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

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islandman said:
Suddenly the government should have morals when it comes to your wallet?

Where was the government's morality when it told the American people that it would bail out corporations, but individuals would be left twisting in the wind?
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Corporations PROVIDE JOBS. Without corporations WE DON'T HAVE JOBS. The majority of people don't want to open their own business and what kind of economy would we have if everybody tried to be a small shopkeeper? Why is that difficult for so many on both the left and right to understand???

As for bailing out individuals, that is morally wrong because the ass wipes shouldn't have taken out loans when they didn't have the ability to pay them back. Its unfair to those of us who live within our means for those kind of people to be bailed out. Debtor's prison would be a better idea.
 
By Barry Moody and Elisabeth O'Leary

ROME/MADRID (Reuters) - Italy's borrowing costs soared to their highest levels since Rome joined the euro on Friday, piling pressure on the newly installed government of Mario Monti at the end of a week in which the euro zone crisis tainted even safe haven Germany.

A punishing bond sale, in which Italy was forced to pay a record 6.5 percent for six months paper, came after a disastrous German bond auction earlier in the week and the leaders of France, Germany and Italy failed to make headway in tackling the growing debt crisis.

Amid signs that the euro zone contagion is spreading, indications emerged in Madrid that the People's Party, getting ready to form a government in the coming weeks, may apply for international aid to shore up its finances.
 
IrezumiKiss said:
But when he's playing a pick-up game of basketball, you whiny assholes never give a fuck. Always bitching about the hoity-toity golf games that are only once in a while.

Keep chasing those windmills, Quixote.
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actually yeah that bothers me too, and when he wastes time picking final four teams and hosting fund-raisers and campaigning and all the other worthless shit - it's just that his (by far) primary choice of colossal time-wastage (its a word, don't look it up i'm on a roll) is golf. i love golf, myself. but i have a job and 2 kids to raise so i've been able to play only twice this year. my dad, who is retired and has all the time in the world, doesn't play half the golf obama does.

so fuck yeah i'm whining. i'm whining that the motherfucker who is most in a position to do something to help the economy, isn't.

if your boss at your office was off golfing all the time, and always bitching about how he can't get shit done because of other people, how much would you respect him?
 
CrackerjackHrt said:
is that what this says?

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/08/05/sp-downgrades-u-s-debt-rating-press-release/
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Yeah, where were they on the housing bubble?

That is a static analysis and hence has little or no validity in its assumptions because lowering the tax on the 1% raised revenue, but it was scored as a loss by all the best thinkers that static economic models can produce. However, an economy is human action and raising taxes will have a further chilling effect upon the nation's actual producers creating an "Atlas Shrugs" effect. We know that the increase will decrease revenue which is why Obama took a pas on it the first time, but thanks to the internet, we know how he really thinks...

Q: You favor an increase in the capital gains tax, saying, “I certainly would not go above what existed under Bill Clinton, which was 28%.” It’s now 15%. That’s almost a doubling if you went to 28%. Bill Clinton dropped the capital gains tax to 20%, then George Bush has taken it down to 15%. And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28%, the revenues went down.
A: What I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. The top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year--$29 billion for 50 individuals. Those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.
Q: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.
A: Well, that might happen or it might not. It depends on what’s happening on Wall Street and how business is going.
Source: 2008 Philadelphia primary debate, on eve of PA primary Apr 16, 2008

When Congress takes money away from the private sector, you get less iPhones, Word, diapers, etc., and you get more Solyndra's and Fiskers as the calculating purchase politicians. It's easy to see the revenue (Bastiat's Broken Window but much harder to see what would have been done with that money if left to the investor and producer class. That's why none of these forecasts ever actually hit their mark and why economic news reporting so often leads with the word "unexpectedly."

When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
Frédéric Bastiat

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
 
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Once you get them attached to the teat, they will take their "entitlement" by force...

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20111126/D9R8C8080.html

Egypt sinking...

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20111126/D9R89PEO3.html

Wall Street gives up gains...

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/...d-persistent-euro-debt-fears/?test=latestnews

Private market tries government ploy of acceleration, increased and earlier sales at the sake of profit...

