One More Reason Not To Read National Review

Sarah Palin Still Can't Dress Herself

Who would pick such shoes?! They are disgusting! Lose 'em and try simple black pumps. Or for a little daring, Superman blue pumps to match the shirt. Or red or yellow pumps to match the logo. Or better yet, all three colors in the pumps, like little red Ss on the toes on a yellow field. Something to knit the picture together. And the belt has to go. It cuts her in half. Totally the wrong color which confuses the picture. I dunno, maybe untuck the shirt? Or still OK tucked in w/o a belt? But the shoes! What a train wreck. She looks like a refugee from Chinese foot binding.

Were 20,000 Non-Union Pensions At Delphi Victims Of Geithner At Treasury?

Administration officials have testified otherwise under oath.

The Daily Caller claims to have the goods on Geithner's Treasury Department, here. You know Geithner, the guy who forgot to pay taxes on his IMF salary, but is still the Secretary of the US Treasury Department anyway.

Obama's Financial Fascism At Work At DOJ: Not A Single Prosecution Since 2008

'Between 2002 and 2008, for instance, [the] GAI [Government Accountability Institute] points out how a Bush administration task force “obtained over 1,300 corporate fraud convictions, including those of over 130 corporate vice presidents and over 200 CEOs and corporate presidents.”

'“Clinton’s DOJ prosecuted over 1,800 S&L [savings and loans] executives, senior officials, and directors, and over 1,000 of them were sent to jail,” GAI adds.

'But, despite having “promised more of the same,” especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration’s DOJ has not brought criminal charges against a single major Wall Street executive.'

Read the whole sordid tale here at The Daily Caller, implicating Attorney General Eric

'Holder, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, Associate Attorney General Tony West, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and Deputy Associate Attorney General Karol Mason — who “all came to the DOJ from prestigious white-collar defense firms where they represented the very financial institutions the DOJ is supposed to investigate.”'

The Market Was Already Overvalued In October 2011, And It Still Is

So says Robert P. Seawright, here, and here:

[T]he market remains overvalued and, if anything, somewhat more overvalued than it was last October. As I have been saying for a long time ... – we are (since 2000) in the throes of a secular bear market, subject to strong cyclical swings in either direction. I continue to encourage investors to be skeptical, cautious, and defensive yet opportunistic. I suggest that they look to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves while carefully managing and mitigating risk, which should remain their top priority.

Seawright presents the case for overvaluation using a variety of metrics, not the least important of which is the Shiller p/e. Long term investors remain skeptical of the present rally based on these metrics.

Nevertheless, the SP500 shot up over 100 points from 1099 between October 3-20, 2011, and is again above 1400 today, a nominal gain of over 27 percent in less than a year. That's a pretty long sucker rally.

Neil Barofsky Calls Geithner And Obama Two-Faced Housing Bailout Liars

'[I]n 2009, $50 billion in TARP funds had been committed to help homeowners through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a program that the president announced was intended to help up to 4 million struggling families stay in their homes through sustainable mortgage modifications. Hundreds of billions more were still available and could have been used by the White House and the Treasury Department to help support a massive reduction in mortgage debt. But Geithner avoided this path to a housing recovery, explaining that he believed it would be “dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, [and] create much greater risk of unfairness.” Treasury amplified that argument in 2010, after it reluctantly instituted a weak principal reduction program in response to overwhelming congressional pressure. ...

'[T]hree years later, with a tightening presidential election and a Democratic base disillusioned by the government’s abandonment of its promise to help homeowners (less than 8 percent of the funds originally allocated in TARP for foreclosure relief has actually been spent), Geithner and the administration would like to present themselves as having undergone a conversion.'

Read the entire entry here.

The announcement of HAMP is what really got Rick Santelli's goat on CNBC one day in early 2009 and set off a fire storm which coalesced in the outrage of the Tea Party movement. The conservative instincts of the Tea Party movement were and remain opposed to bailouts of homeowners, bankers, car manufacturers, insurers, multinationals like GE, and on and on. Barofsky is probably right that this is nothing more than a cynical political ploy to shore up support among Democrats. But if he's not buying it, who will? 

Bob Brinker Of "Money Talk" Is Wrong: GDP Isn't Growing At An Average Of 1.75 Percent

On his radio program "Money Talk" yesterday Bob Brinker sought to defend recent economic performance as better than the Q2 report of 1.5 percent makes it appear. He accomplished this feat by averaging that number 1.5 with the 2.0 percent reported in Q1, coming up with a little better number, 1.75 percent.

This is wrong and I stated so in a post I have since removed.

I thought Bob Brinker said this for political reasons in the context of the remarks, and in a fit of pique I posted that Bob Brinker is a shill for the Obama regime in doing this, remembering as I am wont that Bob Brinker has stated on the program, among other things that hint of leaning to the Democrats despite calling himself an independent, that Obama's man in the US Senate, Dirty Harry Reid, is "a good man, a good man." Harry Reid is manifestly not a good man, recently using the well of the Senate to innoculate himself for potentially libelous remarks he has made from there against Mitt Romney, a fellow Mormon to Reid no less. Harry Reid has also been the chief instrument of gridlock on Capitol Hill, both now and when Pelosi was Speaker of the House. Just ask her how many bills she sent to him which never received action.

I've removed that post because I think it's possible Bob Brinker made the comments entirely out of ignorance, not from political bias. The reason is that I've realized that I've made the exact same mistake about GDP myself on this very blog, and my bias against Obama didn't keep me from making it. I actually forgot about those errors long after I had improved my understanding of GDP. So even if Bob Brinker did make the statements in order to put Obama's performance in the best possible light, it's also possible Bob Brinker just isn't as smart about GDP as he thinks he is. After all, it is a complicated subject about which very few people really are expert, and if I can make an honest mistake about it, so can he.

