Surprise, surprise. Treasury Secretary Geithner backed off the well known and well documented currency manipulation by China. Anyone believe that's because China now owns the United States?
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner pushed Group of Seven officials to soften criticism of China last month after his accusation that the nation was “manipulating” the yuan strained ties with the U.S.’s second- biggest trading partner, said a person briefed on the matter.
G-7 finance ministers and central bankers on Feb. 14 welcomed “China’s fiscal measures and continued commitment to move to a more flexible exchange rate.” By contrast, the group in April 2008 pressed for “accelerated appreciation” of the yuan.
This is just unbelieveable. The Boston Globe reports:
The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits up to $250,000, tried for years to get congressional authority to collect the premiums in case of a looming crisis. But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized - and that bank failures were so infrequent - that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.
Freddie Mac said Wednesday it will ask the government for nearly $31 billion in additional aid after posting a gargantuan loss of more than $50 billion last year as the U.S. housing market worsened.
The mortgage finance company posted a loss of $23.9 billion, or $7.37 per share, in the fourth quarter of 2008. That compares with a loss of $2.5 billion, or $3.97 a share, in the year-ago period.
The recent loss was driven by $13.2 billion in hedged trades, $7.2 billion in credit losses from the declining housing market conditions and $7.5 billion in writedowns of the value of its mortgage-backed securities. The company also took a charge of $8.3 billion for now-worthless tax credits.
This is already a historic record for a budget deficit, and we still have 7 months to go.
Lower tax revenue and massive government spending on the bank bailout pushed the federal deficit to $765 billion in the first five months of the budget year, well on its way to hitting the Obama administration's projection of a record annual imbalance of $1.75 trillion.
The Treasury Department also said Wednesday that the February deficit reached $192.8 billion. That's a record for the month and up 10 percent from a year ago, but below analysts' expectations of $205.7 billion.
With seven months left in the current budget year, which ends Sept. 30, the deficit already has shattered last year's record annual gap of $454.8 billion.
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Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing recently posted a leaked memo from AIG to the Treasury in support of their request for another $30B. You can read the whole memo here.
Exports in February dropped 25.7 percent from a year earlier, compared to a forecast of a 5 percent decline. Imports fell 24.1 percent, against a forecast of a 25.0 percent drop.
Greetings everyone, and welcome to a new edition of the Manufacturing series! Been ill again, so haven't kept up. Rest assured, I'm in somewhat top form now. But enough about me, we got manufacturing stuff to talk about! Some interesting news out there, but first, of course the Numbers!
The Numbers
Times have been tough for manufacturing, we all know this. And the current business cycle has been especially cruel. Month after month of job losses, plant closures, the pairing down of work hours, you name it. In some places, this has sadly been old hat, just ask the folks around Detroit. It's as if you could amalgamate this country's industrial base as a very large person, say back to the middle of the last century, and is now looking like one of those sickly persons one sees in a famine. But could we start seeing a bottoming?
It's well known and well documented illegal labor lowers wages, displaces American workers from jobs and stopping illegal employment is the key to stop the illegal immigration problem.
Yet if you can believe this, our supposed "Labor centric" Senators just voted to kill e-verify, which is the method to make sure workers are legal who get jobs...especially those Stimulus jobs
This is just unbelievable, think about it, do you really want your tax dollars going to give illegal labor a job with this level of unemployment for Americans?
Here is the vote tally and check out all of those lying Senators who voted to table (i.e. not pass) this simple system.
Two key indicators point towards continued problems in the financial industry. One indicator is bank debt.
(Bloomberg) -- Bank debt is as stressed as when Bear Stearns Cos. had to be bailed out and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, according to analysts at BNP Paribas SA.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows contracts on the Markit iTraxx Financial index of credit-default swaps linked to the senior debt of 25 banks and insurers were more expensive today than the Markit iTraxx Europe corporate index. That hasn’t happened since Lehman went bankrupt in September and, before that, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s takeover of Bear Stearns and it reflects “systemic stress” in the financial system, according to BNP Paribas.
Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation this week to cap interest rates charged by credit card companies that now slap consumers with rates of up to 30 percent. "This is money that comes right out of their hides and it hurts," Sanders told The Burlington Free Press. His legislation would impose 15 percent interest rate ceiling. It also would limit fees. “We are going to introduce a national usury law which will prohibit any financial institution from charging these outrageous rates,” he told Thom Hartmann’s nationally-syndicated radio show. “These loan sharks wear three-piece suits, but they’re not much different than those guys who break people’s knee caps.”
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