A few longer reads for your weekend pleasure:
• The Worst of Times to Buy Stocks? (Barron’s)
• Greece Defaults, and Tries to Move On (WSJ) see also The purpose of all financial systems is to match savers who crave safety with investors who take risk (Economist)
• Fed Said to Balk at Bank Payouts Over Loan-Loss Estimates (Bloomberg)
• Even Dairy Farming Has a 1 Percent (NYT Magazine)
• Addison Wiggin: Creative Destruction Means to Die and Let Live (Daily Reckoning) but see When Debating the Auto Bailout, Consider Lehman’s Fate (NYT)
• The Final Facebook Forensic IPO Analysis: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly (BoomBust Blog)
• Fade in China, Made in America (WSJ)
• Postrel: Fight Birth-Control Battle Over the Counter (Bloomberg)
• Rush, Peter Gabriel, Fab Thunderbirds want off Limbaugh’s show (LA Times) see also Rush Limbaugh should take lessons from Imus (Washington Post)
• Slaughterhouse-Five: ‘So it goes’ (Times Literary Supplement)
What are you reading?
>
Signs of Encouragement in the Jobs Reports
Source: NYT
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Preventing the next financial crisis..
http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/the-kids-are-not-alright-1047351-1.html
The liberal establishment wants Limbaugh off the air, preferably disgraced forever.
The conservative establishment detests a plethora of progressive hosts.
Let’s propose a trade for the Fantasy Broadcasting League:
Limbaugh’s head for cable channels Current and MSNBC. All hosts involved will be banned from uttering a peep in public for life.
Approximately equal audiences will be impacted.
The country will be bettter off.
~~~
BR: I disagree — the political insiders know that the radical right scares Moderates & Independents, and that is who decides elections these days.
The economist article claims, “… There seems to have been either a structural increase in the demand for safe assets, or a structural decline in the supply, or both…”
In other words, to paraphrase Irving Fischer, Treasury yields have reached a permenently high plateau.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?get_gallerynr=2863
Jobs created minus new citizens in the workforce. We haven’t created a net positive in jobs enough jobs in 10 years, and we’re adding more deficit every year under the illusion this is the answer.
Keynesian spending has never worked. I’ll post my beauty contest again:
Keynesian Beauty Contest
$50 gift certificate for the winning example:
Keynesian stimulus was used in the
country _____ in the years ______,
during a __ recession/__ depression,
then the economy turned around within 2
years and then produced ___ years
of lasting growth after this. The
increased tax revenue was enough to
pay off all the deficit the stimulus
had created within ______ years.
Keynesian stimulus has been used nigh
on 27 years here in the US, and the
deficits keep rising. Same for 19 of
the 20 western democracies: All
have massively increased deficits that
are larger per capita than the US over
the last 2 decades. None are paying
back the increasing debts. Three
(Greece, Italy, and England) are
abandoning stimulus and are forced to
adopt, not choosing, austerity. Canada
has barely less debt per capita, but it too
is now admitting they are failing to
control deficits.
Austerity is not a conservative “idea”,
it’s a forced march, a response to failure.
theexp,
If Limbaugh loses any more sponsors…
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2012/03/rush-peter-gabriel-fabulous-thunderbirds-rush-limbaugh.html
…the Left should put together a superPAC to keep him on the air. He does more harm to the GOP prospects than any one person.
Billionaires have little influence…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/ct-biz-0310-ken-griffin-interview,0,4421212.story
The Old Get Richer, the Young Get Poorer
http://blogs.smartmoney.com/encore/2012/03/06/the-old-get-richer-the-young-get-poorer/
The Slaughterhouse Five piece brought me back to the first time I read Vonnegut in college. There honestly is something that appeals to the adolescent who first picks him up, but it stays with you. Slaughterhouse Five blew me away when I read it, and I quickly followed with Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions (my personal favorite after SF) and the rest. I think it’s the wit, something sorely lacking today in most writing or opinion pieces. The juxtaposition between that matter-of-fact telling (marching with the clogs in the snow in SF) and the weary “and so it goes” mixed in with finding something funnily ironic in each part is very young adult isn’t it?
Perhaps he could have done that to the financial crisis because I can’t think of anything else to say about it but “and so it goes”.
Matt O’Brien
Income Inequality Is Real, It’s Global, and It’s Worst in the U.S.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/income-inequality-is-real-its-global-and-its-worst-in-the-us/254248/
The Old Get Richer, the Young Get Poorer
http://blogs.smartmoney.com/encore/2012/03/06/the-old-get-richer-the-young-get-poorer/
(I’ll try posting this again. It disappeared after my last attempt to post.)
MSNBC does skew to the left, but they give Joe Scarborough three hours a day. There is no voice that offers any similar degree of counterbalancing on any right wing media source.
I can’t believe the CDS insurers are going to make the holdouts whole. Next time (Greece again, Port etc)everybody will hold out, there’s got to be some sand in this vaseline.
Maybe they will only make them equal to the haircutees arguing they only owe them cash equal to the cash value of the bonds accepted by the haircutees, ie the form of settlement not the amount.
I was thinking the ECB could come in and pay nearly sticker at the auction so the CDS writers don’t lose anything more than their premium and then force Greece to redeem these additional bonds they are holding at full value like their earlier bonds and dump the additional $3B cost on the Greek state which they don’t care about. But this would reward the holdouts and everybody would hold out the next time.
the CDS writers had to give them something or they’d have to put up the “Gone Out of Business” sign.
APPLE LATE TO THE PARTY, AGAIN
Apple recently rolled out it’s “New” iPad, but Samsung had already rolled out it’s Galaxy Note 10.1, which is not just lighter and thinner than the iPad, but actually multitasks, has an integrated IR port for controlling a home theater, has expandable MicroSD storage, and a USB 2.0 host for wired mice and keyboards, among other advantages.