So the politics aside, it is impermissible to take the sum of quarterly headline GDP and divide by 2 or 3 or 4 to get an average rate. Each quarterly statement of GDP is already stating the annual rate, that is, the annual rate prevailing during the quarter. That's what the meaning of annualized is. As the quarters roll and the data become more full and complete, the numbers are routinely refined, even many years after we learn of the third and final estimate of quarterly GDP for month x, y or z. GDP is always a work in progress, and even somewhat controversial among the truly expert.

So in the second quarter, the annualized rate of GDP growth is 1.5 percent, not 2 percent, and not 1.75 percent. And that is terrible for everyone, Democrat, Republican and independent alike, because we are all in this together.

At least that is what we would like to think.

Yuval Levin Opens A Window On Obama's American Fascism

Yuval Levin opens a window on Obama's American fascism, noting its assault on the middle ground which separates the individual from The State:

Its approach to the private economy has involved pursuing consolidation in key industries — privileging a few major players that are to be treated essentially as public utilities, while locking out competition from smaller or newer firms. This both ensures the cooperation of the large players and makes the economy more manageable and orderly. And it leaves no one pursuing ends that are not the government’s ends. This has been the essence of the administration’s policies toward automakers, health insurers, banks, hospitals, and many others. ...

The [contraception] rule implicitly asserted that our nation will not tolerate an institution that is unwilling to actively ratify the views of those in power — that we will not let it be and find other ways to put those views into effect (even though many other ways exist), but will compel it to participate in the enactment of the ends chosen by our elected officials. This is an extraordinarily radical assertion of government power, and a failure of even basic toleration. It is, again, an attempt to turn private mediating institutions into public utilities contracted to execute government ends.

Read it all, here.

The Detroit News Attacks Obama's Imperial Presidency, Congress' Servility

"The imperial presidency Obama is building should worry Democrats as much as it does Republicans. This has never been an "end justifies the means" nation. Even if you agree with the outcomes the president is seeking, his running roughshod over the rule of law should be objectionable, because the powers he is claiming will not be forfeited by the next Republican president."

Read it all, here.

Conservatives' Answer To Change

Spengler On Elections: Revolution Exalted Into A Constitutional Process

"[R]evolution, in the form of periodic mass elections fought by all available means of money, brains, and even - after the Gracchan method - physical violence, is exalted into a constitutional process."

-- Oswald Spengler

WaPo Repeats The Big Lie: "There Are Just Not Enough Tax Breaks To Close For The Rich"

Here:

"[T]here are just not enough tax breaks to close for the rich, and the big money is in those for middle-income taxpayers."

The leftist drumbeat to raise taxes on the middle class just never ends.

But it's not just their agenda, it's the agenda of Republicans and libertarians, and it flies under the radar of "tax reform" and "broadening the base". Its most passionate advocates in the Republican Party are people like Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan, and certain members of the Gang of Six and the Gang of Twelve, you know, like Sen. Tom Coburn and Sen. Saxby Chambliss. The Stupid Party is stupid because the rank and file of America end up voting for this liberalism all the time. But those elected officials aren't stupid. They know exactly what they are doing and how it works.

You promise lower marginal tax rates across the board in exchange for giving up some tax deductions. Then as time passes the Democrats get the government in their hands again and raise taxes. But those lost deductions? They remain lost, and overall the tax burden on the middle class increases. It's what happened in 1986 with the loss of deductibility of interest on revolving credit in exchange for tax reform which lowered rates. But along came Bill Clinton in 1992 and up went the taxes. To help pay for things during the recession which Clinton's higher taxes made worse, middle class Americans tapped home equity like crazy, which was the rope Republicans furnished to hang us with. And now look at us, tapped out like never before with owners' equity in real estate down to 41 percent, facing a bunch of traitors on our side who want more money to misspend.

Tax collectors for the welfare state is who they are, to borrow a phrase from a recent Republican candidate for president who really let us down by not using it during the primary season.

As usual, conservatism's worst enemies are in their own party.

I'm getting just a little sick of it, too, primarily because there is a HUGE pool of tax revenue forfeited by the government which amounts to a gift to the top third of income earners in America. In 2012 everything earned above $110,100 escapes Social Security taxation. That's roughly $2 trillion which flies under the tax radar. At 15.3 percent, that's the biggest tax loss expenditure out there by far: $306 billion of lost revenue to the federal government because high-income earners don't pay it. The mortgage interest deduction, by contrast, is less than a third of that.

Conservatives want the misspending stopped. Until it is, tax increases are off the table.

Total Value Of Household Real Estate, Owners' Equity and Percentage of Total Value

The following charts reproduce real estate data compiled from the Federal Reserve's z.1 Flow of Funds releases going back to 12-11-97 showing the most up-to-date values for the total value of household real estate, the value of owners' equity, and the percentage of owners' equity relative to total value.

Home-Owners' Equity Hollowed Out After 1986 Tax Reform

Did the 1986 tax reform unintentionally contribute to the hollowing-out of home-owners' equity?

It sure looks like it from the graph I've created below, which is compiled from the Fed's z.1 Flow of Funds releases which I've systematically reviewed from the latest release on June 7 all the way back to December 11, 1997.

In exchange for the elimination of a tax loss expenditure important to American consumers, Americans were treated in the '86 reform to lower top marginal income tax rates which fell as low as 28 percent for a brief time under President George Herbert Walker Bush between 1988 and 1992. Unfortunately for them, however, Bill Clinton came along and did away with those low marginal rates, and raised taxes. But Americans never got back the tax loss expenditure to which I refer.

What was it?

Deductibility of interest from revolving credit. You know, credit card interest and the like.

As a compromise, however, the law was structured in such a way as to expand the scope of HELOCs, home equity lines of credit, so that Americans could deduct larger amounts of interest on their taxes from those vehicles, treated pretty much the same as the mortgage interest deduction, the home improvement loan interest deduction or the second mortgage interest deduction. It was a financial innovation which shifted revolving spending on credit cards to these expanded equity lines so that it became fairly routine to buy even cars with home equity when interest rates were low, and all kinds of other stuff. You know, college tuition, that memorable vacation to Acapulco . . . and that condo you bought as an investment property. And some people actually used their HELOCs to improve the primary dwellings they were drawn on. But most of it was pretty imprudent, even though the intention was right in shifting spending from unsecured credit to secured credit.

