STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 10 May 2012

[Tansy_Gold]

[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Thursday, 10 May 2012[font color=black][/font]

SMW for 9 May 2012

AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 9 May 2012
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Dow Jones 12,835.06 -97.03 (-0.75%)
S&P 500 1,354.58 -9.14 (-0.67%)
Nasdaq 2,934.71 -11.56 (-0.39%)



[font color=red]10 Year 1.82% +0.02 (1.11%)
30 Year 3.02% +0.03 (1.00%) [font color=black]


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[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
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[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]

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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
Bloomberg Economic News
Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Bank Tracker
Credit Union Tracker
Daily Job Cuts
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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The Big Picture
Financial Sense
Calculated Risk
Naked Capitalism
Credit Writedowns
Brad DeLong
Bonddad
Atrios
goldmansachs666
The Stand-Up Economist
The Automatic Earth
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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LegitGov
Open Government
Earmark Database
USA spending.gov
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
Charlie Rose talks with Krugman
William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
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Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 = [/font][font color=red]12[/font]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison



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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]

[Tansy_Gold]

1. sorry I'm late

severe thunderstorms here. don't know how long power and internet will hold out.

[Fuddnik]

2. Just relax and watch natures fireworks.

[Warpy]

5. Waiting for that cartoon was well worth it.

It's true, too, I honestly think he will be remembered for far more than the color of his skin, although that will make it absolutely certain he will never be forgotten.

[Demeter]

17. Personally, I'm not impressed

Obama had to be shamed by his VP, strong-armed by North Carolina, and grabbed by the short-and-curlies across the nation to give even this much lip service to equality.

I wonder if the drones were down that day....

[bread_and_roses]

36. Nor am I ... like Cuomo in NY, it doesn't cost him anything for the potential gains

I know the talking heads out there are saying this could cost him swing votes. I don't believe it. Those who care so much about who marries whom tend to have a complex of shibboleths that would never permit them to vote for Obama - on guns, women's reproductive freedom, prayer in school, evolution, environmental dominionism ....etc.

And I cannot believe that the same man who had that revolting minister person give the invocation or whatever it was at his inauguration has not had his number crunchers parse this out to the .0001% on exactly how much it might cost in any possible swing vote vs. how much it might profit in donations.

While few in the GLBT community were ever likely to vote for Robot Romney, they were likely an unenthusiastic and unmotivated constituency whose turn-out, volunteerism, and donations would have been depressed this election.

I am very happy for any and gains in equality for my Sisters and Brothers in the GLBT community. But all credit goes to them - to their activism, courage, persistence.

Obama is just making a purely political calculation.

[Demeter]

38. You put that so much better than I ever could

I'm thinking the man has no soul. Just a typical empty suit.

[Tansy_Gold]

51. And you put THAT far better than I could

I'd go on for paragraphs or even pages. . . .


The thing here though is that making the statement now may serve to bring in election support, but assuming Obama wins in November -- and I really don't think Romney has a chance -- he's not going to have the re-election worries to prevent him, or the people he made promises to, from pushing forward on an agenda, whatever that agenda may be.

This will be even more true if the Dems hold on to any kind of majority in congress.

THE BIG QUESTION, however, is whether the party will look long term and start preparing someone for 2016. If they started a kind of talent show, trotting out all the hopefuls/possibles in a kind of American Idol audition process, they could lessen their worries.

We already know some of the likely pukes, and you have to believe the media will be putting them out there. The Dems don't seem to do this. And while I understand the ick factor of letting the party choose our candidates, this is politics after all. If we the people get out there and make enough noise over the next four years, some things could happen. If we wait until November 2016, we can't complain too much.


Shutting up now,

TG

[AnneD]

57. I remember the late great Ann Richards once saying.......

If I had know I was going to only get one term, I would have pushed for more changes. If you step up to the platform, you may as well ring the bell while you're there.

Obama has kissed too much RW ass, and sold out the middle class. And for what...a future comfortable life life for his family in the realm of the 0.05%. I was hoping for a Cleavon Little riding a Blazing Saddle, instead I got a Gabby Hayes 'Johnson' riding Blossom.

[Demeter]

59. I'm in mind of Alice's White Knight in "Through the Looking Glass"

Always falling off his horse onto his head, carrying a load of useless junk around which he "invented" and which serves no practical purpose.

[Tansy_Gold]

63. Yes.

The point is, though, that while Obama and the party could hide behind the curtain of re-election, now they won't be able to do that. They'll either have to put up or shut up -- and admit they were liars. We here already know they lied: Obama was no more intending to be a good one-term president than he was intending to join the Aryan brotherhood. He wanted the two terms more than anything, more even than any kind of legacy. But retiring from being the most powerful man in the world is going to be a big come down. Bill Clinton was able to walk away, in spite of Gore's defeat by the SCOTUS, with a legacy of happy days, and he had a way of balancing both the bubba down home common man image with the Rhodes scholar academic policy wonk.

Obama can't do that. He just doesn't have the personality. He can do the law professor policy wonk, but he can't do the common man.

And I have a sick feeling that he and the party think that they can sail through another four years with excuses and delays and whines, and I don't think that's going to happen. If they have a Dem House, it's going to be very difficult NOT to pass some of the more progressive legislation that's been on the table for four years.

But what do I know?

[hamerfan]

69. Musical Interlude

Thank you for the suggestion, Tansy!
Aaron Copland. Fanfare For The Common Man:

[Tansy_Gold]

72. Oh, SHIT! I love that!

I am literally all covered with goosebumps!

What a wonderful excuse to take a break from the day job and listen and watch!!!!

[TalkingDog]

3. off to the greatest

bon chance!

[Eugene]

4. Spanish government rescues fourth largest lender, Bankia

Source: The Guardian

Spanish government rescues fourth largest lender, Bankia

Loans given to ailing bank will be converted into shares as jitters
drive Madrid stock market to eight-year low

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 May 2012

Spain's conservative government partly nationalised the country's fourth-largest bank, Bankia, after investors dumped Spanish bonds and stocks amid increasing worries about the country's banking sector.

Under the deal, €4.5bn (£3.6bn) in government loans given to Bankia over the past two years will be turned into shares in the group's parent company, the finance ministry said. That will give the state 45% of the shares and, effectively, full control.

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Bankia has more than €30bn of exposure to troubled loans to property developers and repossessed land and buildings.

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/10/spanish-government-rescues-fourth-largest-bank-bankia

[Warpy]

6. Nationalize them, go through all the books with a fine toothed comb

and jail the ones engaged in fraud.

That's the way to pull the banks out of this one. Nothing else will do, especially while the culture of corruption at the top exists.

If they don't do this, the banks will continue to lurch their host countries from crisis to crisis.

[bread_and_roses]

37. Yep. We could try that here, too ... (n/t)

[kickysnana]

7. (Chinese) ICBC gets approval to take over US bank

Cross post from http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014117741

Source: BBC

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has been given the nod to take over a US bank, the first such US approval for a Chinese firm.

The US Federal Reserve approved state-owned ICBC's plans to acquire the US subsidiary of Bank of East Asia.

This comes just days after high-level economic talks between the US and China in Beijing.

The Fed also gave permission to two other Chinese banks to increase their presence in the US.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18015456

[Demeter]

8. Will Marriage Become a Thing of the Past for All But the Wealthy?

http://www.alternet.org/story/155234/will_marriage_become_a_thing_of_the_past_for_all_but_the_wealthy?akid=8732.227380.6GeliA&rd=1&t=30

Perhaps what we are witnessing is not so much the death of a tradition but a further widening of the class divide. The institution is dying -- for the poor. The idea of Government-managed marriage — the institution that dates from the 1600s and has long been considered one of the foundations of the social structure of civilization — is rumored to have passed away, quietly, in 2011.

It has been widely reported that the institution died of complications from a progressive disease. The causes include growing equality in the workforce, social acceptance of licenseless sex, and the dissolving of the stigma of being either single or gay. In its prime, marriage offered economic structure and support to women who didn’t work outside the home, and a broadly accepted framework for child rearing. Ideally, marriage also offered security and companionship. But as cultural norms changed — influenced by increasing numbers of women seeking higher education and equal rights, along with the mid-20th-century Kinsey reports and the Masters and Johnson report, which offered stunning new insights into human sexual behavior — so too did the practice of marriage. The results: today there are more single than married people in the nation. The shotgun marriage has entered the realm of folklore. And the number of single parents has skyrocketed. A widely quoted 2010 Pew Research Center study reports that four in 10 respondents said the institution is becoming obsolete.

