminate the bump of a recovery, calling it a recovery-less recovery, you cannot eternally eliminate the valley of recession by borrowing, spending, and "stimulating," which returns us to the fallacy merc chose to ignore.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

This fallacy

It depends.

If you're taxing middle and lower class people who spend almost 100% of what they make, yes it's like trying to fill a pool by taking water out of the deep end and pouring it in the shallow end.

If you tax wealthy people who were going to save it or invest in foreign companies, then yes it actually is stimulative for the government to pay people to do jumping jacks all day. Because what's happening is that money that's sitting around stagnant or actually leaving the national economy is being converted into salaries for people who then convert it into pure demand for goods in the local economy.

Of course I'd never advocate for a Department of Jumping Jacks. Give the funding to teachers, social workers who protect kids, county hospital staff, VA professionals to treat our wounded warriors, the military, etc. All these government programs create a ton of value.

You're thinking too concretely again though. A "thing" doesn't have to be created for spending to be stimulative. A county can expand its substance abuse treatment program by hiring a new team of professionals. Or government can fund research into prostheic limb replacement for wounded vets, or to develop Alzheimer's drugs. Those things all create value.

That is a fallacy, have have pointed out many times.

I recommend Bastiat's Sophisms for all government does in spending on jumping jacks is to rob the actual economy of capital and incentive. Even Keynes got that fallacy as in the India story where men were using shovels to dig a canal; Keynes asked why not get some heavy equipment in to do the job and they reply was jobs (a variation on the labor is dear fallacy, see the Robinson Crusoe parable in Sophisms) to which Keynes retorted, then why not take away their shovels and give them spoons?

Your mistake was outlined in the story of the broken pane, you see economic activity and think, man that's good, but then you never step back and say, what might have the money done had first it not been plundered? There is a hidden effect to government spending that is very real and this is reflected in the fear (as Mises would say Human Action) and the refusal to hire by those currently being plundered; they know how successful blackmailers act: they blackmail (they plunder, with a grand sense of self-justification be it altruism or greed).
__________________
You loot the private sector, strip every dollar of 40¢ for overhead, and then give the other 60¢ to your political base in order to revitalize the looted.

What's not to like about that plan?
A_J, the Stupid

Pretty much the entire library of Bastiat is available for free download.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Over the last two decades, private investors have become increasingly dependent on government "investment," particularly in technology. As technologies have become more complex and multidisciplinary, they have become more difficult to evaluate. Investors were particularly roughed up in the IT and biotech booms, and subsequent busts, where they lacked the tools to evaluate those early-stage technologies. In many cases, they were simply the victims of shysters, while in others, the possible rewards were so great that the investors were impelled to take ridiculous risks. So government grants and earmarks (aka investments) have become a way to test the waters, because if a company got government money to research its technology, then that technology must have some substance, right?

By the letter of the law and regulations, that government money (apart from the earmarks) is supposed to be going toward meritorious winners of competitive grants, but it rarely, if ever, happens that way. Assuming that everything goes proper and above-board, reviewers tend to favor hot, new technologies, which may never deliver, over minor improvements on existing technologies. One example is the carbon nanotube transistor (CNT). Nanotubes are hot (they include the term "nano"), and making such small things is really neat, but CNTs will never outperform our 1950s silicon technology. This was fairly well-known and accepted, until Jan Hendrik Schön published results that CNTs could work better than current technologies, and then the money flowed after "nano." Even after it was discovered that Schön lied, money still flowed after CNTs and other nanotechnology. Yes, scientists make mistakes (or worse), and the reasonable voices can be quashed by the herd, so even if everything is fair and proper, government investment in technology can be a craps shoot.

Unfortunately, the letter of the law is rarely followed (except in the case of earmarks), and technologies are often chosen based on politics, rather than merit. This politics can take multiple forms at multiple levels. The most common thing to see is topic authors creating topics pre-targeted toward a specific technology and submitter. Lettermarking is a common way for congressmen to inject their influence into the evaluation of grant proposals, while earmarks completely bypass the entire process. From the administrative side, top bureaucrats have a lot of influence over the low-level government employees reviewing the proposals; you don't turn something down when the big boss says he likes it.

Over the past couple decades, and particularly the last few years, the amount of politics involved in those granting decisions has increased substantially. Following government investment in technology has turned from a craps shoot into following politics and hype down a hole. Solar energy makes a great example. Every month, there is one or more announcement about some new solar company or project obtaining hundreds of millions in government loan guarantees (one page of news alone totals to $5.9 billion), millions in government research grants, and tens of millions in investor money. Knowing the technologies that these companies are using, they will never realize their claims, and they will fail. It is a wonder that 90% of them received money, because only 1 or 2 of the dozen technologies might actually do what they claim. Sure enough, the number of failed, government-backed solar companies grows by the month.

Many investors seem to be naive to all of this, or worse, in denial. I have asked several investors, "What will you do when the government money disappears, or becomes unreliable?" Every single one of them has denied those possibilities. Government money will always be there, and will always be reliable. Looking at the situation in the DoD and DoE, the situation at government labs, and the situations in the university labs, one thing has become quite clear: the grants are vanishing. Despite the budgetary offices' and politicians' claims that more money is spent on research, less money is getting to the researchers. The budget isn't lying, and the researchers aren't lying, so where is the money going? Into under-the-table politics -- loan guarantees, non-competitive contracts, administrative influence, and earmarks. The only thing government investment reliably indicates is political connectivity.