We call it now "amortizing spending". It's really dumb to finance spending this way because you have nothing to show for it at the end of the term, unless the spending is on an asset which retains value. (If only we could get government to do this, but that's another horror story altogether. Government doesn't just finance spending and have nothing to show for it, it never pays it off. So in addition to blowing dough, it pays for it without a termination date, which means it pays forever.)

When the bottom fell out of real estate starting in 2007, for the first time since 1986 the total value of the real estate of households declined, from the all-time high of $22.731 trillion in 2006 to $20.861 trillion in 2007. That's an 8 percent decline in one year. By 2011 the metric had fallen all the way to $16.05 trillion, almost 30 percent down, with owners' equity bottoming out at $6.231 trillion, a level last reached sometime in the year 2000.

The data show that there have been two periods of the hollowing-out, one from which we recovered and one in which we still find ourselves. In the first, the dollar value of the equity recovered even though the percentage of equity relative to total value did not. In the second, both the dollar value of the equity and the percentage of equity relative to total value have failed to recover.  

In 1990 owners' equity started to fall from $4.274 trillion the year before to $4.097 trillion in 1991, a decline of just 4 percent. But it took all the way until 1996 for owners' equity to exceed that level which it had achieved in 1989. It's pretty clear that Americans financed themselves through the recession of these years under Bush 41 and Clinton in part by using home equity. Even though home values continued to increase, owners' share of equity declined from 66 percent in 1989 to 56 percent in 1994, at which level it stabilized.

Owners' equity continued to climb in dollar terms from 1996 all the way through 2005 when it reached its zenith at $13.158 trillion, but as a percentage of total value owners' equity remained fairly stable in a range between 56 percent and 59 percent. The dollar decline from the zenith in 2005, however, to $6.231 trillion last year represents a whopper of a decline in owners' equity, nearly 53 percent, much larger than the 30 percent decline in the over-all values themselves.

I'll leave it to others to figure out just how much of this nearly $7 trillion has been simply lost from the balance sheet and how much was extracted to help people get themselves through this Bush/Obama depression, but you get the idea. America's forced savings in the form of home equity was coaxed out by financial innovation brought to you by politicians intent on reforming the tax code. And, of course, they did this with the help of private sector actors who profited from the operation. 

Americans might want to think harder about it the next time politicians come promising lower tax rates in exchange for a similar thrilling game of tax reform Russian Roulette. Think the mortgage interest deduction itself, which many Republicans and libertarians today want to end. I think it's easy to imagine from recent history how we might be persuaded to give up the mortgage interest deduction today in exchange for lower tax rates which some future government will only end up raising just like Clinton did, at which time we'll be out both the lower rates and the deductions which offered us some protections from the greedy spending bastards who populate both political parties.

The great achievement of the debacle of the 1930s was amortizing mortgages over 30 years, forcing Americans to save in the form of owners' equity. The debacle of the late 20th century was letting politicians convince us it was time to spend it.      

Create a graph

The Anti-Abortion Line Of The Day From Albert Schweitzer

"Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life."

-- Albert Schweitzer

"The spirit of the age is filled with disdain for thinking."

Jobs? There Is No Driver For Jobs.

Gridlock Is Ordinarily The Most Moral Form Of Government

So David Harsanyi, here.

Russians Care More About Liberty Than Americans!

The Trumpet That Gives An Uncertain Sound

Avoid the "O" symbolism, will ya buddy?

Here's A Conservative Tax Idea For Mitt Romney And The Republicans

Current dollar GDP is $15.596 trillion.

All you get, for everything, is $1.56 trillion.

Capice?

The Left's True Objective Is Higher Taxes On Middle Class: Citizen Cohn Admits It

Say whatever you want about Romney's tax numbers not adding up, the objective of the left in America is to raise taxes on the middle class, precisely because government spending as projected going forward cannot be paid for without it.

So Jonathan Cohn, here:

To reiterate something I've said before, I happen to support higher taxes for the middle class, at least over the long term, assuming they are part of a balanced deficit reduction approach that preserves Medicare, Social Security, and other critical programs. In an ideal world, Obama would make a case for precisely that sort of agenda, because without those higher taxes (above and beyond taxing the rich, as Obama has proposed) government won't have enough money to fund future spending obligations. But it's hard to fault Obama for not presenting the full facts about fiscal tradeoffs when the other side has shown repeatedly that it doesn't care about facts at all.

Conservatives need to make the point that government spending even at Rep. Paul Ryan levels is unaffordable without tax hikes on the middle class.

All the talk in the Republican Party about broadening the tax base is really about eliminating tax loss expenditures in order to raise revenues. In other words, taking away the deductibility of mortgage interest expenses, state and local income tax expenses, and the like. If it walks like a tax increase and talks like a tax increase, it's a tax increase, whether it's brought to you by the Gang of Six, the Gang of Twelve, or Mitt Romney.

The Stupid Party is about to vote for this again and the left knows it, which is why they are so happy. People like Jonathan Cohn know a Romney presidency will help achieve their goal, so it really doesn't matter if Obama loses. Unless conservatives take over the Republican National Convention and give the nomination to someone who will actually protect the middle class, taxes on the 66 percent of America which earns less than $100K per year are going up, up, up.

Conservatives need to remember what happened last time we fell for this gimmickry. Ronald Reagan agreed to eliminate deductibility of consumer interest in the 1986 tax reform in exchange for lower rates. We lost that deductibility and got the lower rates, but when Democrat Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, we didn't get back the deductibility. The same thing will happen again. We'll sacrifice deductibility of something else in exchange for lower tax rates, which liberals later will succeed in raising the next time they have power, putting the middle class even farther behind than it is now.

