Gee. What could possibly go wrong....

Yahoo Finance....
Senator Dodd to press financial reform ahead: aides

Yes....this Senator Dodd.

Two plus Two....

A while back, I posted a link to the chart seen here. Its a scary chart, but the thing I just noticed is that it is from almost two years ago...January of 2008.

And today, I was referenced to this chart....



...which I saw via the blog, Calculated Risk. As an Arizona resident, I don't take great pride at having 3% of the nation's Option ARM risk, but man....anyone in California is in for another big hit.

As they say, Read The Whole Thing, and read the links. This ain't over. Not by a long shot.

Gawd....

I'm lovin' me my Glenn Beck. Yeah...sometimes he's a little over-the-top, and he certainly has got a Howard Beale vibe going on, but the guy is making scary sense.

So, yeah...I admit it...there's a lot of video here to watch....but do watch it. We're headed into totally uncharted waters.







I owe my h/t to Karl Denninger at market-ticker.org for these three videos. I read him all the time because he scares me worse than Stephen King.

Now let me add my amateur-economist's analysis to a point Beck touches on at 8:15 or so of the last video.

With words to this effect, Beck asks if the other countries in the world aren't going to be in the same sinking boat that we find ourselves in. I think he's exactly right, and underestimates this point. Take a look at yet another video.....



Yes...its al Jazerra....and there is a point to be made there too. But discounting that for the moment, this story illustrates the problem that China faces too.

For the last 30 years, China has been trying to get their peasant Third-World country into the First-World. To do this, they have kept their currency artificially devalued, so as to facilitate the export of the products that they make. What they're most concerned with is jobs...not the products of those jobs. They're quite content to spend money on cities that no one will live in because they need to keep the construction jobs (read: "economic activity") going.

We're not seeing this reported on any of the American (or Western) media because we're beholden to the debt that China holds. al Jazerra, in essence, the media organ of the Arab OPEC states, has a different set of priorities. They can report the Chinese problems in a candor that Western media cannot. However, the OPEC states are not without their own problems. Absent their oil, they have almost no industry. Their people are not far removed from living in the desert, and many are illiterate. They have few skills, and have to import white-collar and blue-collar labor to give them what they now have. They can operate what are in effect, massive welfare states because they are able to poke holes into the ground and pump out the wealth that supports it.

And here's where my fears are headed.....

All wars are economic.

We're broke.

China can't keep inflating their "production bubble".

And since the world runs on oil, the OPEC states will grind to a halt. (Not to mention the crazy-mad religious motivations that they have.).

These three groups all want to keep things going when we can't keep things going. And something's gotta give. Who'll give first?

Hey....

Anybody else remember back a year and a half ago when Zero's low-level staffers were being thrown under the bus? Or even when some not-so-low-level staffers were thrown under that same bus (but later, miraculously, recovered from her injuries)?

Point being...Zero has habit of blaming others for things he ought to be standing up for.

Like.....his oft-repeated claim of the benefit we're deriving from his Stimulus-inspired "saved or created jobs".

And now this charade is coming apart too. The numbers he is reporting are outrageously inaccurate. So inaccurate, in fact, as to be claimed from Congressional districts that themselves do not exist. So, who is to blame for the reporting of this inaccurate data? Yeah...you guessed it...

"...Late Monday, officials with the Recovery Board created to track the stimulus spending, said the mistakes in crediting nonexistent congressional districts were caused by human error.

"We report what the recipients submit to us," said Ed Pound, Communications Director for the Board.

Pound told ABC News the board receives declarations from the recipients - state governments, federal agencies and universities - of stimulus money about what program is being funded.

"Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes," Pound said...."

[emphases, mine]

Yes. You, the dumb public, are to be blamed for the bad data being reported by Zero's administration.

You know what?

Pretty soon, we're gonna need a bigger chart.



h/t: As always, the fellas at Innocent Bystanders.

Clunker GDP Data.....

This chart ought to tell you something......

The just-announced 3.5% increase in 3Q GDP is fake. We are not out of the recession. This is not over. In fact, its going to get worse. That spike on the chart above is going to correct lower....much lower.

And when it does, they're going to say that it was "surprising".

They're lying to us. Politicians. Media. All of them.

Is it premature to ask if....

....the alternate headline here would be "Dodd Thrown Under A Bus"?

"Oversight panel to subpoena Countrywide info"

"...Oversight Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) issued a statement saying: "It is my goal to work through this matter in a bipartisan fashion and conduct a complete review of the role of mortgage companies in the current financial crisis. As part of this, we need to clarify unanswered questions about Countrywide Financial's VIP program, so I am issuing a subpoena to gather information about how that program worked and whether it provided special benefits to government officials. I am prepared to issue additional subpoenas if other companies fail to respond to our document requests."

