Posts Tagged
‘Summers’
by ilene - February 1st, 2010 5:20 pm
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
Out of Davos come two opinions that Bloomberg (and others) have spun as arguing for "continuing stimulus efforts":
“The headline number will look large and big, but actually when you dissect it, it’s very dismal and poor,” Roubini said in a Jan. 30 Bloomberg Television interview following a U.S. Commerce Department report that showed economic expansion of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter. “I think we are in trouble.”
Roubini said more than half of the growth was related to a replenishing of depleted inventories and that consumption was reliant on monetary and fiscal stimulus. As these forces ebb, the rate will slow to 1.5 percent in the second half of 2010.
No really? We’ve embedded $500 billion in annual transfer payments of various forms over the last 18 months. That’s about 3% of GDP, or more than the "advance" GDP number says that personal consumption expanded (2.2%)
In other words, but for the additions to transfer payments over what was present before we went into this mess consumption would be printing a solid negative number – still.
Summers said that the "statistical recovery" won’t mask "a human recession."
Human recession Larry? Is that like the "mental recession" that John McCain’s favored economic wonk proclaimed during the campaign?
Never mind our "good friend" President Obama, who is proposing a $3.8 trillion budget today. In a break with the usual "optimistic" view compared to the CBO, he’s predicting that the deficit this year will total $1.8 trillion, or almost 50% of the total federal spending – and that’s with more than $800 billion in higher taxes (which have a near-zero chance of actually passing Congress in an election year!)
The President claims to be enacting a "spending freeze" and claims that it is "everything but security and defense." In typical Washington form this is a lie – education and R&D (everywhere) are getting a 6% increase. This, while inflation is currently running at a statistical zero, and on the back of the last year’s budget which amounted to a "ratchet up" game played with the voters.
This is the same game, by the way, that was played with the states and their so-called "Federal Help"…
Tags: Human recession, mental recession, monetary and fiscal stimulus, Obama, politicians, President Obama, Roubini, Summers, transfer payments, Wall Street
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by ilene - February 1st, 2010 2:28 pm
Courtesy of Ellen Brown at Web of Debt
We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Rubin/Geithner). The bodies left strewn on the battleground could include your pension fund and 401K.
The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.
In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm’s reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Rubin protégé. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury “Goldman Sachs South.”
Goldman’s superpower status comes from something more than just access to the money spigots of the banking system. It actually has the ability to manipulate markets. Formerly just an investment bank, in 2008 Goldman magically transformed into a bank holding company. That gave it access to the Federal Reserve’s lending window; but at the same time it remained an investment bank, aggressively speculating in the markets. The upshot was that it can now borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest, and it can use this money not only to speculate for its own account but to bend markets to its will.
But Goldman Sachs has been caught in this blatant market manipulation so often that the JPMorgan faction of the banking
…
Tags: Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, JPMorgan, Morgans, Murray Rothbard, Politics, Robert Rubin, Rockefellers, Rubin, stock market crash, Summers, Timothy Geithner, too big to fail banks, Volcker
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by ilene - January 20th, 2010 12:22 am
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
While most pundits are inclined to view Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts as a referendum on President Obama’s healthcare plan, I view it as a sign of increasing anger over the state of the United States economy. President Obama swept into office on the back of “change” and “hope”. Although there has been an overwhelming amount of hope, there has been almost no change since taking office one year ago.
While the economy continues to suffer President Obama continues, with laser-like tunnel vision, to focus on the healthcare bill. At a time when 10% of American’s are out of work, bankers are receiving record bonuses and the government debt spirals out of control, the President is focused on a bill that will likely raise taxes and increase overall spending. Americans don’t think that makes one bit of sense and they’re exactly right.
It’s time for President Obama to wake up and realize that his economic team is failing him. We are repeating the mistakes of the past and the great reflation experiment is not working for the average American. This policy of print and spend hasn’t worked in the past and it’s not working now. The same men who helped get the economy into this mess (the bankers, Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, etc) are the same men who are going to bury his re-election hopes in 2012 if he doesn’t start reshaping his focus.
Tags: Americans, bankers, Bernanke, Economy, Geithner, Obama, Scott Brown, Summers
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by ilene - September 18th, 2009 1:17 am
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
While many people have called for the giant, insolvent banks to be broken up, Paul Volcker argues for a different approach: making sure that the taxpayers aren’t paying for their speculative activities which lie outside of traditional depository banking functions.
As Bloomberg writes:
“I do not think it reasonable that public money --taxpayer money — be indirectly available to support risk-prone capital market activities simply because they are housed within a commercial banking organization,” Volcker said.
Since January, Volcker has advocated that regulators should prohibit financial companies whose collapse would pose a risk to the economy — those considered “too big to fail” — from engaging in certain types of trading and investing activities. The administration wants stricter oversight for such companies and tighter capital and liquidity requirements.