We didn't get back the deductibility lost in 1986 under George Bush in 2001, and we won't in future if we answer the siren call of broadening the tax base again.

Unemployment Rate Rises To 8.3 Percent: All 42 Months Under Obama Over 8

For the report from the BLS, see here.

For the interactive graphic of unemployment from The Wall Street Journal, see here.

Full-time employment DROPPED from 114.6 million to 114.3 million. In April 2006 the level stood 5 million higher at 119.3 million. 

As recently as April 2006, just six years ago, people working part-time for economic reasons had dipped to 3.9 million. Today the number still stands elevated at 8.246 million, an INCREASE from last month's 8.21 million and more than double the level of six years ago.

Total part-time INCREASED from 27.894 million last month to 27.925 million now. In April 2006 the level stood at 19.1 million. Total part-time employment today is nearly 9 million higher than it was six years ago.

Total self-employment INCREASED from 9.572 million last month to 9.616 million now. The number stood at 10.5 million in April 2006. The number of entrepreneurial Americans has declined by nearly a million in six years.

Holders of multiple jobs INCREASED from 6.769 million last month to 6.845 million now. The number stood at 7.4 million in April 2006. The number of people holding extra jobs has declined by over half a million in six years.

Change you can believe in.

Both Romney And Obama Will Destroy The Economy By Destroying Housing

In November 2011 Romney told Hugh Hewitt, here, that it was not a good time to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction in view of the problems in the housing sector:

My own view is that the idea of limiting deductions in the way the Bowles-Simpson panel recommended makes a good deal of sense. I’d like to see us have lower tax rates, and have a broader base. And it sounds like their idea is looking for a way of doing that. I must admit, I don’t think that this is a great time to be eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction. We obviously have a lot of trouble in the housing sector right now, but I haven’t seen their proposal. It may work just fine, but I just haven’t seen it, so I wouldn’t want to comment on that. But the home mortgage interest deduction right now is something that I think we need to keep in place.

But by February 2012 it had become a good time to eliminate the deduction, at least for the rich, a position identical to Obama's, as noted here:

“In order to limit any impact on the deficit, because I do not want to add to the deficit, and also to make sure we continue to have progressivity in our tax code, I’m going to limit the deductions and exemptions, particularly for high-income folks,” Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said.

Reiterated in April at a private fund-raiser as reported here, the idea suddenly had become toxic again, enough to merit walkbacks from his advisers, reported here:

Senior advisers to Mitt Romney said Monday that Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was merely tossing around ideas, not making policy announcements, when his chat with donors about some significant changes to the tax code was overheard by reporters at a fund-raiser this weekend.

When it comes to Mitt Romney, we all know that there's no there there on any number of issues. But it is especially disturbing that neither Romney nor Obama seem to grasp the scope of the damage their shared idea of eliminating the mortgage interest deduction for the wealthy would cause to the American economy.

Wayne Allyn Root explains, here:

If you think the housing market is in trouble now, wait until the home mortgage interest deduction is eliminated for upper income homeowners.

From Manhattan, Great Neck, and Scarsdale, to Boca Raton, Scottsdale, and Brentwood, home prices in upper class neighborhoods from coast to coast will drop by about 35% overnight. That 35% number is not a guess, it’s automatic.

Today, if you’re in the top bracket, you deduct 35% of your mortgage interest off your tax bill. If tomorrow you can’t, your home is worth about one third less.

That's how economics works.

Unless Obama manages to also raise the top income tax rate to 40%. Then, when you lose your mortgage deduction your home will drop by about 40% overnight. Can you imagine the carnage to the housing market if this happens?

Obama's economic theories just don't compute. He believes that if you take away more of rich people's income through tax increases, and take away their deductions so that the value of their net worth collapses, that will be good for the economy.

He thinks if you take away rich people's money, consumer spending will somehow increase. Even though the facts are that the top 2% of income earners produce over 30% of U.S. consumer spending, while the top 5% produce 40% of consumer spending.

Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a tsunami wiping out values at the top end of the housing market can only swamp values at the low end.

Six years after the collapse in housing began, we still have no leadership on the most significant economic problem facing Americans at all income levels.

Obama's War On Coal Is A War On The Heartland Of America

From a worthwhile discussion of the issues, here:

America produces 40 percent of its electricity from coal. Eight states, including Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and West Virginia, use coal to generate more than 80 percent of their electricity. But over 100 coal-fired generating plants have closed since January 2010, mostly due to Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

EPA's Mercury and Air Toxic Standards for Power Plants rule, issued last December, will make electricity generation more complex and expensive, especially in the eastern half of the United States. It will lead to the closure of many coal- and oil-fired power plants that would be too expensive to bring into compliance. Ultimately, power users will bear these costs.

"Retirement Is The Darkness At The End Of The Tunnel"

The End Of The Tunnel

So says Rosie, here:

“The median age of the boomer is 55 going on 56 and retirement is the darkness at the end of the tunnel,” Rosenberg said. “The trend towards second jobs, do-it-yourself, private labels, dollar stores, maintaining your existing vehicle, downsizing property needs, cocooning and frugality will continue unabated.”

Can We Call It A Depression Yet?

2008 GDP in 2005 dollars didn't recover until 2011, and only just barely so. 

Per the latest revisions from the Bureau of Economic Analysis here, real GDP in 2005 chained dollars:

2008 $13.162 trillion

2009   12.758

2010   13.063

2011   13.299

2012   13.558.

I've written that I think we had a depression starting in 2008 when GDP declined from the previous year 2007, and that the depression ended based on reports of real GDP, but perhaps looked at from the point of view of chained 2005 dollars the depression ended just last year and not in 2010 as I've maintained previously.

Al Lewis for MarketWatch here disagrees:

The Great Depression that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claims to have averted has been part of the background radiation of our economy since at least 2008.

It’s just that like radiation — it’s invisible.