Notably, Towns added that "the subpoena to Countrywide covers records that could show special treatment for Members of Congress," and that if such information is produced, the Oversight panel will forward it to the House ethics committee for consideration...." [my emphasis]

And, oh-by-the-way, did you notice that this announcement came on a Friday afternoon? Not that the R's aren't equally good at doing this sort of thing, but Friday afternoon is becoming an important time of the week to be paying attention to what they don't want you paying attention to.

h/t: Riehl World View.

A little late at....

....Getting to this, but Chris Muir nailed things down pretty securely with this one....

[Click image for a better view.]

Geez, Geez, Geez.....

There are some very smart people out there on the intertubes who can speak of horrors coming our way beyond imagination.

The Virginian: Protection against hyper-inflation. Do read the whole thing, but here are a few quotes....

"...In the middle of 1914, just before the war, a one pound loaf of bread cost 13 cents. Two years later it was 19 cents. Two years more and it sold for 2 cents. By 1919 it was 26 cents. Now the fun begins.

In 1920, a loaf of bread soared to $1.20, and then in 1921 it hit $1.35. By the middle of 1922 it was $3.50. At the start of 1923 it rocketed to $700 a loaf. Five months later a loaf went for $1200. By September it was $2 million. A month later it was $670 million (wide spread rioting broke out). The next month it hit $3 billion. By mid month it was $100 billion. Then it all collapsed...." [Dollars have been substituted for Marks, but the point remains.]

"...People’s savings were suddenly worthless. Pensions were meaningless. If you had a 400 mark monthly pension, you went from comfortable to penniless in a matter of months. People demanded to be paid daily so they would not have their wages devalued by a few days passing. Ultimately, they demanded their pay twice daily just to cover changes in trolley fare. People heated their homes by burning money instead of coal. (It was more plentiful and cheaper to get.) The middle class was destroyed. It was an age of renters, not of home ownership, so thousands became homeless.

But the cultural collapse may have had other more pernicious effects. Some sociologists note that it was still an era of arranged marriages. Families scrimped and saved for years to build a dowry so that their daughter might marry well. Suddenly, the dowry was worthless – wiped out. And with it was gone all hope of marriage. Girls who had stayed prim and proper awaiting some future Prince Charming now had no hope at all. Social morality began to collapse. The roar of the roaring twenties began to rumble. All hope and belief in systems, governmental or otherwise, collapsed. With its culture and its economy disintegrating, Germany saw a guy named Hitler begin a ten year effort to come to power by trading on the chaos and street rioting. And then came World War." [my emphases, obviously.]

And that is my fear.

I'm pretty sure its a rule somewhere....

....Anytime you read an article which includes in it's title the words "Tsunami", "Aggressively", "Irresponsible" and "Loans", its not good news.

The Consumerist...
Newsflash: The Next Tsunami Of Aggressively Irresponsible Loans Didn't Magically Disappear

Also, see this really scary chart of our upcoming second wave of mortgage based problems.



Its going to a long time before we're out of this.

When some politician or talking head or pundit (or Fed Chairman) says that they're seeing signs of a recovery, I have to ask.....

Really?



Do you even have to look past the cover?

Manufactured Conspiracies....

A thought occured to me while watching Glenn Beck....

The Democrats are doing a kind of weird combination of back-pedalling and hard-selling at the same time regarding their failing Health Care Reform initiative.

Someone somewhere on the 'sphere mentioned the other day that Zero's Cash-for-Clunkers is turning out to be a self-induced Katrina.

Zero's press flack, Robert Gibbs, said that the folks who are angrily meeting with their Congresscritters during the August recess are displaying a "manufactured anger".

The DNC is out with their "Mob" youtube....



The thought that occurred to me is that, in 2009, calling your opposition an "Angry Mob", expressing a "manufactured anger" may come to be remembered as Hillary's complaint in 1998 that the Clintons were faced with what amounted to a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy".

Some Thoughts On The Growing Discontent.....

Congressmen of all stripes, but most especially the Democrats and supporters of Zero's policies, are taking it on the chin right now during the August recess.

Health care is the topic today, but the general tone is all about the deficit, the Stimulus (sic) program that isn't working, the missing jobs, the stupid Cash-for-Clunkers program, etc. Instapundit, and Ace, and the guys at HotAir are just the start of the places where you can see videos of the flack that these Congresscritters are taking. I'm sure none of them thought they'd ever see the day when meeting their constituents became such a difficult chore. It's not going to get any easier. America is angry.

