shrike

Book Review: Warren Buffett on Business

Show me where Buffett lost big on derivatives that were not hedges. Same with Dimon.

It looks like the big suckers at the table were AIG and Hank Paulson.

Banks in Atlanta and Norcross, Ga., become 2009's 125th and 126th failures, at a combined cost to the (empty) Deposit Insurance Fund of $271.5M. Updated 6:41 p.m.: The Tattnall Bank in Georgia becomes failure No. 127.

More Georgia banks filled with delusional Teabagging Rednecks.

What else is new?

The Lehman Bankruptcy: Should All Big Banks in Trouble Fail?

Paulson definitely DID stomach another bailout - running to Congress hat in hand begging for a $700 billion TARP program in October.

2008 will forever be a historic year - like 1929.

Food stamps, rebranded as "nutritional aid," now help feed one in four U.S. children, and one in eight adults - even as welfare rolls have stayed virtually flat.

anarchist -

I used "welfare" in parenthetical to illustrate the right-wing talking point that any social program is such - including pre-paid SS and Medicare benefits.

Actual welfare and food stamps are a tiny percentage of federal outlays and I am not in favor of cutting them.

We do have an entitlement mindset (SS and Medicare) but the right demonizes even that with this Nanny State jargon.

Black Friday retail sales rose a scant 0.5% to $10.66B according to early readings from ShopperTrak, but online sales outperformed, up 35% from a year ago. First round in the "big game of chicken" between retailers and customer: shoppers.

"The retail malls are dinosaurs."

You obviously don't know any females.

Food stamps, rebranded as "nutritional aid," now help feed one in four U.S. children, and one in eight adults - even as welfare rolls have stayed virtually flat.

The food stamp program is actually a part of the Dept of Agriculture and is operated much like an extension of farm subsidies.

Notice that the single GOP attempt to cut a "welfare" program was its 2005 attempt to cut Social Security for those under 50.

They know where the real money is flowing.

In an op-ed this weekend, Ben Bernanke worries about leading proposals in the Senate that would strip the Fed of its powers: "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 U.S."

The Fed didn't make Bear, Lehman, Merrill and the like throw their credit standards out the window during the housing bubble. They weren't even commercial banks thus they had no real regulatory agency.

The Fed had no oversight on bogus rating agencies that enabled the MBS madness. The Fed didn't encourage AIG in its massive CDS insurance scheme that it never had a chance to repay alone.

The Fed receives no taxpayer money to fund its open market operations and returns 95% of its profits to the Treasury (after paying a 6% dividend to member banks).

Alan Greenspan admitted that unregulated free market fundamentalism led to this mortgage crisis after a life of embracing such a philosophy.

Bernanke was not the problem. Bad management 2000-2006 was.

A Look at George Soros's Recent Trades

Soros "denounced our system"?

Never heard him do that - to the contrary he applauds democracy and open societies and says the USA is the best example of such.

Oh, you mean he was critical of Bush, don't you?

Turns out he was 100% right about Dumbya.

Squid flu? Growing frustration over reports that Goldman Sachs (GS) (along with big employers including Citigroup (C) and Morgan Stanley (MS)) is receiving hundreds of H1N1 vaccines before many hospitals do. David Weidner has a reader's limerick: "As jobless rates keep getting worse/The bankers cut lines to the nurse/Bad debts they accrue/But when there's swine flu/They finally turn risk-averse." NYC's health commissioner defends the distribution.

That settles it! Obama is a neo-capitalist in the pocket of investment banks!

No! Wait! Obama is a neo-Marxist who favors the little people!


Hold on! Obama is really a Jeffersonian Kenyan authority grabber!

With $770B of the $1.4T in commercial mortgages maturing in the next five years currently underwater, FDIC revises its rules (.pdf) to allow banks to keep loans on their books as 'performing' even when the underlying properties no longer cover the outlay.

The FDIC only has $11 billion left to cover deposits as it is.

Who the hell in their right mind would want to close thousands of banks at once?

Despite the death of inflation one can easily see the popularity of gold.

The Greatest Depression Is Coming

The Bush fascist party pushed fear on the American taxpayer to fund military contracts for years.

What happened to American bravery?

Buy a gun and defend yourself, American idiocracy. Don't depend on a GOP chickenhawk to do it.

The Greatest Depression Is Coming

"The real economic disaster will come when Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, SAIC, Exxon, Chevron, GE and other U.S. conglomerates follow in Halliburton's steps and relocate elsewhere. Elsewhere, is offering attractive incentives for talented and productive individuals and companies, not to mention better living conditions. Who would have ever imagined finding better living conditions outside of the U.S.A.? "


Great - then terminate their fat taxpayer funded contracts. They add no value to a US citizens life at all.

Obama lashes out at health insurers in his weekly radio address, calling their efforts 'deceptive and dishonest.' "For decades, whenever we have tried to reform the system, the insurance companies have done everything in their considerable power to stop us," he said.

"We want to turn our health care over to the VA Hospital. "

Who is proposing that? You are delusional my good fellow. Please seek reality.

Obama lashes out at health insurers in his weekly radio address, calling their efforts 'deceptive and dishonest.' "For decades, whenever we have tried to reform the system, the insurance companies have done everything in their considerable power to stop us," he said.

Health insurance is a legal cartel protected by an antitrust exemption much like OPEC.

The industry is ANTI free enterprise.

Regulate the industry like electric power - are they suffering?

Granted, there is a variation in costs for insurance - but if they don't play remove their cartel protection.

"I do not understand how financial institutions could think they could take taxpayer money and turn around and act like it’s business as usual ... but they seem to be winning this argument." - Elizabeth Warren of the Congressional Oversight Panel on bonuses and the power of banking lobbies (videos, about 10 mins.).

I love it.

Progressive Democrats keep claiming that Obama is beholden to Wall St. financiers and banks.

Teabaggers claim that Obama and Summers are following the Mao playbook.

The good like JPM and GS have repaid TARP with interest. The bad like C and AIG are punished with huge equity losses.

The naysayers are all wrong, of course.

The market knows it.