Marriage’s fall has been chronicled by a vast array of articles in major media outlets, based on a vast array of studies. (Along with the Pew Center study, two others are: “Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces,” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, and “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,” by Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.)

But is it possible that the death of marriage is an exaggeration? Is the old institution simply going through some shape-shifting that is as much economic as cultural? Consider that the studies also show that marriage, while declining among the majority of Americans, remains the institution of choice for one particular subset: adults with a college education and a substantial income. In a recent interview, Andrew Cherlin commented that “Marriage matters more now as the symbol of the good life than as a legal institution.” He added, “I don’t think the battle over same-sex marriage is about rights anymore. It’s about being allowed to have a first-class social status.”


OKAY, MARKETEERS--WHAT DO YOU THINK? WHAT TRENDS HAVE YOU SEEN?

[bread_and_roses]

45. Back to the Middle Ages! or ... forward to a healthier "family?"

Conventional marriage can't die too fast for my liking. It is indisputably dangerous to women and most especially children, and I think a quintessentially capitalist model for household production and the raising of children.

Up through - I think - about the 18th century (I'm no historian, and all the history and analysis I've read over the years rather swirl around in my brain, so not much use on dates and numbers) marriage as an institution seems to have been far more rigid among the "upper class" where it was a matter of estates and wealth and dynasty. The "lower orders" had "jumping the broom" sorts of traditions that might be sanctified by a mendicant Friar sometime or another - or not.

The stats on marriage today in US might reflect the descent to serfdom for the hoi polloi we seem to be experiencing.

Perhaps women will wake up one of these days - poor women, the upper classes have too much wealth at stake - and realize that the most sensible arrangement would be some sort of communal living for women and their children - let the men find their own living arrangements and come as guests, for fun and heavy lifting and at the price of "gifts" of food, work - and at the women's choice.

Women and children would be safer: women would not be stuck in the terrible isolation of conventional marriage and children would have more resources devoted to them and not be so at risk of all the terrible fates they are vulnerable to under our current insane and unnatural arrangement.

[Demeter]

47. You Are Talking "Gate to Women's Country"

The Gate to Women's Country (ISBN 0-553-28064-3) is a post-apocalyptic novel by Sheri S. Tepper written in 1988. It describes a world set three hundred years into the future after a catastrophic war which has fractured the United States into several nations. The setting of the story is Women's Country, apparently in the former Pacific Northwest. They have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy based on small cities and low-tech local agriculture. They have also developed a matriarchy where the women and children live within town walls (so-called women's country) with a small number of male servitors, and most of the men live outside the town in warrior camps.

Plot

The Gate to Women's Country is set in the future, 300 years after a nuclear war destroyed most of human civilization. The book focuses on a matriarchal nation known as Women's Country, and particularly the city of Marthatown.

Stavia, the novel's heroine, is the younger daughter of Morgot, an important member of the Marthatown Council. The book opens with Stavia as an adult, heading to meet her fifteen-year-old son, Dawid. He has spent the last ten years living outside the city walls with the warriors, as all boys do, and is now old enough to decide whether he wishes to remain a warrior or accept a life of study and service among the women as a servitor. Dawid formally renounces his mother and chooses to become a full-fledged warrior.

Afterwards, Stavia remembers when her younger brother was sent to live with the warriors. Much of the rest of the novel is told in flashback, following Stavia's life from childhood to adulthood. In the story's present, Stavia prepares for her role as Iphigenia in Marthatown's annual performance of Iphigenia at Ilium, a reworking of the Greek tragedy The Trojan Women that weaves through the novel as a leitmotif.

While still a child, Stavia met Chernon, the son of one of her mother's friends. Although Chernon lives in the garrison with the other boys and men, he and Stavia form a friendship. They meet at the twice-annual Carnival, the only event in Women's Country where warriors and women can mix freely. Stavia eventually agrees to smuggle books to Chernon for him to read, even though this is forbidden for boys in the garrison.

In fact, Chernon has been ordered by his commander, Michael, to learn more about the secrets of the women who rule Women's Country. After confessing to breaking the ordinances, Stavia is sent away from Marthatown for several years to train as a doctor. On her return Chernon pursues their relationship again. When Stavia is selected for an exploration mission to the south, Chernon leaves the garrison (on Michael's orders) and meets her there.

While away from Women's Country, Stavia and Chernon are captured by a band of "Holylanders", members of a struggling community to the south of Women's Country. They practice polygamy and seem to be descendants of rural fundamentalist Christian splinter groups. The Holylanders are brutally misogynistic and treat women as slaves to their husbands.

Stavia's experiences among the Holylanders gives her a deeper appreciation for her homeland. Upon her return to Women's Country she finally learns the secrets of the Women's Country Council and the choices they have made to preserve their way of life. The secret of Women's Country is that there are no births of warrior children, all children are fathered artificially by servitors. The goal of Women's Country is to breed out the gene that causes men to choose the warrior life.

Major themes

The story explores many elements from ecofeminism, which has been a hallmark of much of Tepper's writing, both in her feminist science fiction and in her pseudonymous mysteries.

The question of the causes of human violence is also a major theme, and in the novel Tepper's society hopes they are successfully breeding violence out of humanity. In the novel, violence appears to be biologically determined. By selecting only nonviolent individuals to breed, the society is slowly increasing the number of such nonviolent members.

Tepper is careful to demonstrate that it is only unreasoning violence, not the ability to learn to fight and defend oneself and others, that is being bred out. Both servitors and women of Women's Country demonstrate these skills, but never due to quarreling or the pleasure of fighting.

It is more apparent that violent men are being weeded out, but women are also given hysterectomies and tubal litigations at the discretion of the medical officers.

The biological determinism of Tepper's world also controls sexuality, and the novel constructs homosexuality as a genetic and hormonal disorder which has been eugenically removed from the population. Jane Donawerth, applauding the depth and richness of Tepper's exploration of this theme, describes Tepper's approach as a "chillingly homophobic solution". Tepper thus illustrates a world approaching a feminist utopia through the vision of a powerful leadership who impose rigid behavioural control on their society, and engineer the removal of those traits they consider undesirable through forced sterilization.

[bread_and_roses]

53. Not exactly - perhaps more influenced by French, "War Against Women."

How amazing to find someone else who knows "Gate to Women's Country." However, I'm no authoritarian. Tepper's construct is far too much so for me (to be clear, I don't know if Tepper herself is an authoritarian or if she was simply exploring a possible scenario - she's a prolific writer, and "Gate" must be among the shortest of her book. I read several other very very very long novels by her but I rather got lost in them - it was when my daughter was a (difficult) infant and my powers of concentration were about nil.)

But the problem of human violence/evil obsesses me too - ever since I fully explored the Holocaust - as I think it must obsess all of us who are thinking beings.

I think my own vision is more informed by Marilyn French's "The War Against Women" which I count among my formative readings - along with history of the Holocaust and the famous Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment.

When I read the staggering compilation in "The War Against Women" I concluded that we can't "fix" this by tinkering or certainly by somehow changing individual behaviors. It's at the least systemic, if not genetic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_French

[Demeter]

58. The "Authoritarisanism" is Far More "Authoritative", and there is a difference

The women's society was below survival numbers. There is no room for error.

In such a scenario, strict attention to breeding, to the quality of the breed, to the efficiency of resource use is paramount for survival of the species and the society. Every gene in the pool was tested at least two generations before discarded.

Because all women were bound up in pregnancy for a decade or so, and all the men exiled until and unless they came to their senses, there was no slack for oopses, no "pool of idled labor" to draw upon.

These women had no luxuries...unless you consider the absence of domestic violence, addiction, and patriarchy as the luxuries they are for women.

And what did the "warriors" want? To revert to patriarchy. The women had reasoned it out and managed to give most people most of what they wanted. And it was working. Their society was increasing in size and territory and technology and health. Their rival "Fundie" neighbors were devolving in the exact opposite direction.

If we must have a dystopic future, I as a woman and a realist prefer this one.

[tclambert]

70. All I know is: Half of all marriages end in divorce, . . . and the other half end in death.

[TalkingDog]

71. touche!

I'm passing that one along to the Spousal Unit.