So, here's what I think must be happening behind the scenes.

Zero and the D leadership have to be desperately searching for a way to get out in front of this thing. Right now, I think that they believe their only hope for success for any Health Care proposal will be to water it down far past anything resembling anything they've talked about thus far. But that will only work until their liberal wing begins to rebel (they are already rumbling). He'll need to walk an awfully thin tightrope to make it work.

If I were an insider, here's what I'd be watching: When the second- and third-tier staffers begin to quit, we'll know that they sense that their ship is beginning to sink. The first-tier staff will have had enough invested with their guy and/or the party that they'll stick through till the end, but the lower staff will have more mobility, and may take advantage while they can.

Zero has bitten off way more than he can chew. He allowed SanFranNan and Dingy Harry to stuff every liberal pipedream into that Stimulus Package, and he, as the inexperienced executive that he is, is now stuck with it. His Cap-and-Tax is in trouble in the Senate, his Cash-for-Clunkers is becoming a self-made Katrina, and he's losing on the central plank of his domestic campaign agenda--health care reform. Chinese students openly laugh at his Treasury Secretary.

[None of this should be taken to mean that I think all would be peachy if we had a President McCain. It wouldn't. Our economic troubles were building for many years, and are systemic. No president could solve them. Zero has made things far worse than they need to be, but McCain wouldn't have been a walk in the park.]

"Stop spending our future"....

Ummm, Yep. Can't argue with one word.




h/t Sine Nominee, seen via Glenn, so he doesn't need my traffic.

Ok....here's the thing.......

Like everybody else in the world, I've got a couple of gay acquaintances, and even a distant relative who is a lesbian.

That said, I'm as straight as the day is long. Not a gay bone in my body. [Awright, awright... I'll dispense with the double entrendes.]

But if ever I was to have a man-crush, it would have to be with this guy.



And yeah, it turns out to be a pitch for somebody, and I'm real close to becoming a gold bug myself, but the rant is beautiful, man. Beautiful.

h/t Gerard.

I'm guessing that...

...The Secretary of the Treasury will create a new
"Bureau of How-Much-You-Ought-to-be-Paid".

How long before this Bureau is not limiting itself to executive compensation? How long before companies find a way around their limitations? How long would it be before we'd see companies' talent pool go John Galt because of these limitiations? How would the Bureau be better than the Boards of Directors, the stockholders--the Market for executive talent--at determining how someone should be paid?

In short: What could possibly go wrong?

h/t OptionArmegeddon

O/T: The NYT link to the SecTreas plan to regulate executive compensation has on its sidebar this story from the "Moral of the Story" column entitled "Give Women Guns". The author, Randy Cohen, we're told has 5 Emmys, one of which he "received [...] as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it." We're also told his Moral of the Story column is one where "he will examine a news story from an ethical perspective." He is also--no kidding--a humorist.

One question: How is it ethical to keep an item gained through a clerical error? Or is that supposed to be humor?

And were I less busy this week, I might try to fisk this thing, but right now I'm overwhelmed.

"This is not a failure of regulation of any kind, particularly of banking...."

....Rather, it’s a failure of over-regulation and a lack of free markets.

Reinforcing my 3½ Minute Rule on YouTube videos...

You really should take a look at this one....



Where is our American version of this guy?

Seen on a number of blogs, but I first watched it via The Anchoress, who, although I am not Catholic, writes a wonderful blog.

I'm beginning to get a suspicious feeling.....

And not just the same "I-Hate-Obama-and-Everything-He's-Doing" feeling. If I'm counting things right, he still has 18 vacancies to fill at Treasury. Geithner is a one-man act, and it isn't going well: They're developing a plan on when to plan to tell us about their plan for the economy. I'm betting that half of these vacancies are due to some of the problems (primarily past taxes) that brought the Zero administration so much attention earlier, but there may be some vacancies due to either Zero being unable to find capable person for the jobs or a willing approach to leave the jobs open. There are calls for Geithner's head, of course, but paradoxically, the vacancies at Treasury almost ensure that no matter how badly Geithner may be handling things, his job is safe.

Whatever the case, Geithner (and by extension, Zero) are handling things badly. The economy is in bad enough shape that this cannot be a one-man job for very long. Geithner will have a heart attack before we get things fixed....there is simply too much to do. Zero had better start something else before Geithner strokes out or something.

The Debt Star...

Courtesy of The Smallest Minority, one of my favorite 2A and mostly libertarian, and Arizona bloggers (whom I should visit more often).

[And, BTW, the "I have altered the pool" image is one that I once used as my signature image on That-Forum-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. That kid still cracks me up.]