Matt Taibbi: Elizabeth Warren For President in 2012

Just a little humor to start the day.

Matt Taibbi, already deeply dissatisfied with Obama in October 2009, said that here:

"Warren to me makes the most sense for the simple reason that it will be virtually impossible for the Democratic Party hacks to dismiss her as a fringe character, given that they themselves gave her such a big public position as chief of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

"This is a woman who understands the finance issues as well as we can hope to expect from any politician . . .."

You know Elizabeth Warren. She's the one who repeatedly said here "the rest of us paid for" everything which the rich used to get wealthy, so they owe us, as if the rich hadn't already paid one red cent in taxes for any of those things, too.

Yep, that's the best reasoning we can hope to expect from the Democrats.

Weekly Standard: Income Growth Has Slowed and Gone Negative in August?

See the figures, especially in Table 1 here, at the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

After reaching a peak in July, August personal income fell below that of July, but is still higher than personal income was in June, and January.

The Weekly Standard is making much of the steady decline in income growth so far in 2011 here, but without once mentioning the boost to incomes the temporary reduction in the payroll tax was supposed to supply.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics here, average weekly hours have been stagnant for a year, so income gains cannot be coming from more hours worked. In fact, all other things being equal, you would expect nominal income to remain the same. Which is to say, no one is getting much of a raise, but they still have jobs.

But here the BLS shows that average weekly earnings have increased 1.85 percent year over year in August 2011.

Hm.

Interestingly enough, the difference between a payroll tax of 6.25 percent on $100 of income and 4.25 percent on $100 of income is . . . $1.82 less tax, going straight into people's paychecks.

And after 7 months in 2011, using the seasonally adjusted annual numbers of the BEA, income is up 1.94 percent, including the downtick in August.

1.85, 1.82, 1.94 . . . looks like a pattern to me.

Nominal incomes are up slightly in consequence of the payroll tax cut. Otherwise, it's a stagnant income picture, just like the unemployment picture.

Unless of course you factor in CPI and discuss real incomes. But that's a whole other, and very real, problem.

Involuntary Part-Time Has Surged 10 Percent in September Since July 2011

As always, calculatedriskblog has the best charts, here:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' recent data is shown here:

Herman Cain's 999 Plan is Under Attack by Bloomberg and WAPO

Here and here, mostly on the grounds of insufficient revenues, and tax regressivity and unfairness.

Herman needs to respond with numbers, and soon.

Occupy Wall Street Demands Student Debt Bailouts

So says Scott Cohn for CNBC.com here:

One proposed list of demands for the Occupy Wall Street movement includes "free college tuition" and "immediate across the board forgiveness" of student debt. While neither demand may be very realistic, the student debt problem is very real.

According to FinAid.org, which carries a "student debt clock" on its website, outstanding student debt is on pace to top $1 trillion in a matter of months. Student debt surpassed credit card debt in 2010, and has not looked back. The average 2011 college graduate had $27,204 in student debt, according to the organization.

The price of worship at the altar of the god, Education. Its high priests rob the easy.

Why Elites Think They Can Say The Middle Class Has All The Money, So Tax Them Instead

Because the top ten largest tranches of net compensation aggregates spanned incomes from $20K to $70K in 2009, for example, that's why.

And 8.2 million people in the $35-$40K category had the single largest pile of dough at nearly $310 billion, while the lowest tranche in the top ten were the 3.1 million people who had nearly $211 billion in net compensation and hailed from the $65-$70K category.

All told, over 68 million wage earners in the $20K to $70K category pulled in $2.7 trillion in net compensation, not quite half of the total $5.9 trillion.

The only thing is, the richer have a lot of income which escapes the categorization called net compensation by the federal government, at least another $2.5 trillion. That's how total adjusted gross income for the whole country gets to $8.5 trillion and higher on some 140+ million tax returns.

When it comes to compensation, however, it is the human factor which gives these numbers some life:

73 million people made less than $25K in 2009 (totaling less than $750 billion);

41 million made between $25K and $50K (totaling $1.5 trillion);

19 million made between $50 and $75K (totaling $1.2 trillion);

another 8 million made between $75 and $100K (pulling in together barely $716 billion);

and at the top were 9.5 million people making in excess of $100K. They alone accounted for $1.8 trillion in net compensation in 2009, the single largest sum.

If I were them, I'd try to move the spotlight somewhere else, too. 

Anti-American Occupy LA Speaker Calls For Violent Socialist Revolution

Video here:

Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer Blames Gridlock on Voters Last November

Here:

“The American people have every right to be angry [and] disappointed by the performance of the Congress.

“Of course, the American people have also elected people with hard stances, so that to some degree the American people are realizing the results of their votes.

“If elections have consequences — which I think they do — some of those consequences are getting what you vote for.

 “In this case, many people voted for people who thought compromise was not something that they ought to participate in.”

Firm grasp of the obvious there, Steny. We voted to stop you and prefer things this way to the alternative.

But there was plenty of gridlock before we stopped you, too. When Democrats ruled the roost in 2010, unactioned bills in the Democrat-controlled Senate sent to it by the Democrat-controlled House went from 290 at the beginning of 2010 to 420 a month before the November elections.

For that kind of impotence there is no pill.

Whatever It Is, What We Have Is NOT Free-Market Banking

John Carney is absolutely correct:

In a system of fiat money controlled by a central bank, with fractional reserve banks backed by deposit insurance, characterized by enormous mega-banks that have grown so large primarily because of concentration-inducing regulation, there is no pre-existing free market into which the government can intervene.

Read the rest here.

This is where all the trouble begins: "Our money is your money, we print it for you to use."