[Demeter]

9. European People Have Rejected Austerity Madness: Will the U.S. Get the Message? By Marshall Auerback

http://www.alternet.org/story/155302/european_people_have_rejected_austerity_madness%3A_will_the_u.s._get_the_message?page=entire

So the voters of Europe have spoken, and surprise, surprise: they are not too keen on fiscal austerity. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, became the first incumbent to lose since 1981. In Greece, the mainstream parties that have been happily participating in the country's national suicide were soundly rejected by the electorate (who finally had a say on the country’s economic course after being the unwilling recipients of a European Union/International Monetary Fund-sponsored financial coup d’etat over the last several months). Governments in Europe have been caught up in the fiscal austerity narrative that the neo-liberals imposed on failing economies everywhere. They believe that if they demonstrate misguided “fiscal responsibility” through the maniacal pursuit of a budget surplus, the electorate will reward them for being good managers. However, as the Greek and French elections vividly demonstrate, the electorate is more concerned about real income growth and employment opportunities and they are clear that the current strategy is undermining both.

What Europe’s technocratic elites fail to grasp is that it is folly to pursue a budget surplus at a time when the economy is slowing. In a weak economy, what economists call "automatic stabilizers" kick in (payments like unemployment benefits) to keep things from going into freefall. When the government has to make those kinds of emergency expenditures, and people are out of work, tax revenue plunges. So budget deficits are to be expected, and trying to pursue cuts in the face of that reality is very irresponsible fiscal management. One would think that American politicians would take note. And yet precisely the opposite lessons are being drawn in the US.

In the US, there has been much discussion recently of what's known as the “fiscal cliff.” That's what we may be headed over on the first day of 2013, when the Bush-era tax cuts revert back to previous levels, and the more than $1 trillion in arbitrary budget cuts Congress approved last year are scheduled to begin. Some would call the policies that have produced this scenario “responsible fiscal management.” I would argue that it would represent a self-inflicted wound of historic proportions. Even the International Monetary Fund has expressed such grave concerns that lawmakers will drive over the cliff that it ranks the possibility as a threat equal to that posed by the European debt crisis.

In the US, it might be sensible to get some kind of balance between high income earners and the 99 percent. But it isn’t a matter of taxing the rich more to get the funds to reduce the deficit. Deficit reduction should not be an object of policy, period. The urgent problem is that we need to support the demand for goods and services in our economy. If we pursue budget cuts that take money out of the pockets of consumers, then people stop spending, businesses stop hiring, and we get into the death spiral that has played out so tragically in European countries. The macroeconomic urgency at present is to escape the austerity mindset and get growth going. In fact, it is only because of those “horrible” budget deficits which policy-makers continue to describe as “unsustainable” that the US continues to grow at all (in stark contrast to the Eurozone). Policy abominations such as those pushed by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who call for so-called "entitlement reform," are exactly the opposite of what is required for a healthy economy. Reaching into the pockets of hard-working people does not drive economic growth -- and at some point, when they are squeezed beyond endurance, the people will push back.

MORE

******************************************************************

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

[bread_and_roses]

46. "Waiting for Copernicus: On the Slow-Death of Neoliberalism"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/09-10

Published on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 by Foreign Policy In Focus
Waiting for Copernicus: On the Slow-Death of Neoliberalism
by John Feffer

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

... A backlash against austerity in Europe, a move toward greater state control in Latin America, a change in leadership at the World Bank: this might seem slender evidence for a Copernican revolution in economics. The evidence for overturning orthodoxy might even have seemed stronger in 1999, when the Asian financial crisis prompted New Perspectives Quarterly to ask economists Laura Tyson, Jeffrey Sachs, and others whether the Washington consensus was truly at an end (they saw greater “market pluralism” emerging). Moreover, a number of leaders like Barack Obama are styling themselves as Tyco Brahe, the Danish astronomer who attempted to combine both Ptolemy and Copernicus into an untenable geo-heliocentric system. These modern-day Brahes want to preserve the Washington consensus with only a few modifications.

Obama as Tycho Brahe -

aside - where the heck were all these good articles on economic matters on the sites I read last weekend when I was trying to find stuff for WE?

[Demeter]

49. (You have to get on the right distribution lists)

It's taken me years to find sources....

[Demeter]

10. Corporate Profits Hit New Records: Still Hoarding Gobs of Cash, Still Barely Hiring

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/927053/corporate_profits_hit_new_records%3A_still_hoarding_gobs_of_cash%2C_still_barely_hiring/#paragraph3

The Fortune 500 are raking in the profits as never before. Indeed, corporate profits overall are back to pre-recession levels.

The Fortune 500 generated a total of $824.5 billion in earnings last year, up 16.4% over 2010. That beats the previous record of $785 billion, set in 2006 during a roaring economy. The 2011 profits are outsized based on two key historical metrics. They represent 7% of total sales, vs. an average of 5.14% over the 58-year history of the Fortune 500. Companies are also garnering exceptional returns on their capital. The 500 achieved a return-on-equity of 14.3%, far above the historical norm of 12%.

But business investment? Running about 16.5 percent vs. a pre-recession rate of 20 percent, according to the International Institute for Labour Studies. And hiring? Still limping along. Millions of new private sector jobs created over the past three years, but far short of the number required. The last jobs report, at a seasonally adjusted 115,000 jobs, was just barely above the level required to absorb increases to the working-age population, although the number of new hires will probably be revised upward 10-15 percent when the next report appears in June. Meanwhile, the biggest U.S. non-financial corporations are sitting on an estimated $2 trillion in cash instead of using the money to hire more workers or invest in new projects.

At present, cash accounts for more than 6 per cent of the assets on the balance sheets of US non-financial companies. That is the highest in at least six decades, and represents the fruit of record high profit margins. Companies cut costs through redundancies during the post-Lehman economic swoon, while negligible interest rates reduced their borrowing costs. As a result, US corporate profits are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than at any time since 1950.

But as uncertainty persists, groups are reluctant to repay that cash to shareholders by buying back stock or — particularly — paying dividends. The pay-out ratio (the proportion of earnings that go in dividends) for the S&P 500 index is at its lowest since 1900.

Got that? Corporate profits are higher, percentage-wise, than in more than 60 years. The dividend pay-out ratio is lower than in more than a century. And the companies are sitting on piles of money that make Scrooge McDuck look like an Occupy activist. Meanwhile, extensive productivity gains during the recovery have benefited employers and stock prices but not workers. While the profits have rolled in, wages have risen less than two-thirds the level of inflation in the past 12 months. Forbes notes that this can't last. Employers have squeezed about as much as they can out of their layoff-shrunken work-forces. Soon, it is claimed, they will have to hire more workers to meet growing consumer demand. There is, it is true, evidence in the data that more and more part-time workers who have been hankering for full-time jobs are finally getting them. And that could be a precursor to vastly more hiring and rehiring. Which, if it isn't just another verse in the siren song we've been hearing for two years straight, would obviously be music to the ears of the 25 or so million Americans who are officially jobless or underemployed, as well as those millions who have fallen off the radar completely.

But, given the actual play of the economy recently, best to believe it when we see it.

[Demeter]

11. The New Wall Street Racket Looting Your City, One Block at a Time

http://www.alternet.org/story/155276/the_new_wall_street_racket_looting_your_city%2C_one_block_at_a_time?page=entire

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduced a “new and innovative” financing tool last month to help Chicago renovate failing infrastructure without precipitating another budget crisis, many in the city were understandably critical. Chicagoans have already endured the notorious 75-year lease of their parking meters to a consortium headed by Morgan Stanley. That sale promulgated a system wherein the public is held hostage by private finance, due largely to the inclusion of arcane legal stipulations like “non-compete clauses” and “compensation events” in the language of the contract. Ellen Danin, writing in the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy relates that: “Chicagoans learned about compensation events when CBS reported that the city’s parking meter contract required reimbursement for events like repairing streets. Public records showed that in the first quarter of 2009, the city was liable to the parking meter contractor for more than $106,000 in lost income during the slow months for street repair and street closings for festivals, parades, and holidays, as well as repairs and maintenance. At that rate, it is not unreasonable to predict that Chicago will owe roughly $500,000 a year to the private contractor.”

