July 2009

As an investment, TARP is down $148 Billion

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While the actual inspector general of TARP is having a rough time getting information from the U.S. Treasury, a private think tank, Ethisphere Institute, is tracking on the TARP.

According to the Ethisphere TARP Index, when markets closed on Friday, June 19, 2009, the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) investment was down approximately $148.2 billion

Ethisphere is treating the TARP as an investment and tracking on the losses. Not a bad idea since the American public was sold the idea they would get the money back.

Commercial real estate outlook is bad and getting worse

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The size of the commercial real estate problem got a number today - $2.2 Trillion.

(Bloomberg) -- About $2.2 trillion of U.S. commercial properties bought or refinanced since 2004 are now worth less than the original price, raising the threat of more foreclosures, Real Capital Analytics said.

Prices have fallen so far that about $1.3 trillion of properties have either lost their owners’ down payment or are close to it, Robert White, president of the New York-based research firm, said in a report. The analysis includes only office, industrial, multifamily and retail properties. Hotels and raw land would “add billions more to the total,” he wrote.

Two years later and still nothing has been learned

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Two years ago Friday the financial crisis started.

Most financial media pundits and politicians didn't recognize that we had a problem until Lehman Brothers went under on September 15, 2008. The official start of the recession is marked at December 2007.

But the real start of the financial crisis was July 31, 2007, when Bear Stearns filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection on its two major hedge funds (High-Grade Structured Credit Fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund).

And yet 24 months later, after all the job and capital losses, after all the heartbreak and stress on the average Americans, the financial media, the politicians, Wall Street, and most of the blogosphere still refuses to even acknowledge, much less address the root causes of our economic problems.

Durable Goods down 2.5% - Another sign of a non-recovery "recovery"

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Durable Goods orders dropped 2.5% for June 2009 according to the Commerce Department press release.

 

New Orders

New orders for manufactured durable goods in June decreased $4.1 billion or 2.5 percent to $158.6 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau announced today. This decrease followed two consecutive monthly increases including a 1.3 percent May increase. Excluding transportation, new orders increased 1.1 percent. Excluding defense, new orders decreased 0.7 percent.

Slate has a Health Care Guide

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Slate magazine has been so kind to put up a mega links site, with reviews of each, on tracking health care reform.

If you're like me, you gave up on the insanity, are waiting for some bill to at least gel, then go online and read it. You then pray it doesn't change, butchered further by lobbyists, so you can voice your opinion to your representatives to vote yes or no.

If you dare, Kaiser has a spreadsheet of all of the major bills and their features. Of course this is subject to change.

No wonder this topic is a lobbyist pig fest. Who can figure this out to even discover if one of these is a good bill or not?

Slate singles out The Treatment, which for EP readers, you might like. Plenty of stats and graphs.

Boom Go the Boomers

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Business Week has an interesting article on baby boomers.

While we have already questioned the statistics on the jump in savings rate, the story shows just how focused policy makers are on Americans being consumers instead of producers.

Some statistics claimed in the article:

Productivity, GDP, jobs and outsourcing

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You see the headlines, you see the cheers. Don't you know the recession is over! Graphs, statistics, tables abound. People argue over margin of error, data points, and debate the great mystery of increased unemployment statistics, then quickly dismiss them as a lagging economic indicator.

But you, down on the ground with the rest of us, say hell no, all of my friends are broke, I can't find a job, I'm in debt, this talk of recovery is bullshit!

You might very well be right and the problem is current statistics appear not to be capturing the true state of GDP, Productivity and thus jobs (in the United States).

When debtors fight back

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It's not much now, but it could be a growing trend similar to what happened during the Great Depression.

Those on the front lines of the debt industry say there is a small but increasingly noticeable group of strapped consumers who, like Ms. Birks, are deciding they will simply stop paying. After loading up on debt eagerly provided by the card companies during the boom times, these people now find themselves trapped in an endless cycle where they are charged interest on interest and fees upon fees while the lenders get government bailouts.

Trucking tonnage drops by record amount

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Many of us have seen the huge drop in rail freight. Now we are seeing a similar drop in trucking.

The American Trucking Associations’ advance seasonally adjusted (SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index fell 2.4 percent in June. In May, SA tonnage jumped 3.2 percent. June’s decrease, which lowered the SA index to 99.8 (2000=100), wasn’t large enough to completely offset the robust gain in the previous month.

Compared with June 2008, tonnage fell 13.6 percent, which surpassed May’s 11 percent year-over-year drop. June’s contraction was the largest year-over-year decrease of the current cycle, exceeding the 13.2 percent drop in April.
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