Will America finally get justice for crimes on Wall Street? We think not. Today, President Barack Obama named Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. The White House and most of the press are touting her credentials as a former New York Southern District prosecutor. From the White House press briefing:
The attack on unions has been clearly effective. America's workers who are members of a union declined by 0.5 percentage points in 2012 to a low of 11.3%. In 1983 20.1% of all workers were members of a union and in 2011 11.8% of America's employed were union members. We have not seen union membership rates this low since the Great Depression.
NAR reported their December 2012 Existing Home Sales. Existing home sales decreased -1.0% from last month and inventories are down to an absurdly tight 4.4 months of supply. Existing homes sales have increased 12.8% from a year ago. While this is the highest annual increase in five years, existing home sales on a monthly basis are not to even 2009 levels.
It is 2013, five years after the start of a recession and two and a half years after so called financial reform legislation was passed. Yet, Too Big To Fail Banks have just gotten bigger, the financial system is still at risk and most of the disaster was buried in a mountain of bail out money.
The December state employment statistics show yet another half and half situation. Sixteen state's unemployment rate increased for December as did the District of Columbia . Twelve states had no change in unemployment, 22 showed declines. The November national unemployment rate was 7.7%.
There is nothing more frightening than when those in charge of the economy miss something that was as plain as the nose on your face. Such was the situation with the Federal Reserve and the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007. The FOMC met on August 7th and claimed there was not enough evidence of a subprime problem.
The DOL reported Initial weekly unemployment claims for the week ending on January 12th, 2013 were 335,000, a 37,000 drop from the previous week of 372,000. Last week's initial claims were originally reported to be 371,000, a 1,000 upward revision.
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There is nothing more frightening than when those in charge of the economy miss something that was as plain as the nose on your face. Such was the situation with the Federal Reserve and the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007. The FOMC met on August 7th and claimed there was not enough evidence of a subprime problem.
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