SMACKDOWN: SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 10.1 vs THE NEW APPLE IPAD
DA CHART
Entire nation of Kiribati to be relocated over rising sea level threat
The low-lying Pacific nation of Kiribati is negotiating to buy land in Fiji so it can relocate islanders under threat from rising sea levels.
8:59AM GMT 07 Mar 2012
In what could be the world’s first climate-induced migration of modern times, Anote Tong, the Kiribati president, said he was in talks with Fiji’s military government to buy up to 5,000 acres of freehold land on which his countrymen could be housed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/kiribati/9127576/Entire-nation-of-Kiribati-to-be-relocated-over-rising-sea-level-threat.html
————-
50 million ‘environmental refugees’ by 2020, experts say
Feb 21, 2011
WASHINGTON — Fifty million “environmental refugees” will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jnW80NlFZ259UCgMAHSd3ekHutiQ?docId=CNG.aa651167cd0af745b3cb395cf1d402e3.c41
Another reason why we are not seeing visiting UFO’s every day. Other planets did not get knocked off kilter by a big asteroid hit early in their formative history….
————–
What If There Were No Seasons?
Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 09 March 2012 Time: 05:24 PM ET
When a Mars-size object collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, it knocked off a chunk that would become the moon. It also tilted Earth sideways a bit, so that our planet now orbits the sun on a slant. Those were two huge changes. Now, over the course of the year, the amount of sunlight striking the Northern and Southern hemispheres varies as they wobble back and forth — first the Southern Hemisphere leaning sunward, then the Northern. This cycle drives Earth’s seasonal variation.
It’s a lucky thing, too. Without Earth’s tilt, humanity would be in a sorry state.
….
http://www.livescience.com/18972-earth-seasons-tilt.html
What am I reading?
The end of the legal system that made America great:
Too Big to Jail
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/johnson29/English
by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, and a professor at MIT Sloan
AtlasRocked,
“Jobs created minus new citizens in the workforce. We haven’t created a net positive in jobs enough jobs in 10 years”
But that was as a result of failed RightWing economic policies.
Prior to that, we had the highest National Labor Participation Rate in decades, after raising taxes on the Rich & Corporate, raising the Federal Minimum Wage twice, and stricter environmental regs, just to name a few.
“Keynesian spending has never worked.”
Of course it has.
* Before the stimulus bill was enacted in early ‘09, the GDP in the 4TH QTR of ’08 (during the previous administration) was a NEGATIVE 8.9%.
* After the stimulus bill was enacted, GDP steadily improved: 1ST QTR ’09: -6.7% > 2ND QTR ’09: -0.7% > 3RD QTR ‘09: +1.7% > 4TH QTR ’09: +3.8%.
* That was a swing of more than 12% GDP from negative to positive.
* The almost 750,000 a month job losses during the previous administration prior to the stimulus was replaced by an average of almost 200,000 a month job gains. That’s a reversal approaching a MILLION jobs a month.
The so-called “Keynesian spending” stimulus worked like a charm.
FDR’s ‘New Deal’ was an even more dramatic and fantastic success.
“Austerity is not a conservative ‘idea’ ”
Of course it is. It’s a failed RightWing “idea”. It is failing DISASTROUSLY everywhere it is being enacted around the globe, right before our eyes.
~~~
You really need to stop regurgitating out of the RightWing’s DUMB playbook.
BR: I disagree — the political insiders know that the radical right scares Moderates & Independents, and that is who decides elections these days.
~~~
BR,
with..
http://search.yippy.com/search?query=Black+Box+Voting&tb=sitesearch-all&v%3Aproject=clusty
how could We, ever, know “…who decides elections these days…”?
BR-
I keep on hearing people that I know say that the US bailout of the autoindustry was a great success and that the US AUto industry was doing wonderful… Is this true?? I thought that GM was partly owned by some foreign companies??? Any articles that you have written or posts on any bearish view on the auto bailout would be great- or any BR readers- please post
ctx you have confused GM with Chrysler. Chrysler is mostly owner by Fiat.
austerity is a failed experiment. look at Ireland. they went full throttle into it. and their economy is much smaller than it was before their and they really cut in ways that if the conservatives ever really accomplished, it would be Pyrrhic victory as they would be out of office permanently
one of my reads today: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203370604577265632205015846.html
Romney is not wooden in the humor department:http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/mitt-romneys-humor-an-appreciation/254282/?google_editors_picks=true
Meredith Whitney has been getting pounded about her call for widespread muni defaults. Maybe it was just a case of premature, uh, you know…like Case Shiller with their housing collapse call and jim Cramer’s housing bottom call.
This is trickle down economics, the feds reduce their reimbursements to the states and now the states cut back their reimbursements to the localities and the localities raise property taxes on tapped out homeowers contributing at least a rivulet to the steam of foreclosures. What happens when a homeower is maxed out on his mortgage, his salary increases a couple percent a year and his property taxes increase double digits year in and yer out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/nyregion/deficits-push-municipalities-to-desperation.html?emc=eta1
Recent debate over contraception comes as GOP loses gains among women
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-suffer-among-female-voters/2012/03/08/gIQANzfM1R_story.html
Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With G.O.P.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/us/politics/centrist-women-tell-of-disenchantment-with-gop.html
Illinois GOP Primary
“…Santorum holds a 35 percent to 29 percent advantage in the 96 counties outside the Chicago area, where Republican voters tend to be more conservative…”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-illinois-poll-20120311,0,1617767.story
Chicks vs. Hicks ’12