Pat Caddell, who was Carter’s pollster, sent this tidbit and considers it to be a meaningful indicator:
Superman may be a comic book character, but he is very much an iconic cultural figure to Americans, particularly the Baby Boom generation.
As reported by Laura Hudson in Comics Alliance:
Read more...Yves here. I have no doubt that some readers will give a knee jerk negative response to the idea of aggressive measures to create more jobs, seeing it as undue government intervention in the economy.
But that horse has left the barn and is now in the next county. Like it or not, the economic damage done by the financial crisis was too severe for governments to sit on their hands. So the question is not intervention versus no intervention, but what sort of intervention is most likely to be salutary? That means the benchmark is not doing nothing, but the measures taken thus far, which consist heavily of overt and hidden subsidies to the financial sector.
By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
A universal Jobs Guarantee Program could free us from the predations of politicians and foster a strong economy.
On the anniversary of the inauguration of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), it is striking to compare the unemployment record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that of his modern day successor, Barack Obama. FDR’s achievements in putting Americans back to work are among the most impressive of his tenure; he took the rate from 25% to 9.6% by 1936. But so far, Obama’s policies have failed to “jump-start” unemployment in a significant way, even as Wall Street has continued a recovery utterly and totally divorced from Main Street.
Read more...The kindest thing that can be said about the 50 state attorneys’ general negotiations over foreclosure abuses is that it is increasingly obvious that there will not be a deal. The leader of the effort, Iowa’s Tom Miller, has completely botched the effort. There was no way to have any negotiating leverage with intransigent banks in the absence of investigations. Miller has changed his story enough times on this and other fronts so as to have no credibility left. But whether there were no investigations (as other AGs maintain) or whether they did some (as Miller, contrary to a staffer’s remarks, now insists), they were clearly inadequate.
We’ve found the rumor, that Miller was angling to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, credible. It would explain his unduly cozy relationship with Federal banking regulators, as well as his efforts to wrap up negotiations quickly, which reduced what little bargaining power he had (time pressure means a party that drags its feet can extract concessions).
But like so many zombies that inhabit the financial landscape, the mortgage settlement negotiations refuse to die.
Read more...Was the US Treasury Secretary’s deep sixing of a plan by the seldom-charitable IMF to give the Irish some debt relief Versailles redux? By that I mean the Treaty of Versailles, the agreement at the end of World War I devised by the victors to dismember the German economy. Bear with me as I tease out this conceit.
Read more...Cross posted from MacroBusiness
Ok, we all know that anyone who says “this time it is different” is to be treated at best as misinformed, at worst as a fool. “They are the five most dangerous words in the English language” etc. etc. But, to repeat my question: “Are things always the same?” Mostly, yes. Modern housing bubbles are not unlike 17th century Holland’s Tulipmania, government debt crises have not changed all that much since Henry VIII reduced the gold in coinage, greed, profligacy, irresponsible plutocracies are always with us.
But in global finance there are some things happening that are genuinely different. Dangerously so.
Read more...The government’s policies have been geared towards redistributing wealth upwards …
Read more...The Euro has fallen from roughly 1.49 to the dollar to 1.43 in a mere two days, which is a huge move. Many pundits have argued that the ECB’s newly accommodative stance is the trigger, but there may be additional forces at work. Most experts have deemed the idea that any eurozone member would exit the currency to be simply inconceivable, that it would be too costly and disruptive. But with the hair shirt that Greece is being asked to wear, all bets may be off.
As of this juncture, this reports in Der Spiegel does not appear to have gotten traction among the Usual Suspects in the MSM. Headline: “Greece Considers Exit from Euro Zone” (hat tip readers John M and Illya F).
Read more...We’ve taken a dim view of the “worse than stress tests” review by Federal regulators of foreclosure practices late last fall. This was an obvious effort to alleviate concerns in the wake of the robosigning scandal. When the bank-friendly OCC released the results of the review, the guts of which was a look at 2800 seriously delinquent loans from all the major servicers, it confirmed our reservations:
Read more...This week seems to be open season on Deutsche Bank. The Department of Justice suit on them over FHA loans was singling them out when a lot of US banks are every bit as guilty. Now we have a Los Angeles prosecution over Deutsche acting as a slumlord, with the city attorney looking to launch cases against other major securitization trustees, namely HSBC, US Bank, and Bank of New York.
We have pointed out, that banks (more accurately, securitization trustees and servicers) are awful property managers, as anyone who lives in a neighborhood with foreclosed properties will attest. This inattention becomes disastrous in densely populated areas. The story in the Los Angeles Times is about as gripping as real estate gets:
Read more...In a new effort to guarantee the continued right of banks to loot and pillage, 44 Republican senators have written to Obama saying that they won’t approve of any head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ex what these Ministers of Truth choose to call a “restructuring” of the agency.
The arguments made against the agency strain credulity. As the New York Times reports:
Read more...We’ve been sayin’ the commodities runup and the fixation on inflation looked like a rerun of spring 2008: a liquidity-fueled hunt for inflation hedges when the deflationary undertow was stronger. That observation is now looking to be accurate.
But what may prove different this time is the speed of the reversal. With investors acting as if Uncle Ben would ever and always protect their backs, markets moved into the widely discussed “risk on-risk off” trade, a degree of investment synchronization never before seen. All correlations moving to one historically was the sign of a market downdraft, not speculative froth. And as we are seeing, that means the correlation will likely be similarly high in what would normally be a reversal, and that in turn increases the odds that it can amplify quickly into something more serious.
Read more...
