The Current Shape of the 78 Year Emergency

Robert G. Wilmers, a defender of community banking, doesn't explicitly mention the abolition of Glass-Steagall, but he lays out some of the consequences of that nonetheless, one of which is that the FDIC is now on the hook for the mistakes of speculators, something it was never intended for:

In 1990, the six largest financial institutions accounted for 9 percent of all U.S. domestic deposits. As of Dec. 31, 2010, the six biggest banks accounted for 36 percent of deposits. ...

In 2010, the six largest bank holding companies generated $56.1 billion in trading revenue, or 74 percent of their $75.7 billion in pretax income. ...

The Big Six institutions earned more than 93 percent of the trading revenue generated by all American banks during the past two years. ...

The major Wall Street banks operate under the taxpayer-backed umbrella of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and, as we saw in 2008, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. To pay for the cost of such protection, legislators and regulators have forced thousands of Main Street banks like the one I run to absorb a larger, more expensive set of regulatory costs, including higher capital and liquidity requirements. ...

Regulators have failed to distinguish between trading activity and traditional banking, or to recognize that the activity of an institution, not its form, should be the proper focus of oversight.

New Rules Needed

Main Street banks are heavily regulated -- and have been for generations -- to ensure their safety, soundness and transparency. A new generation of regulation must now be applied to what has become a virtual casino. ...

Those financial institutions that engage in trading should live and die by the pursuit of their fortunes, rather than impose a burden on the whole economy.

It’s time to disentangle the trading of big financial institutions from their more traditional commercial banking operations and put an end to this unsafe business model.

Make sure to read his entire op-ed at Bloomberg, here.

Will 'Buy and Hold' Soon Mean Just Minutes?

Jack Hough wonders in a fascinating little story about high frequency trading, here, in which we learn that program trading by some estimates now accounts for more than 75 percent of the volume.

Just one of the reasons I remain out.

'High Frequency' or 'Program Trading' is on the Rise in Asia

So says a recent story from Reuters, predicting it will take only three to four years for Asia to catch up to the US:

Japan is the only market that comes close right now to the HFT seen in western markets. ... [T]he proportion of trades classified as high frequency [is] around 30 percent . . ..

High frequency trading now accounts for as much at 70 percent of turnover in US equity markets, where have HFT systems are dealing with up to 2.3 million messages per second in some cases.

Read the full story here.

Quantitative Easing Was 'Cash for Spelunkers'

Jed Graham made the case last November here, and now notes that among other commodities, gold is $200 an ounce higher.

Absent more Fed purchasing of Treasuries, look for commodity price deterioration.

Sarah Palin: The Vulgarian Streak Runs Deep

If Sarah Palin is supposed to represent a resurgent social conservatism, her fascination with all things 'WTF' speaks against it.

I had forgotten this one, which Toby Harnden of The UK Telegraph recalls here a couple of days ago, breezing right over it:

The notion of Mrs Palin as White House kingmaker would have seemed wildly improbable if anyone had raised it before August 2008.

It was then that she was catapulted to international fame by Senator John McCain’s surprise decision to make her his vice-presidential running mate. Her reaction? “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”

Cleaning out the alcohol from the Alaska governor's residence was easy by comparison.

"Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man."

-- Matthew 15:11

Addison on criticism

 

A critick is a man who, on all occasions, is more attentive to what is wanting than what is present.

-- Joseph Addison

The Nine Rebellious Stripes

DE PA NJ CT MA MD SC NY RI

ObamaCare's High Risk Pools Flop, Only 18,000 Sign Up as of March

So says Megan McArdle here:

I've predicted that lots of parts of Obamacare will not work the way they're expected to.  But here's one I wouldn't have predicted: the high-risk pools, which were meant to tide people over until 2013, have signed up just 18,000 people as of March.

There were supposed to be millions of people who were uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions.  We heard lengthy testimony about their terrible plight.  I don't think it's too strong to say that this fear . . . was one of the main reasons offered for the health care overhaul.

