This is all too late - the seismic shift is happening and it is too late to prevent the change. The world will be a different place in a couple of years time - positive or negative change? We will not know until we know.
well, one thing that is hypocrisy is how our Congress, with bodies falling on the floor due to "stress" is how they will not confront the brazen, institutionalized age discrimination going on in the U.S. labor market. If the were engineers, every single one of them would be discriminated again.
....a cherished goal of CA Republicans the &^%$ will hit the fan blades. Millions of 'parents' rely on the school system to warehouse their kids.
Here as in DC the Democrat Party seems unable to realize that they must play smash mouth football not engage in the 'bi-partisanship' Kumbaya that they seem drugged by.
At least the social drone Caroline Kennedy dropped out of contention for Senator of NY. But the true arrogance of our 'inane bureaucracy' and we need to include both House and Senate in the bureaucratic category is that a man with a brain tumor is still Senator.
What effective human organization would leave a man with a brain tumor in a place of critical decision making. Only one with a supreme indifference to it's ability to perform. Only one where the rewards and perks for the 'Leader$hip' insulate them from reality.
Okay enough hammering on the political aspects by me.
Wow, just wow. and they are delaying payments to the most vulnerable, the blind, disabled SSI payments.
I'm sorry but they need to enforce immigration law in part simply to reduce the budget drainage. It's estimated to be about $10.5 billion in the hole and the underground economy in that state has to be massive.
Obviously the housing bubble pop is #1 reason they are in such trouble but still....
I'm sorry it's beyond practicality.
#2 is they are an inane bureaucracy of entrenched politicians that never lose their seats.
now that is very interesting. New wave of "slum" landlords?
Yeah, read Tony's link to some of the well known left political bloggers on Obama and the financial sector.
Myself I am interested in what works and it does seem both left-right are extremely pissed about the massive amounts of money as well as their is not consensus it eased the credit crunch, although some (Calculated Risk, Bonddad)are saying it did.
....the 'S&L Crisis and Lordy the causes were pretty much the same. Yeah, securitization.... Ask John McCain he probably remembers some good tricks.
Here's some anecdotal evidence: Foreclosures were 35% of the sales in LA county according to DataQuick last month. Now who is buying those houses and why? My second mortgage broker provides the answer. When I asked her how business was she told me she's keeping busy financing folks who are buying up every foreclosed rathole they can afford running in cash contractors for a quick clean up and renting them out.
Now why would they do that?
The answer should be obvious.
They are not making any more land in close to urban centers where the jobs are now and will be found in even heavier concentrations as transportation becomes more expensive or even impossible as the Feds abandon Amtrac and the roads disitegrate.
This 'housing crisis' is not a new thing I've been through 7 or eight...lost track. Too be sure they were a lot smaller than this one but the solution is known. Buy up the 'damaged assets' and wait until the market rebounds as it will. People will always need housing.
The apparent problem is Obama's playing to the idiot policies of the Republicans. I had my doubts about his 'bi-partisan' approach and was roundly vilified for same during the campaign but have tried to remain optimistic. Is Obama trying to mousetrap the Republicans. Who can say?
If he caves to the Republicans on this tax cut crap the party will come to an abrupt end. The 'stimulus package' as it seems to be now, we don't really know yet, will be a failure because if fails to address the root of the financial problem.
The free fall in housing valuation.
The solutions to most all of our problems are, as President Obama has said many, many times, known. The root cause remains.
The insistence of a small band of idiots, and if you listen to such as Cornryn you will see what I mean, who are trying to salvage what remains of their party at the expense of the rest of us.
As you know I monitor the web statstics and this is actually quite a surprise.
It's not a matter of posting on a large traffic blog like dailykos or even cross posting around.
It seems the blogs that get read the most on EP are:
1. not cross posted elsewhere
2. it's almost viral. Basically it's some original material or something one cannot read elsewhere and then someone reading our blog plain picks it up and links to it from some major financial or economic or political website.
Why do they pick up on some and not others? Well, if I knew the answer to that one I think I could charge $450/hr to be a content SEO consultant....(ha ha) but the above seems to give a few clues on this.
The Vox Populi are the post which have the most reads of all time and that can give some clues on what people pick up on.
That's why I pointed to what Sweden did and they basically said "tough luck" to all of those investors, executives, shareholders. Anyone who took on risk or was also responsible for the original debacle. They made them all lose their money whereas we seem hell bent on making sure the people who created this mess not only keep their money, but get more money and power.
We especially have a problem in that public service, government is a revolving door with the private sector, esp. large multinational corporations as lobbyists.
Right now it seems the U.S. taxpayer, they are simply nationalizing the risk and privatizing the profits.
