Tuesday Reading
By Barry Ritholtz - June 8th, 2010, 4:04PM
Some reads for a Tuesday afternoon . . .
• Kass: Placing Our Bets, Once More, on the Banks? (TheStreet.com)
• U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP (Bloomberg)
• The dreadful potential of frugality (FT)
• Bernie Madoff, Free at Last (NY Mag)
• Report: Revolving Door Spins Quickly Between Congress, Wall Street (Open Secrets)
• I’m not sure if I like the New Bloomberg.com site (Bloomberg)
• How a far-sighted 17th-century scientist saw the future (Sydney Morning Herald)
• Funny! BP Public Relations (Twitter)
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June 8th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
I *hate* the new bloomberg site. It looks generic, it’s unresponsive and certain things, like the sovereign yield curves, are extra clicks away or I haven’t found them yet. I don’t know how told them to go to that white and orange thing, but it’s gross, too bright, distracting and reuters-ish, which eww.
June 8th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
I agree…RE:Bloomberg…that’s well in to ugly/awful/hard on the eyes etc…
rt
June 8th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
That new Bloomberg site is appalling. They should just keep the one they’ve got, why change when its not broken?
June 8th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Seriously…orange?
June 8th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Reminds me of HTML 1.0!
June 8th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
from an ex-lobbyist relative o’mine:
keep in mind a couple of things a) I could have been considered in
that group of 1,400 at one point. My firm registered all lobbyists
for all clients even if you did no work for them so, depending on how
a firm files their disclosure reports, these numbers could be
deceivingly inflated. b) It’s a huge industry and covers a lot of
ground – big and small – but this chooses to highlight only the main
“offenders.” It also covers associations that represent smaller
community banks, credit unions, etc…. in the “financial services”
industry who, I doubt, many would argue are the bad guys, however,
they still are affected by regulation and require lobbyists.
June 8th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Looks to me like they’re trying to dumb down the Bloomie site a bit with the huge font size and colors. The race to the bottom lives on!
June 8th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
The site Bloomie has now is great. Of course it’s time to change it.
June 8th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Only Buy the Good Ones
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/06/only_buy_the_go.html
June 8th, 2010 at 6:01 pm
my eyes started watering from the brightness at bloomberg beta – yuck
June 8th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
About debt.
Annexing the debt to GDP numbers is always going to have an adverse effect in recession time, rigor will also have an adverse effect but is more permanent than the fabricated numbers modern governments are willing to dish out.
As a side-note, debt wasn’t such a big deal, even for Greece, before bankers became strapped for cash.
The debt porn we are seeing right now reminds me of the televangelists of the 80s, God (as in Goldman) is short of cash; well that’s too bad because unless they restructure the grand ole debt of our Greek, Spanish and Portuguese friends and the list goes on, they are shit out of luck, they are going to default.
We have two choices:
accept the current Ponzi scheme of public (public, my arse) debt and live in a constant rigorous state of affairs, a little like feudal times but more debt on top of us or…
just fucking default, who owns this gigantic debt anyhow?
The bankers who just got bailed out?
The Chinese who can’t get out their own way and actually participate rather than profit?
Take the whole thing down and start from scratch, but this time put a leash on those banking parasites.
June 8th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
I BLAME OBAMA FOR THIS…
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-07/business/ct-biz-0608-preexisting-kids-20100607_1_health-coverage-children-s-health-insurance-program-health-reform-debate
…I agree with the Tea Partiers, this is a travesty. Somebody needs to yell at someone in a town hall!
I wish Bush was back so we could have an emotional guy making life or death decisions. I miss him.
Thank god for the GOP who has clearly, logically explained to us how terrible Reid and Pelosi are for dumping this socialist nonsense on hard-working people who will never see a dime of this government largess… they’re adults after all!
…and of course – the CHICAGO Tribune is the MTM, of course! – not a mention about the poor children of the CEO’s of the large health insurance companies, and not an ounce of feeling for them from the Android-in-Chief. Who’s praying for them? Here’s hoping they can get a few scraps at dinner time, once their parent’s reasonable – decided by the free market! – pay packages get slashed to be able to sacrifice for Obama’s socialist paradise and death march of every businessman and businessperson in this once-number-one land.
June 8th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
New bonds to help cash-strapped states also benefiting Wall Street
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/06/AR2010060603606.html?wpisrc=nl_headline
New federally subsidized bonds that have proven wildly popular in helping cash-strapped state and local governments fund roads, schools and other construction projects also offer a windfall to a less obvious beneficiary: Wall Street banks.
Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and other firms that dominate the U.S. underwriting market stand to earn millions, if not billions, of dollars under a planned expansion of the Build America Bonds program, which provides tax credits to local and state governments seeking to finance capital projects. Major banks lobbied heavily for the program’s expansion under a jobs bill recently passed by the House and under consideration in the Senate.
“These are sweetheart deals for everybody but the taxpayer,” said Steve Ellis, vice president for programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense. “The real winners are the banks who are putting together these deals, raking in great fees and trading the bonds in the secondary market. . . . Investors can turn around, resell and pocket a quick profit. Nice gig if you can get it.”
———–
Keep on truckin’ . More of the same. The rape of J6P via states and municipalities on the verge of bankruptcy.
Pile that debt on and bank those bonuses.
Thanks to the Senate and lobbyists. Nice catchy title tho : ” Build America Bonds”.
June 8th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
The new Bloomberg format totally sucks.
Lakers in 5.
June 8th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
From “Revolving Door Spins Quickly Between Congress, Wall Street”…
“Organizations in the financial services sector have deployed at least 1,447 former federal employees to lobby Congress and federal agencies since the beginning of 2009,”
Our engineers, physicists, etc. heading for Wall St is brain drain. This is crap that clogs the drain drain.