Which just goes to show you that fear is a lousy reason to do anything, except run like hell from a bureaucrat wielding a butcher knife against your way of life.

The budgeted amount for the program was $5 billion to cover about 200,000 enrollees until ObamaCare kicks in in 2014, even though the Medicare actuary predicted there would be 400,000 enrollees (doesn't this tell us that we ought to wonder about everything else the Medicare actuary predicts?).

Now they're changing the rules to make it easier and cheaper to sign up for the high risk pools so the regime can say the program is a success. 

Top 5 Radiation Hot Spots of 50 Air Measurement Points Inside Fukushima 20 km Zone

Okuma town is the hardest hit at points 2.5 to 5 km distant from the nuclear power plant:

Koirino 93.9 microSv/hour

Ottozawa 68.4 microSv/hour

Kumagawa 41.2 microSv/hour

Shimonogami 35.6 microSv/hour.

Futaba town, 5 km distant, also has many points with high readings, the highest of which is:

Nagatsuka 30.8 microSv/hour.

The measurements were made June 3 and reported here.

Normal readings would be more like 0.11 microSv/hour.

It's been three months since the tsunami and meltdowns.

A Vote for a Mormon is a Vote for the Flip-Flop as an Acceptable Principle

And Mitt Romney epitomizes this ethos already.

From Warren Cole Smith here:

Mormonism is particularly troubling . . . because Mormons believe in the idea of "continuing revelation." They may believe one thing today, and something else tomorrow. This is why Mormons have changed their views, for example, on marriage and race. Polygamy was once a key distinctive of the religion. Now, of course, it is not. Mormons once forbade blacks from leadership roles. Now they do not. What else will change?

Your Healthcare Future: Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?

Shikha Dalmia chooses door number three:

ObamaCare is the worst thing that could happen to seniors in their old age; inaction is the next and RyanCare is the least bad. As a senior in the making, if those were my only options, I would ignore Democratic demagoguery and take RyanCare in a heartbeat.

ObamaCare, however, I’d avoid like the plague.

Follow the link here to find out why in "Medicare's Least Bad Fix."

Main Street, Obamaville: All Bumps, No Road

From the inimitable Mark Steyn, here:

The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding.

Cutting Spending: Tea Party's Meession from G-d

As reported by Howard Gold here:

Congress has raised the debt limit 74 times since 1962 so the federal government can meet its obligations.

Usually it’s just a rubber-stamp exercise. But this time a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which swept into power on the back of the Tea Party movement, is preparing to take a stand against too much federal spending and picked the debt ceiling as the battleground.

[Greg] Valliere [chief political strategist of Potomac Research Group] called the 87 freshman Tea Party House Republicans “unlike any group I’ve ever seen in my career. These people don’t give a damn about being re-elected. They feel they are on a mission from God to cut spending,” he told me.

Guarantees Implicit Under Dodd-Frank Hand Big Banks Billions in Borrowing Advantages at Taxpayer Expense

So says John Carney here, calling Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, among others, our new Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs.

Corporate Cash Reaches New Record Yet Corporate Borrowing is at Staggering Levels

Corporate cash reached a new record of $1.9 trillion in Q1 according to the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds report. The figure is referenced in discussions here and here, among other places.

But what rarely seems to get mentioned in these sorts of discussions is the debt side of the equation involving all this corporate cash. To cite the growth in cash as evidence that corporations don't need a tax cut and aren't investing simply misses the larger reality which helps explain the phenomenon.

John Carney here points out among many other important considerations that corporations are behaving out of fear just like individuals had when they increased their savings in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Many businesses experienced first hand just how difficult times can be without sufficient liquidity in a situation where no one is lending. Increasing cash should be viewed in part as insuring against a repetition of a similar lending lock up in future. 

Other more extenuating circumstances should also be considered when evaluating the issue of corporate cash. One is Federal Reserve induced low interest rates.

