May 2009

What Losing a Job Does to People

It's fairly sad that such an article even needs to be written. But in this day and age of people as disposable commodities, something to trade like baseball cards, the first to zero in on to reduce costs, I guess the obvious needs to be said.

There’s the executive assistant who says she’s read 20 novels in the past month. The administrator who admits she sometimes stays in her pajamas until 3 p.m. And the business analyst who found himself in a months-long video game stupor, rarely leaving the couch.

The recently unemployed are discovering that layoffs mean more than lost income: they strip away routines and social structures, leaving many people feeling trapped at home and in a rut.

Career counselors call it hitting the wall. The people who have reached that point say it can feel more like a black hole.

New TALF program starts in June

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The Federal Reserve just keeps getting in deeper and deeper to bail out their Wall Street bankster buddies.

The Federal Reserve announced Friday that it will launch a much-awaited program in June to bolster commercial real-estate lending.

And, to help make the program more attractive to investors, the Fed will provide longer, five-year loans.

Investors would use the money to buy securities backed by commercial real-estate loans.
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"There's a looming crisis in commercial real estate whereby owners of shopping malls, hotels, rental properties and many other types of buildings are unable to refinance or to pay for new construction," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned lawmakers on Capitol Hill in March.

Just a Little Minor Detail in Credit Card Reform Legislation - Small Business Still Screwed

A funny thing happened on the way to bill passage. Congress forgot all about small business and none of the credit card predatory lending limits apply to small business.

The House just passed the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights, which restricts some aggressive tactics by credit card companies, like arbitrary rate changes, applying payments in a way that maximizes interest charges, and double-cycle billing. But the bill as written doesn’t apply to small business credit cards, even though such cards are personally guaranteed and function exactly the same way consumer credit cards do. An amendment that would have made this change explicitly apply to cards issued to businesses with fewer than 500 employees did not make it out of committee yesterday.

The Populist Pub is now open.

 

Petit Julien welcomes you back to the Populist Pub.  

Earlier this week, we passed a milestone of sorts. The Obama administration marked its first 100 days in office. In 1933, FDR, facing a full blown depression, made numerous and transformative changes in his first 100 days. Since then, the accomplishments of the first 100 days of every new administration have been symbolically compared. That is, until this year.

On Thursday, Day #101 of the Obama administration, Steve Lendman, author, blogger, radio co-host and activist, who lives in Chicago, wrote an excellent article contrasting the first 100 days of FDR to BHO. This was effectively a follow up to a scathing article he wrote two weeks earlier. In that article, published on April 18th, Steve Lendman was highly critical of the Obama economic team especially. It was provocatively titled Barack Obama: Crime Boss.

CDS = WFMD, An Example Case

I've been catching up to my reading and came across an incredible story in FT which makes a prima facie case for the very strict regulation of credit default swaps. Here's the gist of it:

As the financial crisis virus has swept around the globe in recent months, Kazakhstan’s banking sector has been engulfed in turmoil. This is not just creating a headache for the Kazakh government and Western creditors, but also highlighting issues about the credit derivatives market that extend well beyond those far-flung steppes.

Take the case of Morgan Stanley’s dealings with BTA, Kazakhstan’s largest bank. A few years ago, BTA – like many of its Eastern brethren – was an up-and-coming darling of the capital markets world, with investment bankers furiously competing to float its bonds, provide loans, and much else.

Friday Movie Night - Bill Moyers Does Econ Edition

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It's Friday Night! Party Time!   Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!

Journalist Bill Moyers had done a series of interviews with economists, experts on the financial crisis and they are bombshells. Below are some of the must see interviews.

 

Simon Johnson & Michael Perino, Part I

Johnson, Perino

 

Education is a Business After All

A most enlightening article on higher education shows they are plain going out of business (Bloomberg).

Simmons, home to 4,700 students, opened the 66,500-square- foot (6,200-square-meter) center in January, two months before the U.S. stock market hit its lowest point in 12 years. Even before the ribbon cutting, enrollment in the management school had been dropping.

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