Economics

Too Much Online | Who deserves to sit on this year's list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun?

Alternet | Barney Frank takes pride in being the Left's darling, but he's almost entirely funded by Wall Street and his votes show it.

Reuters | U.S. banks that spent more money on lobbying were more likely to get government bailout money, according to a study released on Monday.

Forbes | A crushing burden of debt threatens to sap America's growth for years to come.

Video | Congressman Ron Paul describes the American power structure. As a member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Paul was in a unique position to see the inner workings of economic power and control of the country, and how this power translates into political power.

Ludwig von Mises Institute | Defenders of Keynes, such as the recent convert Bruce Bartlett, often claim that he supported capitalism. (Bartlett's The New American Economy has this as a primary theme.) His interventionist measures had as their aim not the replacement of capitalism by socialism or fascism. Rather, it is alleged, Keynes aimed to save the existing order.

Bloomberg | Seven U.S. banks were seized by regulators, bringing this year’s total of failed lenders to 140 as financial companies are tested by the recession and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. anticipates more shutdowns.

Baseline Scenario | For most the past 12 months, Paul Volcker was sitting on the policy sidelines.  He had impressive sounding job titles – member of President Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board immediately after last November’s election, and quickly named to head the new Economic Recovery Board.

The Robalution | Yesterday, President Obama said “the federal government will go bankrupt” if a sweeping, trillion dollar health care bill isn’t passed. “Health care costs,” he claims, “Are going to consume the entire federal budget.”

The Future | Are they kidding? Time magazine has named Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its Person of the Year.

Lew Rockwell | This medium of exchange should satisfy certain properties: it should be durable, that is to say, it does not wear out easily; it should be portable, that is, easily carried; it should be divisible into units usable for every-day transactions; it should be recognizable and uniform, so that one unit of money has the same properties as every other unit; it should be scarce, in the economic sense, so that the extant supply does not satisfy the wants of everyone demanding it; it should be stable, so that the value of its purchasing power does not fluctuate wildly; and it should be reproducible, so that enough units of money can be created to satisfy the needs of exchange.

New York Times | Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work.

New York Times | The bond vigilantes are back.  But this time they are roaming mostly through Europe rather than the United States — at least for now. Their mission: to force governments to cut budget deficits that have ballooned in the wake of the financial crisis, The New York Times’s Landon Thomas Jr. writes.

Raw Story | The vast majority of an estimated $352 billion in proceeds of organized crime, mostly from the drug trade, was funneled through the global banking system during the financial crisis of the past two years, and in some cases, the money rescued banks from collapse, says the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Wall Street Journal | Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc.  Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms.

Business Insider | With all the banks paying back the TARP money, some folks are assuming that the great Wall Street bailout is finally coming to an end.

Daily Kos | Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans."

New York Times | Math majors don't always get much respect on college campuses, but fat post-grad wallets should be enough to give them a boost.

Rolling Stone | Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Washington Times | The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) released a report last week concluding that 7.7 percent of U.S. households, containing at least 17 million adults, are unbanked (i.e. those who do not have bank accounts), and an "estimated 17.9 percent of U.S. households, roughly 21 million, are underbanked" (i.e., those who rely heavily on nonbank institutions, such as check cashing and money transmitting services). As an economy becomes richer and incomes rise, the normal expectation is that the proportion of the unbanked population falls and does not rise as is now happening in the United States.

Alternet | A permanent security blanket for big boys of finance will further inflame public opinion. Only the public isn't likely to know.

Spielgel | Production jobs have been moving out of Europe for years. But as the Daimler decision last week to move C-Class production to the US shows, the process is accelerating as the dollar becomes weaker. Companies from Airbus to ThyssenKrupp are opening factories in America to improve their bottom lines.

Video | His last stunt proved that most people are complete idiots about the price of gold, not to mention the economic turmoil we face.  Now he is back in action and showing that people will even sign a petition to increase inflation, which would completely destroy our economy for all time.  It is not even funny how stupid people are these days.

Huffington Post | If adopted, the measure would give banks one year to choose between being commercial banks or investment banks. The nation's biggest -- those now commonly referred to as "too big to fail" -- would be broken up. The Obama administration opposes the measure.

BBC | Ordinary people are reported to be desperately trying to buy as many goods as they can with the old currency while it is still valid.  The government told its people on Monday that it was knocking two noughts off the nominal value of banknotes.

The Independent | Britain seems doomed to be relegated from the "premier league" of international economies over the next few years - with serious implications for its diplomatic status and international "clout".

Washington Post | He wears no coat though it's freezing, shines no light though it's near midnight, carries no shotgun though he's tramping on the pine-needled tracks of black bears.  He wants to be lost in these woods.

Times Online | The CIA is to be given broad access to the bank records of millions of Britons under a European Union plan to fight terrorism.  The Brussels agreement, which will come into force in two months’ time, requires the 27 EU member states to grant requests for banking information made by the United States under its terrorist finance tracking programme.

Wall Street Journal | If you want to encourage the kind of conspiracy theories that have prospered in the wake of last year’s financial crisis — those that describe a secret cabal of elites running the world — try doing the following...