David Zeiler calls attention here to the fact that the current low cost of borrowing is too attractive for corporations not to lock in before QEII ends and the cost of borrowing inevitably rises:

The amount of debt companies have issued this year is staggering. As of May 18, companies with investment-grade ratings had issued $392 billion of bonds, an increase of 30% over the same period last year.

Another consideration is related also to formal government policy, namely that much corporate cash may simply be too unattractive to use for tax reasons:

"Many tech companies have looked to raise capital in the [U.S. debt] market over the past year, for a multiple of reasons, including acquisitions, the maturing of businesses and the inability to tap offshore cash without tax consequences," Keith Harman, a managing director in debt capital markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch told Reuters.

The issue of offshore cash is a significant one. For many companies, offshore money accounts for the bulk of their cash. About 46% of Google's cash is overseas; 90% of Cisco's and virtually all of Microsoft's.

Because of a reluctance to pay the 35% U.S. corporate tax on that money, that cash remains offshore and unavailable for many uses, such as stock buybacks and infrastructure investment. (Microsoft used some of its offshore cash to buy Luxembourg-based Skype earlier this month.)

This suggests that repatriating corporate cash should be a fundamental goal of tax reform in the US. That would mean making it more attractive to keep it here by reducing corporate tax rates.

Come to think of it, why stop there? Why not patriate everyone's cash in the world to America as a matter of formal government policy?

The more cash, the better.

Progressivism: Just Another Word For Fascism

As seen here:

"Reading various online threads, it never ceases to amaze me that advocates of what we will call a more liberal or progressive line of economic thinking inevitably embrace the corporate state [fascism] for solutions."

Palin Proves Again That the Climb Down Into the Gutter Comes Natural to Her

Here it is again on her Facebook page, playing cutesy with the acronym for Obama's "Winning the Future."

Every time she resorts to one of these easy low one-offs she destroys her credibility as a Christian and as a serious political player.

The descent into barbarism continues apace.

Imagine 1.2 Million Mortgagors Not Making ANY Payments in Over Two Years

And about 3 million more who haven't paid anything in over a year.

The story is here.

Looks like judicial foreclosure states only, of course.

The EU Project Has Been an Elaborate Charade from the Beginning

So argues Samuel Gregg, in considerable detail, here:

[T]he economic woes of countries like Portugal, Spain, and Greece have resulted from more than just bad policy. With each passing day, evidence mounts that one dynamic driving the crisis is that of untruth: a disturbing European pattern of fabrication about levels of public spending and debt.

The latest proof for this thesis is the discovery by newly-elected Spanish regional and local governments of concealed debts run up by their predecessors. This contradicts claims by Spain's Socialist Finance Minister, Elena Salgado, that Spain's regions had no "hidden deficits" on their accounts. Spain's business community, however, has long complained about local governments pressuring private companies to do business with them "off the books."

One reason for such behavior is that Spain's government knows that the greater Spain's real overall-public debt, the higher will be the interest-rates demanded by financial markets and the more stringent will be the conditions attached to any "financial assistance package" (i.e., bailout) that Spain might, like Portugal and Greece, eventually need.

Unfortunately, financial sleight-of-hand in today's EU has a longer history than the present turmoil. It's characterized the entire monetary union project from the start.

The rest at the link should not be missed.

Now You Know Why The Dept. of Education Wanted to Procure Shotguns

The "federal business opportunity" placed here on March 8, 2010 was for 27 shotguns for the Dept. of Education.

They probably used them in the recent raid reported here, smashing down a family's door at six in the morning, looking for payment on delinquent student loans.

There's an old saying that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have them.

Shotguns with barrels less than 18 inches long are outlawed. That's why Obama's fascist police state thugs from the Department of Education procured shotguns with 14" barrels.

Think of it as close quarters tutoring.

As we reported here, the IRS got some too, for close quarters audits, and ObamaCare insurance compliance.