We’ve called it the recovery, the jobless recovery, the slogging recovery and more recently the fading recovery. We’ve measured modest growth in our nation’s gross domestic product to record that our so-called Great Recession ended in June 2009. And now we are saying that if this disappointing growth suddenly disappears, as currently feared, we will be in a new recession.

There is nothing more depressing than hearing about a new recession when you haven’t fully recovered from the last one. I take heart in suspecting that in a still-distant future, historians will look back with clarity and call this whole rotten period a depression.


Lewis' remarks at least show that calling what we've been through a "depression" is now possible in polite company.

I'd call that . . . progress!

Congratulations, Rush, For 24 Years Of Success With Irritable Mental Gestures

Euro Area Gold Holdings Declined Almost 14 Percent Up To Crisis, Then Held Steady

So says Axel Merk in a very interesting analysis, here, which concludes that central banks have been scared into holding gold since the financial crisis:

From what we see, central banks have been scared into holding gold since the onset of the financial crisis. Beyond that, we don’t see an active strategy at the ECB to keep its gold reserves at 15% of total assets. Instead, the ECB’s comparatively measured approach has simply lead to a reasonably stable percentage of gold reserves. Of course that was before ECB President Draghi said on July 26, 2012, that he shall do “whatever it takes to preserve the euro.” (an interpretation of that may be that more money printing is on the way). For now, the cultural differences in responding to the financial crisis (Europe: think austerity; US: think growth) suggest that the euro should outperform the U.S. dollar over the long term, assuming the not-so-negligible scenario of a more severe fallout from the Eurozone debt crisis won’t materialize.

His chart shows Italy has sold absolutely no gold since 1999, and Germany very little, while the Euro area as a whole has sold just under 14 percent of gold holdings since December 1999. France was the big seller from 1999, arresting its gold holdings during the crisis at a level which nearly matches Italy's. America's gold reserve has remained constant for years according to official reports, although it is said that Rep. Ron Paul would like to audit Fort Knox and The Federal Reserve Bank Of New York just to make sure.

(image source)

"Never Has The American Consumer Been This Weak For This Long"

So says Stephen Roach of Yale University, here:

Over the last 18 quarters, annualized growth in real consumer demand has averaged a mere 0.7 percent. This compares with a 3.6 percent growth trend in the decade before the crisis erupted. Never before has the American consumer been this weak for this long.

What's Happened To Michelle Obama's Toned Arms?

Lookin' just a little flabby down south.

h/t 'nita (source)

The State-Capitalist Quotation Of The Day Comes From Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren provides the state-capitalist quotation of the day, as seen at this link:

“We've got bridges and roads in need of repair and thousands of people in need of work. Why aren’t we rebuilding America? Our competitors are putting people to work, building a future. China invests 9% of its GDP in infrastructure. America? We’re at just 2.4%. We can do better.”

Oh, if only Obama were the head of China, things would be so much better . . . here!

Banking "The Achilles Heel Of Capitalism"? Or The Right's Version Of Socialism?

There is a term for right-wing socialism, but nobody seems to want to use it because to do so is to indict what we've been living under since at least the time of FDR as fascism.

It was inevitable that grafting onto capitalism elements of left-wing economics would turn out this way. Just look at China, which grafted from the other direction. Both now meet in that middle ground of state capitalism and find in each other the most agreeable of economic partners. The Chicoms have become but the mirror image of an America which long ago shed its devotion to free-market capitalism.

This upsets people, especially the partisans of left and right who couldn't possibly tolerate the obliteration of the distinctions they assert between themselves, as between Republicans and Democrats. Still, some perceptive individuals in our midst see that there is really no difference between left and right in America because the two have been combined in a peculiarly American way through multiple revolutions in banking which socialized both the assets and the liabilities.

Despite what anyone says, the fact is we don't have a free market in banking, and haven't had one for a very long time.

From Ed Yardeni, excerpted here:

“The problem with banks is that they tend to blow up on a regular basis. That’s because bankers are playing with other people’s money (OPM). They consistently abuse the privilege and shirk their fiduciary responsibilities. Whenever they get into trouble, government regulators scramble to bail them out first and then scramble to regulate them more strictly. Without fail, the bankers respond to tougher rules by using some of the OPM to hire financial engineers and political lobbyists to figure out ways around the new regulations.

"In my opinion, banks are the Achilles’ heel of capitalism. They really do need to be regulated like utilities if their liabilities are either explicitly or implicitly guaranteed by the government, i.e., by taxpayers. Banks should be permitted to earn a very low utility-like stable return. Bankers should receive compensation in the middle of the pay scale for government employees, somewhere between the pay of a postal worker and the head of the FDIC. It should be the capital markets, hedge funds, and private-equity investors that provide credit to risky borrowers instead of the banks.”

Our money is your money. We print it for you to use.

The Fascist Grip Of Banking: Rate Rigging In LIBOR, Now Also In Municipal Bonds

There is no corner of contemporary economic life which is not in thrall to state-sponsored banking, and so no corner of it which is not rigged to favor the players wielding the taxpayer backstop.

American-style fascism only seems most vivid when "banking's" losses are finally socialized through spectacular bailouts. Just as spectacular as the bailouts are the efforts to re-define nearly everything as banking in order to bring it all under its aegis. Think GE, GM, Chrysler, investment banking and AIG. That process of socialized losses continues apace on a smaller scale with every bank failure carefully orchestrated for Friday nights, to which Americans are now so thoroughly inured due to its frequency and efficiency. That is but the ubiquitous residual background radiation of the system's big bang, the collapse of banking's housing collateral, rapaciously used to leverage private shareholder and investor gains.

But even the spectacular blow-ups do not keep our attention for very long. Like the public servants who have succumbed to regulatory capture by industry, our anger is also subject to capture by the power of banking's propaganda, the central message of which is that the collapse of banking as we know it would mean nothing short of civilizational collapse. But it is merely their revolutionary version of civilization, not ours, based as it is on the dictum "How can you respect a man who needs you more than you need him?" Traditional Americans have always believed instead in "Owe no man anything".