“Extensive participation in the impersonal, transaction- oriented capital market does not seem to me an intrinsic part of commercial banking,” Volcker said. “Substantial involvement in heavily leveraged finance and heavy proprietary trading almost inevitably entails risks.”
“I want to question any presumption that the federal safety net, and financial support, will be extended beyond the traditional commercial banking community,”
As the Wall Street Journal notes:
Mr. Volcker said banks should be banned from "sponsoring and capitalizing" hedge funds and private-equity firms, which are largely unregulated. He also said "particularly strict supervision, with strong capital and collateral requirements, should be directed toward limiting proprietary securities and derivatives trading."
He also said collateral and leverage restrictions against the largest nonbank financial institutions "may be needed."
The comments reflect Mr. Volcker’s long-held view that banks should act more in line with their traditional role and not take extremely risky gambles, which could threaten the viability of commercial banks and expose the Federal Reserve and taxpayers to large risks…
Of course, the people with real power in the Obama administration – Summers, Geithner and Bernanke – don’t want to break up or regulate the too-big-to-fails.
As Yves Smith has repeatedly pointed out, Volcker has been sidelined from the first days of Obama’s cabinet nominations . .. even before Obama was sworn in as President.
Tags: Banks, Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, too-big-to-fail, Volcker
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by ilene - August 6th, 2009 5:21 pm
Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain
As we said, we would be taking a closer look behind the headline GDP numbers recently released. The advantage of procrastination is that eventually a capable person will chart up the data which you have been studying. So thank you to ContraryInvestor for his excellent charts. His site is among the best, and we read it regularly.
The big story is the collapse of the US consumer, unprecedented since WW II, and possibly the Great Depression. This is apparent in the numbers despite the epic restatement of GDP having just been done by the BLS in their benchmark revisions.
If the Fed and Treasury were not actively monetizing everything in sight, we would certainly be seeing a more pronounced deflation as prices fall WITH demand. And if they continue, we may very well feel a touch of the lash of that hyperinflation that John Williams is predicting. We still think a stiff stagflation is more likely, but are allowing that the Fed and Treasury may indeed be ‘just that dumb enough’ to trigger something less probable.
Until the consumer returns to some semblance of health, there will be no sustained recovery. It really is that simple.
The Fed will have to stop artificially draining credit supply by paying such a high rate of interest on reserves. They know this. It will stimulate lending, even to less worthy borrowers. But this is not a cure. It is one of the paths to more inflation, fresh asset bubbles, and the devaluation of the dollar. And ‘stimulus’ handouts are no better. Healthcare reform is a step in the right direction. The US consumer pays far too much for the same (or less) level of care in most of the developed nations. But that is not enough.
The cure will be to increase the median wage, and to stop the transfer of the national income to fewer and fewer hands. For that is how the system is set up today. It is not the result of ‘free markets’ but a sustained transfer of wealth through regulatory and tax policies, and a pernicious corruption of the nation most significantly starting in 1980, although a case has been made for 1913.
It is an ironic echo that our current over-his-head badly advised President seeks…
Tags: consumer demand, Economy, Geithner, Obama, Summers, the Federal Reserve, The Treasury
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by ilene - August 3rd, 2009 11:45 am
Courtesy of Allan
To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a “This Week” exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, "We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”
Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.
“We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,” Geithner told me. “And that’s going to require some very hard choices."
George Stephanopoulos Aug 2, 2009
Back on November 1, 2008, I published my endorsement of Barack Obama for President. To say I have been disappointed would be a gross understatement. My previous political cynicism, which I thought was slayed and erased by Obama’s candidacy, has returned with a vengeance. Like a Swine Flu virus temporarily muted by the vaccine of the moment, my political atheism has mutated once again and this time the result is a complete obliteration of faith in political leadership.
It’s not that I retract my endorsement, or that I would now have voted for John McCain, electing Obama was good for our country in narrowly defined ways, good for the global community as well, but he has revealed himself to be just one more in a long line of lying, deceiving, incompetent political hacks.
Obama ran on the promise to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home in 16 months after he took office, by May 20, 2010. Instead, he has acted to just bring some of the troops home by August 31, 2010. Not a big deal? Say that to the soldiers who are slain or maimed between May and August of 2010, or to those who will be part of Obama’s "residual force" of 50,000 troops who will be staying until December, 2011.
In Afghanistan Obama has embraced George Bush’s indefinite occupation policy as well as the extension of that war into Pakistan.
Similarly, Obama is defending and even expanding the Bush administration’s war-on-terrorism powers, which have constituted among the greatest infringements on civil liberties and privacy in our nation’s history.
Obama ran on a clearly anti-Washington establishment platform, promising an administration of new names and
…
Tags: Bush, Campaign Promises, Council on Foreign Relations, Geithner, Summers, Taxes, The Bilderberg Group, the obama deception
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.