The next breakcame when two men who are now known to have been in the Illuminati gave John Jacob Astor a special government privilege. The two men were President Jefferson and Secretary Gallatin--both Illuminati members. The United States government had placed an embargo on all U.S. ships from sailing with goods in 1807. But Astor got special permission from these two men for his ship to sail with its cargo. His ship sailed and made close to a $200,000 profit in that day’s money. Astor strangely profited greatly from the War of 1812, which crippled almost all the other American shippers. Prior to 1817, John Jacob Astor entered into the fur trade and remained the biggest player in the fur trade until he got out of it in 1834. Over the years, he had managed to build up a monopoly. How he managed to push everyone else out is a good question.
“The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work — all counted as fully employed — rose by an additional 621,000.
Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight years ago, which never happened in previous decades.”
is to be headed by former Fed Chief Paul Volcker.
The WSJ noted today that the panel is “modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board established by then-President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, when officials worried that that the existing bureaucratic structure was inadequate to help the U.S. keep pace with the Soviet threat. The financial crisis has drawn similar worries that the government isn’t properly organized to monitor and respond to modern financial markets.”
The first thing you can do to feel better when someone gives you a gift is to realize that the giver put effort into thinking of a gift for you by going through the process if finding and buying it, or perhaps in making the gift. Don’t feel guilty when you think of this! But realize that no one made the giver think of giving a gift and no one made her go out and get it. She chose to do this herself. Many people enjoy the whole gift giving process. So the whole time, up to and including the point when they gave you their gift, they’ve been doing something pleasant and enjoying themselves.
Index funds, which represent about 10 percent of the stock market, ``got $5 billion from owning BUD.'' BUD is the ticker symbol for Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser beer. ``The stock that was added was a $500 million weight, so about $4.5 billion has to be put to work,'' said Buek. ``That money was spent across the other 499 names. To perfectly track the close, you'd want to put the $4.5 billion to work on the close.''
4 years ago Bill Fleckenstein wrote . . . "I think the party that has won, in this case the Republicans, might want to be careful what they wish for, in that both the stock and real-estate bubbles will unwind on their watch, with them in full control of the House, the Senate, the presidency and the governorships.
"Perhaps we'll all get lucky and the Republican Party will decide to pursue a flat tax, tort reform, and term limits -- the three major areas of reform which I believe could help the country become more competitive and help extricate us from the horrible fix that I see us in. However, if they continue the pork-barrel politics of the last four years, I would think that next go-round, the Republicans will be bounced from office after people's hopes are dashed in the upcoming economic turmoil."
To review the point that I made in Chapter 7 of my book "Greenspan's Bubbles" and in many columns: In the past expansion, economic growth was almost entirely about real estate. Gross-domestic-product growth, excluding mortgage-equity extraction, was almost nonexistent. In addition, when you consider that 30% to 40% of all jobs were real-estate-oriented, it's clear how hollow the economy is liable to be going forward.
Considering the capital destruction and the credit contraction now under way, I have a hard time seeing where the new jobs will come from to handle all the layoffs that are going to take place. Given that lots of marginal businesses have survived on consumers' wild spending, many of them will not make it as folks retrench aggressively. That's on top of all the carnage in anything related to real estate or finance. click here for more
Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.
Hence the financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient," as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.
The threat became more severe when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words -- and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.
The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.
That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system.
to read more about Noam Chomsky click here
``The forced sale was due to the precipitous drop in XL's share price last week,'' O'Hara said in a statement distributed by PR Newswire today.
from Barry Ritholz at Big Picture blog
To repeat my prior arguments, the proximate cause of the Housing crisis were 1) Ultra-low rates; and 2) Abdication of traditional lending standards, thanks to 3) originators ability to resell mortgages for securitization purposes, and therefore not have to worry about loan defaults.
The credit crisis was caused by 1) the above securitized mortgage paper, that was 2) rated triple AAA by Moody's and Standard & Poors, which then 3) Which was then "insured" by credit default swaps (CDS) -- the unreserved for, shadow insurance products whose exemption was made possible by the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. That legislation exempted these derivatives from any supervision or regulation. The lack of reserve requirements is why there is now $62 trillion in CDS, many of which will never pay their counter parties the promised insurance.
If you are going to blame Fannie/Freddie/CRA, or George Bush or Barney Frank, you are missing the big picture.
The fund, which was valued yesterday at $1 a share, experienced ``significant redemption pressure,'' the Boston- based company said in a statement. A drop below $1 a share, known as breaking the buck, would have exposed investors to losses.
The fund had no exposure to securities issued by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Washington Mutual Inc. or American International Group Inc., the company said.
Reserve Primary Fund, the oldest U.S. money-market fund, on Sept. 16 became the first in 14 years to break the buck. Investors pulled 60 percent of their money from the $62.6 billion fund on Sept. 15 and 16 before withdrawals were delayed.
Putnam is a unit of Canadian insurer Great-West Lifeco Inc.
The FDIC issued a report showing that the number of financial institutions on its so-called problem list rose to 117 from 90 which were reported at the end of the first quarter.