Meanwhile the gains accruing to elites manipulating the levers of industries which have installed doors to the government are harder to ferret-out, the heads-they-win side of tails-you-lose. Lately it was LIBOR manipulation which came to the light, which has been rigged for far longer than since the latest financial crisis. Now the municipal bond market's municipal market data index, MMDI, is in the spotlight, according to this story in The New York Times, reproduced here:

Thomson Reuters, which owns Municipal Market Data, said on Monday that it “has been involved in discussions with regulators” about the rates, which influence the prices of bonds and derivatives in the $3 trillion municipal bond market.

The company released the statement after the municipal bond industry’s self-regulator, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, said that its board was “concerned about the transparency” behind the creation of a few indexes used to set prices in the municipal bond market, the most important of which is the M.M.D. index.

What we may find from this is that local taxing districts have been paying way too much for roads, schools, libraries, cops and firemen, providing gains for the few financed once again on the backs of many (property) taxpayers.

Massive Central Bank Purchases Of Gold Boosted Price Over 30 Percent In Last Year

This baby weighs one metric ton

That's the upshot from this report in The Wall Street Journal, here, in early June:

Central banks increased their gold hoards by 400 metric tons — each equal to almost 2,205 pounds — in the 12 months through March 31, up from 156 tons during the prior year, according to recent World Gold Council data. ...

Central banks “will probably be continuous buyers of small volumes of gold for the foreseeable future,” says Jeff Christian, founder of New York–based commodities consulting firm CPM Group. By small volumes, he means 311 to 374 metric tons a year, or about 10% of the global supply. ...

He says that central bankers will avoid buying any quantity that dramatically affects the price. They know that the market is tiny, compared with the $4 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market. Still, consistent buying of 10% of annual supply can’t but help keep the price elevated.

Up from 156 tons? That's a 156 percent increase in purchases by banks in the last year, March over March.

That's a remarkable development in the face of the enormous growth in central bank balance sheets to support weak economies at the same time that stiffer Basel III capital rules are imposed on the world's largest fiat money banks. Central banks are the banks of last resort and have been demonstrating rather vividly what they think counts as the capital of last resort.

Is it any wonder then that gold soared from $1,400 the ounce in March 2011 to $1,900 by September 2011? Gold has been above $1,750 as recently as March 2012. Clearly central bank demand has boosted price. 

Purchases of 400 metric tons at today's pull-back-price of $1,600 the ounce would imply $22.58 billion allocated to gold purchases by central banks during the one year period. Purchases of 156 tons at $1,400 the ounce at the top previously comes to at best only $7.7 billion allocated to gold purchases just prior to the period. That's a nearly three-fold increase, and a sign that central banks' confidence in sovereign support of fiat currencies has eroded to say the least. 

The implications for gold price going forward, however, are tricky.

The Wikipedia gold investing article, which also depends on figures from the World Gold Council, puts annual demand in 2005 at 3,754 tonnes and states annual production figures, for example, of as few as 2,500 tonnes as of 2010 to as many as 3,859 tonnes in 2005. Complicating matters is its assertion that 2,000 tons routinely gets allocated to jewellry and industrial production annually, making central bank acquisitions of 375 metric tons annually far more than 10 percent of the remaining supply on either accounting of the total.

It would seem that the very wide spread for annual production reported between 2,500 tons and nearly 3,900 tons (over 50 percent!) is part of a delicate balancing act by the industry, which attempts to pay its respects to all sides concerned in the gold business, both those who profit from production and those who profit from consumption.

Jeff Christian, cited in The Wall Street Journal article above, hints perhaps at how to split the difference. If his low end estimate for bank purchases of 311 metric tons is really 10 percent of annual supply, that means annual supply is probably closer to 3,100 metric tons. Sans jewelry of 2,000 metric tons, bank consumption of 350 metric tons or so going forward would be nearly a third of remaining production if sustained at that level.

In response to this surging demand by banks in the last year, however, production has probably run up against a new and unsustainable level, which is why the price of gold has softened roughly 15 percent off the high in recent months. Add to this that significant fresh inputs from consumers are unlikely in view of declining wages and the increased demand for return on investment which gold cannot give. Few have significant resources left to mop up increased supply of gold.

Oversupply of gold has been noted as recently as mid-July, here, by Dominic Schnider, an analyst at UBS Wealth Management in Singapore:


"The market is in oversupply -- production growth is solid and we simply don't see incremental gold purchases," he said.


That suggests banks continue to buy at levels consistent with the recent past, but are restraining themselves a little bit. This coheres with an observed supply glut and softened prices.

An attempt at a non-partisan evaluation of supply here suggests that already mined gold "above ground" historically totals 170,000 metric tons, with another 100,000 metric tons in the ground, less than half of which is profitable to mine under current conditions. In other words, you could devalue the above ground supply with the below ground supply over time, but only by another 28 percent at the extremes, not counting such factors as the small amounts of above ground gold lost to industrial production, the long time required for mines to become profitable, the changing costs of extraction, and the like.

My take is that bank purchases of gold at higher levels in recent times signals that the pendulum has started to swing against endlessly devaluing fiat currencies and against the elite consensus which created them. Official gold reserves around the world already approach 31,000 metric tons, and I expect they will only increase from here, if but gradually. The effect, however, may be to shore up existing currencies rather than to replace them, which would augur for a stabilization of gold prices near present levels and improved conditions for the world's economies.

Interest On The Debt 2007-2012 Has Completely Swallowed GDP Growth

Using the numbers from the June Z.1 release from the Federal Reserve, combined with the latest revisions to GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, I'm showing current GDP, Q2 2012, at $15.596 trillion. GDP in 2006 was $13.377 trillion, for a nominal gain of $2.219 trillion over the period.

The Treasury Department indicates that for fiscal years 2007 through 2011, interest payments on the debt have totaled $2.132 trillion. Extrapolating to twelve months for fiscal 2012 from nine months so far, I add an additional $504 billion to get $2.636 trillion in interest payments over the period, for a net loss of $417 billion. If I forget the current fiscal year and substitute 2006, interest payments have totaled $2.538 trillion, for a net loss of $319 billion.

