Yearly Archives: 2012

Spain is in Trouble

By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

As I talked about yesterday the outcomes of the failing policies enacted by European leaders in the face of the economic crisis boil down to a lose-lose struggle between international creditors and national citizens.

In Europe, It’s Debt vs. Jobs

By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

As the signs of social unrest continue to grow in the southern peripheries of Europe, highlighted again by the over night action in Spain, I thought it was timely to take a step back from the day-to-day and re-assess exactly what we are witnessing in the Eurozone from the longer macro-view.

Lambert here. Yves comments: “A nice explanation of why austerity in Europe isn’t working (even though the writer is weirdly defensive about saying it in those terms).”

Links 9/26/12

On FICO’s Dubious Explanation of Why it Treats Short Sales the Same as Foreclosures

April Charney sent me a link to a post which had a condescending explanation of a recent piece by FICO that warrants further discussion. The FICO article attempted to justify its position that someone who enters into a short sale gets his credit score dinged as badly as for a foreclosure. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the reasons many borrowers go to the effort to arrange a short sale, as opposed to the faster and easier process of “jingle mail” is that they assume that the damage to their credit score will be lower.

Here is the rationale….

Sheila Bair Gives Her Account of the Crisis, and (Quelle Surprise!) the Bailouts and Geithner Do Not Look Pretty

Sheila Bair’s new book Bull by the Horns is out and based on early reports, it looks like it skewers the bailouts in general and Tim Geithner in particular. But it also gets a lot into the weeds in what still needs to be fixed in bank-land, which is a part of these crisis post-mortems and retrospectives that too often get short shrift.

No, Virginia, Mitt Romney Did Not Pay 14.1% in Taxes in 2011 as He Claims, He Paid Less

I know this site may seem to be going hard and heavy after Romney in the last 24 hours, but truth be told, it’s just too much fun. And we’ve been shooting at Obama for so long that even this brief interlude of close scrutiny of Romney would not come close to achieving “balance” if “balance” as opposed to trying to get past the PR, were our objective.

Links 9/25/12

European Optimism Fades

By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

I genuinely thought the Europeans were getting somewhere in the last few weeks as I detected (or maybe that should be optimistically hoped) a change of rhetoric from some of the more hardened camps and a growing realisation that the current approach to “solving” the crisis is failing. My optimism was helped by the fact that the OMT, like the LTRO before it, has driven down sovereign yields which has given the European leaders yet another opportunity to sit down away from the fire fighting and discuss outcomes beyond a short term market window.

But alas, this is Europe and I appear to have been wrong.

Romney Exhibits Symptoms of MBA Derangement Syndrome

Marcy Wheeler wrote up an astonishing little episode from the Romster’s campaign.

Links 9/24/12

Bank of America Offers Mods with a Gag Order to Buy Silence

It’s hard to tell whether the situation described in an article the New Haven Register is very unusual, or just under the radar by design. But either way, it does not pass the smell test.

Michael Hudson: QE3 – Another Fed Giveaway to the Banks

In this Real News Network interview, Michael Hudson gives a high level discussion of why the Fed’s claim that QE3 will help employment needs to be taken with a fistful of salt.