I sometimes believed a look of jaw drop would be permanently etched on my face as I watched towers implode, votes not counted, hanging chads, invasions based on obvious lies, the corruption of Congress, the false data and information being put on as news, the implosion of the value of work, the real production economy and the U.S. middle class.
Bubbles, bubbles everywhere, popping and forming, ride 'em up, ride 'em down, but eventually almost all would fall to the ground.
While digging around in the very statistically noisy initial weekly unemployment claims, which usually generate a whole lot of headline buzz and a warm fuzzy, but do not capture the real state of unemployment....
I came across this AP headline, 20 million-plus collect unemployment checks in '09.
When you know you are about to do something unpopular you try to hide it. For instance, the public would never know that over 140 banks (not counting credit unions) have gone under this year because their announced failures only happen on Friday evenings.
Another extremely unpopular event would be another round of bailouts for Wall Street banks. That's why the provisions are hidden deep within the financial reform bill.
For all its heft, the bill doesn’t once mention the words “too-big-to-fail,” the main issue confronting the financial system.
Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate’s health-care bill look minuscule.
Believe it or not, this is not the most outrageous thing Washington has done in the last week.
if we think of the United States as bearing a proportionate share, and also use the rule of thumb that one point of GDP = 1 million jobs, we’re looking at 1.4 million U.S. jobs lost due to Chinese mercantilism.
Bear in mind this is not a formal result, simply a very rough estimate put forth on his blog for discussion, not a formal research paper.
A couple of IMF researchers estimated China accounts for 0.9% of GWP (gross world product).
Since China's GDP is heavily export driven, Krugman asserts one can look at this as a negative impact on world exports., which in turn, negatively impacts purchases of goods and services from U.S. providers and this is a multiplier effect.
I frankly don't trust what the American Enterprise Institute usually has to say, but this one may be right. According to a former U.S. Treasury Peter Wallison, now at AEI, the U.S. taxpayer may lose $400 billion on the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bail outs. Here is the Bloomberg video interview
Taxpayers will lose more than $400 billion dollars
We noted Fannie and Freddie received an unlimited bail out, on Christmas Eve. no less (some present for the U.S. taxpayer!).
Update: It seems we have a bait and switch. the Chicago ISM has been revised down.
Dow Jones reports that the Chicago Institute for Supply Management revised down the Chicago PMI to 58.7 on Thursday from the announced reading of 60.0 on Wednesday. The most significant change was to the employment index that now shows contraction at 47.6 compared to the announced 51.2.
The Chicago PMI was released December 30th, with all of the headlines ablaze that the business activity index hit 60%, the highest since 2006.
Recall the Bush administration didn't lift a damn finger on China's dumping practices.
The United States imported about $91 million worth of the product from China in 2008. Steel grating is used in industrial floors, docks, ramps, drainage covers, staircases and other applications.
The trade case is one of about a dozen brought by U.S. companies in 2009 against Chinese-made goods that they said have benefited from government subsidies or are being sold in the United States at less than fair value.
The Commerce Department said it set a preliminary anti-dumping duty of 14.36 percent on four Chinese producers or exporters in the steel grating investigations.
The federal government said Wednesday that it will take majority control of troubled auto lender GMAC and provide an additional $3.8 billion in aid to the company, which has been unable to raise from private investors the money it needs to staunch its losses.
The Treasury Department has said for months that GMAC would need more federal money, but the decision to increase the government's ownership stake came as a surprise, cutting against the grain of the Obama administration's recent efforts to wind down its bailout of large banks...
Treasury said that it will increase its stake in GMAC to 56 percent from 35 percent. The government also will hold about $14 billion in what amounts to loans that GMAC may eventually repay. The government plans to appoint four of the company's nine directors.
Morgan Stanley (MS.N) has been sued by a Virgin Islands pension fund that accused the Wall Street bank of defrauding investors by marketing $1.2 billion of risky mortgage-related notes that it expected to fail.
The lawsuit filed December 24 in Manhattan federal court said Morgan Stanley collaborated with credit rating agencies Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's to obtain "triple-A" ratings for notes marketed in 2007 as part of a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) known as Libertas.
The European Commission warns that public finances in half of the 16 euro-zone nations are at high risk of becoming unsustainable.
Governments will spend the next year and beyond balancing the urgent need to fix public-sector debt and deficits -- without imperiling what appears to be a feeble economic recovery.
Greece and Spain saw their ratings downgraded. Ireland and Portugal have been warned they could be next. Even broader downgrades threaten if other European governments don't shape up.
Fitch warns in a December report that particularly the U.K. (which isn't in the euro zone) and Spain and France (which are) risk being downgraded if they don't articulate more-credible fiscal-consolidation programs during the coming year given the pace of fiscal deterioration....
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