Over a year ago Fed Chief Ben Bernanke made a very clear statement for what needed to be done.
“If actions taken by the administration, the Congress, and the Federal Reserve are successful in restoring some measure of financial stability -- and only if that is the case, in my view - - there is a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery,” Bernanke said in remarks to the Senate Banking Committee in Washington.
It seemed to make sense. The collapse of the financial system was what caused the Global Recession, so stabilizing the financial system appeared to be a necessary condition to get out of it.
A Senate hearing on the credit rating agencies, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: The Role of Credit Rating Agencies, exposed Moody's and Standard & Poors for being complicit in fictional credit ratings. Market share, or who pays the ratings agencies, was more important than objectivity. AAA credit ratings were slapped on a host of Credit Default Obligations, enabling Banksters to peddle their worthless crud to unsuspecting investors, all the while betting against them (see here also).
A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation's financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages in exchange for lucrative fees. - McClatchy News Reporting
I've debated about posting this because it is such easy pickins'. But considering Bill Black's testimony yesterday, a cheap, sleazy shot (pun intended), sounds like a good idea.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
March Producer Price Index, or PPI for March 2010 came in at +0.7%. The original press release is on the BLS website. Eat your veggies just became a right of the privileged. Vegetable prices surged 49.3% in one month.
Talk about the tax credit bump. Existing home sales soared with an 6.8% increase for March 2010. From the NAR:
Existing-home sales1, which are completed transactions that include single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, rose 6.8 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.35 million units in March from 5.01 million in February, and are 16.1 percent above the 4.61 million-unit level in March 2009.
On inventories:
Total housing inventory at the end of March rose 1.5 percent to 3.58 million existing homes available for sale, which represents an 8.0-month supply2 at the current sales pace, down from an 8.5-month supply in February. Raw unsold inventory is 1.8 percent below a year ago, and is 21.7 percent below the record of 4.58 million in July 2008.
The bond market concluded that short-term risk on Greece has now hit crisis levels, as Moody's downgraded the country again.
(Bloomberg) -- Greek bonds plunged, driving two- year yields above 11 percent, after the European Union said the nation’s 2009 budget deficit was larger than previously stated and Moody’s Investors Service cut its credit rating one step.
TPM Muckraker has done a nice call out on a lobbyist front group Too Big To Fail, using some fairly sophisticated confusion tactics to basically block any financial reform.
But as TPMmuckraker has looked into the group, every indication is that Stop Too Big To Fail is an astroturf operation funded by corporate interests to give the appearance of grassroots opposition to reform.
Gets better. They managed to get blog posts on our classic libeeraaal political sites.
Stop Too Big To Fail's $1.6 million ad campaign, which is targeting Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), asks viewers to tell their senators, "vote against this phony 'financial reform.' Support real reform, stop 'too big to fail.'"
Currencies of a number of emerging Asian economies remain undervalued, substantially in the case of the renminbi,” the IMF said in the report. Renminbi is a name for China’s currency, a denomination of which is the yuan. It’s essential for China to address excess demand pressures by reining in credit growth and allowing exchange-rate appreciation - IMF
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