Archive for the 'Money' Category

Why does is always take a smoking Democrat to clean up a Republican economic mess?

From the Associated Press:

The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for jobless benefits dropped last week, and the number of people remaining on the rolls also fell, evidence that layoffs have eased. Still, both figures remain above levels associated with a healthy economy, and analysts expect the unemployment rate to keep rising.

The tally of those continuing to claim benefits dropped to 6.13 million from 6.25 million in the previous week, the lowest level since early April. The figures on continuing claims lag initial claims by a week.

While the figures are volatile, first-time claims have trended downward in recent months. Initial claims topped 600,000 for most of this year, until falling below that level in early July. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out fluctuations, fell by 4,750 to 566,250 last week. That’s about 90,000 below its peak for the current recession, in early April.

The weekly figures remain far above the roughly 325,000 that analysts say is consistent with a healthy economy. New claims last fell below 300,000 in early 2007.

Job losses have slowed recently. The department said earlier this month that companies cut 247,000 jobs in July, a large amount but still the smallest number in almost a year. The unemployment rate dipped to 9.4 percent in July from 9.5 percent, its first drop in 15 months. The recession, which began in December 2007 and is the worst since World War II, has eliminated a net total of 6.7 million jobs.

So the worst economic crash since the Great Depression came as a result of 7 years of Bushonomics. It lasted until a month and a half after Obama’s stimulus bill passed with virtually no Republican support. In fact, if it was up to the Republicans, we would have just kept cutting taxes on the rich and scaling back on public investment.

That policy kept the nation in recession for a total of 22 months of Bush’s presidency, and ensured that growth remained stagnant during the rest of Bush’s presidency. All told, Bush created fewer jobs per year than any president since Herbert Hoover, while turning a federal surplus into the biggest deficit in the nation’s history. And congressional Republicans still persist in their refusal to support any meaningful changes to his policies.

I don’t think voters will be kind to the Republicans in 2010.

The only constituency that the Republican Party really serves

Schumer Asks SEC to Ban Flash Orders Used by High-Speed Traders

Senator Charles Schumer asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to ban “flash orders,” saying the transactions give high-speed traders an unfair advantage over other investors.

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., Bats Exchange Inc. and Direct Edge Holdings Inc. hold these orders for milliseconds, giving their customers the opportunity to gauge demand before traders on other exchanges get the chance to bid, Schumer said in a letter to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. Brian Fallon, a spokesman at Schumer’s office, confirmed the authenticity of the letter.

“Flash orders allow certain members of these exchanges to obtain access to order flow information before that information is made available to the public,” Schumer wrote. That allows “those members to use rapid trading programs to trade ahead of those orders and profit from advanced knowledge of buying and selling activity,” he added.

The senator said that if the SEC doesn’t prohibit flash orders, he will introduce legislation that would.

A couple of centuries of economic research tell us that allowing a few traders to have an advantage over other traders will harm the economy. But this is exactly the sort of common-sense regulation that the Republican Party has fought since the days of Ronald Reagan, and that mindset (along with Reaganite borrow-and-spend fiscal policies) helped create the current financial crisis.

It’s true that Democrats like Bill Clinton co-opted much of the Republicans’ deregulatory ideology, so I’m not trying to say that Republicans like Phil Gramm, John Kyl, and George W. Bush are the only ones responsible for the economic debacle, but the Republicans’ continued resistance to re-regulation of the financial markets makes it clear that the Democrats represent our only hope of real economic reform.

Today we intended telling the terrible tale of the ‘take what you want when you want’ culture of (apparently), tons of turdy Brit members of parliament.

But then, somebody anonymously sent us this particularly odious porker-picture…

…which, suddenly made us stop and wonder why we should bloomin‘ be bothered to.

Since ‘The Telegraph‘ is already doing such a sterling job of explaining and exposing exactly what sort of absolutely stinking stuff has (seemingly, serially) been happening in our old Brit House of Commons.

So, click here to see lots & lots about some of said shocking smelly shenanigans for yourself.

Shame?

This shower of SOBs simply possesses none.

(Cross posted from across at How This Old brit Sees It)

In addition to being a great congresswoman, Maloney is the author of an incisive social critique

From CNN:

“From the floors of Congress to the people in my district, everyone has a credit card horror story,” says Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Such stories helped make this New York Democrat the sworn enemy of arbitrary interest rate hikes, excessive fees, misleading terms, and other shenanigans.

Thanks in part to Maloney’s efforts (she introduced a Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights in 2008), the Fed passed new regulations last year banning card issuers’ most egregious practices.

But the new rules don’t take effect until July 2010 - so she has introduced a bill that would require them to kick in much faster, plus limit other damaging moves, such as targeting minors.

With the support of heavy-hitters like Rep. Barney Frank, the bill has a good chance of passing.

Do I really need to tell you which party Maloney belongs to?

Republicans fear that Obama would provide too much stimulus

House Minority Leader John Boehner has asked his fellow Republicans to oppose Obama’s stimulus plan, saying that the president’s package is overlarge:

Republicans plan to test President Barack Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship as his $825 billion stimulus package heads to the floor of the House of Representatives this week, with the House Republican leader saying Sunday morning that many in his party will vote no unless there are significant changes to the plan.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all of the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” the House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And so if it’s the plan that I see today, put me down in the no column.”