That's an increase of 30% in three months, and things look to get worse before they get better. The number of banks on the list is the most visible thing to consumers, but the amount of assets held by those problem institutions is more troubling still. The total assets of institutions on the problem list tripled. That means some pretty big players are in the additions.
Andy, now 62, on the left with me while we were enjoying a cerveza in Mazatlan. He's a great guy, good father and loving husband to his wife Helene.
Ever wonder what the actual CPI is? Here's a chart that show what todays CPI would be using the same basket of goods and services of 1990. Wow, it's 8% more than the "official" rate the government tells us today. Learn more at Shadowstats.com
In New York State, the 16 largest banks sent taxes totaling $5 million in the most recent reporting period; that compares with $173 million from the same period a year ago.
Taxes paid are down an astonishing 97%!
And this is going on throughout the United States . . . . ouch!
"It will be a number of years before Wall Street starts paying taxes again,'' the mayor said at a press conference yesterday in Manhattan. "They will carry forward all of those losses.''
There were over 100 Goldens in the park click here
1/30/08
San Francisco, CA - A report released today finds that anglers in California generate billions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue in the state, which supplies an important economic boost, particularly for rural communities. The report also recommends that a high priority be given to habitat protection and maintenance, which would increase present and future economic benefits to the state's economy.
The report was conducted by Carolyn Alkire of Environmental Economics and Policy Consulting and was released by the advocacy group California Trout to develop a deeper understanding of the factors that determine fishing's economic effects, expanding the study of this important relationship for the benefit of decision-makers and policy-makers in the state.
"We knew that fishing was important to California's economy, but now we know just how important," said Brian Stranko, CEO of California Trout. "The findings of this report make it abundantly clear that people all over the state depend on the financial infusion caused by recreational fishing, and that this beneficial effect could be increased even further by better protecting and maintaining the streams and surrounding habitats that make fishing possible. Also, by encouraging young people to get involved in fishing, the people of California can maximize the long-term value of this healthy, sustainable activity."
The Floyd Norris at the NY Times notes that the 12-month change in private sector jobs is down 125,000 jobs from may 2007 to May 2008. Since 1953, this indicator has a perfect record, identifying 9 out of 9 recessions. When it flips negative (year over year), the economy is already in recession each and every time.
You can read about it here
QSPEs can have legitimate purposes -- but they also can obfuscate the true financial condition of a bank or broker. The purpose is not to simply hide losses off balance sheet, but to get those assets off balance sheet so leverage/Tier 1 capital ratios look better. Essentially you can be much more leveraged than you appear, so that ratios like ROA and ROE look stronger than they would if they weren’t employed.
Some financial gurus wonder if "The migration of exotics to the balance sheet may be inevitable." If he's correct, it bodes poorly a quick recovery for the financials. They have years worth of leveraged derivatives on their books, and writing them down won't be quick or painless.
9th inning? Hardly.
Customer payments are more than three months late on 5 percent of loans already purchased from Detroit-based GMAC, trying to avert bankruptcy for its residential mortgage unit. That's more than double the average rate for mortgages held by the Bingley, England-based bank, it said yesterday in a statement.
May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Jerome Kerviel was able to amass 50 billion euros ($78.7 billion) in unauthorized futures positions at Societe Generale SA because of ``fragmented'' internal controls, a report commissioned by the bank said today.
Kerviel's direct manager was ``weak,'' and the hierarchy failed to ``react in an appropriate manner to several alert signals,'' said the 71-page report from a special committee of the bank's board. Unwinding those positions cost a record 4.9 billion euros, the biggest trading loss in banking history.
His supervisors missed the level of his earnings, cash flows, brokerage expenses and overlooked warnings from Eurex AG, Europe's biggest futures exchange, the report said. Societe Generale's management has said the 31-year-old former trader lied, faked documents and e-mails, and hacked into the bank's computers to carry out and conceal trades. Kerviel is currently at the center of a criminal investigation into the affair.
• The amount of trading dollars that are in dedicated short pools are tiny: About $5.4 billion That's one-seventh the size of Fidelity's Magellan Fund.
• The $5.4B dedicated short hedge funds are a sliver of the nearly $2 trillion of hedge-fund assets.
• Over the past two decades, 58% of the issues on the New York Stock Exchange have advanced, while 42% have declined -- every year.
"In the U.S. counts food as only 8% of the CPI index. Whereas, it counts for about 10% in the United Kingdom, about 15% in the rest of Europe and more than 18% in Japan."
Now here's where things get really interesting. If you consider the proportion of U.S. household spending on food by income quintile, all but the top 20% of earners spend at least 20% of their paychecks on food.
Hence, what the weighting versus the reality are very different. This means that for 80% of the country's populace, the CPI weightings are dramatically understates what the average American is experiencing in terms of their inflation versus the official CPI measure.
What is dynamic range compression? This studio effect reduces the difference between the loud and soft parts of a piece of music — recently, mastering engineers have used it to make sure every moment on a CD is as loud as possible.
The world's biggest banks and securities firms have announced $290 billion in asset writedowns and credit losses since the beginning of 2007, including reserves set aside for bad loans
now ring the bell . . . . who's next?
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