SAR #11276

An economist is a sociologist who passed statistics and flunked logic.

Gentle Ben: Chairman Bernanke says the Fed could do more to boost the economy, and will do so "as appropriate" in "a context of price stability." The market went giddy with the hope of even more free money. He also told GOP lawmakers to stop sending him threatening mail and to refrain from budget moves that would harm a recovery, should one come along.

Drown-proofing: European leaders say they will throw Greece another piece of the promised lifeline... in November – and suggest the Greeks practice treading water until then. Or the dead man's float.

Follow The Money: Why care about Greece? After all, US banks hold but a few billions of their paper. But. But it's dominoes. French and German banks hold a lot of Greek (and Portuguese and Italian and Spanish) paper. And even though Wall Street's exposure to an unraveling Europe is just shy of $3 trillion, they are sure everything is going to be fine. They've got insurance. Remember AIG?

Kewpie Doll: Mitt Romney – a man who knows a thing or two about corporate greed - says he thinks the Occupy Wall Street movement is a dangerous expression of class warfare. See, their message is getting through. Give the man a prize.

Magic Act: The entrenched are again proposing to off-shore a few tens of thousands of jobs under the rubric of "free trade". The administration and the corporations (not quite the same thing, not quite) claim these deals will create jobs. They will, overseas. At home they'll deregulate financial services (those that brought us to this particular dance), grant corporations even more 'personhood', permit trade adjudication committees to overturn US state and federal law and gut environmental regulations and so on. That's the sort of "freedom" embedded in free trade pacts. But this time we're supposed to believe them.

And I Quote: "Republicans have a problem. People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but Republicans have nothing to offer them."

Hush, Now, What's that Sound? Wall Street's version of winner-take-all capitalism is failing again. Or still, for it never recovered from the tech and housing bubbles. The old cures and postponements didn't work, don’t work, won't work. Three years ago while millions of Americans lost their life savings, their pensions, their jobs and their houses, Wall Street got over $700 billion of their dollars. Finally comes a protest, and many have quickly dismissed them and their complaints. That's a mistake. The crowds grow and are spreading. The tweets and meet-ups are growing into something that looks serious. As markets tumble and the banks look for more support, they'd do well to remember Vietnam, which was lost in the streets long before it was lost in the jungle.

Budgie Watch: US capital goods orders stirred a bit in August, climbing 0.9%, the most since May. Orders for all factory goods declined 0.2%. Still down, not out.

Q & A: Asked by Senator Sanders if he saw "Wall Street’s greed and recklessness [as the] cause [of] this recession, that led to so many people losing their jobs?” Bernanke said that regulators' failure to curb Wall Street's "excessive risk taking" most certainly "had a lot to do” with the causing the recession. He also said "I think people are quite unhappy with the state of the economy and what’s happening. They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington.. I can’t blame them."

Takes One To Know One: Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that threatened sanctions against Syria if it didn’t stop killing its citizens. Syria threatens to kill Israelis if made to stop killing Syrians.

Voter Fraud: The GOP's massive and fraudulent campaign to keep minorities, the poor (who are most certainly not a minority) and students from voting seems likely to disenfranchise 5 million probable Democratic voters. Not a bad day's work for solving a problem that didn't exist.