Boehner just doesn’t get it. Obama’s package really isn’t that big. It only seems large when it’s compared to the various packages that the Republicans have whipped out recently.

The fact is, the country gave a resounding mandate for change in November. The era of doing nothing and trying to wish our problems away are over. Voters will not forgive Republicans if they prevent Obama from pursuing his agenda while the nation’s economy languishes. And the GOP leadership doesn’t have much credibility when they argue for fiscal responsibility after rubber stamping Bush’s deficits and urging congressional Republicans to vote in favor of Bush’s $700 billion giveaway to the nation’s banking executives.

Over in the Senate, Republican leaders seem more cognizant of the political reality of the situation, even as they ignore the economic reality. John McCain says that he will support a large stimulus bill, but only if he gets to write it. Apparently, he’s forgotten how the last election turned out. And Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claims that it’s the Democrats who are opposed to Obama’s plan, while the Republicans are supporting him.

In the end, the Republicans will ensure that Obama gets the two Republican votes that he needs in order to avoid a filibuster. They understand that they can’t win in 2010 if they tie Obama’s hands as he tries to resuscitate the economy. What they’re trying to do is get on record as having supported the idea of a stimulus while opposing Obama’s specific proposals. Then they’ll spend the next two years praying that the stimulus fails, and the economy falls into a long recession. It’s politics at it’s worst, but it’s the sort of politics that the Republicans do best.

From the New York Times:

A private group’s measure of manufacturing activity has fallen more than expected in December, hitting the lowest reading in 28 years as new orders and employment continue to decline.

The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing executives, said Friday that its manufacturing index fell to 32.4 in December from 36.2 in November. Wall Street economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected the reading to fall to 35.5.

Any reading above 50 signals growth, while a reading below 50 indicates contraction. The index has fallen steadily for the last five months as the economy deteriorated.

So that’s the biggest decline in manufacturing since the worst days of the Carter administration. Naturally, the wingnuts are blaming this on Obama, who hasn’t even taken office yet:

Hannity and Limbaugh

Hannity and Hewitt

Human Events

Jerry Bowyer

O’Reilly and Ingraham

Using their logic, I suppose we can blame Carter’s recession on Ronald Reagan. I wonder what other Bush failures they’ll try to blame on Obama. Iraq’s missing WMD? The failure of No Child Left Behind? The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Abu Ghraib? 9/11?

Bill O’Reilly, making even more of an ass of himself than usual

Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and other far-right commentators have been trying to blame the subprime mortgage meltdown on loan guarantees made by the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) for loans made to poor and minority home buyers.

It’s absurd to think that poor people control enough wealth to bring down the American economy (the wealthiest 1/5 of the country owns about 80% of the nation’s wealth, and the top 2/5 own more than 95%), but that hasn’t stopped the wingnuts from scapegoating the poor and their alleged enablers in the Democratic Party. But the facts tell a different story:

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Here it is, folks!

What we’ve all been waiting for.

The joke of the day - week - month - year - decade - century - millennium!

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

So what happened? Why did the congress refuse to authorize a bailout of the American financial system that just about every mainstream economist says is necessary to prevent a prolonged recession?

First and foremost, it’s because people are so good at shutting their eyes to unpleasant truths. All over the Internet, TV, and radio, we’re hearing fringe economists and political commentators with no economic expertise tell us that the price of doing nothing is not very high, and that if we ignore the financial crisis, the only people who will feel any real pain will be those annoying Wall Street rogues and a few cab drivers and dental hygienists who used shady mortgages to buy million dollar homes. But take a look at the list of American institutions that have been liquidated, bailed out, or cut up into pieces and sold over the past few weeks:

* Every single investment bank

* Several large commercial banks

* Our largest mortgage company

* Our largest insurance company

* Two major brokerage houses

* Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest thrift. WaMu’s collapse was the largest bank failure in history.

* The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), which together owned or guaranteed $6 trillion worth of mortgages. That’s a larger amount than the GDP of Japan, which is the world’s second largest economy. That’s 11% of the world GDP.

And things are just getting worse. The most watched American stock indices, the S&P 500 and the Dow, are both down byy around 25% since the beginning of the year. Fannie Mae says that delinquency rates continue to rise on the loans that it guarantees. Bankruptcy, inflation, joblessness, and homelessness are all soaring. The American crisis has helped trigger a world economic crisis that has taken down several large European banks.

In short, the US is in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But thousands of Americans are calling their congressmen to urge them not to do anything about it, and too many congressmen decided that

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From the Associated Press:

The Dow industrials have fallen more than 700 on fears bailout package vote will fail. Wall Street fears the government’s plan to buy up toxic debt wouldn’t be sufficient to resuscitate nearly frozen credit markets.

The news comes as President Bush and congressional leaders looked to shore up support for the rescue measure, which they and many on Wall Street believe is a difficult but necessary step to revive moribund credit markets. Banks and other financial houses are hesitant to lend to one another because of fears about bad mortgage debt on companies’ books. Tight lending conditions make it hard and expensive for businesses and consumers to get loans, which can hurt the economy.

In fact, the bailout plan did fail, 228-205, with 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voting no. So I guess this means that John McCain’s campaign will remain suspended. Or it would, if McCain had ever followed through on his commitment to suspend his campaign until an economic rescue package was in place. In fact, McCain’s political gamesmanship is one of the reasons that congressional leaders had to struggle to patch together an agreement at the last minute, as Senator John Kerry explains:

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