Rolling Irrational Exuberance . . . in Pictures

in housing from 1997

in the fed funds rate from 1990

in stocks from 1994

in oil from 2003

in gold from 2005

Liberals Blame Bill Clinton for Housing Bubble

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, under Phil Angelides who had a testy, partisan, op-ed in The Washington Post yesterday, in its report sought to blame Wall Street for leading the way to the housing bubble, not government policy as mediated through the likes of Fannie Mae.

Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times has begged to differ, and Steven Malanga provides a timely and sympathetic review of a new book she co-authored which uncovers a major impetus to the housing bubble in the administration of none other than Bill Clinton, who took a weaker form of liberalism under George Herbert Walker Bush and ran with it:

Reckless Endangerment locates the origins of the crisis in the ironically named Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, which was supposed to protect taxpayers from big losses by Fannie and Freddie. That law pushed the institutions into affordable housing lending and prompted Fannie in particular to adopt a strategy to disarm critics by continually arguing that efforts to rein in the company's operations, such as requiring it to back its mortgage purchases with more capital, would only hurt the goal of expanding home ownership. "You should rejoice in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rather than fight them," Fannie's chief executive, James Johnson, told the New York Times.

In the wake of the 1992 legislation, Fannie Mae created the Housing Impact Advisory Council, an assembly consisting of low-income housing advocacy groups and mortgage lenders. Fannie Mae also began supplying grants to the housing groups, like ACORN, which a few years earlier had criticized the GSEs in the press as "strictly by-the-book" interpreters of underwriting standards whose young underwriters, "are not sensitized to the existence of redlining, be it racial or geographic." Now Fannie was singing a different, more cooperative tune, and its new council, Morgenson and Rosner write, evolved into "the centerpiece" of President Clinton's 1994 National Partners in Homeownership program, a "disastrous homeownership policy" that played a crucial role in inflating the housing bubble.

With The Nation pinning financial deregulation on Bill Clinton in recent days, liberalism's not having a good start to the summer.

If Bill Clinton were smart, he'd respond to all this by blaming Bush, or hope people still have enough money left to go to the beach and read trashy novels instead.

Corporate Cash Earned Overseas, Presently About $1 Trillion, Cost the US Treasury About $90 Billion in 2008

So says a detailed and insightful story at Bloomberg here by Jesse Drucker, showing how companies book earnings abroad through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda, lawfully, to minimize taxation both in the US and in high tax European countries.

The next time some pinhead US politician says he wants to take away your $88 billion mortgage interest deduction, tell him this corporate tax loss expenditure is just as big, and getting bigger. 

When you consider that corporate taxes represent less than a third of the tax revenues which individual payers contribute to the federal government under current arrangements, there's plenty of room to rebalance that income portfolio more fairly.

Maybe we could start by rewarding companies for earning their money here instead of over there. If the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda can do it, why can't we?

Well? 

Flaky, as in 'Obama' (not as in 'Bachmann')

Michele Bachmann may be many things, but flaky is not one of them.

For flaky, we must throw out the much too tame traditional dictionary, and go to the Urban Dictionary, which nails it many times over:

An unreliable person. [See 'Obama' who hasn't improved one economic measure for black people, let alone anyone else, except for their government dependency]

A procrastinator. [See 'Obama' who dithered and dithered for three days after the Fruit of Kaboom bomber incident in route to Detroit because he and his administration were all on vacation, again. And how many months did it take him to decide to surge in Afghanistan?]

A careless or lazy person. [See 'Obama' who was content to let the House and the Senate duke it out over their versions of healthcare reform and provided no legislation of his own, or who let BP clean up the spill in the Gulf despite a long-standing contingency plan put in place by the government in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska]

Dishonest and doesn't keep to their word. [As in 'Obama' who didn't close Gitmo and didn't try the terrorists in civil court]

They'll tell you they're going to do one thing, and never do it. [See 'Obama' who promised to end the war in Iraq but our soldiers continue to die there]

They'll tell you that they'll meet you somewhere, and show up an hour late or don't show up at all. [As in 'Obama' who, the president of all the people, deliberately misses church, and patriotic or Christian holidays but never seems to miss a Muslim one]

Also spelled "flakey", or "flake" in the noun form. [Also spelled 'baked' in the adjectival form, as in the noun 'head']

She told me she would send me her pictures, but it's been 3 months and she hasn't sent me shit. She's flaky as hell.

I think Sean Hannity is still waiting for an RSVP for that beer.

Plane for Moochelle's Africa Trip Alone Cost Us Over $400,000

Another timely expenditure by the queen of shtrong.

White House Dossier has the shtory here.

The Federal Reserve's ZIRP is Another Form of Age Discrimination

Baby boomers, like Ben Shalom Bernanke, are such a self-loathing brood. First they put us all out of work, and then they pay us nothing on our savings:

[I]t is reasonable to call Bernanke the enemy of savers, because he is the enemy of savers. When one can’t earn anything over one year without risk, something is wrong. ...

Saving deserves a return. Let the Fed raise the Fed funds rate by 1%, and they will see that there is no harm to the banks, and little harm to the economy. Once you have 1% slope between twos and tens you have more than enough oomph to make the economy move. What, does the AARP have to bring a age discrimination lawsuit against the Federal Reserve to make this happen? The Fed is discriminating against the elderly.

David Merkel has more to say here.

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