the Obama’s have officially EXITED REALITY…
Category Archives: economy
Booming banks say consumers may not see lower mortgage rates – The Washington Post
Fed actions to reduce mortgage rates may be helping banks more than borrowers
Fed actions to reduce mortgage rates may be helping banks more than borrowers
via Booming banks say consumers may not see lower mortgage rates – The Washington Post.
Keeping Up Statistical Appearances – Ron Paul
Last week, supporters of the current administration rejoiced over job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS). For the first time since the administration came to power, the official unemployment number fell below 8%. Keynesian cheerleaders all claimed the numbers meant we are surely on the road to economic recovery, just in time for Christmas, and also, the election. Others saw through this ruse.
The situation on the ground looks nothing like a recovery. 23 million people are still out of work or chronically underemployed. This number is expected to rise dramatically next year. The situation in Washington should not give anyone cause for optimism. Politicians refuse to look honestly and intelligently at the cause of our economic malaise, and so real solutions are not taken seriously or acted upon. It is much easier and less painful to simply recalculate the numbers and redefine the terms until a rosier picture is presented. There is only blind hope that at some point, for some reason, things might change. But nothing will change for the better if we only stay the course.
The truth is the long term solutions to our economic quagmire involve some short term pain. Re-evaluating the economic role of an institution as insidious and behemoth as the Federal Reserve will inconvenience some people, and those people happen to have a lot of power. Similarly, the idea of ending government programs and closing down superfluous departments will always upset someone because it means someone will stop getting a government check.
No one wants to upset the apple cart, even if all the apples are rotten.
Not all of the unemployed are counted in the BLS unemployment numbers. This is no secret. In 1994 government statisticians came up with the term “discouraged worker” to remove entire swaths of people from the unemployment statistic. Now all the government has to do to improve the unemployment numbers is discourage people from looking for a job.
Far more unintended consequences are created in Washington than jobs.
Ideally, the business sector should be able to depend on sound numbers from the BLS, but smart business leaders know that trust in these numbers leads to bad decisions and failure. In regards to the recent jobs numbers, investor Jim Rogers recently stated “I have learned not to take advice from the government, especially the US government, which frequently misleads its citizens.” He also noted the election just around the corner, suggesting timing as an extra incentive to keep fudging the statistics.
The real drivers of the productive economy can’t afford to take risks based on false numbers. This is why economist John Williams created Shadow Government Statistics, utilizing more traditional methodologies and definitions to show business decision makers the real economic picture, warts and all. He shows the real unemployment rate to be a staggering 22.8%.
This is a difficult figure to accept as the actual truth. Perhaps if the politicians did, the people would finally demand real change and real solutions. Perhaps they would consider that all of the so-called stimulus spending, quantitative easing and mountains of regulation from Washington has only crippled the economy. Perhaps people would come to understand that fewer checks handed out from the public sector would mean more checks available in the private sector, and a return to real prosperity instead of just the appearance of it.
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent – NYTimes.com
A painting of 17th-century Venice, with a view of the banks of the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace, by Leandro Bassano.
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By CHRYSTIA FREELAND
Published: October 13, 2012
IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.
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Keiser Report: Slippery Snake Split Strategy (E353) – YouTube
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss workers of the world ‘uniting’ to give up their rights and nations of the world ‘uniting’ to give up their sovereignty. And the IMF sees for Europe an Irish like future where JP Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America and the Big Four accounting firms write the laws. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Nick Verbitsky, director of CONFIDENCE GAME, about the civil mortgage fraud suit filed against JP Morgan.
U.S. Sues Wells Fargo: Yet Another Bailed-Out Bank Accused of Fraud | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
Earlier this year, Charlie Munger, who is billionaire Warren Buffet’s right hand at Berkshire Hathaway and a sort of self-proclaimed mad oracle of Wall Street, made some interesting comments. He bashed people who buy gold, delivering an all-time amazing quote:
Gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939 but civilized people don’t buy gold – they invest in productive businesses.
Munger, if you might remember, is the same gazillionaire dickhead who two years ago ripped people experiencing post-crash economic hard times, saying they should “suck it in and cope” and that anyone who wants to complain about the Wall Street bailouts should realize they were “absolutely required to save your civilization” (Munger thinks a lot about “civilization”). He added that even if you didn’t like them, “you shouldn’t be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger.”
Some of those bailouts we shouldn’t have complained about, of course, were directed at one of Munger’s favorite companies – banking giant Wells Fargo, in which Munger and Buffett are heavily invested. Wells Fargo got as much as $36 billion in federal aid after the crash and got a massive push from the government to help it buy up the dying crash-era megabank Wachovia for $12.7 billion, a shotgun wedding that created the second-biggest bank in America. Wells Fargo not only got $25 billion in TARP funds just before it bought Wachovia, it got a special tax break from then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, which some reports say was worth as much as $25 billion to WF at that time.
