Specifically, one Jay Nordlinger of the National Review Online, who just posted an article titled, “GOP life on the down low, &c. “
My guess is that this guy is not up on cultural slang…..Like shooting fish in a bloody barrel.
H/T Matthew Yglesias for the catch.
The recount in Minnesota is getting increasingly conentious in Minnesota, with ballot challenges on the increasing on both sides, (click image for current graph) and the Franken campaign expressing concerns about missing ballots to the Secretary of State.
Additionally, the Franken campaign is claiming that Norm Coleman and His Evil Minions&trade are using bogus challenges to keep his total above Franken to influence the canvassing board, which will make the final decision on challenged ballots.
It’s going to be a while before this is all sorted out.
Gee, the updated numbers for US GDP are in, and they have gotten worse, going from an annual rate of contraction of -0.3% to -0.5%.
In an effort to staunch the bleeding, the Federal Reserve has announced a new sh#@pile buy:
The Federal Reserve announced on Tuesday that it will initiate a program to purchase the direct obligations of housing-related government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)–Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks–and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. Spreads of rates on GSE debt and on GSE-guaranteed mortgages have widened appreciably of late. This action is being taken to reduce the cost and increase the availability of credit for the purchase of houses, which in turn should support housing markets and foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally.
They are also opening up a facility for
consumer and small business loans.
This took down 30 year mortgage rates to a record low, down 1-1/8 percentage point to 4-7/8.
Of course, right now, the banks are so skittish that they are unlikely to do a mortgage unless the property is sold at a seriously depressed price anyway.
This is actually good sense, as the Case-Schiller home price index fell 17.4% year over year.
That’s probably why the Libor is trending up again. Too much uncertainty, so banks want more for their overnight loans.
Then again with the number of banks characterized as “troubled” by the FDIC jumped from 117 in the 2nd quarter to 171 in the 3rd quarter, the highest number in 13 years.
It’s no wonder that some of the technical wonks who watch the stock market are noting that this is the most volatile market ever, with average daily swings over the last 50 trading days of 3.82%.
By way of comparison, this number was 0.33% in February.
Oil fell a bit to day, to $50.77/bbl, and I think that the markets are starting to wonder about just how much money that the Federal Reserve will print, so the dollar fell on the news of the new Fed lending facilities.
Doesn’t anyone remember what happened the last time Palin was in close proximity of a large turkey?
Nell Lancaster at a Tiny Revolution has a very good point, “President-elect Obama just made public the choices for his administration’s ‘economic team.’ What sort of signal does it send that a Secretary of Labor was not among them?” (emphasis mine)
On the good news side of the equation, we have John Brennan withdrawing his name from consideration as head of the CIA.
I guess that all the DFHs* objecting to his consistently pro-torture, pro rendition, and anti-civil rights statements won.
We are also seeing reports that Robert Gates will be the choice for SecDef, and that he would continue in the role that he assumed under Bush and His Evil Minions™ for at least a year into the Obama administration.
Not too impressed with that. I have not trusted him since Iran Contra, and defense procurement is completely out of control, and a change is needed.
Gates is not a change the system kind of guy.
*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies, which is what bloggers who care about right and wrong are, you know?
This is just plain common sense, and the case involves a gay man who took in two abused kids as foster children, but the Florida Department of Children & Families wants to continue to pay this guy to be a foster parent, so they are appealing.
This is the second ruling on this in the past 3 months.
It turns out that Florida in a fit of Anita Bryant induced insanity, passed a law prohibiting gay adoption in 1977.
Well, first they missed a payroll, and noe Eclipse Aviation has filed for reorg under Chapter 11, but it also, “simultaneously announced an offer for the sale of its assets for a combination of cash, equity and debt to an affiliate of Etirc Aviation, its largest shareholder.”
It looks like there may be an auction, and they filed in Delaware (where else) to get Debtor in Possession funding.
Like I said, put a fork in them, they are done.
So says New York Post
….. although we didn’t think it would be possible to silence Ann Coulter, the leggy reactionary broke her jaw and the mouth that roared has been wired shut . . .
The fact that I’m amused makes me a bad person….Oh well…
Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, and Lawrence Summers, aka the human stain, as director of the National Economic Council.
Lawrence Summers, crap. This man leaves a trail of misery wherever he goes.
Melody Barnes, to head the Domestic Policy Council.
