SAR #10107/Weekender

Madness is contagious.

Skunks Have Stripes:  Goldman is being charged with fraud. The market dropped a hundred points, pretending this was news.

Gift Horse's Mouth:  JPMorgan 'earned' $3.3 billion in the last quarter, some of it coming from Uncle Sam paying them to borrow money.  Right. We paid JPM 0.05% to use $271.9 billion of our money – mostly by lending it back to us.  Nice work if you can get it.  We're standing at the other end of the horse.

Partly Cloudy:  Mitch McConnell pretends to believe we  “must put an end to taxpayer funded bailouts for Wall Street banks.”  Time for an up-or-down vote, put up or shut up, Senator.

Diagnosis:  The health care reform law insists that at least 80% of every premium dollar go to medical costs.  So the insurance industry got right to work, reclassifying administrative costs as medical costs.  WellPoint, for example, "has already 'reclassified' more than half a billion dollars of administrative expenses as medical expenses."  A full recovery is expected.

Party Game:  Define “Bank”.

Beef, It's What's For Dinner:  Scientists examining bones left behind at the Donner party's winter campsite discovered no evidence of human remains among the bones of cattle horses, deer and dogs.  Another one bites the dust.

Lemonade, 2¢ A Glass:  BofA claims a $3.2 billion quarterly profit, mainly because it set aside $3.6 billion less for potential losses this quarter than last, even as the bank's net charge-offs grew by $2.4 billion to $10.8 billion for the quarter.  Bonuses all 'round!

Asked and Answered:  Is the consumer back?  Yes, but god knows how he got here, what she's using for money, and why nobody is paying sales taxes.

Leftovers:  Saudi Arabia’ growth in demand for petroleum products is the world’s second largest, accounting for 11.7% of the world's increased demand this year.  We get to bid on their leftovers.

Dismal Science:  In order to pretend that economics was a science, economists started using lots of numbers.  Eventually colleges got embarrassed and decided to teach some real math to economics students. But the curriculum was already overloaded, so something had to go. Economic history got jettisoned, which explains most of what has happened recently.

Seconded:  Present-day America and the People's Republic of China are both run by a small financial and political elite in largely inherited positions.  Who's your daddy?

Knee Jerk:  Scientists in New Zealand have been given permission to put human genes into goats, sheep and cows for the next 20 years, to see if the animals will produce human proteins in their milk.  The object is to make pharmaceuticals.  I've read Oryx and Crake, and I'm worried.

Why?  The Library of Congress is going to digitally archive your “tweets” for posterity, between the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and the novels of Herman Melville.

Something Else:  Phosphorus is critical in our food supply, both as a fertilizer and as a mineral in our diets.  For plants it is as necessary as water. It is mined.  And it is running out.  Projections range from 2034 to the 2070's, but all involved agree, when it's gone we are going to be in big trouble.  Go ahead, have another kid.

Porn O'Graph: Democratic Capitalism.