When investors send all of their money after government money, they run out of money to send after the things government missed. When the miraculous new solar technology loses out to presidential donors, those donors get their payback, solar panels continue to fall short of promises, and investors have missed out on the next Apple or Microsoft. Government investment has become bad investment, and it is time for it to end, or be massively reformed.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/when_government_investment_is_bad_investment.html

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The more government impedes upon the market with good intention and positive interference, the more expensive that market becomes and the maxim that you get what you pay for becomes outed as an out-and-out lie.
A_J, the Stupid

The more distant and powerful your government, the more likely it is to be dominated and controlled by just a very small group of people.
A_J, the Stupid

When Government gets so powerful that its purchase price is cost effective, even imperative, to business, then business will purchase government indulgences.
A_J, the Stupid

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Q: What do you get when crony capitalist and friend of Obama, Warren Buffet, invests heavily in too big to fail?





A: 40,000 less jobs.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/2011/09/09/bank-america-aides-mull-40k-job-cut-wsj/

 

[koalabear]

Q: What do you get when crony capitalist and friend of Obama, Warren Buffet, invests heavily in too big to fail?





A: 40,000 less jobs.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/2011/09/09/bank-america-aides-mull-40k-job-cut-wsj/

I was going to say more money to invest in GE-Chinese airplane venture.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Barack Obama has his own stable of Enrons, companies benefiting from close ties to the president, seemingly able to leverage campaign donations, receiving taxpayer dollars to boost their prospects. They may be unviable on their own (as Solyndra was) or just get an added boost from us to help them against competitors whose investors and executives do not play the game.

The Washington Post have been superb in their coverage of Solyndra; a few months ago they tipped readers to yet another company apparently benefiting from donations to Obama's campaign. The company is publicly-held Polypore. They own another company called Celgrad that makes a key component of batteries used in the electric cars that Obama touts and spends our taxpayer dollars on developing and producing (for example, grants made to Fisker Automotive, a company that has Al Gore as a major investor).

The Washington Post's reporters Carol Leonnig, Joe Stephens, and Alice Crites reported back in June that Celagrd has benefited in unusual ways from government largesse:

Charlotte-based Celgard, for example, already was considered a global industry leader in manufacturing a battery component used in consumer electronics, including electric vehicles. It applied for stimulus funding to help build a new factory, and in August 2009, the Energy Department awarded it a $49 million stimulus grant. The company was one of 48 winners from among an estimated 240 applicants in the electric vehicle and battery sector.

Various government officials came to the plant and lauded its prospects. These included the head of the Department of Energy, the Labor secretary (to throw in the green jobs angle; in reality, green jobs are a euphemism for crony capitalism), and Barack Obama. President Obama lauded an unnamed company that fit Celgard to a tee in a State of the Union address.

Competitors were understandably not happy. The granting of government money to a profitable company was offensive. But what also set them off was that Polypore, Celgard's parent company, was being pursued by federal regulators. The Federal Trade Commission had charged Polypore with trying to monopolize several battery markets and control prices. Obama's visit came after an administrative judge had decided that Polypore was an illegal monopoly (the decision is being appealed).

Competitors complained that all this money and attention were giving Polypore massive advantage over rivals. The company did not need the money: its stock has risen more than tenfold since Obama took office and started promoting electronic vehicles. They could have tapped cheap equity capital or borrowed the money as other companies have done. Of course, if they issued stock to raise funds to build the factory, that would dilute existing shareholders by lowering the value of the stock they owned in Polypore.

So why did Obama's team give this company taxpayer money? Why help a monopolist? Aren't monopolies supposed to be evil?

Why not help create a level playing field and help rivals? Isn't fair competition the heart of capitalism, a dynamic that brings great products at a great price to consumers? Why not boost rivals against a monopolist?

Maybe those rivals were misallocating their money. Instead of investing their money in jobs and products, they should have invested in a certain Cook County politician.
The Washington Post again:

Private-equity firm Warburg Pincus has seen its original $300 million investment more than triple in value and recently has been locking in gains with stock sales. (More than $253,000 was raised for Obama in 2008 from Warburg employees and their families, campaign finance records show.)

The chairman of Polypore's board, Warburg Pincus director Michael Graff, and his wife donated $14,600 toward Obama's 2008 presidential bid, including $10,000 given shortly before the election to an Obama committee geared to get out the vote in battleground states. Graff, a registered Republican, made no donations to Republicans in the 2008 cycle, records show.

Doesn't Obama excoriate Wall Street on a somewhat regular basis -- especially when bad economic numbers are released and he needs a villain and punching bag to rile up Americans and distract attention from him and his policies? Why is he chumming up and helping Wall Street titans with taxpayer money?

Barack Obama learned a great deal about pay-to-play politics by spending his adult years in Cook County, where pay-to-play is the modus operandi of politicians. He seems to have learned his lesson well. He now has a history of running interference for donors and giving taxpayer dollars to donors. Undoubtedly, dogged investigators are on the trail of other Green Schemes and the people behind them. Will they reach the one guy who seems to the key player who parts with our money with delightful abandon?

Obama and his allies make a great deal about the potential of sunlight. To me, Justice Louis Brandeis had more sensible things to say about sunlight than our president. Brandeis said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." We need a lot of sunlight in Washington.

The nation needs to see that Barack Obama is the King of Crony Capitalism.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

http://i.imgur.com/BHLWZ.jpg

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I was going to say more money to invest in GE-Chinese airplane venture.

I like that, a glass half full guy; 40,000 more CHINESE jobs...