Christina Romer as head of the Council of Economic Advisers, she’s cut her teeth in the study of depression era economic, like, here is the scary part, Ben Bernanke.
Peter Orszag director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Peter Schiff completely owning financial pundits, including the unbelievably stupid Ben Stein (at 4:00_ proving that he’s a better comedian than he id an economist.
And he sucks as a comedian.
*Owned.
How Tom Daschle scares conservatives, because they think that if he fixes healthcare, the average citizen will see a benefit, and thus be inclined to trust government to work.
There you have it, Conservatism is terrified by the possibility of making people’s lives better.
Can you imagine a more morally bankrupt ideology than one that demands failure?
That’s the short read on Dan Ariely’s reseasrch, he is a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University:
We did this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low so that we could pay people amounts that were substantial to them but still within our research budget. The lowest bonus was 50 cents — equivalent to what participants could receive for a day’s work in rural India. The middle-level bonus was $5, or about two weeks’ pay, and the highest bonus was $50, five months’ pay.
What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.
(emphasis mine)
So, we have people over compensated and for work that mostly really does not to be done, (financials have exploded relative to the rest of the economy over the past few decades) and given bonuses for under-performing, and now we find out that the bonuses make them do a crappier job.
Delightful.
So far US Pledges to the financial industry exceed $7.7 trillion.
Current money actually laid out? $4.2845 trillion. To put that in perspective:
That’s $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources.
Yep, that’s what you get when finance industry guys manage the finance industry for 35 years.
We now have reports that Hank Paulson is considering asking for the 2nd $350 billion installment of TARP.
Great googley moogley.
I’m just saying.
He’s lied every step of the way. He’s been wrong every step of the way.
He has studiously cushioned his friends from consequences, creating moral hazard, every step of the way.
Give him nothing….Except perhaps Robert Rubin as a cell mate.
Now it appears that the US Attorney for the district, who was married to a Republican operative, and allegedly recused herself….Well, not so much:
It was those connections that led Ms. Canary, under pressure, to publicly withdraw from the Siegelman case in May 2002 — she “completely recused herself,” said the acting United States attorney, Louis Franklin — as proof that the prosecution of Mr. Siegelman would be free of partisan bias.
Yet in her complaint, the Justice Department employee, Tamarah T. Grimes, cited several instances suggesting Ms. Canary maintained a close watch on the case. Ms. Grimes said a legal aide in the office reported on Mr. Siegelman’s trial to Ms. Canary or her top deputy “every day, sometimes several times per day by telephone.” Once, she observed Ms. Canary “frantically pacing in the executive suite” after a courtroom blowup, “pleading with someone” to get on the phone to “tell Louis he has to control his temper.”
Ms. Grimes also disclosed an e-mail message written by Ms. Canary commenting on legal strategy in the case and suggesting to aides that Mr. Siegelman not be allowed to “comment on court activities in the media.” Ms. Grimes, who is also in a dispute with the department related to her accusations that the Siegelman prosecution team had harassed her, cited the affidavit of a former legal aide in the Montgomery office, Elizabeth Jane Crooks, who wrote that “the morning that the trial started, the U.S. attorney herself carried food and beverage over to the courthouse to support the ‘Trial Team.’ ”
Some more people who need to go to jail to show what’s wrong.
To quote Pat Boone, they “should be displayed publicly and have all of his fingers and toes broken, and then publicly executed so they who think [that] those like the
imprisoned Manson and Sirhan are glamorous — will think differently.”
Though to be fair to Mr. Boone, he was talking about a neo-Nazi murderer who went after children in a day care center, but the offense against society here is at least as corrosive.
So the US government is putting in $20 billion for non-voting preferred stock and guaranteeing over $300 billion in securities.
They are getting only 8% on this, and remember that Citi’s market cap was $22 billion. That $20B should have given the Feds 90% control of the company.
They should have taken it over, and fired (no golden parachute) upper management…Particularly Robert Rubin.
Instead, it’s a suspension of dividends, and some cosmetic restrictions in executive pay.
Mark Thoma has the rundown of informed reactions. A bailout was necessary — but this bailout is an outrage: a lousy deal for the taxpayers, no accountability for management, and just to make things perfect, quite possibly inadequate, so that Citi will be back for more.
