S&P500 rises just 0.18% to make another new high on Friday at 1923.57

Bank Failure Number Nine: Slavie Federal in Bel Air, Maryland

Slavie Federal Savings Bank, Bel Air, Maryland, failed last night, costing the FDIC $6.6 million. It's the ninth bank failure in 2014, and number 501 since February 2007.

Cold wintry places which had positive GDP, unlike the US under Obama (-1.0%)

Poland     +1.10%
Denmark     .89%
Germany     .80%
England       .80%
CANADA   .70%
Switzerland .50%
Norway       .30%

24 from France's National Front elected to European parliament, 24 from England's UKIP

In each case, nationalist parties won a clear plurality of seats from their countries' respective delegations, which are only 74 and 73 strong to begin with, respectively. It is a strong vote of displeasure from the citizens of France and the UK in sending nearly a third of their parliamentarians from parties of the right to raise hell over the Euro.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks this means it's curtains for the EU, here:

The EU authorities are now in a near hopeless situation. The logic of EMU is a further erosion of nation states. The "Two Pack", "Six Pack" and "Fiscal Compact" are all coming into force, and national regulators are losing control over their banking systems. The euro will inevitably lurch from crisis to crisis without some form of fiscal union and debt pooling. Yet voters have just let forth a primordial scream against any further transfers of power.

Adam Carolla: What are female comedians doing about the lack of Jewish roofers? I demand answers!

Here in "The gay mafia is real."

Yesterday's new high for the S&P500 at 1920.03 was a rise of just 0.425% from the previous high

If George W. Bush had a negative GDP report, you'd never hear the end of it

21 quarters into his presidency Barack Obama produces -1.0% GDP growth to start the year and everyone is falling all over themselves to excuse it if they have to talk about it at all, while most people the day after the announcement aren't talking about it at all. Not even the right wing. It's astonishing. By far the worst GDP performance of any presidency in the post-war, even worse than W's, and no one has one thing to say about it.

My country, on medication.

Your Michigan coalition to protect perversity includes Chambers of Commerce and big business, and The Nerd

The Nerd is a member of a PCUSA church, aka CPUSA

Reported here:

The Detroit Regional Chamber and Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce on Thursday joined a coalition seeking to add sexual orientation and gender identity protections to the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act of 1976. ...

Gov. Rick Snyder "does not believe in discrimination" and remains "open to having a conversation with the Legislature" about changing the law, said spokesperson Sara Wurfel, noting he thinks "it would be great to tackle sometime this year." ...

The business coalition behind the push formed earlier this month with founding partners AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Consumers Energy, Dow Chemical Co., Google, Herman Miller, PADNOS, Steelcase, Strategic Staffing Solutions and Whirlpool Corp.

Chrysler, Pfizer, the Kellogg Company and a handful of other businesses also joined the coalition this week.

Bank purchases of Treasurys at highest level since 1Q 1994 help drive demand and prices higher, yields lower

The Wall Street Journal reports here:

U.S. banks also have been big buyers of government debt. Treasury bondholdings of commercial banks and savings institutions rose to $237.2 billion at the end of March, the highest since 1995, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Traders and analysts said the purchases have been driven by tighter banking regulations aiming at improving banks' balance sheets after the 2008 financial crisis. Overhauls such as the Dodd-Frank financial law in the U.S. and global regulations require financial institutions to hold more high-graded debt. The $12 trillion U.S. Treasury bond market is the world's most liquid bond market.

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The 1Q 1994 level held by financial institutions was $310 billion.

The 10 year Treasury yield fell to 2.44% yesterday. On May 1 it had stood at 2.57%.

Obama GDP Failure: 1Q 2014 GDP revised down to -1.0% from +0.1% in second estimate

From the BEA news release here, which fails to make mention of either "winter" or "weather" in the report:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 2.6 percent. ...

The downturn in the percent change in real GDP primarily reflected a downturn in exports, a larger decrease in private inventory investment, and downturns in nonresidential fixed investment and in state and local government spending that were partly offset by an upturn in federal government spending.

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The consensus estimate for the revision had been -0.2% from +0.1%, while worst case scenarios had talked about -0.4%, so this is quite the stunner to go all the way down to -1.0%.

If the American economy has become so fragile that a little bad weather can knock off economic growth while China doesn't let a little thing like that stop it, we're in worse shape than I thought.

What's really showing up here is continuing weak demand after a quarter which included Christmas which could only muster so-so GDP at 2.6%. The weakness was already evident there.

The failure that is Obama continues. His average report of GDP after 21 quarters falls to 1.70%.

If "climate change" caused famine and brought down the Bronze Age, why did hungry conquerors DESTROY food?

It's a question which this classicist doesn't seem to have asked himself before writing here, in The New York Times:

The marauders are thought to have been the Sea Peoples, possibly from the western Mediterranean, who were probably fleeing their island homes because of the drought and famine and were moving across the Mediterranean as both refugees and conquerors.

One letter sent to Ugarit advised the king to “be on the lookout for the enemy and make yourself very strong!” The warning probably came too late, for another letter dating from the same time states: “When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burned and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!” ...

We still do not know the specific details of the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age or how the cascade of events came to change society so drastically. But it is clear that climate change was one of the primary drivers, or stressors, leading to the societal breakdown.

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There's famine, and then, well, there's famine.

