Here we go again. The Greece parliament has approved more austerity, code speak to cut pensions, wages and dump Greek debt on the backs of the people. Literally Athens is burning.
Rob a 7-11 with a gun? Get at least 20 years in prison. Rip-off investors to the tune of $1.6 billion, get no jail time, no charges and you don't even need to make restitution. MF Global represents yet another example how financial crime goes unpunished and not penalized.
We know MF Global played around with customer's money. The amount they lost is even larger than originally estimated, now at $1.6 billion bucks. Seems there is $700 million overseas and that branch of MF Global in the U.K. ain't giving the money back.
The annual trade data out of the December trade report has some shocking results. The 2011 trade deficit increased 11.6% from 2010. As a percentage of GDP the trade deficit is returning to pre-recession levels. The trade deficit is now 3.7% of U.S. GDP, up from 3.4% in 2010. The worst was 2006, when the soaring out of balance, trade deficit was 5.6% of GDP. Below is a graph of the U.S. trade deficit as a percentage of U.S. annual nominal GDP.
The December 2011 U.S. trade deficit increased $1.74 billion to $48.8 billion in a month. This is a 3.7% deficit increase from last month in the trade deficit. November's trade deficit was revised down by $694 million. December exports increased $1.23 billion, or -0.69%, while imports increased $2.97 billion, or +1.32%.
As expected, states were strong armed by the administration and have agreed to a $25 billion, 50 state mortgage fraud settlement with five banks for robo-signing and mortgage fraud. According to the Wall Street Journal:
The agreement covers five banks: Ally Financial Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. Together, the five firms handle payments on 55% of all home loans outstanding, or about 27 million mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
About $5 billion would be cash payments to states and federal authorities, $17 billion would be pegged for homeowner relief, roughly $3 billion would go for refinancing and $1 billion would be paid to the Federal Housing Administration.
Initial weekly unemployment claims for the week ending on February 4, 2012 were 358,000. The DOL reports this as a decrease of 15,000 from last week. The previous week was revised, from 367,000 to 373,000, an increase of 6,000.
Last week the CBO released their report, The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2012 to 2022. Deficits everywhere, high unemployment, lackluster economic growth and one very scary year, 2013. Below are the CBO economic forecasts.
The Federal Reserve's consumer credit report for December 2011 shows a 9.3% monthly increase in consumer credit. Revolving credit increased 4.1%, and nonrevolving credit increased 11.8%. The Credit Kraken is clearly on a rampage, for the second month is a row.
JOLTS stands for Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The December 2011 statistics show there were 3.88 official unemployed people hunting for a job to every position available*. There were 3,376,000 job openings for December 2011, an increase of 8.27%, from the previous month of 3,118,000. This is a marked improvement from last month. While job openings have increased 60% from their June 2009 trough, jobs are still way below the 1.19 person per job opening at the start of the recession. Below is the graph of number of official unemployed, 13.097 million, per job opening for December 2011.
Rob a 7-11 with a gun? Get at least 20 years in prison. Rip-off investors to the tune of $1.6 billion, get no jail time, no charges and you don't even need to make restitution. MF Global represents yet another example how financial crime goes unpunished and not penalized. 
As expected, states were strong armed by the administration and have agreed to a $25 billion, 50 state mortgage fraud settlement with five banks for 
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