The New York Times has a great slide show about the OECD's global economic leading indicators (h/t Calculated Risk). It is well worth your time to check it out. As of May 2009, the OECD's indicators suggested a turn to global economic expansion was near.
July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. may lose its investment in a proprietary trading code and millions of dollars from increased competition if software allegedly stolen by a former employee gets into the wrong hands, a prosecutor said.
Discussing Matt Taibbi's masterful expression of outrage, in Rolling Stone last month, over the series of crisis spawned by Goldman Sachs and the domination of the United States by "gangster economics," Robert Johnson, Director in the Economic Policy Initiative of the Roosevelt Institute, writes that
Taibbi’s rage is filling an emotional void. It is a reaction to what is missing after this profound speculative episode that the IMF suggests will cost over $4 trillion in losses on balance sheets and untold trillions in lost output. It is fury over a crisis that is, by any measure, the most profoundly damaging episode since the 1930s.
Kevin Phillips, with his masterful recounting of how the Spanish, Dutch, and British empires swiftly fell from their zenith because of imperial overreach, and more importantly the growth and ascendancy of a financial / rentier class, foretells what lies ahead for the United States.
This month’s cover story in Harper’s magazine is a must-read for those who recognize that the broad currents of human history repeat themselves. In, “Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again” Kevin Baker writes:
Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past-without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.
Paul Krugman calls out The Heritage Foundation as propaganda:
Whenever you encounter “research” from the Heritage Foundation, you always have to bear in mind that Heritage isn’t really a think tank; it’s a propaganda shop. Everything it says is automatically suspect.
This is so true! We have a host of organizations claiming to issue studies when they are really glorified marketing pieces with flawed data tables, absurd assumptions and some beyond comprehension bad mathematics.
But if one reads the "math" and the details usually one can locate the buried statistical flaws deep in the data. These organizations bank on Congress as well as your inability to add two numbers together to see their manipulated statistics.
Increasingly we are seeing major financial reporting being in the spin zone. Here is what Bloomberg headlined on the ISM non-manufacturing index June 2009 report:
U.S. ISM Service Industries Index Increased to 47
U.S. service industries from retailers to homebuilders contracted last month at the slowest pace in nine months, as measures of new orders and employment improved.
The reality is the economy contracted for the 9th straight month. Bloomberg even goes so far as to claim this is stabilization:
This is a refreshing announcement. A new Venture Capital firm is starting and they will only invest in Silicon valley based companies (U.S. would be better folks!)
But what is interesting is they are also doing angel investing or the first $50k to get started, which has died down in recent years.
Now a lot of absurdity did happen in the dot con bubble, at the same time to truly obtain innovation, one has to fund a lot of fizzle to obtain that one true spark.
It's also great that this $300M fund will be investing in U.S. companies. About time we stopped hearing the offshore outsourcing mantra and had funds being directed exclusively to U.S. technical innovation.
General Motors Corp (GMGMQ.PK) is heading to bankruptcy court on Tuesday to seek approval to sell its assets to a "New GM" in a plan to reinvigorate the automaker under U.S. government ownership.
GM is seeking approval for the sale from U.S. bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber just 30 days after filing for Chapter 11. Under the deal, brokered by the Obama administration's autos task force, the company would sell its assets under Section 363 of the bankruptcy code to a "New GM" and continue to operate its best assets, like Chevrolet and Cadillac, while gaining access to billions in funding from the U.S. Treasury.
I could hardly believe it when I saw this poll come out.
It's a testament to effective public relations that a majority of people believe that they will be better off next summer than they are right now. If perception was all that mattered then the mission of fixing the economy has already been accomplished.
Unfortunately for all of us, actual facts mean more than managing perception. Just ask Baghdad Bob.
With that in mind, let's look at those pesky inconvenient facts.
One would figure governments fueled on property taxes, which in turn sat squarely on the housing bubble through property over evaluation, would collapse and indeed they are:
The tax appeals and reassessments present a new budget nightmare for governments. In a survey conducted by the National Association of Counties, 76 percent of large counties said that falling property tax revenue was significantly affecting their budgets, said Jacqueline Byers, the association’s research director.
Officials in some states say their property tax revenue is falling for the first time since World War II.
What is more interesting in the above New York Times article is just how high property taxes can actually be:
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