24
Nov
09

geithner gone by january?

Here is what Geithner had to say about financial markets in a speech in Atlanta in May 2007, just about a year before the crisis really ignited:

“Changes in financial markets, including those that are the subject of your conference, have improved the efficiency of financial intermediation and improved our confidence in the ability of markets to absorb stress.”

Later he added, “The larger global financial institutions are generally stronger in terms of capital relative to risk. Technology and innovation in financial instruments have made it easier for institutions to manage risk.”

That rosy description by a Fed president kind of makes you want to run out and buy stock in Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., doesn’t it? No wonder the Fed failed to press the industry harder. It thought that financial innovations had worked a miracle.

Geithner used to be asleep at the wheel in New York. Now he is asleep at the wheel in Washington.

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a1B7Cs1f.TO8

24
Nov
09

potential keystone in gov’t-banking complex arch

excerpt:

Jamie Dimon

The New York Post reported this morning that lawmakers are discussing JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as a potential replacement for current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Leaving aside concerns that appointing a Wall Street CEO to the Treasury’s top position would draw heavy criticism over Wall Street’s coziness with Washington, it’s not clear that Dimon would be a natural fit in the Obama administration. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dimon departs from White House policy on a handful of key issues.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/23/jamie-dimon-treasury-secr_n_368218.html

23
Nov
09

snl’s spot-on take on obama in china

more about “SNL: China & Obama’s Economic Policies“, posted with vodpod

 

16
Nov
09

crazy pitcher’s no-hitter on lsd

16
Nov
09

alec baldwin suprises daughter with lil wayne birthday cake

12
Nov
09

george will always says it best

11
Nov
09

great explanation of how banks derivative trading makes EVERYTHING more expensive

excerpt:
“Over the course of an average month at the NYMEX, 5 BILLION barrels of oil will be traded, with a fee being collected on every single transaction which is ultimately passed down to US consumers, yet less than 40M barrels will actually be delivered. That is just 8 tenths of 1 percent of actual demand for the product that is being traded – 99.2% of the oil transaction fees being paid by the American people do nothing more than create fees for the traders and record profits and bonuses for the trading firms!”

http://seekingalpha.com/article/172797-the-global-oil-scam-50-times-bigger-than-madoff

 

11
Nov
09

i love our fubar government-crony-capitalistic welfare state

lets just make EVERYTHING free and let the gov’ment tell us what we need and don’t need….

more about “i love our fubar government-crony-cap…“, posted with vodpod

 

10
Nov
09

dollar as chief inflator of stock market

interesting theory that fed is using 0% interest rates to drive investment $$$ into stocks…..lets see if central planning times things right this time :/

07
Nov
09

ron paul’s philosophical hero: ludwig von mises

ron paul has been promoting ludwig von mises’ austrian school of economics for 30 years….but only now are people paying attention…even wsj picking it up:

excerpt: 

We all know what happened next. Pretty much right out of Mises’s script, overleveraged banks (including Kreditanstalt) collapsed, businesses collapsed, employment collapsed. The brittle tree snapped. Following Mises’s logic, was this a failure of capitalism, or a failure of hubris?

Mises’s solution follows logically from his warnings. You can’t fix what’s broken by breaking it yet again. Stop the credit gavage. Stop inflating. Don’t encourage consumption, but rather encourage saving and the repayment of debt. Let all the lame businesses fail—no bailouts. (You see where I’m going with this.) The distortions must be removed or else the precipice from which the system will inevitably fall will simply grow higher and higher.

Mises started getting some much-deserved respect once “Theorie des Geldes” was finally published in English in 1934. It is unfortunate that it required such a disaster for people to take heed of what was the one predictive, scholarly explanation of what was happening.

But then, just Mises’s bad luck, along came John Maynard Keynes’s tome “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” in 1936. Keynes was dapper, fresh and sophisticated. He even wrote in English! And the guy had chutzpah, fearlessly fighting the battle against unemployment by running the currency printing press and draining the government’s coffers.

He was the anti-Mises. So what if Keynes had lost his shirt in the stock-market crash. His book was peppered with fancy math (even Greek letters) and that meant rigor, modernity. To add insult to injury, Mises wasn’t even refuted by Keynes and his ilk. He was ignored.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704471504574443600711779692.html