You have to wonder if Detroit is just the first city to experience this.
One measure of how tough times are in the Motor City: Some of the offenders in jail don’t want to be released; some who do get out promptly re-offend to head back where there’s heat, health care and three meals a day.
The December 2009 ISM Manufacturing Report is out and PMI came in at 55.9%. This is the highest since April, 2006. New orders are at 65.2%, a huge increase, 5.2%, from last month. Employment is positive, at 52%. Take note, imports increased faster than exports, which for overall GDP is not a good thing.
A new year but same old story from the Obama Administration - more reports of coddling of the financial oligarchy and Wall Street. This time from Bloomberg: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished as Banks Seek Profits from Bailouts. This story of centers around the now infamous PPIP program. The one crafted by the financial oligarchy's biggest protector in the Administration - Timothy Geithner.
The supposed purpose of PPIP was to purchase, through government and private investors, some the bad debts that were the books of "troubled banks". Well, guess what. Financial conglomerates are not stupid (they may be incompetent when it comes to assessing risk):
Only months after it was started, the U.S. program designed to purge debts of no immediate discernable value from the balance sheets of troubled banks has helped transform the frozen debt into a money-maker as the bonds have rallied. Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., who received 22 percent of the $418.7 billion American taxpayers loaned to troubled financial institutions, boosted holdings on their trading books of home- loan bonds that lack government guarantees while investors were raising cash for the program, according to Federal Reserve data.
Got that? According to Bloomberg reporters' analysis, the two biggest zombie banks actually went out and purchased more "toxic assets". But these two zombie banks were not alone:
By now we are all aware of the HAMP program and how it has "extended and pretended" the foreclosure problem in this country ( less than 1% of trial mortgage modifications become permanent modifications).
But you probably didn't know that the HAMP program has a sub-clause called HAFA, and HAFA is going to unleash a closurefraud.org/2010/01/03/hafa-new-program-offers-borrowers-foreclosure-alternatives/"> foreclosure bomb on the housing market this spring.
As part of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), HAFA provides financial incentives to servicers and borrowers who utilize a short sale or a deed-in-lieu (DIL) to avoid foreclosure on a HAMP-eligible loan.
The HAFA program simplifies and streamlines the use of short sale and DIL options by incorporating the following unique features:
...
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke says the Housing Bubble is Regulator's Fault and the Fed had nothing to do with it:
“The best response to the housing bubble would have been regulatory, rather than monetary,” Bernanke said today in remarks to the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta. The Fed’s efforts to constrain the bubble were “too late or were insufficient,” which means that regulatory actions “must be better and smarter,” he said.
Right o! Bernanke supported all of Alan Greenspan's cheap money policies:
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
Not only was there no job growth, middle incomes shrank and retirement funds shrank.
Finally some Cities and Counties are getting wise on giving away millions in tax breaks to corporations on the promise of jobs for the area that never materialize.
As the recession drags on, municipalities struggling to fix roads, fund schools and pay bills increasingly are rescinding tax abatements to companies that don't hire enough workers, lay them off or close up shop. At the same time, they're sharpening new incentive deals, leaving no doubt what is expected of companies and what will happen if they don't deliver.
This is a strange story. Bloomberg headlined, Goldman Sachs Helps YRC Avert Bankruptcy Following Hoffa’s Plea as if Goldman Sachs saved America's largest trucking company from default.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. helped YRC Worldwide Inc. complete a debt swap to avert bankruptcy after the Teamsters union said the bank was trying to profit from a failure of the largest U.S. trucker by sales.
A group consisting of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank AG, Aristeia Capital LLC, Silverback Asset Management and a Smith Management LLC unit, “got us over the goal line by going into the market, buying bonds and tendering them,” YRC Chief Executive Officer Bill Zollars said yesterday.
One must read this post over at Zero Hedge. They have cranked some money outlays from the Treasury for unemployment insurance checks and found a 32% discrepancy. So, is someone getting a lot more money or...
is the actual number of those unemployed getting unemployment checks much larger than what is being reported?
a correlation which used to be almost 1.000 has diverged massively, and now the relative outlays surpass what the government highlights are the number of people actually collecting benefits by 32%!
This implies two things: either the average unemployment monthly paycheck has surged, which is not the case, or there is some gray unemployment area which is not disclosed by the government, and which accounts for a shadow unemployed insurance economy.
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