The city essentially acts as an insurer for the meter merchants, with the return being a one-time injection of roughly a billion dollars that the previous mayor, Daley the Second, haphazardly exhausted on closing budget deficits in the waning years of his two-decade tour at the helm. With the current infrastructure deal, Emanuel has repeatedly claimed that this is not privatization: This is not like the parking meter deal. Can the public believe him? Here is how the “infrastructure trust” works: the city pays for upgrades to its roads, rail or schools with dollars pooled by Emanuel’s friends from the banking and investment world. Meanwhile, the city retains “ownership” of the infrastructure, though this comes at the cost of having to ensure a revenue stream for the fund. Emanuel’s favorite example is his $225 million pet project to green-retrofit some of the city’s older buildings. The savings on energy usage stemming from the renovations are then extracted and used to pay off investors. Of course, the city could also sell municipal bonds to raise necessary funds, and then use the savings in energy costs to pay the loan back at a much lower cost to taxpayers. But then Emanuel’s friends (and campaign donors) would not be the richer for it.

While the mayor bills his plan as “bold” and “innovative,” the reality could not be further from the truth. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been around for decades in various forms and their track record is replete with delays, cost overruns and prolonged legal battles. What’s more, the beneficiaries of these investment mechanisms are the same rapacious Morgan Stanleys and Goldman Sachs that gave us the mortgage-backed securities scandal and the ensuing recession. Using the economic malaise they created as cause, they have ratcheted up their advocacy of PPPs as a means of helping cash-starved public entities finance capital-intensive projects. The upshot is that they are holding us hostage all over again. They are using infrastructure built over decades with public monies as collateral to extract profit off of the back of taxpayers. A cursory look at some past projects of this nature demonstrates that PPPs are often inefficient, overly costly and inherently unjust.

THREE GROTESQUE EXAMPLES ARE DESCRIBED HERE (SEE LINK)

Toward Sustainable Investment in Infrastructure

PPPs are purported to make additional resources available for public expenditure on capital-intensive infrastructure projects. However, the opposite tends to be the case. A report published by the Public Services International Research Unit notes: “The great majority of PPP’s rely on a stream of income from payments by government – i.e. public spending...In a context where there are political demands to cut public spending, the existence of PPP’s creates greater threats to other spending on public services. This is because PPP’s create long-term contractual rights to streams of income, and so governments are legally constrained from reducing payments to PPPs.” Even the International Monetary Fund warns that public investment in PPPs should be subject to strict scrutiny in a July 2009 publication: “Intervention measures should be consistent with the wider fiscal policy stance, be contingent on specific circumstances, and be adequately costed and budgeted.” The IMF also argues that PPPs related to weathering the economic crisis should include a “turn off” mechanism. A green paper published by the Commission of the European Communities in April 2004 even went further, recommending against PPPs as a tool to close any budget deficits. They argue that the mechanism should be employed primarily when the private entity is providing a specific field of expertise.

After all, why should anyone trust the same racketeers who precipitated the global economic crisis to make acute investment decisions on behalf of the people? All levels of government face serious fiscal constraints stemming from a range of causes, including the ongoing recession and regressive tax policy across the board. When financiers so generously offer to open up the purse strings to invest in pet infrastructure projects, the public response ought be: “No, thank you. Instead, we are going to raise the top marginal tax rate.” That would be a far more efficient and prudent way of beginning to tackle the fiscal crises in government.

MORE PROOF THAT RAHM IS A SCUMBAG, IN CASE YOU HAD DOUBTS.

[Demeter]

12. Chomsky: Do We Have the Makings of a Real Revolution?

SHORT ANSWER: NOT YET

http://www.alternet.org/story/155329/chomsky%3A_do_we_have_the_makings_of_a_real_revolution?page=entire

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history. The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s -- although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today -- nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world -- you could see it in the business press at the time -- because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis....

MORE AT LINK

***************************************************************************************

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects,Making the Future, and Occupy, published by Zuccotti Park Press, from which this speech, given last October, is excerpted and adapted. His web site is www.chomsky.info.

[Tansy_Gold]

13. "...just a step before taking over the factory."

Remember that word -- Mondragon.

[AnneD]

64. I would not characterize it as hopeless ......

or despair, but one of temporary resignation. People still have a little bit of hope but they are fast realizing that the application of the law is not equal. Our political parties have failed us, our Congress is divided along ideological lines that they couldn't pass gas if their lives depended on it, our Executive branch has grabbed so much power as to make Congress superfluous and is now basically on the path to a dictatorship, an our Judicial Branch is fast losing the only power they had...respect of the populace for the rule of law with their usurping election, destroying personal privacy, both bodily and communications, giving person hood to corporations, and taking away private property rights of the average individual.

Unless these areas are addressed, and soon, I fear that any adverse change will destroy the thin veneer of civilization and the people will revolt in a violent way. FDR did not make real changes until unions started getting aggressive. OWS is peaceful now, but how long can one keep knocking at the door for scraps to eat before the door is kicked in.

[Demeter]

14. Postal Service: Will keep rural post offices open

http://news.yahoo.com/postal-keep-rural-post-offices-open-140355580--finance.html

The struggling U.S. Postal Service is trying to tamp down concern over its wide-scale cuts, saying it will seek to keep hundreds of rural post offices open with shorter hours.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe tells a news conference the new plan will save the mail agency half a billion dollars each year while addressing concerns of rural residents most opposed to post office closings.

Previously, up to 3,700 low-revenue post offices were slated for closure or consolidation beginning sometime after May 15, many in rural areas. It was part of a multibillion-dollar postal cost-cutting effort to stave off the agency's bankruptcy.

The Postal Service now plans to seek regulatory approval for the new plan and get community input, a process that could take several months.

[Demeter]

15. Indian Court Blocks Exxon Valdez From Entering Scrap Yard

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/05/09/152328255/indian-court-blocks-exxon-valdez-from-entering-scrap-yard?ft=1&f=1001

One of the most infamous ships still sailing can't dock at its final resting place just yet.

India's Supreme court has ruled that the Exxon Valdez (now called the Oriental Nicety) cannot enter a scrap yard in the western state of Gujarat until its owners can prove the tanker has been cleaned of mercury, arsenic, asbestos, residual oil and other potential contaminants.

According to The Times of India, the ship's owners plan to appeal the court ruling...Since the spill, the AP says, "the tanker moved on, with five name changes ... and ownership changing repeatedly, apparently to keep the ship in use while distancing it from the disaster."

It's been estimated that the ship will bring about $16 million for its scrap parts.

[Demeter]

16. Spain set to take big stake in Bankia

Spain is expected to announce the partial nationalisation of Bankia after the troubled bank’s new chairman called for state intervention at a board meeting on Wednesday evening, people familiar with the situation said

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/EB8122/08S23O/RP6QL/16WKA8/FKOLLT/QR/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=9

[Demeter]

18. Vermont poised to be first state to outlaw fracking

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47343737/ns/us_news-environment/#.T6tB11LN3AN

Vermont will be the first state to outlaw a controversial oil and gas drilling method known as fracking when Governor Peter Shumlin signs a bill banning the practice, a largely symbolic move given the state's apparent lack of energy reserves..."Governor Shumlin does support the fracking ban," said Sue Allen, a spokeswoman for Vermont's Democratic governor. "He will sign the legislation when it reaches his desk." Vermont's House and Senate approved the measure last week and the bill is undergoing a final review by legislative staffers before being sent to the governor, Allen said.

It is a largely token gesture, given that Vermont does not have any natural gas reserves to speak of, sitting just outside the boundaries of the vast Marcellus shale formation...Vermont did not produce a drop of oil or natural gas between 1960 and 2009, and consumes the smallest amount of energy of all U.S. states, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The move is the latest in an effort by states to regulate or curtail fracking, which was exempted from many federal clean water regulations during the George W. Bush administration. New York and Maryland both have moratoriums on the practice pending environmental review. In 2010, Wyoming became the first state to require energy companies to disclose what chemicals they use in the process, followed by Texas and Michigan...MORE

[Demeter]

19. Austerity Can't Be Just for Regular People MATT TAIBBI

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/austerity-cant-be-a-one-way-street-20120508

It didn’t take long to crank up the backlash against European voters. This is inevitable whenever a socialist wins a major election, but particularly now, when new French president François Hollande rode to victory shouting, "Austerity can no longer be inevitable!"

