July 2011

Saturday Reads Around The Internets - Credit Ratings, Crazies and Crisis

shocknews
Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop. This week the fur is flying over the never ending economic absurdity spewing from our government representatives.

 

Did the GOP Play Math Hooky?

Scarecrow calls it on how the press doesn't even challenge outrageous economic fiction being spewed by politicians in did the GOP miss third grade math?

Compared to laying siege to government, hurting millions, and putting the economy at risk, it’s only a minor irritant, I suppose, one of the dozens of little misrepresentations that we are so used to hearing from the right wing that we just shrug our shoulders and wait for something new. But the fact the media almost never pushes back suggests that letting it slide is a mistake. And it’s just fractions!

Remember third grade math? Sure you do. It’s when you probably first learned fractions. Numerators! Denominators? Percentages! Pies! Well, it seems many right wingers skipped that year, because they can’t recall that a fraction has both a numerator and a denominator, so the size of the fraction depends on both.

So night after night, apparent third grade dropouts tell news anchors and talk show hosts, none of whom even sighs (sigh), that government spending has exploded under Socialist Obama. Before Obama, it was about 19 percent of GDP or 1/5th. But now its almost 1/4th, or 24 percent of GDP.

Tom Coburn said that on my public tv. Boehner and McConnell and Kyl say that. Every Tea-GOP and rightwinger has it tatooed on their foreheads, and Sarah Palin has is written on her palm. From 19 to 24 percent! Yikes!

While Government Fiddles as America Burns, Traders Place Their Billion Bets

While our Congress slashes our social safety net and spews economic fiction on how deficits somehow matter when it comes to our jobs crisis (they do not at this point), traders are placing bets the United States is downgraded and even goes into default.

The bet that shook up the world today was a $1 billion dollar futures trade.

Someone dropped a bomb on the bond market Thursday – a $1 billion Armageddon trade betting the United States will lose its AAA credit rating.

In one moment, an invisible trader placed a single trade that moved the most liquid debt market in the world.

The massive trade wasn’t placed in bonds themselves; it was placed in the futures market.

The trade was for block trades of 5,370 10-year Treasury futures executed at 124-03 and 3,100 Treasury bond futures executed at 125-01.

The value of the trade was about $850 million dollars. In simple terms, if that was a direct bond buy, no one would be talking about it.

However, with the use of futures, you have to have margin capacity behind the trade. That means with a single push of a button someone was willing to commit more than $1 billion of real capital to this trade with expectations of a 10-to-1 return ratio.

You only do this if you see an edge.
This means someone is confident that the United States is either going to default or is going to lose its AAA rating. That someone is willing to bet the proverbial farm that U.S. interest rates will be going up.

The Simple but Horrifying Fallacy at the Core of the Tea Party

Originally published on The Agonist

It’s hard to say if the Tea Party has an acknowledged leader, but someone who professes to be just that has chosen a very opportune moment to trash Speaker John Boehner’s attempts to craft legislation that would allow an increase in the debt ceiling. Judson Phillips, the CEO of Tea Party Nation, is the self-acknowledged head of the Tea Party, and in an editorial this morning in The Washington Post, he attacks Boehner’s legislation for providing “almost non-existent budget cuts.”

Phillips says:

As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

Here is what is fundamentally wrong and dangerous with the core assumption of the Tea Party: There are two ways to get to a debt crisis – you either spend too much money or you don’t take in enough revenue. Anyone who has done a family budget or a business budget understands there are two sides to every discussion of cash flow: cash flow in, and cash flow out. In government terms, this equates to taxes received and expenditures made.

Initial weekly unemployment claims for July 23, 2011

Initial weekly unemployment claims decreased to 398,000, the first time initial claims has dropped below 400,000 since April. That said, last week was revised up from 418,000 to 422,000. The 4 week moving average is 413,750, but declined 8,500 from last week's 422,250. A weekly average above 400,000 does not indicate job growth.

 

Durable Goods New Orders Declined -2.1% for Advance Report, June 2011

New Orders in Durable Goods decreased -2.1% for June 2011. New Orders has declined the last two months out of three.

Core capital goods new orders decreased -0.4%, after gaining 1.7% last month. Core capital goods is an investment gauge for the bet the private sector is placing on America's future economic growth.

 

If you declare bankruptcy, will everything be OK in a few days, weeks?

The crazies in the United States House of Representatives would have you believe it were so.  They say fix that budget before we'll raise the debt ceiling.  If we don't get our fix, they announce, there's no deal.  We'll just default until things get straightened out. (Image: George Romero)

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