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...ained-from-early-starts-younger-shoppers.html

Yeah, no Doom and Gloom to report on.

All we have to do is take everything the top 1% has and we can run government for a good solid five months...

Yeah!
 
In good news, we do have some bipartisan agreement...

Money slated for health law gets detoured
Lawmakers tap fund three times within a year

In cash-strapped Washington, President Obama’s $1 trillion health care law is presenting a tempting target for lawmakers seeking funds for other projects, as Congress last week raided the health care piggy bank for the third time in less than a year.

Congress last week axed a part of Democrats’ signature domestic achievement to find $11 billion to cover the cost of repealing a withholding tax that otherwise would have hit government contractors in 2013. Mr. Obama signed that bill into law on Monday.

The withholding bill follows two other efforts — one in December and another in April — that reworked the health care law to squeeze savings for other priorities. The December bill funded higher payments for doctors who treat Medicare patients, and the April legislation repealed a paperwork provision in the original health care law that businesses said would be onerous.

All told, Congress and the president have tapped some $50 billion earmarked to pay for benefits and programs in the health care overhaul in future years to fund more-immediate spending needs.

Both earlier efforts dealt with health care issues, but the bill Mr. Obama signed Monday marks the first time that the massive 2010 law has been tapped to fund something completely unrelated.

“They don’t want to open it up. They’re getting forced to open it up now and then, but to open it up for budgetary reasons, I think the pressures are pretty real,” said former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin, who said it’s easier to cut future benefits than it is to cut programs that are already paying out.

Most of the health care law’s benefits won’t begin paying out for several years, and Mr. Holtz-Eakin said he expects legislators to revisit the law again before then.
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Isn't that wonderful?

Such restraint and shutting down of revenue flows...

;) ;)

http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/24/money-slated-for-health-law-gets-detoured/
 
NOVEMBER 26, 2011 7:00 A.M.
More More More
Mark Styen, NRO
How do you like Andrea True’s federal government?

In honor of Andrea’s passing, I have asked my congressman to propose the adoption of this song as the U.S. national anthem. True, Miss True wrote the number as an autobiographical reflection on her days as a porn-movie actress but, consciously or not, it accurately distills the essence of American governmental philosophy in the early 21st century: excess even unto oblivion.

When it comes to spending and the size of government, only the Democrats are officially panting orgasmically, “More More More, How do you like it?” while the Republicans are formally committed to “Less less less.” This makes for many dramatic showdowns on the evening news. In the summer, it was the “looming” “deadline” to raise the debt ceiling. In the fall, it was the “looming” “deadline” for the alleged supercommittee to agree $1.2 trillion of cuts. The supercommittee was set up as a last-minute deal for raising the debt ceiling. Now that the supercommittee’s flopped out, “automatic” mandatory cuts to defense and discretionary spending are supposed to kick in — by 2013. But no doubt, as that looming deadline looms, the can of worms will be effortlessly kicked down the room another looming deadline or two.

In return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and, by the way, that’s the wrong way of looking at it: more accurately, we’re lowering the debt abyss), John Boehner bragged that he’d got a deal for “a real, enforceable cut” of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY 2012.

Which of these numbers is accurate?

The correct answer is: Who cares? The government of the United States currently spends $188 million it doesn’t have every hour of every day. So, if it’s $1 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes to roast a 20 lb. stuffed turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner, the government’s already borrowed back all those painstakingly negotiated savings. If it’s $7 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes you to defrost the bird, the cuts have all been borrowed back.

Bonus question: How “real” and “enforceable” are all those real, enforceable cuts? By the time the relevant bill passed the Senate earlier this month, the 2012 austerity budget with its brutal, savage cuts to government services actually increased spending by $10 billion. More more more, how do you like it?

But don’t worry. Aside from spending the summer negotiating a deal that increases runaway federal spending, those stingy, cheeseparing Republicans also forced the Democrats to agree to create that big ol’ supercommittee that would save $1.2 trillion. Over the course of ten years.

Anywhere else on the planet that would be a significant chunk of change. But the government of the United States is planning to spend $44 trillion in the next decade. So $1.2 trillion is about 2.7 percent. Any businessman could cut 2.7 percent from his budget in his sleep. But not congressional supercommittees of supermen with superpowers thrashing it out across the table for three months. So there will be no 2.7 percent cut.