Either way, America isn't growing at all, and hasn't since 2006. In point of fact, America is in decline. Our national income is not growing sizeably enough even to keep pace with interest payments on the debt.

Ask many people who have gone bankrupt in recent years if they are familiar with the phenomenon of more going out than coming in.

Noted Progressive Calls Second-Great-Depression-Excuse For TARP "Crap"

Dean Baker, here:

[T]he commonly claimed "second Great Depression" scenario is, to use a technical economic term, "crap."  The first Great Depression, by which I mean a decade of double-digit unemployment was not locked in stone by the mistakes made at its onset. There was nothing that would have prevented the government from having the sort of massive stimulus spending that eventually got us back to full employment (a.k.a. World War II) in 1931 instead of 1941 and without the war. The fact that we remained in a depression for more than a decade was due to inadequate policy response.

Don't you see? There are no problems which Keynesian monetarism cannot solve, it's just that FDR didn't practice them then,  and that Obama is not practicing them now.

Otherwise Baker makes the case for clearing the system the quick and dirty way, the way free markets are supposed to work:

The place to look for insight on this question is Argentina, which went the financial collapse route in December of 2001. This was the real deal. Banks shut, no access to ATMs, no one knowing when they could get their money out of their bank, if they ever could.

This collapse led to a plunge in GDP for three months, followed by three months in which the economy stabilized and then six years of robust growth. It took the country a year and a half to make up the output lost following the crisis.

While there is no guarantee that the Bernanke-Geithner team would be as competent as Argentina's crew, if we assume for the moment they are, then the relevant question would be if it is worth this sort of downturn to clean up the financial sector once and for all. I'm inclined to say yes, but I certainly could understand that others may view the situation differently.


Once again, the domestic analogy would be 1920, but that's so, I don't know, modern.

This Idaho Billboard Doesn't Quite Capture It For Me

Instead of "Kills Thousands With His Foreign Policy," I suggest more to the point would be:

"Murders Americans Abroad With Drones. Republicans Applaud."

The political party which lately lays claim to all things constitutional, even showboating by reading the damn thing from the House floor, loudly approves of the president deeming someone a terrorist and dispatching him without benefit of trial. Which is why they voted for the NDAA, an ominous codification of the imperial power of the presidency by a servile Congress.

The Republicans are not the friends of ordered liberty they claim to be. They are the Executive's slaves.

So what does that make you?

"WHY DO WE HEAR THE LOUDEST YELPS FOR LIBERTY THE CONSTITUTION FROM THE DRIVERS OF NEGROES THOSE WHO IGNORE IT?"

Ben Bernanke Sure Is Lucky

Somehow he got the European Central Bank to commit to quantitative easing for a change instead of having to do it again himself.

It buys Ben a bunch of time, and gives him cover during the perilous political season when direct Federal Reserve action would look especially political. Maybe it even frees him up to do a little bit more, on the theory that he can always credit any success we experience to European action, not to his, saying a rising tide lifts all boats, and rot like that.

Crafty devil.

Obama must be praying like hell it works long enough and well enough to keep everyone afloat for three more months.

Famous Spaniard Threatens Leaving Euro On Wednesday, ECB Moves On Thursday

And markets pop accordingly to finish the week, solely on a serious promise of coming central bank intervention.

As reported here on Wednesday the 25th, Spanish elder statesman Francisco Alvarez Cascos, former secretary-general of Spain’s ruling party, became the first major figure in Spain to openly suggest leaving the Euro, saying,

'This can’t go on for long, or we will have to think about leaving the euro before we are thrown out.'

Is it any coincidence that the European Central Bank "moved" on Thursday, as reported here?

'Mario Draghi, the ECB president, vowed to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro within limits of its mandate. "Believe me, it will be enough," he said in London.

'Picking codewords instantly understood by traders, Mr Draghi said the violent spike in bond yields in recent days was hampering "the functioning of the monetary policy transmission channels" - the exact expression used to justify each of the ECB's previous market interventions.'

It was bad enough that ousted Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi had been openly suggesting in recent weeks that Italy should think seriously about whether it ought to continue in the Euro. To put that on the table in Europe's third largest economy was a serious sign that events were turning. Now joined by a similar suggestion in the fourth largest economy in Europe, the ECB had to act to stanch the wound.

The bond markets are forcing everyone to do what they do not want to do, but they will have their say, one way or another.

Q2 2012 Anemic GDP Nearly Swallowed Whole By June's Debt Service Payment

WTOP reports the annualized dollar figure for Q2 2012 GDP at almost $118 billion, here:

Current-dollar GDP increased at an annual rate of $117.6 billion in the second quarter to $15.6 trillion.

Unfortunately, interest payments on the public debt swelled in June to nearly $104 billion:

The debt service shark just chomped the thing down, leaving the head and shoulders on the beach.

"If I Stop Eating The Unemployed I'll Be Just A Regular Bastard"

Q2 2012 GDP, First Estimate, Up Only 1.5 Percent. Q1 Revised Up To 2 Percent.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis report may be found here. The customary summer revision of the data going back several years is also part of the release, here.

The revised real GDP numbers going back to 2008 are something of a stunner, revealing no real GDP growth in any year from 2008 at 2.5 percent or above.

I am reminded of this statement attributed to Ben Bernanke three years ago today at Reuters, here:

It takes GDP growth of about 2.5 percent to keep the jobless rate constant, Bernanke noted. But the Fed expects growth of only about 1 percent in the last six months of the year.

"So that's not enough to bring down the unemployment rate," he said.


Since we haven't had annual GDP growth of 2.5 percent for going on five years, declining unemployment obviously has had nothing to do with government action, but rather with the growing number of people not counted as unemployed. Headline unemployment is based on the answer to the question "Did you look for work in the last four weeks?" and if you answered "No" you are not counted as unemployed even if you are.

