SAR #11296

They are still planning to plan.

Solution: The apparent plan is to give bondholders a 60% haircut and then give them pretend money to make up for the losses. Obtain the pretend money by taking €450 or so from the taxpayers and 'leveraging' it five times (ie, printing five times that amount, or borrowing it from the Chinese, using your good looks as security) and pretend that you've got enough numbers to fade Italy's losses. As well as Spain, Portugal, Greece and so on. If that doesn't work, borrow more from the IMF – which in turn would get it from the Fed. Game, Set, Match.

First Do No HARP: Obama's puppetmasters are trying to con more people into staying put and paying, paying, paying on their underwater houses, by cutting the fees involved and getting even deeply underwater homeowners to keep paying on their over-priced houses. The program will be run by the independent FHFA, at the president's direction. (Define independent.)

Is the euro system doomed?  The short answer is “yes”. The long answer is “Yes, of course.”

The Godfather: The Pope, dreaming of the days of Clement VI and Leo X, has called for a “global public authority” complete with a central bank with dominion over all the world. The proposal is very straightforward, calling for “a supranational authority” with “universal jurisdiction”, run by the UN, which would usurp and destroy national sovereignty. Not quite what #Occupy and the Indignados had in mind. The idea hasn't a prayer.

Silly Question: Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted? Some?

Guns, Sticking To: Senate Republicans, marching lockstep over the cliff, have blocked a bill that would have provided funding to enable cash-starved states to put nearly 400,000 teachers and public safety officers back to work, citing the program as another effort by Democrats to drive the nation further into debt while pandering to unions. It will also help increase the number of the uneducated and the afraid, who are seen as potential GOP voters.

Daily Doom: Paul Erlich, who's been wrong before, says there is a 90% chance that our global civilization will collapse from famine, drought, poverty and conflict. And global warming. And far, far too many people. Before you dismiss him out of hand, figure out how you think we'll feed the next two billion folks who show up for dinner.

Persistence: The American Family Business Foundation, which was founded to “abolish the Death Tax', is trying to convince the Super-Duper commission to repeal the estate tax in the name of creating jobs. Quite how providing more money to rich kids so they won't have to work creates jobs wasn't specified.

Inaction In Action: We know anthropogenic climate change is an immense problem that will only get worse if nothing is done. Yet nothing is being done. The reasons nothing is being done to avoid the inevitable and disastrous results of climate change are that it is a slow moving phenomenon, mostly invisible on a day-to-day basis, that any effective remediation would require global consensus in undertaking coordinated, expensive actions to prevent problems we cannot yet see, and largely because the initial effects will be mainly visited upon poor nations no one really cares about.