James Altucher Refuses to Recognize the (Education) Gods of the State

But they didn't serve him hemlock at the dinner party, just hatred. (Hey, isn't that a crime?)

Here:

The main thing is, these people didn’t like me very much. I felt like I had upset the religion of America so I was an apostate. I left at the end and very few said goodbye to me.

My new hero.

One Voice Suggesting Money Market Mutual Fund Risk is Not Worth It

Bill Fleckenstein, here, who advocates government guaranteed debt instruments maturing in a year or less, or FDIC insured cash accounts:

For the risks associated with [big money market funds], investors are getting paid a whopping one basis point (0.01%, or one one-hundredth of 1%). ...

The point in all of this is that because no one is being compensated no matter where they put their savings, there is really no point in taking any risk at all. Thus, it probably makes sense for those who can to shift their holdings to Treasury bills.

Another Enemy of the Mortgage Interest Deduction

Bloomberg.

Editorial here.

The hard fought war to subsidize the nuclear family has been lost from within. Dissolve the nuclear family through cultural decadence, and suddenly its members no longer value its advantages because they do not experience them. By choice.

The fool and his money soon are parted, one from the other.

Too stupid now to know how good they could have had it.

The loudest voices against the deduction stand to gain the most.

Asset Allocation: The Big American Picture, Built on Debt

Cash:   14 percent ($8.3 trillion)

Stocks: 27 percent ($16 trillion)

Bonds: 59 percent ($35 trillion)

Size of US Bond Market in 2009 was $35 Trillion

As per FINRA here:

All Sums Held in Cash, $8.3 Trillion, Equivalent to 52 Percent of Wilshire 5000

An astonishing number, as Tom Petruno points out here, because most of that cash is making next to nothing, and everyone who holds it is losing money because of inflation:

[I]nvestors who want absolute safety for their money are sticking with cash. Lots of cash.

Since 2008, millions of individuals and corporate investors have sharply boosted what they hold in cash accounts at banks. The total in basic savings and money market deposit accounts has reached a record $5.58 trillion, up from $5.09 trillion a year ago and $4.03 trillion three years ago, according to Federal Reserve data.

There's an additional $2.7 trillion sitting in money market mutual funds.

Most of the combined $8.3 trillion in those cash accounts is earning close to zero interest. That's a massive chunk of capital producing almost no return for its owners. To put it in perspective, the sum in cash accounts is 52% of the value of the entire U.S. stock market as measured by the Wilshire 5,000 index.

Fukushima Prefecture Residents Have Absorbed 3.2 MilliSieverts Between March and May

According to this story.

The total is over 3 times the annual limit, in just 2 months, while Americans typically get 6.2 millisieverts per year from natural background radiation, air travel, and medical diagnostic scans.

Levels of radiation in the air in Fukushima have declined steadily, but concentrations of radiation in soil and water have contaminated food which residents are urged to avoid.

Residents of Iitate and Kawamata had their food and urine tested in the study.

Fukushima City Checks Radiation at Over 1000 Sites, 6 Are Above 3.4 MicroSv/Hr

The city itself is 60 km inland from the nuclear power plant on the coast.

Reported here.

The levels are over 30 times normal, three months and counting since the accident.

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Ammo: About $1 Trillion in MBS Garbage

(source)

Q1 2011 GDP Final Revision: 1.9 Percent

Discussed here.

August 5, 1997: A Date That Will Live in Housing Infamy

When President Bill Clinton signed into law The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, and liberalism turned your home into just another commodity:

The act exempted from taxation the profits on the sale of a personal residence of up to $500,000 for married couples filing jointly and $250,000 for singles. This is for residences that were lived in for at least 2 years over the last 5 ... .

Real estate churning was off to the races, in concert with a deregulated financial industry, almost as if someone had flipped on a switch:

(source: Ritholtz/Steve Barry, The Big Picture, here)

Top Ten Countries with Direct Banking Exposure to PIIGS

Since May 2010, banks of eight countries with assets directly exposed to the PIIGS group of countries have made considerable progress in reducing that exposure, based on the figures reported here, now and previously:

IRELAND ........ down 65 percent to $  31.7 billion

Netherlands ........ down 38 percent to $150.5 billion

Belgium ............... down 34 percent to $  78.2 billion

PORTUGAL ........ down 30 percent to $  45.2 billion

France ....... down 29 percent to $646.5 billion

Germany ..... down 24 percent to $532.7 billion

U.K. ............. down 17 percent to $347.2 billion

SPAIN............ down 15 percent to $126.8 billion.