This sounds like the beginning of what will be a very heated debate over who has to pay for the excesses of the financial crisis. It was previously assumed that everybody but the actual financial services sector would have to pay, but voters in Europe now are refusing to go along, sparking a wave of eye-rolling editorials in the financial press. Even David Brooks got into the act today, penning a lugubrious editorial about the errant political instincts of the populist masses here and abroad.

Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:

1. Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;

2. Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;

3. After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;

4. Pay for it all by slashing services to what’s left of the middle class.

This is the model we used in America. We had a monster asset bubble based on phony mortgages, which Wall Street was allowed to inflate to spectacular dimensions with minimal reserve capital, huge amounts of leverage, and tons of fraud for good measure. When that bubble exploded, we first rescued the banks who inflated the thing in the first place, and then our plan for paying for it mostly revolved around folks like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, who made great political hay by trying to take an ax to "entitlements" like health care and retirement benefits....MORE...if pain’s coming, it can’t just be regular people who pay. Bankers have to find new ways of making money that don’t just involve betting the hot table and taking out instant billion-dollar profits. They have to go back to building real businesses and being content with gradual returns over time. If there’s going to be austerity, it has to be for everybody.

[Demeter]

20. Austerity, the Euro Crisis and the US

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9032-austerity-the-euro-crisis-and-the-us FOR TRANSCRIPT

&feature=player_embedded

[Demeter]

22. How Europe's Austerity Backlash Might Change U.S. Politics

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-08/how-europes-austerity-backlash-might-change-u-dot-s-dot-politics

...Nevertheless, at least some experts believe that Europe’s plight will make austerity measures less likely in the U.S. After all, austerity’s effect this week on the careers of prominent Greek and French politicians—namely, ending them—certainly might alter a lawmaker’s views toward the necessity of deep budget cuts. A new research note from investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW) makes this case. “In our view, these elections will ultimately diminish the chances that the U.S. adopts austere fiscal policies,” writes the bank’s senior vice president of Washington research, Brian Gardner. “Thus, we feel confident that the ‘fiscal cliff’ facing the U.S. economy at year-end will be averted at least temporarily.”

Among the implications, Gardner suggests, are that the full Bush tax cuts (including those on high earners) are likely to be extended for another year. I spoke to him Tuesday to suss out how this might happen, given liberals’ staunch opposition to extending the high-end tax cuts and Republicans’ agreement that austerity is the path forward. “I don’t think you can look at Republicans as being homogenous, and moderate members have to be getting nervous,” Gardner said. “Post-election, if House Republicans suffer meaningful losses—10 to 15 seats—Democrats will blame the Paul Ryan budget.” That will spook surviving Republicans and make Democrats less inclined to accept entitlement cuts. Result: They’ll punt, by raising the debt ceiling in exchange for an extension of the cuts, buying time to work through tax reform.

Gardner also thinks that the Federal Reserve will influence Congress toward this result. “They’ll get pressure from the Fed to do that as well,” he said. “Ben Bernanke has been pointed in warning about the fiscal cliff. [Extending the Bush tax cuts] is not incompatible with avoiding that and buys time.”

[Po_d Mainiac]

29. The percentage of people that actually realize

Wall St. has captured the Country, is perhaps 15-20% (just a guess)

[Demeter]

34. Captured?

Well...it is a best a temporary victory. Because a complete victory would require the total destruction of the 99%. And who would do the "menial" work then?

There's nothing worse than capturing a prisoner you can't afford to kill.

Because you really have no power over the prisoner that he doesn't permit, or that you don't gain by deceptions, and deceptions are easily broken.

[Po_d Mainiac]

42. You don't 'kill' those captured

Until all ransom's have been paid.

The most efficient parasites don't kill their host.

[Demeter]

50. There's no ransom going to be paid, though

And these parasites are not that bright. They ARE killing the host. And as a result, the host is going to have to purge the parasites, or die.

And it's not practical to put 99% in prison, and expect the 1% to do the prison guard scut work. They can't lower themselves to that! They'll try to hire mercenaries, and we know how well that works. Some of the best immigrants to the US were the Hessian prisoners of war during the revolution....

[Po_d Mainiac]

52. What's the 'Headline' on the front page of your local newspaper?

How about the New York Times? Bloomfart? HuffPost?

The ransom is being paid. The parasites are thriving, and the host seems to be very content riding around in a rusty Buick banging on 5 cylinders.

[Demeter]

60. We don't HAVE a local newspaper

The Fundies bought it and destroyed it. They were trying to "convert" the "People's Republic of Ann Arbor" to Reaganism by slanting the news and endorsing GOP candidates. It didn't take. Subscription dropped precipitously.

So they shut it down, broke all the unions, and created this print / on-line abortion to replace it. Still slanted, still espousing GOP talking points, it's an "Advertising delivery system" that bills itself as "hyper-local news", which uses snippits of usually inaccurate gossip or rumor to "sell" it. (They once published the wrong starting time for the football game...that's how unconcerned with journalism this product and company are).

[Demeter]

21. Why Are Student Loan Interest Rates Set to Double? Thank These Lobbyists Who Helped Kill the Bill

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9028-why-are-student-loan-interest-rates-set-to-double-thank-these-lobbyists-who-helped-kill-the-bill-yesterday

On Tuesday afternoon, Senate Republicans blocked a measure that would have prevented a big hike for student loan interest rates. The legislation would have kept “subsidized Stafford loans at 3.4 percent for an additional year, rather than doubling automatically for new loans starting July 1.”

While the vote yesterday was certainly a partisan battle, a closer look at the interest groups driving the roll call vote explains the greater powers at play. Democrats wanted to pay for the student loan support by closing a tax loophole that even the late Robert Novak and the Wall Street Journal lamented as one the most egregious problems in the tax code. Essentially, wealthy individuals and large corporations often file using ‘subchapter S’ companies to dodge paying employment taxes. With Republicans refusing to close this loophole, student loan interest rates are set to double.

Republicans blocked the student loan interest rate bill simply because big businesses and campaign contributors lobbied aggressively against closing the loophole. The National Journal published a letter from a number of Beltway lobbying groups — among them, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents many multinational corporations, and the American Banking Association — protesting the measure. These lobbying groups have wide sway over both parties, but particularly the GOP. For a full list of the corporate lobbying groups that are ensuring that students pay more for college, see LINK

[Demeter]

23. Trade Alert! Is Another Job-Killing Trade Agreement Heading Our Way? By Dave Johnson

http://www.nationofchange.org/trade-alert-another-job-killing-trade-agreement-heading-our-way-1336570678

The trade agreements we have entered into over the last few decades have greatly enriched the already-wealthy 1% but not worked for the benefit of most of us. They have created massive trade deficits that drain our economy. They have cost millions of manufacturing, textile and other jobs. They have empowered huge, multi-national corporations to break unions and force pay and benefit cuts. Now the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is coming up, and once again things don't look so good for most of us. Maybe "look" is the wrong word to use, since We, the People are not even allowed to know what "our" government is proposing!

The TPP Trade Agreement

The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement is a major trade deal for Pacific Rim countries -- Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Japan, Mexico and Canada have said they plan to sign on later. Other Pacific Rim countries including Indonesia, Russia, the Philippines and possibly China are also expected to join. So this is a big deal. So far there have been eleven rounds of negotiations. Reports say that the United States has introduced proposals for the rest of the agreement. The 12th round of negotiations for the TPP start today in Dallas.

Another NAFTA-style Trade Agreement?

The NAFTA-style trade agreements we are familiar with have been used as weapons by the already-wealthy and their huge corporations to break unions and force working people to accept pay and benefit cuts, resulting in the "hollowing out" of our middle class. They have turned democracy -- with its good wages & benefits and environmental protections -- into a competitive disadvantage in world markets. These agreements are sold as "opening up trade" into new markets. This supposedly helps us by increasing exports, which supposedly should open up lots of jobs in the exporting industries. But now we see how these agreements have really been used. While increasing some exports like agricultural products and raw materials they have increased imports more, costing us jobs, factories and entire industries. The resulting trade deficits have literally drained our economy. The resulting movement of good-paying jobs has hollowed out our middle class These trade agreements have empowered companies to break unions. Companies cut pay and benefits, telling workers their jobs can be off-shored. This forces other companies to do the same whether they want to or not.