AFP | Negotiating with China is "worse than the IMF," Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said Saturday after rejecting China's conditions for a 1.7-billion-dollar loan to build a hydroelectric plant.  In his weekly report on government activities, Correa said some of the conditions China's Eximbank required for the loan were "really a threat against our sovereignty."

From Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone Magazine) at True Slant | The plate belongs to Morgan Stanley Vice-Chairman Rob Kindler. The blunt double-entendre obviously referencing his banker-member, for which the Porsche-in-middle-age is already an overcompensating signal to the rest of the world, adds significantly to the humor for me

BBC | They meet under the auspices of a hush-hush club formed after World War II, whose operations are so mysterious that even the grandees who attend it seem unclear what it's really called.  One bank supremo told me its name was the Instituts d'Etudes Financieres or some such; another that it went by the moniker IIEB.

Video | U.S. Senator Jim Bunning delivers his statement at the Senate Banking Committee explaining why he will oppose the nomination of Ben Bernanke to serve a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Video | Rolling Stone Magazine's Matt Taibbi exposes the role of Michael Froman in establishing the Obama-GoldmanSachs connection. And how that led to the hiring of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary

Washington's Blog | The basic assumption that jobs will eventually return when the economy recovers is probably wrong. Some jobs will come back, of course. But the reality that no one wants to talk about is a structural change in the economy that's been going on for years but which the Great Recession has dramatically accelerated.

Daily Reckoning | The division of the New York Mercantile Exchange commonly known as the Comex provides a commodities market for gold, as well as aluminum, copper, and silver. Without going so far as suggesting it’s impossible to get physical gold when exercising your Comex futures contracts, Jesse’s Cafe Americain explains that these days it just doesn’t seem very likely

CNBC | CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino tells the desk that Bank of America is going to repay $45 billion and get out of the TARP program.  And they will raise capital over the next few days, he adds. That suggests to host Melissa Lee that there will be an offering - although Karen Finerman says she would be surprised if it's entirely done with common equity.

List Verse | Most men have probably had a fantasy or two about pulling off a “once in a lifetime” kind of heist worth millions. Fortunately, most of us are sane enough not to let it get further than a thought. Below are a few men who were not. The only criteria for entry on this list is that they must have gotten away with it, at least temporarily. Anyone caught in the act does not qualify for this list. Whether it be cash, jewels, art or anything else worth big bucks, you can bet there is someone, somewhere, planning on stealing it. All values are in US$ or UK£, which bear in mind, are worth more than US dollars.

Lew Rockwell | After the CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine, Foreign Policy magazine is the second most influential Establishment (i.e., One World Government/New World Order) propaganda rag in the world. The magazine just came out with its list of the world’s top “thinkers” (i.e., best propagandists for the One World Government/New World Order). Guess who is the top* “thinker” in the world?

Market Oracle | The following information may be the most important we have ever published. One of our Intel sources, highly placed in banking circles, tells us that on 1/1/10 all banks that have received TARP funds have been informed by the Federal Reserve that they must further restrict any commercial lending. Loans have to be 75% collateralized, 50% of which has to be in cash, which is a compensating balance.

The Nation | Two months after we had marveled at the convergence of labor, farm, environmental and human rights activists outside the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle, Paul Wellstone and I were riding along the back roads of New Hampshire.

Truth USA | "Mr. Speaker, we are here now in chapter 11.. Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any Bankrupt entity in world history, the U.S. Government. We are setting forth hopefully, a blueprint for our future. There are some who say it is a coroner's report that will lead to our demise.

Bloomberg | “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

Counterpunch | The local news was replete with images of First Lady Michelle Obama in the elegant, strapless designer gown she wore for this White House's first state dinner.  More than 12% of all Americans know what it means to be poor in America. While they're conspicuously absent from reality T.V. shows, from box office movies, and political party platforms, they are increasingly visible at food banks, and shelters.

Infowars | “These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States,” Bernanke wrote in the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post.

 Video | Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and, most recently, Meltdown: A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (with a foreword by Ron Paul). Visit his website, and watch his Rally for the Republic speech

Law.com | IndyMac Bank v. Yano-Horoski, 2005-17926, came before Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey A. Spinner as the result of a state law mandating pre-foreclosure settlement conferences between lenders and borrowers of subprime, or high-cost, home loans.

Lew Rockwell | A revolution involves five crucial elements: (1) a new view of sovereignty; (2) a new view of authority; (3) a new view of law; (4) a new view of sanctions; (5) a new view of the future. Any revolution that does not involve all five is more of a coup than a revolution: a substitution of new rulers for old, not a change in the system.

Times Online | Fears of a dangerous new phase in the economic crisis swept around the globe yesterday as traders responded to the shock announcement that a debt-laden Dubai state corporation was unable to meet its interest bill.

Video Cafe | From Morning Meeting Nov. 25, 2009, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and the Financial Times' Chrystia Freeland discuss Matt's recent article at Rolling Stone and the divide between the recoveries on Wall Street and Main Street. Their analysis about what's wrong with the economic team Obama has surrounded himself with is spot on and until he starts listening to some different voices on how to fix our economy, Matt Taibbi is correct, the cycles of bailouts are going to continue to repeat themselves.