This is all just background for the latest news: Wells Fargo is being sued by the State for vast fraud in the mortgage markets. The U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, yesterday brought a case against WF seeking “hundreds of millions of dollars” in damages for what it says is a decade of fraudulent behavior, in which WF wrongfully certified more than 100,000 mortgages as being eligible for federal mortgage insurance. Basically, Wells Fargo screwed the FHA and HUD by mass-approving loans without regard for whether they were defective or not. From the L.A. Times:
When Wells Fargo discovered problems with the loans, it failed to notify HUD, which administers the FHA program, as required, the suit said. The action alleges more than 10 years of misconduct.
“The extremely poor quality of Wells Fargo’s loans was a function of management’s nearly singular focus on increasing the volume of FHA originations – and the bank’s profits – rather than on the quality of the loans being originated,” Bharara’s office said in a statement.
The action by the U.S. Attorney here in New York comes on the heels of another suit against Chase brought last week by Eric Schneiderman in Obama’s Mortgage Fraud Task Force. That action alleges similar mortgage-related scumbaggery by Bear Stearns, which Chase acquired in another government-brokered, market-concentrating shotgun wedding in early 2008.
So in just a week, we’ve seen two pretty big actions brought against the Coke and the Pepsi of the American commercial banking world. We’ll see how they pan out, but it’s interesting, if nothing else.
So just to recap Munger’s comments: gold is not an investment for civilized people, it’s for panicked Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Civilized people, according to Munger, instead invest in productive businesses like Wells Fargo, which according to this new suit spent a decade committing mass fraud and dumping tens of thousands of dicey loans onto the lap of the taxpayer. If we think about it in retrospect, Wells Fargo then got rewarded for years of bad behavior by receiving tens of billions more in bailout money, which it used to buy a dominating market share – artificially inflating its share price for the next generation, to the benefit of wrinkly old greedheads like Charlie Munger. And if you don’t like it, you should suck it in and cope.
I wonder what Munger thinks about his investment now. Is it still civilized?
U.S. Sues Wells Fargo: Yet Another Bailed-Out Bank Accused of Fraud | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.
Keiser Report: Bust-a-Bankster (E351)
In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss whether it’s time to start loving bankers as former Mayor Ken Livingstone suggests and they also wonder if the flying naked short selling witch caught by religious police in Saudi Arabia is, in fact, Blythe Masters covering an oil trade. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Aston Walker – aka the Birmingham Looter – about whether he was ever offered a deferred prosecution agreement for his crime of looting during the 2011 riots and ask whether he would have been granted immunity had he offered the loot as an infinitely rehypothecated collateralized looted H&M clothes bonds.
Popping The “Black Friday” Myth | ZeroHedge & WSJ
And so another urban legend falls, this time of the retail “doorbuster” ploy known as “Black Friday“, whose only goal is to get as many gullible US shoppers into retail stores with promises of massive discounts and unbeatable bargains. As it turns out the promises are completely hollow, in based on an analysis by the WSJ, those highly touted Black Friday deals aren’t deals at all, and in fact the bulk of the “discounts” are smaller compared to comparable price cuts throughout the year. In fact, the only thing that is true about the day that launches Holiday shopping, is that it is a great demonstration of the herd effect in play, where people line up in droves just because other people line up in droves. In the meantime, everyone else has already managed to snag that much desired purchase long ago and at a lower price. Of course, if this key day that anchors the start of the profitable retail shopping season is relegated to the dustbin of urban legendry, then retailers’ already negligible margins will be cut even further, leading to severe adverse economic consequences for a country whose economy is 70% based on consumption, and which is already on the edge as said consumer is largely tapped out and whose credit cards have been maxed out long ago.
After crunching two to six years’ worth of pricing data for a number of typical holiday gifts, The Wall Street Journal has turned up the best times to go deal hunting — and they almost never involve standing in the freezing cold all night.
It turns out that gifts from Barbie dolls to watches to blenders are often priced below Black Friday levels at various times throughout the year, even during the holiday season, and their prices follow different trajectories as the remaining shopping days tick down.
Watches and jewelry, typical last-minute quarry for well-heeled shoppers, get more expensive as the season progresses, according to Decide Inc., the consumer-price research firm that gathered and analyzed the data for this article. Blenders, which might sit around for months if they aren’t bought in the holiday window, get much cheaper at the end.
Presenting this visually:
America’s Moral Degeneracy – PaulCraigRoberts.org
On May 31, 2010, the Israeli right-wing government sent armed military troops to illegally board in international waters Gaza aid ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. The Israelis murdered 8 Turkish citizens and one US citizen in cold blood. Many others were wounded by the forces of “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
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ACA: An Impossible Mandate | The Beacon
ACA: An Impossible Mandate
By John C. Goodman | Monday October 8, 2012 at 10:09 AM PDT
Most Americans will be required to have health insurance beginning on January 1, 2014. The type of insurance you have, where you will get it, and what you will pay will be determined not by you and your employer or by free choice in the marketplace, but by government. Here are the biggest problems the mandate will create. (For more details, please consult my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.)
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