The Citizens Trade Campaign, in What Corporations Want with the Trans-Pacific FTA, worries about TPP, saying,

If it continues on its current course, the Trans-Pacific FTA will serve two primary purposes:
1. Making it easier for corporations to shift jobs throughout the world to wherever labor is the most exploited and regulations are the weakest; and
2. Putting checks on democracy at home and abroad by constraining governments’ ability to regulate in the public interest.

... Here, specifically, are examples of what corporations want with the Trans-Pacific FTA:

* Cheaper Labor Costs. ... (click through to read)
* New Tools for Dismantling Environmental Laws. ...
* Longer Drug Patents. ...
* Further Financial Deregulation. ...
* Caps on Food Safety Protections. ...
* Concentration of Global Food Supplies. ...
* Greater Access to Government Contracts. ...
* Lower Taxes. ...

Why The Big Secret?

We, the People are not allowed to know what our own government is proposing in these trade negotiations! But corporate lobbyists are working with the negotiators and are able to review drafts of the agreement. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, -- formerly Mayor of Dallas, candidate for US Senate, lobbyist for Energy Future Holdings Corporation, which was created by KKR, TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs in a $45 billion 2007 leveraged buyout -- has refused to release any of its negotiating proposals for public scrutiny. At the same time approx. 600 corporate lobbyists have been given "cleared advisor" status Why are our own country's proposals kept secret from We, the People? They are not a secret to the other governments involved in these negotiations, nor to the corporate lobbyists who have "cleared advisor" status.

TPP Concerns

Several chapters of the proposed agreement have leaked, raising questions about who this agreement will benefit. The Citizens Trade Campaign, "a broad and diverse national coalition of environmental, labor, consumer, family farm, religious, and other civil society groups" has a list of questions about the TPP:

Labor rights: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA include labor standards based on International Labor Organization conventions, and if included, how will they be enforced?

Investment Provisions: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA include so-called “investor-state” provisions that allow individual corporations to challenge environmental, consumer and other public interest policies as barriers to trade?

Public Procurement: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA respect nations’ and communities’ right to set purchasing preferences that keep taxpayer dollars re-circulating in local economies?
Access to Medicines: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA allow governments to produce and/or obtain affordable, generic medications for sick people?

Agriculture: Will the Trans-Pacific FTA allow countries to ensure that farmers and farm workers are fairly compensated, while also preventing the agricultural dumping that has forced so many family farmers off their land?

Buy America Banned?

"Buy America" procurement preferences for federal procurement contracts are one of the few tools we have left to make sure that We, the People benefit when our own tax dollars are spent. Currently and since the 1930s, American-produced goods have received preferential "buy America" treatment in federal procurement contracts. It has been leaked that the TPP agreement grants the TPP countries the same privilege. In other words, Buy American in federal procurement will give these countries -- Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam -- the same preferences as American-made goods. The idea is that these countries will then have to give American producers equal access to their own government contracts. Of particular concern is that Chinese-based firms in these countries will be able to bid against American companies for these government contracts. This would force American producers to compete with countries that do not have minimum wage laws or environmental protections, undermining our own such protections.

MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

24. Bundesbank signals softening on inflation

The most hawkish of central banks says an inflation rate above the eurozone average could be part of a natural adjustment process

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/6NPSBB/PF5T7S/ULCJB/084X22/B5B3Z6/HK/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=10

[Demeter]

25. Chevron and Shell to win Ukraine gas deals

Chevron of the US and Royal Dutch Shell are set to be named by Ukraine ahead of three other energy majors to explore two vast fields for unconventional natural gas resources, according to someone familiar with the situation.

The developments are likely to be the largest foreign investment in the country to date.
The tender could lead to some of the biggest shale gas extraction projects, using US-developed technology, in central and eastern Europe.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/LVA6WW/ZG9ZEC/RP6QL/XH77NB/B5BLOZ/KI/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=10

[Demeter]

26. China surplus jumps on weak imports

China’s trade surplus jumped in April as imports and exports both further decelerated, renewing fears of a harder than expected landing for the world’s second-biggest economy.

Exports grew by just 4.9 per cent from a year ago, compared to 8.9 per cent growth in March. Imports rose 0.3 per cent year-on-year, compared to March’s 5.3 per cent increase, according to official data released on Thursday.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/VKY5JJ/08SAA4/DXJ2Y/979JK5/DW8UOH/XL/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=10

[Demeter]

27. Stephen King - Ghosts from the 1930s have returned to haunt us

We may not yet have succumbed to a Great Depression but depression, in one form or another, is all around us. And we are witnessing the rise of political extremism, a nationalist backlash against a country’s obligations towards its – typically foreign – creditors.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/2SRI11/XHE2WP/ULCJB/OR88YR/SPK4KS/B7/t?a1=2012&a2=5&a3=10

[Tansy_Gold]

28. King should write a new version of "It Can't Happen Here." n/t

[Roland99]

35. The Haves always want to blame/repress the Have Nots

The creditors insist the debtors have only themselves to blame for the lack of growth. In the years preceding the financial crisis, southern European countries allowed their wages to rise far too quickly, thereby undermining competitiveness.

For creditors, it’s an attractive explanation because it lets them off the hook. Yet it’s an explanation full of holes. If competitiveness in southern Europe was so bad, why did northern European creditors lend to southern European nations with such reckless abandon in the first place? If the problem is only one of competitiveness, why have “well-behaved” northern European nations also ended up back in recession? The Dutch economy is shrinking again as is the UK despite – in the latter’s case – the supposed benefits of regular bouts of quantitative easing and, in the initial stages of the financial crisis, a huge decline in sterling. And if the story is only about competitiveness, why has the allegedly competitive US economy struggled to regain its pre-crisis poise?

Creditors typically absolve themselves from blame until it’s too late. And they demand adjustment from debtors even when the debtors no longer have the political capacity to do so. Yet, as the interwar period demonstrates, problems for debtors inevitably become problems for creditors too.

In 1931, Austria was attempting to deliver the kind of austerity now being witnessed in parts of southern Europe. Under the Gold Standard, the only option to regain competitiveness was to force domestic prices and wages lower. In the process, businesses failed, non-performing loans rose and the banking system began to look incredibly vulnerable. The crisis culminated in the failure of Creditanstalt, a major Viennese bank – the 1931 equivalent of Lehman Brothers. What had up until then been only a Great Recession turned into the Great Depression. A handful of years later, Hitler was welcomed by cheering crowds in Vienna.

[xchrom]

30. after a day of thunderstorms yesterday - in more ways than 1 - it's lovely today

i feel like doing this!

[xchrom]

31. China's exports and imports see slower growth

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18015458

China's export and import growth slowed in April raising fears about a sharp slowdown in its economy and triggering calls for monetary policy easing.

Exports rose by 4.9% in April from a year earlier, down from the 8.9% annual growth seen in the previous month, a sign that global demand may be slowing.

Meanwhile, imports rose just 0.3% on the year, down from 5.3% in March, indicating a fall in domestic demand.

China has been trying to boost domestic consumption to rebalance its growth.

[xchrom]

32. Bank of France predicts zero growth for first half

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18018445


The Bank of France has predicted zero growth in the French economy for the first six months of 2012.

Official figures for gross domestic product (GDP) for the first three months of the year are due to be released on 15 May, which is also the day of the inauguration of the new President, Francois Hollande.

Mr Hollande was elected on a platform of boosting economic growth.

The economy grew 0.2% in the last quarter of 2011.

[Roland99]

33. Today's Reports (a slew of them...jobless claims, import prices, trade gap)

* U.S. jobless claims dip 1,000 to 367,000
* Four-week claims average falls 5,250 to 379,000
* Continuing claims decline 61,000 to 3.23 million

* U.S. import prices sink 0.5% in April
* U.S. import prices minus fuel up 0.1% in April
* U.S. import prices 0.5% higher vs. year ago

* U.S. March trade gap with China $21.7 billion
* March trade gap above consensus of $50 bln
* U.S. March trade gap widens 14.1% to $51.8 bln

[Demeter]

39. Thanks, Roland

Glad you picked up that bit of the thread....

[Roland99]

43. ....