It's the only game in town, until it isn't. And until it isn't, we don't have to like it.

Misery Index Hits Highest Level in 28 Years

From a Herman Cain economic adviser here:

There is certainly more than enough misery to go around. With the unemployment rate at 9.1%, and the 12-month change in the CPI at 3.77%, the “misery index,” the sum of the two, in August was 12.87, its highest level since May, 1983.  And, last week’s report that the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.1% in September means economic misery remains high.

The S&P500 is Up About 9 Percent in One Week. Totally Irrational.

I can remember when that was a great year.

Taxpayer-Insured Commercial Banks Continue To Write CDS in $Trillions

Protest that you numbskulls.

These banks' political contributions are going to your man in The White House.

Gretchen Morgenson has the story here for The New York Times.

Why is This Man Making Bad Bets With Our Money?

Kyle Smith wants to know, here.

Why Don't You Occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Herman finds his voice (or we found his):


"Wall Street didn’t write these failed economic policies -- the White House did."

“Why don’t you move the demonstrations to the White House?”

“Wall Street didn’t write those failed policies, Wall Street didn’t spend a trillion dollars."

“Wall Street isn’t asking to spend another $450 billion.  It didn’t work with a trillion. It’s not gonna’ work with $450 billion. You can demonstrate all you want on Wall Street. The problem is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!”

Herman! Herman! He's our man! If he can't tell 'em, nobody can!

More here.

Herman Cain: “We’ve got some altering and abolishing to do!”

Cain also quoted the Declaration of Independence, stating that “it is the right of the people to alter and to abolish” the government.  “We’ve got some altering and abolishing to do!” he said.

Story here.

For Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Occupy Wall Street Anger Counts, ObamaCare Anger? Not So Much.

As quoted in the LA Times here:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco on ABC’s “This Week,” essentially called [Rep.] Cantor a hypocrite for criticizing the Wall Street protesters while embracing the “tea party” movement.

“I didn’t hear him say anything when the tea party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol, and he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them,’ Pelosi said.

Pelosi said she supported the movement’s “message.”

“I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest, that change has to happen,” she said “We cannot continue in a way that does not — that is not relevant to their lives. People are angry.”

"The Hindenburg of anti-bank gasbags"

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, according to banklawyersblog.com, here.

Very entertaining.

The World: One Giant Organized Crime Which Keeps Two Sets of Books

I nominate "The Cost of Financial Ignorance" by Hernando de Soto in The Washington Post for most important editorial in the wake of TARP.

A few excerpts:

"Advanced nations seem to have forgotten . . . how important documenting assets and transactions is to the creation of credit. Consider that most private credit is made up not of bills and coins, anchored in bank reserves, but in papers that establish rights over the assets, equity and liabilities that guarantee loans. Over the past 15 years, however, as they package, bundle and resell securities, Americans and Europeans have gradually undermined the reliability of the records that guarantee or make credit trustworthy — the deeds, titles, liens and other documentation that establish who owns what and how much, and who holds the risks. ...

"When property is poorly documented, markets don’t get the information needed to connect assets to finance, and governments don’t obtain the data required to detect which connections have gone awry and how to fix them. This became obvious in 2008 . . ..

"The U.S. Treasury secretary created the Troubled Assets Relief Program to prevent a run on banks by purchasing the derivatives that financed the subprime mortgages. But officials realized within days that they couldn’t locate the assets or find criteria for pricing, buying and then removing them from the market. ...

"TARP authorities couldn’t locate knowledge about toxic assets fast enough because so many non-standardized types of records were scattered around the world. U.S. property and mortgage transactions records became obscured when companies were permitted to raise large amounts of financing by “bundling” mortgage loans into marketable liquid securities and recording these “derivatives” not with the traditional public registries but with the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company whose registry reportedly holds about half the mortgages in the United States.

"These derivatives had a notional value of $600 trillion to $700 trillion — 10 times the amount of global annual production. They are still outside any property memory system."

'Our Citizens Ascribe Our Distresses To Every Thing But Their True Cause, The Banking System'

With its fictitious capital, otherwise known as credit without collateral, which enriches only those who issue it:

"The enormous abuses of the banking system are not only prostrating our commerce, but producing revolution of property, which without more wisdom than we possess, will be much greater than were produced by the revolutionary paper. That too had the merit of purchasing our liberties, while the present trash has only furnished aliment to usurers and swindlers. The banks themselves were doing business on capitals, three fourths of which were fictitious: and, to extend their profit they furnished fictitious capital to every man, who having nothing and disliking the labours of the plough, chose rather to call himself a merchant to set up a house of 5000. D. a year expence, to dash into every species of mercantile gambling, and if that ended as gambling generally does, a fraudulent bankruptcy was an ultimate resource of retirement and competence. This fictitious capital probably of 100. millions of Dollars, is now to be lost, and to fall on some body; it must take on those who have property to meet it, and probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of their debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind. If the present crisis should end in the annihilation of these pennyless and ephemeral interlopers only, and reduce our commerce to the measure of our own wants and surplus productions, it will be a benefit in the end. But how to effect this, and give time to real capital, and the holders of real property, to back out of their entanglements by degrees requires more knolege of Political economy than we possess. I believe it might be done, but I despair of it’s being done. The eyes of our citizens are not yet sufficiently open to the true cause of our distresses. They ascribe them to every thing but their true cause, the banking system; a system, which, if it could do good in any form, is yet so certain of leading to abuse, as to be utterly incompatible with the public safety and prosperity. At present all is confusion, uncertainty and panic."

-- Thomas Jefferson, to Richard Rush, June 22, 1819 

(source)

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