That means the “sequestration” from defense and discretionary spending will now be enforced, starting in 2013. That would be so brutal and slashing that by 2021 it would reduce U.S. public debt by $153 billion! Which sounds kinda big if you say it in a Dr. Evil voice and give a menacing mwa-ha-ha laugh, but in fact boils down to about what we borrow currently every month.

But don’t worry. Slashing a month’s worth of spending over a decade is way too extreme. So that’s not going to happen, either. Instead, CNN and Meet The Press will just interview bigshot senators and congressmen about it day in, day out, and then normal service will resume: More more more, how do you like it?

In the course of a typical day I usually receive at least a couple of e-mails from readers lamenting that America is now the Titanic. This is grossly unfair to the Titanic, a state-of-the-art ship whose problem was that it only had lifeboat space for about half its passengers. By contrast, the USS Spendaholic is a rusting hulk encrusted with barnacles, there are no lifeboats, and the ship’s officers are locked in a debate about whether to use a thimble or an eggcup.

A second downgrade is now inevitable. Aw, so what? We had the first back in the summer, and the ceiling didn’t fall in, did it? And everyone knows those ratings agencies are a racket, right? And say what you like about our rotten finances, but Greece’s are worse. And Italy’s. And, er, Zimbabwe’s. Probably.

The advantage the United States enjoys is that, unlike Greece, it can print the currency in which its debt is denominated. But, even so, it still needs someone to buy it. The failure of Germany’s bond auction on Wednesday suggests that the world is running out of buyers for Western sovereign debt at historically low interest rates. And, were interest rates to return to their 1990–2010 average (5.7 percent), debt service alone would consume about 40 percent of federal revenues by mid-decade. That’s not paying down the debt, but just staying current on the interest payments.
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Time to rearrange the deck chairs!

NOVEMBER 26, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Republicans Subsidize Mansions
Andrew McCarthy, NRO
The GOP is missing its chance to stand for limited government.

Almost two weeks ago, when they figured no one was watching, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, by an overwhelming 292–121 margin, voted to increase funding for the Federal Housing Administration. Just as government debt hit $15 trillion, edging closer to 100 percent of GDP, these self-proclaimed scourges of spending decided Uncle Sam should continue subsidizing mini-mansion mortgage loans — up to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.

Given the straits that the mortgage crisis has left us in, to say nothing of the government’s central role in getting us there, one might think Republicans would be asking whether the government should be in the housing business at all. “Stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of government” — that is what Boehner, Cantor, & Co. promised in big bold letters during the 2010 campaign. That was in the snippets of text that occasionally interrupted the gauzy photo spread they called their “Pledge to America.”

Instead, here we are a year later, careering toward the cliff. We ought to be doing everything in our power to tee up the 2012 election as a high-noon showdown between Obama’s insatiable Leviathan and a GOP vision of fiscally sane, constitutional conservatism. So how do Republicans respond to their moment? How do they propose to “stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of government”? Why, by putting taxpayers on the hook for shaky loans on luxury homes — sure to add prodigiously to the already $142 billion (and counting) housing bailout attributable to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Not housing for the poor, mind you, nor even for the middle-class — luxury homes. The real-estate market is so depressed at the moment that the median sale price of a single-family home is less than $170,000. Even in high-cost areas like Los Angeles, the Wall Street Journal reports, it has plunged to less than $325,000. Yet the Republican House — installed by the Tea Party in a sea-change election to be the antidote to Obamanomics — decided the taxpayers should guarantee FHA loans up to $729,750. Had they not acted, the public obligation would have been reduced to “only” $625,500 per FHA loan — couldn’t have that, right?

