Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot and sunny. On the prairie outside the Republic Steel's Chicago plant the strikers and their families began to gather for picnics. Women were dressed in their holiday best. Children could be seen riding on their father's shoulders.
Sam's Place was nearby. Once a dance-hall, Sam's was now the strike headquarters. Gradually the families drifted over to where a soup kitchen had been set up and where strike leaders gave speeches from a platform. A group of girls began singing IWW union songs, and the men joined in. Plans were being made for a mass demonstration, despite the rumors that the police had something big planned themselves.
The day seemed just too nice for anything bad to happen.
The Mortgage Bankers Association released Delinquency data today and almost half of all subprime loans, in the United States are now past due.
Subprime ARM loans and prime ARM loans, which include Alt-A and pay option ARMs, continue to dominate the delinquency numbers. Nationwide, 48 percent of subprime ARMs were at least one payment past due and in Florida over 60 percent of subprime ARMs were at least one payment past due.
The overall delinquency rate is 7.88% by the end of Q4, 2008. This breaks the record of their delinquency data going back to 1972.
If one includes the number of mortgages with one payment behind the percentages hit 11.93%.
Yesterday supposedly the U.S. start market bounced on the news the China economy was getting a stimulus.
But is it a hollow hurrah?
Buried in the WSJ is a blurb mentioning investors fears of insolvencies in China and how due to Chinese bankruptcy laws, they will not be able to recover a thin dime.
Here is what Roubini had to say on the Chinese stimulus:
Another voice confirming what we already know. Wall Street, financial institutions lobbied for our and their demise. Two watch dog groups, have released a report (large pdf) on precisely how Wall Street, the financial sector, hedge funds bought off our government.
With that act, she added to the estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement that Indians leave each day in fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach, on banks that line rivers used for drinking and bathing and along roads jammed with scooters, trucks and pedestrians.
Diana Olick of CNBC believes no one is going to notice what she did. Well, CNBC now that you brought this to our attention, I think we will amplify it!
The plan claims it will not aid speculators or house flippers, but how specifically it does not specify.
Stabilize home prices by reducing principle of the loan and the U.S. taxpayer ponies up the cost.
They are also reducing interest rates and the refinancing past the actual current home value. Also, they are allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce the principle owed on a home and mortgage modification.
This video of Milton Friedman espousing greed and self-interest as expressed by free enterprise and free trade is making the rounds again:
Friedman reduces all of human behavior to greed. "You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed?" "You think the communist commissar rewards virtue?.... Do you think American Presidents reward virtue? Is it really true that political self interest is more noble than economic self-interest? Tell me where in the world you are going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us?"
Professor Friedman, we do not need nor do we seek angels to organize society. While Phil Donahue may have been flummoxed, none other than chief framer of the US Constitution James Madison had a complete answer to your prescription of increasing concentration of wealth and plutocracy, over 200 years ago.
Senator Bernie Sanders to Fed. Reserve Chair Bernanke - Show Me the Money!. This is a must watch clip and note the condescending attitude, the expression of disdain, from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Sanders basic question of who is getting $2.2 trillion dollars in short terms loans from the Fed.
There was lots of news coming out of Washington today. Both Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner agree: more bailouts are coming. That $700 Billion? That was just the downpayment. Congress wasn't pleased.
Representative Ginny Brown-Waite, a Florida Republican, told Geithner that she had “mixed” emotions about his appearance before the committee.
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