[Demeter]

40. New Emails Reveal Banks' Pre-Recession Arrogance, But Admin Fails at Prosecuting Financial Misdeeds

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/927051/new_emails_reveal_banks%27_pre-recession_arrogance%2C_but_admin_fails_at_prosecuting_financial_misdeeds/#paragraph3

Yesterday Bloomberg News published an op-ed by William D. Cohan which rips into newly-released Lehman Bros. email that reveal just how much the firm--and others of its type-- knew about the impending financial crisis:

...the cache dispels the myth that Dick Fuld, chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and his close associates were unaware of the risks their business faced in 2007 and 2008. That would be bad enough, but the more devastating reality is that Fuld and his sycophants were warned repeatedly but were blinded by their hubris.

The records confirm, yet again, that the “forces-out-of- our-control” argument we hear from Wall Street leaders is bunk. It is the ill-advised behavior of one banker after another, day in and day out, that leads to the sort of devastating financial crisis we are only now emerging from.

The entire piece is well worth a read. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-06/lehman-e-mails-show-wall-street-arrogance-led-to-the-fall.html

Meanwhile, the Daily Beast has just run another article by Peter J. Schweitzer and Peter Boyer on the failure of the Obama administration to go after these guys, explaining that when it comes to prosecuting financial fraud, this administration has been all talk and no action.

"There hasn't been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI," says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government's response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. "You need heads on the pike," he says. "The first President Bush's orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there's a new sheriff in town."

Obama delivered heated rhetoric, but his actions signaled different priorities. Had Obama wanted to strike real fear in the hearts of bankers, he might have appointed former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald or some other fire-breather as his attorney general. Instead, he chose Eric Holder, a former Clinton Justice official who, after a career in government, joined the Washington office of Covington & Burling, a top-tier law firm with an elite white-collar defense unit. The move to Covington, and back to Justice, is an example of Washington's revolving-door ritual, which, for Holder, has been lucrative--he pulled in $2.1 million as a Covington partner in 2008, and $2.5 million (including deferred compensation) when he left the firm in 2009. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html

There's a reason Occupy Wall Street hasn't gone away.

[Demeter]

41. Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide INTERVIEW

http://www.alternet.org/story/155281/noam_chomsky_on_america%27s_economic_suicide?page=entire

...There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift — a striking shift — from production to financialization.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this….

[Demeter]

44. A Question of Timing: What America Can Learn From the Revolt in Europe By Robert Reich

http://www.nationofchange.org/question-timing-what-america-can-learn-revolt-europe-1336459870

Who’s an economy for? Voters in France and Greece have made it clear it’s not for the bond traders.

Referring to his own electoral woes, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Monday in an article in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “When people think about the economy they don’t see it through the dry numbers of the deficit figures, trade balances or inflation forecasts — but instead the things that make the difference between a life that’s worth living and a daily grind that drags them down.” Cameron, whose own economic policies have worsened the daily grind dragging down most Brits, may be sobered by what happened over the weekend in France and Greece – as well as his own poll numbers. Britain’s conservatives have been taking a beating.

In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other. It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse. That’s because public spending is a critical component of total demand. If demand is already lagging, spending cuts further slow the economy – and thereby increase the size of the public debt relative to the size of the overall economy. You end up with the worst of both worlds – a growing ratio of debt to the gross domestic product, coupled with high unemployment and a public that’s furious about losing safety nets when they’re most needed.

The proper sequence is for government to keep spending until jobs and growth are restored, and only then to take out the budget axe. If Hollande’s new government pushes Angela Merkel in this direction, he’ll end up saving the euro and, ironically, the jobs of many conservative leaders throughout Europe – including Merkel and Cameron. But he also has an important audience in the United States, where Republicans are trying to sell a toxic blend of trickle-down supply-side economics (tax cuts on the rich and on corporations) and austerity for everyone else (government spending cuts). That’s exactly the opposite of what’s needed now. Yes, America has a long-term budget deficit that’s scary. So does Europe. But the first priority in America and in Europe must be growth and jobs. That means rejecting austerity economics for now, while at the same time demanding that corporations and the rich pay their fair share of the cost of keeping everyone else afloat.

President Obama and the Democrats should set a clear trigger — say, 6 percent unemployment and two quarters of growth greater than 3 percent — before whacking the budget deficit. And they should set that trigger now, during the election, so the public can give them a mandate on Election Day to delay the “sequestration” cuts (now scheduled to begin next year) until that trigger is met.

[xchrom]

48. Trade Gap in U.S. Widens More Than Forecast as Imports Jump

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-10/trade-gap-in-u-s-widens-more-than-forecast-on-record-imports.html

The gap grew 14 percent to $51.8 billion, the Commerce Department reported in Washington today. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for an increase to $50 billion. A 5.2 percent jump in imports, the biggest in more than a year, swamped the 2.9 percent gain in exports, which also reached a record.
The pickup in the value of imports reflected higher fuel prices and a bounce back in shipments from China following the week-long Lunar New Year celebrations amid increasing consumer spending. Sales by American companies to counterparts in Mexico, the European Union and South Korea reached the highest ever, giving no indication of a slowdown in global demand.
“It’s hard to get nervous that imports are rising,” said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York. “It does suggest that consumer demand is strong.”
Maki said exports “don’t suggest the slowdown in Europe is having a dramatic effect on growth” in the U.S.

[DemReadingDU]

54. Michael Hudson: Firing Alan Greenspan

http://vimeo.com/41897361

Transcript:
Prof Michael Hudson discusses Greenspan's reputation in his formative days on Wall St.

This is the transcript of an interview with Michael Hudson, discussing a 1966 incident:

MH: They increased it largely by having Alan Greenspan create the Greenspan Commission to look at social security and pushing the myth that social security had to be funded out of pre savings, so American labour was essentially taxed 11% between itself and the employers to pay social security and this vast increase in social security taxes was used to lend to the Government(US) to provide it with enough money to slash taxes on the rich and that was Greenspan’s ploy.

He was rewarded by being made head of the Federal Reserve for his actual hatred of labour and his desire that you had to reduce living standards in order to increase the profits of capital.

And so Greenspan was sort of the hack that was hired.

When I was on Wall Street, Greenspan was hired as part of a study I was doing on the balance of payments of the Oil Industry. And one day my boss, John Deaver came into my office and said he really worried about Greenspan being a part of this report because he was known as a hack that always gave …his clients what they wanted instead of something actual.

So he (JD) gave me Greenspan’s figures on depreciation of oil producing refinery assets in Europe and asked me to find out where the faking is? He said he couldn’t believe that Greenspan by himself wouldn’t of just faked the figures and it took me about a week to figure out where the faking of the figures came out (from) and that was Greenspan had simply picked up depreciation rates relative to output for the United States and projected them onto Europe.

So I went over and talked to his assistant Lucille Woo and she said “it’s all implicit, all implicit” and I confronted her with it and she said “Yes that’s what we did”!

And so, Greenspan was indeed ‘talked off the study’ and we met… John Deaver, David Rockefeller and myself and I was told…Greenspan was such a little bastard that if they fired him, he’d hold a grudge against Chase Manhattan for years and they told me to be the guy to give him the news that we couldn’t use his (laughs) statistics on it and I was a 25 year old economist at the time and he hardly new me at all, so I was the guy that…subsequently became known as ‘the man who fired Alan Greenspan’.


The video can also be found on these 2 links
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/05/michael-hudson-firing-alan-greenspan.html
or
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/michael-hudson-on-greenspans-hackery.html

[Demeter]

56. +99%!

[Demeter]

55. As Gas Prices Fall, a Sigh of Relief

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303630404577390502832273754.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

Gasoline prices fell for the fifth consecutive week, extending a sharp decline that has eased fears that prices would soon top $4 a gallon at the pump. The average price of regular gasoline dropped to $3.790 a gallon as of Monday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said, down 3.8% from the 2012 peak of $3.941 reached April 2.

Many of the forces that drove gasoline up are reversing, and that is helping bring prices back down, though they still remain near record highs. Tensions over Iran's nuclear program have eased, while softening economies in the U.S. and Europe have curbed demand. At the same time, some refineries pegged for closure are coming back online, and bottlenecks in the supply of crude oil are becoming unclogged.

The changes have led analysts to temper their price predictions for the summer driving season. A few months ago, some were saying pump prices could shoot above $4 a gallon and even reach $5 by the summer, but now they say that is highly unlikely....

IT WAS ALWAYS HIGHLY UNLIKELY...

[Roland99]

66. "bottlenecks in the supply of crude oil are becoming unclogged"

oh...they're finally unloading all those ships at sea that have been harboring who knows how much oil for who knows how long??

