SAR #10135/Weekender

Of course there will be another crash, why do you ask?

Uncertainty:  The markets have figured out that there's a direct and inverse link between fiscal austerity and economic growth.  They've also figured out that in Europe fiscal austerity isn't going to be austere enough. The actual existence of the trillion-dollar bailout package is also doubtful, much less its adequacy.  This leads to uncertainty, which leads the market places you don't want it to go.

Bigger Brothers:  The EU proposes that the euro countries (or the EU commissioners) be allowed to have a veto over their neighbors budgets. Best two out of three?

Perfect Timing:  After a week of preemptive attacks on a possible IMF bailout of Greece, the Republicans have introduced bill to prevent US taxpayer dollars from going to a rescue plan.  That it might be in our best interest to keep the world from imploding never crossed their minds. Minds?

Quoted: “This is not free market capitalism's finest hour.”

Well Seasoned Numbers: The BLS regularly makes jobs appear out of thin air via its Birth/Death Model, but this time around they made the creation of 1,158,000 jobs show up as only a 290,000 job gain in the Employment Situation report.  Details, details.

The Dog Ate My Homework:  Transocean told Congress that the last seven hours of information from the Deepwater Horizon was missing and that all written logs were lost in the explosion.

Kicking the Tires:   US retail sales rose 0.4% in April, m/m.  Take building materials, autos and gasoline out of the data and sales are down 0.2%.

A Smaller World:   If the world's oil supply is no longer growing then there will have to be fewer cars driven a lot fewer miles somewhere so that there can be a whole lot more cars driven around somewhere else. Somewhere is the US of A. Somewhere else is China and India.  And that makes $100+ a barrel oil probable real soon, recession or not.

Triple Play:  From Global Warming to Peak Oil to Overpopulation - the evidence is overwhelming: we are “running Genesis backwards." We well may be among the things we are going to exterminate.

Just Asking:  Detroit is going to demolish 10,000 houses.  It's a start.

Carnivore's Dilemma:  If you can’t grow, you can’t pay back what you owe. If a government must reduce its borrowing, it reduces the potential for its economy.  To get their pound of flesh, the banks will crash the economy.  It is called deflation, it is not nice, and it is already happening in Spain and Portugal.  Deutsche Bank calls it a death spiral.

Contemporary Economics:  US manufacturing output rose 1% in April. Wages didn't.

Daily Petard:  “We made a few little mistakes early on,” says BP CEO Tony Hayward, before adding, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean.  The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny “

Definitions: Officially, 16 year old Aussie Jessica Watson isn't the youngest woman to sail around the world,  not because she isn't the youngest woman to sail around the world, she is,  but because the world she sailed around apparently wasn't the official world.

Bait & Switch:  Received wisdom, received mostly from right-wingers, is that the US taxpayer is now paying to bail out Europeans.  Wrong.  We're simply indirectly bailing out our own big banks.

No Notes: Our intrepid Special Inspector General for TARP says he can't inspect the records of  where the billions went  because the Treasury didn't keep any.  They had to give the money away far too fast to keep track of who got what.

Non Sequitor:  The hedge fundsters say they should not be regulated because they are pure capitalists.   As if that were a good thing.