The possibility of nationalization and if it is indeed the path of least pain for the U.S.
While you are reporting the U.K. cannot nationalize I am seeing instead they will not.
Was Sweden with total liabilities in this level of boat in 1992? There they just said to the shareholders to any bank executive, sorry, bummer, you just lost all of your money and set the toxic assets to zero and they did not suffer any major collapse.
So, this is the next question, how to make worthless publicly that which is worthless and not collapse one's entire economy?
George Will does us the inestimable favor of affirming where the problems began, when he writes mournfully today,
[Obama] acquires power just as the retreat of the state has been abruptly reversed. The retreat began 30 years ago this May, when Margaret Thatcher became Britain's prime minister; it accelerated 20 months later when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated; it acquired an exclamation point a year after that, when adverse market forces compelled French President François Mitterrand to abandon socialism in a nation receptive to it.
Way back at the beginning, last August, I saw a post from somebody who was well connected, if a bit strange, that British Banks were overleveraged 200:1 into the CDS market. It appears that assessment was right....
The country stands on the precipice. We are at risk of utter humiliation, of London becoming a Reykjavik on Thames and Britain going under. Thanks to the arrogance, hubristic strutting and serial incompetence of the Government and a group of bankers, the possibility of national bankruptcy is not unrealistic.
...
It is finally dawning on the Government that the liabilities of the British banks grew to be so vast in the boom years that they now eclipse the entire economy. Unfortunately, the Treasury is pledged to honour those liabilities because it has guaranteed not to let a British bank go down. RBS has liabilities of £1.8 trillion, three times annual UK government spending, against assets of £1.9 trillion. But after the events of the past year, I wager most taxpayers will believe the true picture is worse.
Meanwhile, the assets are falling in value. This matters, because post-nationalisation these liabilities are now yours and mine.
And they come piled on top of the rocketing national debt, charitably put at £630 billion, or 43 per cent of GDP. The true figure is much higher because the Government has used off-balance sheet accounting to hide commitments such as PFI projects.
Add to that record consumer indebtedness and Britain becomes extremely vulnerable. The markets have worked this out ahead of the politicians, as usual, and are wondering what to do next. If they decide our nation is a basket case, they will make it so.
The PM and the Chancellor , both looking a year older every day, tell us that for their next trick they will buy more bank shares, create a giant insurance scheme for bad debt, pledge to honour liabilities without limit, cross their fingers and hope it all works. The phrase "bottomless pit" springs to mind for a reason: that is what they have designed.
This is what a post-nationalization problem looks like. What will our nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac look like in two years?
Trade should NEVER consist of finished goods. Instead it should consist solely of intellectual property. In other words, instead of selling them merely a line and a hook, why not sell them the plans for a factory to make lines and a factory to make hooks? And instead of re-importing finished goods back into the United States and wasting all of that useless shipping, why not have factories as close to the consumer as possible, so that we're only shipping ideas, not goods?
Here's a great wish list- extend the ratings system to comments as well. That way, a great comment like "For those so inclined" could be voted all the way up to the front page if enough people agreed.
This comment should be an Instapopulist, at least. One thing I must say is....we can't fuck this up if people are pushing for nationalization of the banks.
I am working on a response to Drum today, but I want to get this crucial point out here as soon as possible: without a national industrial policy, saving the financial system really makes no difference. The key is to move the U.S. economy off of its base of burning fossil fuels and into the future. That requires a national industrial policy; whatever you want to call it to calm the demons of free market ideologues doesn't matter. Whatever we end up doing with the financial system will only succeed if we tailor what we do to this objective of moving the U.S. economy away from burning fossil fuels and into the future. The financial system should be serving that great national purpose, not obstructing it, has it has for the past three decades, by channeling credit into the building of suburban sprawl and speculation on the trend of peak oil - which just a few months ago delivered us gasoline at nearly five bucks a gallon. With that caveat in mind, I bring to you this from the editors of investment website Seeking Alpha.
When a bank is nationalized, shareholder equity should be written to zero, and existing management should be handled as roughly as the law allows. If we have a bit of courage, we should impose haircuts or debt-to-equity conversions on unsecured creditors, but I don't think we have that kind of courage. "Toxic" assets should be revalued at pennies-on-the-dollar market bids or else written to zero and hived into "bad banks". Once we have a conservative valuation of the assets and know exactly what is owed, we'll know how much public money would be required to cobble a robustly funded bank from the wreckage. However, if we recapitalize "too big to fail" banks without restructuring them, we will quite deserve our next mugging. We had better cut these monsters into little, itty, bitty pieces. We should embed strict size and leverage limits into their itty, bitty charters, restrict their ability to recombine, and then hire management to run the little things on strictly commercial terms. Hopefully we will change what it means for a bank to run on commercial terms — we should create a tax and regulatory structure that penalizes scale and leverage across the board. Better yet we should decouple the payment system from risk investment by reorganizing banking functions into "narrow banks" and credibly not-guaranteed investment vehicles.