I wonder how many times a week “Hey, your and my kids and grandkids will be fine” is said in a DC bar?
Bloomberg no longer wants commoners to feel as if they are peeping a terminal. Bright and white! for the sleepy sheeple. I like that the chart is now on the same page as the summary when you look up a security, though.
June 8th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
“BP’s latest oil spill response update for June 4th says the total amount of the dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1,021,000 gallons.
But what most people don’t know is that the active ingredient of the toxic chemical dispersant, which is up to 60% by volume, being sprayed by BP to fight the Gulf oil spill is a neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and aquatic life, causes cancer, causes damage to internal organs such as the liver and kidneys simply by absorbing it through the skin and may cause reproductive side effects.
In fact the neurotoxin pesticide that is lethal to 50% of life in concentrations as little as 2.6 parts per million has been banned for use in the UK since 1998 because it failed the UK “Rocky shore test” which assures that the dispersant does not cause a “significant deleterious ecological change” – or to put that in layman’s terms it can kill off the entire food chain.
Corexit has also earned the highest EPA warning label for toxicity…”
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/06/05/amount-neurotoxin-pesticide-corexit-sprayed-bp-tops-1-million-gallons/
~~
“RTAmerica — June 04, 2010 — The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a catastrophe and as it continues to unfold wildlife and locals are bearing the worst. However, did you know that there was another spill in Alaska? Apparently, BP has another spill to deal, with but with the epic spill in the Gulf, it seems as though Alaska has been overshadowed. Greg Palast says to keep it quiet, BP officials acted like …”
http://redactednews.blogspot.com/2010/06/theres-another-bp-oil-spill-shhh-says.html
~~
“Congressman Oscar Callaway lost his Congressional election for opposing US entry into WW 1. Before he left office, he demanded investigation into JP Morgan & Co for purchasing control over America’s leading 25 newspapers in order to propagandize US public opinion in favor of his corporate and banking interests, including profits from US participation in the war. Mr. Callaway alleged he had the evidence to prove Morgan associates were working as editors to select and edit articles, with the press receiving monthly payments for their allegiance to Morgan.
One of the leading papers, The New York Times, printed the story of Congressman Callaway’s call for investigation from Washington, D.C., but the editor chose a curious and dis-informing headline for the story:…”
http://www.examiner.com/x-18425-LA-County-Nonpartisan-Examiner~y2010m6d6-Congressional-Record-JP-Morgan–Co-purchased-all-major-media-for-propaganda-1917-And-now
June 8th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
job opening = 3.1 million, unemployed > 8 million
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/06/bls-low-labor-turnover-job-openings.html
June 8th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
studying economics is brain washing?
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/06/08/the-perils-of-studying-economics/
June 8th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
global GDP chart
http://econompicdata.blogspot.com/2010/06/two-track-economic-recovery.html
June 8th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
@Mark
A little more recent, some things never change.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/02/politics/politico/main5130173.shtml
“Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive “salon” at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, non-confrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors. “
June 8th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Ike Davis!!!
June 9th, 2010 at 1:17 am
Believe it or not orange is one of the most powerful marketing colors going. They kind of canceled it out with the gray but otherwise this will probably be a net benefit for the site. I think the worst revulsion people have is with their conditioning to expect what was already there and to see such a drastic contrast
June 9th, 2010 at 1:22 am
I also generally don’t like the new Bloomberg site. It takes too long to come up and takes more time to get to get an overview. Makes CNBC look good.
But, the Television page picture quality is greatly improved over the old one: it now uses Flash, in a big middle finger to Steve Jobs and his followers. It looks like he’s making the same mistake with the iPad and iPhone as he did with the Mac. He was the first to steal the mouse paradigm from Xerox, but his control freak personality limited what hardware and software would work on Macs. He even had a head start of several years over MS and blew it. IBM compatibles running Windows were just the opposite of Macs with a sloppy, uncontrolled ecosystem of hardware and software that evolved in unpredictable ways to give us features and programs that no one anticipated; it’s somewhat analogous to the difference in speed of evolution between sexual and asexual reproduction. As a result, over 90% of personal computers run Windows.
I don’t like Google, but Android’s openness is likely to repeat something like Windows success, except this time on phones and slates. It doesn’t get all the hype that Apple can generate, but the new phones are beautiful and fast, and more importantly, developers and manufacturers don’t face artificial restrictions on what they can do. As a result, the Android market is growing rapidly and some stats show it already selling faster than iPhones in the US.
Barry: Thanks for the link to the Madoff story. Very interesting.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Brett Arends five reasons things are worse than they seem.
“…The government also reported that those workers produced 2.8% more goods and services per hour…”
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/109739/the-bad-news-bad-news-on-jobs?mod=bb-budgeting&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode
So productivity growth rises, corporations make four straight quarters of profit, corporations become more efficient and invest, hire and pay dividends to shareholders down the road… that can only be bad to a clown like Brett Arends from the WSJ opinion page when there’s a Democrat in the White House.
The blue hair and bulbous red nose is a nice look for you, Brett, just don’t trip over your big, floppy shoes.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:59 am
Nothing has changed.
Fed Finds Status Quo in bank pay
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/09pay.html
private profit at public expense, sweet
June 10th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Can’t get excited about a few billion lost by upper middle class shmoes who tried to get over and got run over….. I reserve my abiding hatred for the geniuses who gave us the ultimate ponzi schemes and will never see the inside of a jail…..the handmaidens of medicare and social security, from both parties. Madoff is the very definition of scape goat…..somebody upon whom we can project our sins, and then sacrifice…..