Most every sensible person realizes the housing market will never recover until it is allowed to bottom out — meaning no more price supports, period. Yet, thanks to Republican leadership, the FHA marches on, under the Fannie/Freddie radar. As the Journal’s editors elaborate, though the agency now guarantees a whopping $1.1 trillion, its capital reserve against this astronomical liability is $2.6 billion — too small to be considered even a pittance. Leave aside that this is illegal: It’s less than an eighth of the meager 2 percent reserve federal law requires. The reserve amounts to a leverage ratio of 422:1, a metric by which, the Journal editors quip, Lehman Brothers was comparatively “risk-averse.” With GOP at the helm, the ratio is up over a thousand percent since the salad days of 2009, when it was a more Lehman-like 33:1.

In their pre-election pledge, Republicans promised to “End Government Control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” They explained that the government-backed mortgage giants had “triggered the financial meltdown by giving too many high risk loans to people who couldn’t afford them.” GOP leaders thus committed to “ending [Fannie and Freddie’s] government takeover, shrinking their portfolios, and establishing minimum capital standards,” which they projected would save $30 billion.

Sure. Let’s put aside that Fan and Fred are still open for business — and structuring executive bonuses to rise in direct proportion with taxpayer bailout tabs. The pledge studiously avoided mention of the FHA. Now, thanks to GOP leadership’s good offices, this government mortgage guarantor now sports expanding portfolios, capital reserves acknowledged only in the breach, and the potential for hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. As the Journal notes, FHA loan down-payments can be as low as 3.5 percent — at a time when market conditions have prudent lenders insisting on 20 percent.

The FHA debacle and the excellent WSJ editorial about it were hard to forget this week when the vaunted deficit “supercommittee” — another joint Obama-GOP soap opera — collapsed in failure. Unlike Journal editors and maverick senators, a number of us Hobbits alwaysthought the debt-ceiling deal from which sprang the supercommittee was pathetic: It enabled President Obama to incur staggering new debt for a nation already drowning in red ink without any meaningful reduction in spending. But the Journal’s postmortem was truly rich.

The editors dismiss as a “Beltway fable” the Democratic talking point that the supercommittee flopped because of GOP resistance to tax increases. True enough, but then they counter with a Beltway fable of their own: to wit, the real problem is that “the two parties disagree profoundly on a vision of government. Democrats don’t believe they need to do more than tinker around the edges of the entitlement state while raising taxes on the rich. Republicans think the growth of government is unsustainable and can’t be financed no matter how much taxes are raised.”

In truth, the two parties are largely in agreement: The blob must grow. Yes, Obama Democrats want to grow it by about $6 trillion over the next decade, but Republicans are nearly as bad. Writing with Reason editor Nick Gillespie, NRO Cornerite Veronique de Rugy points out that the GOP would grow it by close to $5 trillion — a 30 percent increase.
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No Inflation?

The monetary policy of targeting nominal gross domestic product (NGDP) is starting to come into vogue in mainstream economic and political circles. Christina Romer, the architect behind President Obama's first stimulus failure and professor of economics at the ideology vacuum known as the University of California, Berkley, recently penned a New York Times editorial on the issue:

Mr. Bernanke needs to steal a page from the Volcker playbook. To forcefully tackle the unemployment problem, he needs to set a new policy framework - in this case, to begin targeting the path of nominal gross domestic product.

Nominal G.D.P. is just a technical term for the dollar value of everything we produce. It is total output (real G.D.P.) times the current prices we pay. Adopting this target would mean that the Fed is making a commitment to keep nominal G.D.P. on a sensible path.

More specifically, normal output growth for our economy is about 2 1/2 percent a year, and the Fed believes that 2 percent inflation is appropriate. So a reasonable target for nominal G.D.P. growth is around 4 1/2 percent.
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Sounds simple enough, right? All Ben Bernanke and the technocrats at the Federal Reserve need to do is simply leave the switch to the money-printer on "high" setting and watch prosperity flow as dollars engulf the world. Problem is, Bernanke is already printing at roughly a rate of 15% annually for the past 6 months. The Consumer Price Index, which was fixed in the late '90s to undervalue the inflation rate so much that PIMCO head Bill Gross famously called it "a haute con job," is already running at 3.5% for the year. A recent report from Mail Online out of the U.K. showed that Brits can save 50% on their Christmas shopping by hopping across the pond to the U.S. -- a clear sign of an ever-weakening dollar.