At the end, they provide an extremely extensive and useful list of links - all within the past few days - on the issue of nationalizing the banks.
Just leads to the Weimar Republic and what it did to Germany (think not being able to buy a loaf of bread with money you can carry without mechanical assistance).
My real point is that freidgeld- expiring money- is the way to go. Yes, we need massive inflation to counter the massive deflation. But no- we don't have to put up with that inflation sticking around.
But you're right- the elites will never let it happen. Let somebody normal pay back their loan with money that will go "poof" and disappear after a while?
... EP crossposts. Then I can just load the boilerplate from a text file, then copy the text from the Midnight Oil after the boilerplate, and it will be guaranteed to be a unique combination of text.
This is all too late - the seismic shift is happening and it is too late to prevent the change. The world will be a different place in a couple of years time - positive or negative change? We will not know until we know.
well, one thing that is hypocrisy is how our Congress, with bodies falling on the floor due to "stress" is how they will not confront the brazen, institutionalized age discrimination going on in the U.S. labor market. If the were engineers, every single one of them would be discriminated again.
....a cherished goal of CA Republicans the &^%$ will hit the fan blades. Millions of 'parents' rely on the school system to warehouse their kids.
Here as in DC the Democrat Party seems unable to realize that they must play smash mouth football not engage in the 'bi-partisanship' Kumbaya that they seem drugged by.
At least the social drone Caroline Kennedy dropped out of contention for Senator of NY. But the true arrogance of our 'inane bureaucracy' and we need to include both House and Senate in the bureaucratic category is that a man with a brain tumor is still Senator.
What effective human organization would leave a man with a brain tumor in a place of critical decision making. Only one with a supreme indifference to it's ability to perform. Only one where the rewards and perks for the 'Leader$hip' insulate them from reality.
Okay enough hammering on the political aspects by me.
Wow, just wow. and they are delaying payments to the most vulnerable, the blind, disabled SSI payments.
I'm sorry but they need to enforce immigration law in part simply to reduce the budget drainage. It's estimated to be about $10.5 billion in the hole and the underground economy in that state has to be massive.
Obviously the housing bubble pop is #1 reason they are in such trouble but still....
I'm sorry it's beyond practicality.
#2 is they are an inane bureaucracy of entrenched politicians that never lose their seats.
now that is very interesting. New wave of "slum" landlords?
Yeah, read Tony's link to some of the well known left political bloggers on Obama and the financial sector.
Myself I am interested in what works and it does seem both left-right are extremely pissed about the massive amounts of money as well as their is not consensus it eased the credit crunch, although some (Calculated Risk, Bonddad)are saying it did.
....the 'S&L Crisis and Lordy the causes were pretty much the same. Yeah, securitization.... Ask John McCain he probably remembers some good tricks.
Here's some anecdotal evidence: Foreclosures were 35% of the sales in LA county according to DataQuick last month. Now who is buying those houses and why? My second mortgage broker provides the answer. When I asked her how business was she told me she's keeping busy financing folks who are buying up every foreclosed rathole they can afford running in cash contractors for a quick clean up and renting them out.
Now why would they do that?
The answer should be obvious.
They are not making any more land in close to urban centers where the jobs are now and will be found in even heavier concentrations as transportation becomes more expensive or even impossible as the Feds abandon Amtrac and the roads disitegrate.
This 'housing crisis' is not a new thing I've been through 7 or eight...lost track. Too be sure they were a lot smaller than this one but the solution is known. Buy up the 'damaged assets' and wait until the market rebounds as it will. People will always need housing.
The apparent problem is Obama's playing to the idiot policies of the Republicans. I had my doubts about his 'bi-partisan' approach and was roundly vilified for same during the campaign but have tried to remain optimistic. Is Obama trying to mousetrap the Republicans. Who can say?
If he caves to the Republicans on this tax cut crap the party will come to an abrupt end. The 'stimulus package' as it seems to be now, we don't really know yet, will be a failure because if fails to address the root of the financial problem.
The free fall in housing valuation.
The solutions to most all of our problems are, as President Obama has said many, many times, known. The root cause remains.
The insistence of a small band of idiots, and if you listen to such as Cornryn you will see what I mean, who are trying to salvage what remains of their party at the expense of the rest of us.
In short, the problem is political.
Is Obama tough enough to win this fight?
Guess we are gonna find out, eh?
As you know I monitor the web statstics and this is actually quite a surprise.
It's not a matter of posting on a large traffic blog like dailykos or even cross posting around.