[Demeter]

61. Gotta Go

I'll come back later to see if they tried the paddles on the markets again...CLEAR!

[xchrom]

62. The London Olympics Are Looking Like A Financial And Organizational Disaster

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-london-olympics-are-looking-like-a-financial-and-organizational-disaster-2012-5

As part of my London trip, I attended a university track and field event at the Olympic Park. On the northeastern outskirts of London, this is a former industrial wasteland that has been transformed with $15 billion into a consumer/spectator wasteland (enough to fund three or four Shanghai Disney resorts). Paths between venues are on a vast inhuman scale, with hardly any art or sculpture to break up the long walks.

Athlete housing is visible from the park and it strongly resembles the Cabrini-Green housing project. Supposedly the apartments will be turned over to local residents (who tend to be low-income immigrants from Muslim countries; this is the same area that was supposed to be home to the largest mosque in Europe) after the Olympics.

It is tough to understand how this is all going to work for spectators. With the stadium literally only about one percent full, there were long queues for coffee and snacks. It took about 10 minutes to get through an airport-style security process with complete X-ray and metal detector screening. An average of about 100,000 people per day show up at the world’s busiest airports, but they tend to arrive in a reasonably randomly distributed manner. The stadium alone holds 80,000 people and they will be arriving in tight blocks.

The English are going generally crazy spending money for security (story putting the total cost of the event at $17.6 billion). There are surface-to-air missiles being mounted on rooftops. In case the British military needs to invade its own country, while I was there they sailed their navy’s largest ship, a 22,000 ton amphibious assault vessel, up the Thames (story). If nothing else, billions spent on security has to be considered a subtraction from a nation’s wealth.


Read more: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/05/09/london-olympic-park-and-costs/#ixzz1uTn6x6yg

[xchrom]

65. Waiting for Copernicus By John Feffer

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE11Dj04.html


It's happening in Buenos Aires. It's happening in Paris and in Athens. It's even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the past three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded "end of the Washington consensus" is finally upon us.

After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. "Wall Street's financial meltdown marks the end of an era," wrote Michael
Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers in Counterpunch at the end of 2008. "What has ended is the credibility of the Washington Consensus - open markets to foreign investors and tight money austerity programs (high interest rates and credit cutbacks) to 'cure' balance-of-payments deficits, domestic budget deficits and price inflation.

It was a tempting conclusion. Putting Wall Street and financial speculators at the center of the universe had generated an economic supernova, and everyone seemed to get the message. Everyone except Big Money, which never received the obituary notice. After some minor tweaking of Wall Street practices, some bailouts of enterprises deemed too big to fail, and the injection of some stimulus spending to arrest the free fall, Washington continued with business as usual.

The Barack Obama administration, like the Bill Clinton administration before it, discovered the immense power of the bond market. The Inernational Monetary Fund and the World Bank, meanwhile, didn't fundamentally change their policies. And the European Union, led by tight-fisted Germany, continued to back austerity. All the major economic actors held to the old orthodoxy even though it flew in the face of common sense and common decency (though not in the face of the bottom line).

[Roland99]

67. Anti-Bailout Coalition Soars In Popularity Ahead Of Second Greek Election

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/anti-bailout-coalition-soars-popularity-ahead-second-greek-election

Now that the first parliamentary election vote is meaningless, with no party able to form a coalition government, everyone is focusing on the outcome of the next election, which will take place some time in mid-June. Minutes ago Marc and Alpha (via Reuters) released the results of a poll conducted on Tuesday but just published, and which, if sustained means major trouble for the EMU, because the results show that Anti-bailout Syriza is alone going to have almost as much represented as its two main pro-bailout opponents combined, and confirms that all the other parties are losing voters which instead are going toward the one party that seeks above all, to sever the terms of the Memorandum.

Syriza: 23.8%, up from 16.8% in the election
New Democracy: 17.4%, down from 18.9%
Pasok: 10.8%, down from 13.2%
Independent Greeks: 8.7%, down from 10.6%
KKE: 6.0%, down from 8.48%
Golden Dawn: 4.9%, down from 7%
Dimar: 4.0%, down from 6.11%

In other words, more and more Greeks are aligning with the anti-bailout Syriza. If we were Europe we would be worried. Very, very worried.

Or at least installing Diebold voting equipment all across Greece.

[Roland99]

68. As New Greek Bonds Tumble To All Time Lows, Is Greece About To Re-Default In 5 Days?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/new-greek-bonds-tumble-all-time-lows-greece-about-re-default-5-days

Back on May 5th, before the shocking outcome of the Greek elections was known, and before anyone had even heard of the May 15th €430 million bond maturity, we explicitly warned that in the case of continued lack of government in the country (predicting the inability to form a gogvernment) that, "it is unlikely that Greece can persist under anarchy, especially with another critical event coming due: a €430 million payment on an international law bond that matures on May 15, and whose owners have held out from the PSI process (remember that? apparently not all has been swept under the rug). In fact we now know that the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund could very well be the entity that will demand payment and when it doesn't get it will promptly proceed to sue Greece." Indeed, as explained, the bond is held by non-PSI holders, and it has international-law covenants, in other words by parties non compliant to the PSI agreement and whose claims must be satisfied unless total chaos were to break out in the sovereign arena! Which means that for all the rhetoric about the successful Greek PSI with acceptance rates of nearly 97%, it is one tiny issue that can derail the whole process and send Greece into an out of control default.

Recall what only Zero Hedge warned back in January: "while the bulk of the bonds, or what is now becoming obvious is the junior class, can be impaired with impunity (pardon the pun), it is the UK-law, or the non-domestic indenture, bonds, which are the de facto fulcrum security. And since the notional outstanding here is tiny, it is quite easy to build up a blocking stake in the bonds and to obtain full control of the process" It appears that more have grasped this outcome, and now 5 days ahead of D-Day are once again dumping all exposure to the bond which some other hedge funds called a "No-Brainer" and the "Trade of the Year."

more at link.

[DemReadingDU]

73. JPM Crashing After It Convenes Emergency Call To Advise Of "Significant Mark-To-Market" Losses

oops

edit to add a few details...

5/10/12 JPM Crashing After It Convenes Emergency Call To Advise Of "Significant Mark-To-Market" Losses
Out of nowehere, JPM announced 40 minutes ago that it would hold an unscheduled 5pm call to coincide with the release of its 10-Q. Rumors were swirling as to why. The reason is as follows:

JPMORGAN SAYS CIO UNIT HAS SIGNIFICANT MARK-TO-MARKET LOSSES - "Fortress balance sheet" at least until Bruno Iskil gets done with it.
JPMORGAN SAYS LOSSES ARE IN SYNTHETIC CREDIT PORTFOLIO - but, but, net is NEVER, EVER Gross.
JPM WOULD NEED $971M ADDED COLLATERAL IF RATINGS CUT ONE-NOTCH
JPM WOULD NEED $1.7B ADDED COLLATERAL IF RATINGS CUT 2 NOTCHES - how about three notches?
JPMORGAN: MAY HOLD SOME SYNTHETIC CREDIT POSITIONS LONG TERM - "Level 3 CDS FTW"
"As of March 31, 2012, the value of CIO's total AFS securities portfolio exceeded its cost by approximately $8 billion"

As a reminder, the CIO unit is where Bruno Iksil was making $200 billion-sized bets. Basically JPM has suffered massive losses at its CIO group most likely due to its IG/HY positions held by Iksil.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/jpm-crashing-after-it-convenes-emergency-call-advise-significant-mark-market-losses

[Tansy_Gold]

74. WTF is a "synthetic credit portfolio"???

Doesn't "synthetic" kinda like mean "manufactured to look like the real thing but isn't"?

[DemReadingDU]

75. Fake!

[DemReadingDU]

76. Karl Denninger: Now They're F*d (JPM And Probably Others)

5/10/12 Now They're F*d (JPM And Probably Others)

Oops...

JP Morgan is blaming "hedging" for a monstrous mark-to-market loss, presumably with their "whale" (the big credit trader that was blamed for actually moving markets a few weeks ago.)

By definition if something is a hedge then it's balanced by a gain somewhere else.

So this was not hedging -- it was speculation and there's only one thing worse than speculating -- that's unintentionally speculating!

"Fortress balance sheet" my ass.

JP Morgan getting trashed after hours, the S&P futures are off 11 points and the Dow is off almost 100.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=205809