Americans have dropped out in massive numbers because they are tired of beating their heads against a wall of mismatched skills, massive age discrimination, cheaper foreign labor and inhospitable government policy toward business, and they no longer count, quite literally.

It's no surprise really. 50 million abortions since 1973 haven't counted either. And while a gunman killing a dozen or more in a theatre makes big news for a few days, a similar number of illegals dying in a truck crash a few days later doesn't.

The message of the "modern" world is that lives are expendable, especially unemployed lives, who are now nothing more than "depreciating assets".

US Birthrate Declines From Replacement Rate To 1.87

So says a report in USA Today, here:

As the economy tanked, the average number of births per woman fell 12% from a peak of 2.12 in 2007. Demographic Intelligence projects the rate to hit 1.87 this year and 1.86 next year — the lowest since 1987. ... The U.S. fertility rate has been the envy of the developed world because it has remained close to the replacement rate of 2.1 (the number of children each woman must have to maintain current population) for more than 20 years.

This Is Capitalism? Negative Interest Rates Mean Capital Is Being Destroyed.

So says Jeffrey Snider, here:

It cannot be a true capitalist system that is creating negative interest rates throughout the "developed" world since capitalism, at its very core, values capital. Negative interest rates are the very real signal that capital is being destroyed at will. Since this capital destruction is not localized, and does not appear to be temporary, this strongly suggests that some exogenous force (exogenous from the perspective of a system that values capital) is uniformly acting upon the global system in a manner that does not conform to what would fairly be called capitalism. ...

Today's negative interest rates are the prime signal that money is more valuable than capital, a consequence that only monetarism and financial domination could produce willingly. In all those countries experiencing the renewal of the receding economic tide of re-recession (or just continued depression for simplicity's sake) there sits an activist central bank at its modern core. ...

[T]he real economy appears to be fighting back, rejecting money and credit as a workable solution.

That's Hysterical: Do 2 Recessions Equal 1 Depression?

So Paul Vigna in The Wall Street Journal, here:

"Do two global recessions equal a modern depression? We seem destined to find out."

Notice the word "modern",  as if to say we in our time are much too advanced to have an old-fashioned depression like they had way back in the day. You know, a god-awful depression where massive numbers of people go hungry and die before their time.

The fact is depressions happen. They have a technical character. You can measure them. Some are indeed severe, as in 1920. Some are also short, as in 1920. Some are relatively shallow, as in 2008 or 1937, and go on forever due to incompetence. Some are severe and go on forever due to incompetence, as in 1931, or in Greece today. Our problem is that we won't agree to agree on a name for this depression enemy this time around because depressions don't happen in "modern" times. Insisting that depressions don't happen in "modern" times is actually a form of hubris. And you know what cometh before a fall. But try telling that to an entire civilization.

By the way, isn't the "modern" age over already? The old right in America, you know, the opposition to FDR in the 1930s, used to stand against the modern age which FDR, and Wilson before him, represented. There's still a magazine in print by that name which hails from the conservative ethos of that very time and continues to talk about this, which really is a mark of true conservative distinction, seeing that conservatism at its best brings forward into the present the truths, and critiques, of the past. But "modern" truly is an old conception which is getting a little long in the tooth to continue to be used of this age when we have clearly moved on in any number of ways, except perhaps in our conceits. An exception to this might be our nostalgia for Glass-Steagall, which makes us sort of conservatives of modernism, if it's permissible to speak that way.

But I digress.

What thoughtful people are worrying about at this moment is that we could re-elect this incompetent boob, Barack Obama, who is working on the choom gang, and finally go really and truly insolvent while he fritters away four more years getting in touch with his inner Arnold Palmer. Some people think insolvency is actually his objective, which to my mind gives him way more credit than he deserves. He seems to think money grows on trees, planted by the financial, insurance and real estate sectors, but hasn't yet figured out that his usefulness to them comes with an expiration date not unlike the expiration dates which attach to all the promises he has made and end up going poof into the air.

When liberals finally do conclude the emperor has no clothes on, this indeed will be all over, but the problem with that is that most liberals went to public school. They won't figure it out until it's way too late. Say 2022, if they live that long.

The left already figured it out, however, in the first year of Obama's presidency, but decided to make their strategy of destroying the country Obama's strategy by continuing to support him. This was an inflexion point where all that stupid talk from the right about how we share some common ground with the left should have come to an end. I don't recall the left saying they had any common ground with us. Instead what we got and continue to get from Republicans and other liberals is incredulity about Obama's failure to have learned anything by now.

Here's a newsflash for you: He has no intention of learning anything. Republicans continue to misunderstand his opposition, as is their wont. Saddam Hussein was not worth getting angry about, but they did, and Barack Obama is worth getting upset about, but their response is . . . Romney. No wonder Democrats have contempt for Republicans. The stupid party.

No, everything now depends, unfortunately, on the residuum of common good sense among the rank and file out there, the apolitical people who simply have had enough of this. Considering the depths of our social dissolution, however, and Obama's attempts to subsidize that with food stamps, free cell phones, disability payments and the revivification of welfare (what else would you expect from a drug addict?), it is hard to remain optimistic about them, but that's probably all we've got remaining.

"The Great Depression, after all, actually comprised two technical recessions, 1929-1933 and 1937-38, not that most people could tell the difference.

"What would you call a 7-10 year period of suppressed growth and stagnant wages, of economies on the verge of collapse and overwhelmed leadership? You could do worse than “depression” – lowercase “d” to be sure, and we’ll hope for a great new age on the other side of it. But a depression all the same."


I'll see you at the polls in November, voting for Romney. I'll be the one with a clothes pin on my nose.

And I'm going to keep it because I have a feeling I'm going to be needing it.

Samuel Johnson For Our Overly Political Times

"How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,

Our own felicity we make or find:

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,

Glides the smooth current of domestic joy."

The poetry is Oliver Goldsmith's, but Johnson wrote it.