Friday, April 24, 2009

SAR #9144

There is a very thin line between inflation and theft.


Economics 101, Day One: A corporation must inform shareholders of all materially significant financial data. It's called fiduciary responsibility, it's a matter of law, and Bernanke and Paulson are not included in an exculpatory footnote.

Nutshell: "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a host of other top officials deliberately, willingly, and with malice aforethought, established a system of interrogation using brutal techniques that they knew were against the law."

Six of One... GM will shut most of its facilities for a minimum 9 weeks this summer. Sumer will begin in mid-May, just like school break. Maybe teh UAW will run a day-camp.

Field of Play: If it was just sub-prime, we'd be near the bottom. It's not, we're not. Option Alt-A and Prime each make the former look like tiddlywinks. California (where fads start) now is seeing new records set as prime loans collapse. Prime is turning out to be ground chuck.

Misfortune's 500: Fortune 500's profits have dropped 85% from 2007. One, Exxon Mobil, produced over 45% of the net profits of the whole group last year.

Pre-Need Alibi: General Guns-and-Money Petraeus has started laying the groundwork for acceptance of his alibi for screwing up US in Afghanistan even worse in the coming months.

Prognosis: Auditors report that nearly one-quarter of publicly traded companies may not live out the year.

Let the Guessing Begin: Make me an offer on banks' post-stress-test needs. Okay, we've got $1 trillion from the agency down front, do I hear $2, who's got 2, 2 anyone...

One Damned Thing... Put 'Caribbean tsunami' on the list.

Explication: Paul McCulley of PIMCO : "In order to stop this downward deflationary spiral, we need the political will to socialize losses from which privatized gains have already been made." Translation - I'm done. You can get the bill now, leave a good tip.

Truth? A national study found that more than one in four kids drop out of high school. Makes ya proud.

Bang the Drum: Clinton says Pakistan's government is abdicating control to the Taliban. She apparently sees some fine distinction there. The Pakistani government has not abdicated, it has but recognized reality - a strange concept for a government. War there, war soon.

Charge It: Capital One expects US credit card losses to soon exceed 10% of the outstanding balance. Outstanding isn't the term I'd have used.

Shut Up and Listen: We don't listen thoughtfully to the other guy's point of view often enough, even when we should. Mr. Franks is a socialist-democrat or a democratic-socialist or something like that; he's also pretty thoughtful. Go read.

The Little Engine that Did: From 2001 to 2005, housing provided 30% of GDP growth and 50% of employment growth. What time's the next train?

Breaking Broken News: There are a lot of disgusting things about Fox News, starting with the obvious - it's not news. But the worst thing is people watch it. No one ever went broke underestimating the American public.

What's Wrong With This Picture? From day one, the TARP program depended on Wall Street acting responsibly, on their own, without adult supervision.

Porn O'Graph: Bank capitalization and derivative exposures.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

RE: Explication

Could have said "let them eat cake". Oh, someone already tried that line. Didn't end well then either.

RBM

jfwells said...

One Damned Thing... Put 'Caribbean tsunami' on the list.Oh yeah? I will see their landslide caused tsunami and raise them a Magnitude 9 earthquake:

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/big_earthquake_coming_sooner_t.html

Previously thought to occur on an average cycle of 350 to 500 years. Now looks more like 300 to 350 years between events. Last one occurred January 26, 1700. (and the story behind the sleuthing that pinned that date down is fascinating as well) Let's see here, 2009 minus 1700 equals....

This PDF has a much more detailed look on what could potentially happen to the region:

http://www.crew.org/PDFs/CREWSubductionZoneSmall.pdf

jfwells

Anonymous said...

I just read the Sanders posting at HP. Interesting about Finland, but it brought some questions to mind.

1. Is their model scalable?
2. Can it be implemented with the cultural diversity that exists in the US ?
3. Could the model withstand the pressure of a mass migration such as the US has been experiencing with the Mexican migration?

All that being said it left me wondering if our biggest failure is the growth of the Federal Government over the States. Seems to me that a state like Vermont could easily implement such programs as opposed to California with it's disparate problems.

What we need to be arguing in this country is states rights. Unfortunately, however, that will never happen as the issue is too wrapped around the racism issue to be discussed.

RBM

Anonymous said...

RE: Nutshell

And BHO thru the lie of hope and change is taking away what little is left of our rights.

Unknown said...

libby libby libby
About ready to unbookmark your blog. Chew on some of your commie brothers, they are doing plenty to screw us out of money and liberty, but that would be too much to ask of you.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Bye, Libby.
ckm

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Ooops. It's late. Meant "Bye Windjammer."

ckm

fajensen said...

Anon @ April 24, 2009 12:02 PM:

If the social science teacher was right; Assuming cultural diversity and mass immigration are both good things then it follows that diverse places like f.ex. Africa, especially Congo with it's 400+ tribes, would be the best place to live on the planet.

What multi-cultural society really means in practice is that if your car breaks down in the wrong area you will get beaten by your own tire iron and robbed.

One can paper over the cracks for a while with massive amounts of ever-growing state-directed effort and coercion - historically, all the way up through dictatorship and into ethnic cleansing - but the destruction of the host nation is inevitable.

The Obese Nanny-states of our time very much like the "paper over the cracks" phase for it's unlimited growth potential - so much they actively promote mass immigration.

F.ex. here in Denmark:

While people are busying themselves with outrage over the current inter-ethnic gang war; muslim drug dealers VS AK81's (white supremacist drug dealers) in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, then media bandwidth is consumed and the government can get away with more and more until it can "suspend democracy temporarily for our own protection".

The amount of scum involved is maybe 300 - 1500 people out of a population of Five Million.

A number Easily contained in proper detention facilities - Greenland perhaps? - except that incarceration would solve the problem *without* more draconian wire-tapping of ordinary citizens, more armed police, the introduction of anonymous witnesses and generally more "Gestapo" ....

I think I am becoming an Anrachist!

PS:
I root for the Taliban toppling Pakistan: Someone simply *has got to* kick a leg from under the one-world-dictatorship crap "we" are currently putting into place.