Amazing how much damage the lame ducks can do in the time remaining
Paul Kedrosky goes into a bit more detail in Good Bank, Bad Bank, and F$#ked Bank ($# mine):
Here is the gist:
- Citi will carve out $300-billion in troubled assets, which will remain on its balance sheet
- The first $37-$40-billion in losses on those assets will go to Citi
- The next $5-billion in losses will hit Treasury
- The next $10-billion in losses will go to the FDIC
- Any more losses will go to the Fed
- There will be no management changes at Citi, because, you know, they are all fine and upstanding people who have done nothing wrong
- There will be some compensation limitations, but those have not yet been made clear
To be clear, this is not a “bad bank” model. Assets are not, apparently, being taken off the Citi balance sheet and put into another entity walled off from the Citi biological host. Instead, they are being left on the Citi balance sheet, but tagged and bagged for eventual disposal via taxpayers. In other words, we are, given the size and nature of the maneuver, creating a new variant on the good/bad bank model that I hereby christen “f$#ked” bank. You do that, of course, when removing all the toxic assets from a “good” bank’s balance sheet would leave no bank behind at all.
(emphasis mine)
You know, I was wrong when I said that Robert Rubin should be fired. He should be pursued by criminal authorities with the same Javertian intensity that that corrupt prosecutor did in the Julie Amero case (previous post).
Robert Rubin needs to go to jail for a very long time.
You may remember the story.
She was substitute teaching, and because the sysop at her school turned off the spyware protections, her computer was innundated with sexually oriented popups.
They charged her with providing pornography to minors, and she faced up to 40 years in jail.
She lost a baby, and after a judge threw out the conviction:
In June of 2007, Judge Hillary B. Strackbein tossed out Amero’s conviction on charges that she intentionally caused a stream of “pop-up” pornography on the computer in her classroom and allowed students to view it. Confronted with evidence compiled by forensic computer experts, Strackbein ordered a new trial, saying the conviction was based on “erroneous” and “false information.”
The “false information” was the prosecution presenting a detective with a few hours of computer training as a forensic expert.
But the prosecutors have continued to pursue her, and finally, they managed to Well, coerce a guilty plea for disturbing the peace, and force her to give up her teaching license.
I’m not sure as to whether this is just hubris, or fear of a lawsuit, but it should be against the law….In fact, it may be, depending on how you read the law.
They took her baby, her career, and her health, she has been in and out of hospital since this all started, and they kept going after her, because they were unwilling to do the right thing.
If only she played Lacrosse, perhaps the DA’s license to practice law would be pulled.
The WaPo has a story about how Countrywide Mortgage went regulator shopping to find a more compliant agency, they ended up going with the Office of Thrift Supervision, who wooed the now disgraced mortgage lender. Why?
Winning Countrywide was important for OTS, which is funded by assessments on the roughly 750 banks it regulates, with the largest firms paying much of the freight. Washington Mutual paid 13 percent of the agency’s budget in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, according to OTS figures. Countrywide provided 5 percent. Individual firms tend to make a larger difference to OTS finances than other bank regulators because the agency oversees fewer companies with fewer assets.
Yes, let’s make sure that regulators are paid by the industries that they regulate.
Let’s make sure that regulators are forced to compete for who they regulate.
That way, they won’t regulate at all.
Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is looking at a $500-700 billion package, and he wants it on Obama’s desk for inaugeration day.
I think that we have to start with the fact that U.S. Treasury Credit Default Swaps risk premiums just hit record levels.
If that sounds arcane and obscure, that’s because it is, because the brokers like it that way, but here is a slightly clearer statement, returns on insurance against a defaults on US Treasuries hit a new high….Meaning that investors are pricing in the possibility of a US government default.
This means that a Lot of people are betting that the full faith and credit of the United States of America means nothing.
The US defaulting is the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man moment of US society, and an increasingly large segment of the investing world is betting on it.
At its core, the problem is that this bubble is something that people cannot walk away from, housing and shelter, and the realtor-pimps are now saying that existing home sales are softening, though the staid New York Times is saying that home prices are plunging.
Existing home sales down over 3.1%, and prices down 11.3% year over year.
In the mean time, the Citi bailout is pushing on both currency and energy, with
the dollar falling, because people realize that the printing presses are running non-stop.
That being said, the falling dollar is not helping the ruble, where the Russian central bank has reduced support for the currency for the 2nd time in as many weeks.
It also drove oil up about a fin spot, though retail gasoline prices fell for 68th straight day.
It’s not going to get better any time soon, because MasterCard is reporting falling retail sales.
Meanwhile, Calculated Risk’s Credit Crisis Indicators are slightly worse today.