Two additional countries, Austria ($36.8 billion exposed) and Switzerland ($56.4 billion exposed), join these eight in the top ten ranked by seriousness of exposure to PIIGS as a percentage of their bank assets. These are, in descending order:

UK, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Switzerland and Ireland.

PIIGS ranked by the most owed to the banks of these ten countries are as follows:

Italy       $780.3 billion

Spain     $594.5 billion

Ireland   $357.4 billion

Portugal $189.5 billion

Greece   $130.0 billion.

Total owed by PIIGS to the banks of just these 10 countries:  $2.052 trillion.

Oh, Obama's Ignorant Dutch Sabotoogee, Eh?

"When it comes to genuine, pro-capitalist job-creation, Obama is a saboteur, in the original meaning of the word. Its root is sabot, which is French for “wooden shoe,” and it was such shoes (clogs) that insecure, ignorant Dutch workers threw into the gears of new machines centuries ago, hoping to impede output gains and prevent job losses among colleagues. To sabotage something means to purposely weaken or destroy it through subversion, obstruction and disruption. That’s what public policy does today to those who might hire labor." -- Richard M. Salsman, here

(video here, 1944)

Secretary of State Hillary Mussolini

Money Funds Inundated by Inquiries About Exposure to Euro Banks

Reported here:

"We've been inundated by inquiries on (our) exposure to French banks, to German banks, our direct exposure to Greece," said Peter Li, director in money markets at Northern Trust. "The profile of our portfolios has gotten very, very conservative."

America's Top Half of Income Earners Paid 36 Times More in Taxes in 2008

Individual income tax revenues in 2008 were $1.03 trillion on AGI of $8.43 trillion, for an effective overall tax rate on the individual American taxpayer of . . . 12.25 percent, to which add social insurance taxes and excise taxes.

The bottom 50 percent of Americans enjoyed a much lower rate, however, than the top 50 percent: 2.59 percent vs. 13.65 percent.

The top 50 percent in 2008 made 7X as much as the bottom 50 percent, and paid 36X as much in taxes.

And liberals say the rich don't pay their fair share.

(source)

Whose Side Are You On?

So asks Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the US House.

Glenn Greenwald notices that in saying so, the Obama regime sounds just like the Bush regime.

Here.

None dare call it liberalism.

Liberals Deliberately Conflate Extension of Bush Tax Rates With New Cuts

As here. It's their, well, job to lie like this.

Steve Benen still expects us to believe that a reduction in the top rate from 39 percent to 35 percent, ten years ago, was a massive cut?

It would be nice if we could have some Republicans today actually proposing reducing top marginal tax rates to say, 28 percent. Now that would be a cut. But massive? From 70 percent, and 50 percent, yes (for a brief, shining moment under G.H.W. Bush, when 'Read My Lips. No New Taxes.' meant raising them anywhere north from 28 percent). But cutting taxes now anywhere south from 35 percent would be a massive cut? Puh-leeze.

Of course things haven't improved since the Bush tax rates were extended, temporarily. Nothing has changed.

Unless of course the Republicans want to argue that the extension averted another Great Depression.

But only Democrats could say such things with a straight face.

The Nation Rips Bill Clinton a New One for Enabling Financial De-Regulation Under Gingrich

An argument, here, with which we happily agree, except there's no discussion of the de-regulation of the homeowner, who, since 1997, has been able to forego taxes on up to $500,000 of gains on the sale of a principal residence every two years.

Smart couples plausibly have been able to milk this provision very profitably by flipping homes up to five times since then, until everything fell apart in 2008.

And don't forgot all those HELOCs whose capital was misallocated to financing automobile purchases, vacations, and other consumption not even remotely having to do with "home improvement."

The current housing debacle shows among other things, as Chris Whalen has suggested, how the entire post-war commitment to housing was a giant, civilizational misallocation of capital. More than anything, it was a failure of a sentimentality which developed in the wake of the de-moralization which forever destroyed the naivete of a nation. The de-regulation of the financial industry at the end of that road was only the logical conclusion of this process, its final outworking, not its cause.

Obama Regime Tries to Mollify Restless Natives, Releases Oil From Strategic Reserve

The bread and circuses continue.

Story here.

Combined with announcing an end to the surge in Afghanistan last night, the man who would be king is trying to remedy political and economic disasters of his own making.

The surge has been ineffective, and the drilling moratorium a disaster. So like FDR he'll just keep trying things in the hope that they will work.

Good thing we decided to limit presidents to two terms.