It seems the blogs that get read the most on EP are:
1. not cross posted elsewhere
2. it's almost viral. Basically it's some original material or something one cannot read elsewhere and then someone reading our blog plain picks it up and links to it from some major financial or economic or political website.
Why do they pick up on some and not others? Well, if I knew the answer to that one I think I could charge $450/hr to be a content SEO consultant....(ha ha) but the above seems to give a few clues on this.
The Vox Populi are the post which have the most reads of all time and that can give some clues on what people pick up on.
That's why I pointed to what Sweden did and they basically said "tough luck" to all of those investors, executives, shareholders. Anyone who took on risk or was also responsible for the original debacle. They made them all lose their money whereas we seem hell bent on making sure the people who created this mess not only keep their money, but get more money and power.
We especially have a problem in that public service, government is a revolving door with the private sector, esp. large multinational corporations as lobbyists.
Right now it seems the U.S. taxpayer, they are simply nationalizing the risk and privatizing the profits.
It's what the heck you do with it *after* you nationalize. Nationalization is just a change in ownership.
The possibility of nationalization and if it is indeed the path of least pain for the U.S.
While you are reporting the U.K. cannot nationalize I am seeing instead they will not.
Was Sweden with total liabilities in this level of boat in 1992? There they just said to the shareholders to any bank executive, sorry, bummer, you just lost all of your money and set the toxic assets to zero and they did not suffer any major collapse.
So, this is the next question, how to make worthless publicly that which is worthless and not collapse one's entire economy?
George Will does us the inestimable favor of affirming where the problems began, when he writes mournfully today,
Way back at the beginning, last August, I saw a post from somebody who was well connected, if a bit strange, that British Banks were overleveraged 200:1 into the CDS market. It appears that assessment was right....
The realization is finally dawning on people.
This is what a post-nationalization problem looks like. What will our nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac look like in two years?
However, I think I've got a meta point on him:
Trade should NEVER consist of finished goods. Instead it should consist solely of intellectual property. In other words, instead of selling them merely a line and a hook, why not sell them the plans for a factory to make lines and a factory to make hooks? And instead of re-importing finished goods back into the United States and wasting all of that useless shipping, why not have factories as close to the consumer as possible, so that we're only shipping ideas, not goods?
Here's a great wish list- extend the ratings system to comments as well. That way, a great comment like "For those so inclined" could be voted all the way up to the front page if enough people agreed.
This comment should be an Instapopulist, at least. One thing I must say is....we can't fuck this up if people are pushing for nationalization of the banks.
to read more material on the economic and financial peril to our republic.
First, Stirling Newberry crucifies the Obama administration. Here's the short version, from today.
And here's the long version, from yesterday. It is not for the feint of heart, nor for those with limited attention spans.
Two days ago, Kevin Drum threw down the gauntlet and challenged anyone to present a good case for the nationalization of the banks. This, of course, echoes the interesting brawl between Bonddad (Why TARP Was -- And Is -- Still Necessary) and Jerome a Paris (Oh boy - TARP was not necessary and it's a trillion dollar robbery) on Dailykos the same day.
I am working on a response to Drum today, but I want to get this crucial point out here as soon as possible: without a national industrial policy, saving the financial system really makes no difference. The key is to move the U.S. economy off of its base of burning fossil fuels and into the future. That requires a national industrial policy; whatever you want to call it to calm the demons of free market ideologues doesn't matter. Whatever we end up doing with the financial system will only succeed if we tailor what we do to this objective of moving the U.S. economy away from burning fossil fuels and into the future. The financial system should be serving that great national purpose, not obstructing it, has it has for the past three decades, by channeling credit into the building of suburban sprawl and speculation on the trend of peak oil - which just a few months ago delivered us gasoline at nearly five bucks a gallon. With that caveat in mind, I bring to you this from the editors of investment website Seeking Alpha.
At the end, they provide an extremely extensive and useful list of links - all within the past few days - on the issue of nationalizing the banks.
Some nationalization links
Just leads to the Weimar Republic and what it did to Germany (think not being able to buy a loaf of bread with money you can carry without mechanical assistance).
My real point is that freidgeld- expiring money- is the way to go. Yes, we need massive inflation to counter the massive deflation. But no- we don't have to put up with that inflation sticking around.
But you're right- the elites will never let it happen. Let somebody normal pay back their loan with money that will go "poof" and disappear after a while?
and since you mention sed, I'll assume you are not someone who just knows how to use "email". ;)
also, everything is LAMP+.
... EP crossposts. Then I can just load the boilerplate from a text file, then copy the text from the Midnight Oil after the boilerplate, and it will be guaranteed to be a unique combination of text.
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