Romer, like many neo-Keynesians, is convinced that if inflation could just be ginned up a little more, we could all feed on a free economic lunch. Pesky things like speculative asset bubbles (housing, anyone?) don't concern her, despite the fact that newly created money always enters the economy through different sectors.

Another issue with "targeting NGDP" is what economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek called "The Pretense of Knowledge." Alan Greenspan famously dropped interest rates to historically low levels to fight the dot-com bubble burst he created with the same policies in the late '90s. This easy credit financed a housing bubble in turn. Greenspan was often labeled the "maestro" during his time as Fed head because of his supposedly wondrous skills at "guiding" the economy through interest rate manipulation. One deep recession later, and we can all see how apt a term that is now.

The idea behind targeting NGDP assumes that Bernanke, after failing to boost the economy for over three years, can somehow hit a target that's dictated by the actions of billions acting homogenously. Putting money in the hands of banks and individuals doesn't guarantee that said money is spent in a fashion to boost NGDP. As financial blogger Mike "Mish" Shedlock puts it, "[f]or starters the Fed cannot spend money, it can only lend it. Thus the Fed has at best an indirect affect on GDP." The real danger lies in the overshooting of a target which can lead to out-of-control inflation. To think that just a few men are capable of coordinating the independent spending habits of hundreds of millions is sheer idol-worshiping at the altar of governmental central planning.
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Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/the_problem_with_the_feds_targeting.html#ixzz1eolUHfdg


If you ask me, I think what we're experiencing isn't in fact closer to a "growthless" recovery than to a jobless one. Because GDP started to grow more than a year and a half ago, but with the exception of just a couple of quarters, growth has not been noticeably above its trend rate of about 2-1/2 percent a year. I don't rejoice at the news that we added 216,000 jobs in March. About a hundred thousand of that 216,000 is needed every month just to keep up with the growth in the labor force. At this rate of job growth, it would take most of the decade to replace the eight 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost in the recession.
Christina Romer
Chairwoman of Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors
 
Obamanomics: Walk Like an Egyptian (OWS)!

The Chamber of Commerce’s Mr. Khalil also reports a black market erupting in the failing Egyptian currency:

Khalil believes that banks have the needed supply to stabilise the market but are afraid to transfer money to their branches and exchange companies at this time.

[ :D We forced our banks to take on a lot of cash too! ]

As is the case during all crises, Khalil added, the black market has flourished, where the dollar is sold at an even higher price. This leads to a further weakening of the local currency. “People just look to invest in the safe haven of the dollar without thinking of the repercussions on the pound,” he said.

It is entirely understandable that the Egyptian mob wants to help itself to the contents of armored cars, considering that the Egyptian press and blogs have reported for months that the country’s leaders are stealing rice, diesel oil, propane, and other commodities whose distribution is controlled by state companies. If everyone is stealing, why shouldn’t the man in the street get his share, too? Massive theft from state warehouses has been reported widely in Egyptian print and Internet media, but under the mainstream media’s affirmative action policy for failed states, not a word about this has made it into the conventional press.

Al Ahram adds that it will be hard for Egypt to obtain foreign aid under the circumstances:

Depleted reserves and the outflow of investments can only be compensated by international aid. Egypt turned down the offer of a $3.2 billion financing facility from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this summer, in a move that the then Minister of Finance Samir Radwan attributed to Egypt’s ruling military’s reservations about increasing foreign debt.

Hazem El-Beblawi, minister of finance in the now resigned cabinet, said last week that the country is reconsidering taking the loan. But CI Capital’s Mansour ruled out this possibility: “The IMF loan to Egypt may be muted on the back of such unrest and the reshuffling of the government — which will further undermine investors’ confidence.”

Cairo has so far received in-principle offers of aid totalling well over $10 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. However, it did not get even half this sum so far in what analysts attribute to reservations many Gulf countries hold against the fact that former ally Mubarak is facing trial.

The Obama administration, the mainstream media, and the liberal punditeska sit insensate before this hideous spectacle like children at a matinee of “Peter Pan,” hoping that Tinkerbell will come back to life. “If you believe in the Arab Spring, clap your hands!”
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http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11...currency-democracy-in-action/?singlepage=true

Yeah, China might be done here...
 
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