Rare cheetah captured on camera BBC
The “Worst Food Product Ever” May Have Been Found [Awesome] Consumerist
And Yet, Still Rules Their World Digby (hat tip reader Doug)
A few words from a reader on TALF mechanics Ed Harrison
Lonely Geithner Felix Salmon
Moody’s predicts default rate will exceed peaks hit in Great Depression Telegraph. The title strikes me as misleading, since it compares overall defaults in the Depression with projected junk bond defaults. However, the authorities back then did not create an armada of fancy facilities to prop up dud borrowers. Who knows where we’d be in their absence.
Top N.Y. legal officer demands bonus list from BofA CEO Reuters
Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Megan):
13 comments
Comments are closed.
The Portfolio / Felix Salmon story about Geithner being alone at treasury is BS.
Treasury has plenty of employees with expertise in many areas. The only thing Geithner is missing is his personal helpers, which as Volker says are the assistant secretary and deputy assistant secretaries in various subjects, and undersecretaries in various subjects. However, those people don’t do the actual work, they supervise. The people below them do the actual work in treasury, instead of speaking on panels and participating in boondoggles, and most of those lower level people in the Bush administration stuck around.
Geithner/Summers/Volker know those lower level people are there, and are the workhorses. They are just cooking up excuses for the press, and the press is eating them like a kid does candies.
The article has it completely wrong: it’s not that Obama is setting up Geithner to fail, it’s that people who could occupy senior positions in Treasury have concluded they don’t want to be associated with a Treasury Secretary who’s so cleary inept and incompetent. They don’t want to accept senior positions, knowing they will be fired when Geithner is replaced.
Obama’s 2010 budget increases taxes on the poor. Obama proposes eliminating the advance earned income tax credit, this allows poor people to take their credit currently by reducing their withholding taxes instead of filing a return to get a payment the following year.
Obama is lying when he says he isn’t increasing taxes on the poor. This is absolutely a tax increase on the poor.
Obama is also continuing the Bush tax break of letting the big banks defer taxation of foreign earnings from “active financing” or “active dealer” income, but killing the Bush tax break for manufacturers so they can’t defer taxation of foreign earnings from manufacturing goods that are sold into the US.
Obama likes the banks more than the manufacturing companies.
The Salmon piece also continues Obama worship by saying that he ran the most efficient Pres campaign ever. What BS! He didn’t even out-perform the Congressional Dem Party as a whole, despite having the advantage of a hated President to run against.
Hate to point it out to Mr. Salmon, but GWB’s tie/victory in 2000, at a time of rampant peace and prosperity and with high approval ratings for Clinton’s job performance, was far more impressive than Obama spending vast sums to ride a Dem tide. JFK’s victory in 1960 was certainly “efficient” in similar circumstances.
BofA does not want to cave to Cuomo on this demand for data on the Merrill bonuses given the continuing fight, now at the Supreme Court, over the ability of a state to exercise “visitorial powers” over a national bank. If I were BofA lawyers, turning this data over would scuttle the current case before the court and open it up to claims by the employees that employee data was being disclosed inappropriately.
RE: Worst food product – Pork Brain
Cholesterol in the correct place is brain tissue, in the wrong place, a component of arterial plaque. I suspect that the problem is much more involved than simple consumption of fats as evidenced by the diet / health of the Inuit and other people of the polar regions.
“BofA does not want to cave to Cuomo on this demand for data on the Merrill bonuses given the continuing fight, now at the Supreme Court, over the ability of a state to exercise “visitorial powers” over a national bank. If I were BofA lawyers, turning this data over would scuttle the current case before the court and open it up to claims by the employees that employee data was being disclosed inappropriately.”
Cuomo can legitimately demand the information to pursue claims of fraudulent conveyance against the recipients of the bonus. Pursuing a remedy requires recovery from the recipients, and pursuing the claim requires information on solvency and the timing of the payments and the timing of work done by the particular employees.
No regulatory authority is necessary to pursue claims of fraudulent conveyance. NY also has securities disclosure laws that Cuomo can investigate, regardless of regulatory jurisdiction.
Yves-
Take a look at Eddie Lampert’s letter to SHLD shareholders, in which he discusses at length his views on the origins of the financial crisis. Interested in your reaction.
Yves,
Not sure whether you saw it, but I think it would be worthwhile to look at JK Galbraith (junior)’s testimony before the House – for example here: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/galbraith022609.pdf
what animal is that? is it real?
I’d say that is a penguin chick.
At first President Hoover-Obama tried to organize national optimism by summoning business execs to DC to declare that conditions were sound and that there would not be wage cutting. When that did not work (stop the depression), he became inactive for a while, trusting to the idea that it all would self-correct. When that did not work, he organized an international moratorium in war debts and reparations. This actually did help stem the slide further into depression, but only briefly.
Then he set up the Reconstruction Finance Corp. to bring federal aid to hard pressed banks and businesses. Just as it seemed that this might work and that recovery was at hand, in the winter of 1932-33 the banking system in America went into a tailspin. On March 4, 1933, the American banking system ground to a complete halt.
Hoover was an able and intelligent president who attempted orthodox economic ideas, but became a victim to the collapse of the system.