Temperature was quite a bit warmer 3000 years ago than it is today, but without the present day scale of supposed human-caused climate change. Why aren't people asking why? And somehow mankind survived to produce what we know as human history despite all that. It is sad to see academics who specialize in the ancient world jumping on this bandwagon of climate hysteria when their own area of expertise ought to tell them that there is something terribly wrong with the contemporary theory. It is more plausible that the much warmer conditions of the past simply produced more human flourishing than the food supply at that time could sustain. And those much warmer conditions of past human history ought at least give them pause. 

Brian Wesbury sounds just like the regime: Dude, that bad GDP report was so two months ago

Brian Wesbury, here:

But regardless of which part of the GDP report accounts for the downward revision, the most important thing to remember is that the report is for the first quarter, the last days of which ended almost two months ago. It's a "rearview mirror" picture of the economy. The winter weather was awful, everyone knows it, and everyone knows that the economy in Q1 was weaker than in recent years.

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Like Obama administration narratives which have consistently blamed exogenous events for bad economic news everytime it comes out, which has been every time (it is a global economy after all), facts must never be allowed to interfere with the reality, which in Wesbury's case is his narrative of the ploughhorse economy of continued growth of a plodding, unspectacular but nevertheless good-enough sort that we should all embrace as indicative of the resilience of the great free-market economy of the United States.

Ya man, hallelujah.

Nevermind growth has been declining since 1984 and precipitously since 2004 as America made the shift to wanton free trade and debt-fueled economic growth. TCMDO doubled at its fastest pace in the post-war under Carter/Reagan from 1977 to 1983 and under Reagan from 1983 to 1989, building the foundation of our present discontents in the form of massive debt.

When those bad actors pulled prosperity from the future into their present, our past, they neglected to tell us that we have to pay it back when we get to the future they pulled it from, our future, our now.

Welcome to it. Time to pay up, ploughhorses.

We remember and give thanks with countless others

I love Kim Strassel of The Wall Street Journal, but they can't let her on again without fixing her teeth

Seen here.

And the makeup and eyelashes are pretty bad, too.

This is just criminal to do to such a good journalist.

Whack job writes in support of reparations

Errin Haines Whack in the UK Guardian article

 

"The 'Case for Reparations' is solid, and it's long past time to make them: Ta-Nehisi Coates's piece reveals the conversation that Americans need to start about our history of racial oppression",

 

here:

[A]n African-American writer telling this story in a legacy, mainstream publication like The Atlantic . . . adds weight and validity to the argument – and makes reparations harder to dismiss, yet again, as "crazy talk".

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Translation: We've got liberal whitey licked. Time to drive the knife home.

These people have always lusted for blood, and they may get it. The knife cuts both ways.

Recent Obama appointee Judge Matthew Leitman saves John Conyers' incompetent rear end

The lead from the story in The Detroit Free Press here:

U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ on-again, off-again roller-coaster ride for the Aug. 5 ballot took a new twist Friday when U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman put the 85-year-old congressman back on the ballot.

Leitman’s decision, released late Friday, contradicts the Secretary of State’s review of Conyers’ petitions, which found earlier in the day that Conyers had less than half the required signatures of valid registered voters on the petitions he turned in to qualify for the Aug. 5 primary ballot.

But Leitman said the requirement that petition circulators be registered voters — the issue that got Conyers booted off the ballot in the first place — put serious limitations on the free speech rights of the circulators, the people who signed the petitions and Conyers.

“The public interest favors the enjoining of the likely unconstitutional Registration Statute,” for circulators, Leitman said.

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Every matter great and small

passed by the States into law

lately suffers in the thrall

of Fed'ral power's giant maw.

What's the point of passing them

just to feed Leviathan?

-- Brutus

The median existing home is affordable if you make $77,577

The median existing home in April is affordable if you make at least $77,577.

Unfortunately, only about 13% of individual wage earners make that much, which means two incomes are generally required to buy it and keep it. Long gone are the days when one income can support a wife raising children in the home.

The price for the median existing home has climbed to $201,700 in April, and the homeownership rate as of the beginning of the year has fallen to a level first achieved in the early 1970s.

At $154,600 in January 2012, the lowest median existing home price since the late housing bubble, the then median existing home was affordable if you made at least $59,461, which was the case for 20% of individual wage earners at the time. The homeownership rate then was 65.4.

So in just two short years the percentage of wage earners for whom housing is affordable has contracted by a whopping 35% as prices have rebounded in excess of 30% under the influence of Federal Reserve interest rate policy.

The birth rate in 2012 at 12.6 per 1000 women is half what it was in 1955 and the lowest yet in the post-war.

Friday's new S&P500 high at 1900.53 beats the old one by just 0.16%

Floatin' like a butterfly . . .

Bank Failure Friday: The 500th bank failure since February 2007 and the 8th failure in 2014

The banking crisis which began in 2007 has reached its 500th milestone. Columbia Savings Bank, Cincinnati, Ohio, failed today, the eighth bank failure of 2014, costing the FDIC $5.3 million.

"Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 to restore public confidence in the nation's banking system", says the press release, as says every press release going back to the first failure of the current banking crisis seven years ago.

Instead read: Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to make the public believe the banks are sound even though they are not. Hell, the banks are designed under the Federal Reserve and the FDIC to be precisely NOT SOUND.

Extend and pretend works its way through, ever so quietly, ever so unremarked.

Opportunity is a stern goddess to whom the only acceptable offering is cash

Seen here, quoting a diary from the Great Depression:

July, 1933: "Again and again during this depression it is driven home to me that opportunity is a stern goddess who passes up those who are unprepared with liquid capital."