Oh ye Gold bugs, are you gonna love this one. Looks like India is buying the rest of IMF gold, 201.3 tons.
India is ‘open to buying’ more gold from the International Monetary Fund, the Financial Chronicle newspaper reported, without saying where it got the information.
Ok, we are already way past the Federal Reserve's previous predictions of unemployment. Remember that? "Oh, unemployment won't hit 10%" according to Bernanke testimony. The unemployment rate is at 10.2%, U6 is 17.5% and growing.
Good god, can we get some real labor and jobs policy going that deals with the real facts of labor economics? These numbers imply we're going to destroy hundreds of thousands of middle class lives....permanently.
Most officials said it would take five or six years for growth, unemployment and inflation to return to levels consistent with the central bank’s goals, the minutes said. Some participants said it may take longer, according to the Fed.
The BEA released it's revised Q3 2009 GDP today. Q3 GDP was revised downward to 2.8%.
The second estimate of the third-quarter increase in real GDP is 0.7 percentage point lower, or $23.7 billion, than the advance estimate issued last month, primarily reflecting an upward revision to imports and downward revisions to personal consumption expenditures and to nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by an upward revision to exports.
Think our trade deficit isn't a problem? Think again. So, we imported more stuff and people bought less. From the tables, imports jumped 20.8% in Q3 2009 and contributed a whopping -2.53 to overall GDP.
Think when companies go bankrupt their executives aren't still getting millions? Think Again.
A new study from Harvard Professors Bebchuk, Cohen and Spamann, The Wages of Failure tells us that regardless of running a company into the ground, executives make sure they get theirs.
The study focuses on Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.
We find that the top-five executive teams of these firms cashed out large amounts of performance-based compensation during the 2000-2008 period. During this period, they were able to cash out large amounts of bonus compensation that was not clawed back when the firms collapsed, as well as to pocket large amounts from selling shares.
Wall Street CEO's are deaf to Main Street while awarding themselves record bonuses from taxpayer bailout money. Democrats in Congress, in the White House, and regulators in the Federal Reserve who propose a permanent TARP bailout program are also deaf to Main Street.
But even the IMF has heard the increasingly angry rumble of Main Street, and they are warning the plutocrats that their insatiable greed will only be tolerated for so long.
The public will not bail out the financial services sector for a second time if another global crisis blows up in four or five years time, the managing-director of the International Monetary Fund warned this morning.
The Dollar bottom is forecast to be a long way away according to most forecasters.
The most accurate dollar forecasters predict the world’s reserve currency will continue sliding even when the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates, which policy makers say is an “extended period” away.
Standard Chartered Plc, Aletti Gestielle SGR, HSBC Holdings Plc and Scotia Capital Inc. say the dollar will depreciate as much as 6.4 percent versus the euro. About $12 trillion of fiscal and monetary stimulus, the world’s lowest borrowing costs and a record $4 trillion of government bond sales between 2009 and 2010 will weigh on the currency, they said. So will the nation’s 10.2 percent unemployment rate and signs that the economic recovery may falter, they said.
October sales went up 10.1% from September. Sales are also at 2007 levels. NAR attributed this surge to the expiring first time home buyer tax credit and said expect sales to decline for the rest of 2009, Q1 2010.
Existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – surged 10.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate1 of 6.10 million units in October from a downwardly revised pace of 5.54 million in September, and are 23.5 percent above the 4.94 million-unit level in October 2008. Sales activity is at the highest pace since February 2007 when it hit 6.55 million.
Inventories
Inventories are at their lowest level in 2.5 years.
The impending state budget crisis is something that has been covered in depth here. Just to remind everyone just how bad it's going to get, a picture that says a couple hundred billion dollars.
Few people realize that for the past fifty years the policy of the United States government has been to get rid of jobs.
So says former Senator Fritz Hollings in SOBER UP, a piece calling for an end of the inane rhetoric and a start to seriously formulate trade, labor policy that is in the national economic interest.
Hollings notes on the Stimulus:
With stimulus, we bail as fast as we can to stop the leaks, but do nothing to plug the hole in the hull ripped by offshoring. Stimulation can be a total success and we’ll still loss more jobs than are created.
Hollings calls cash on what globalization is really all about:
Globalization is nothing more than a trade war with production looking for a country cheaper to produce. What we have now is a trade war, without guns.
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