Friday, July 16, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 16, 2010


Com'on... belt it out with (me and) Elvis!

Whoa...oh...oh...oh...! Whoa...oh...oh...oh...! Whoa...OH...OH...OH...!!!
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4 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/currency/7893238/Feds-volte-face-sends-the-dollar-tumbling.html

The euro rocketed to a two-month high of $1.29 and sterling jumped two cents to almost $1.54 after the Fed confessed that the US economy may not recover for five or six years.

* BUT I THOUGHT BERNANKE AND CO. HAD BEEN INSISTING PUBLICLY THAT WE'RE IN THE MIDST OF THE OBAMA RECOVERY...???

(*SMIRK*)

Far from winding down emergency stimulus, the bank may need a fresh blast of bond purchases or quantitative easing.

The Fed minutes amount to a policy thunderbolt, evidence of how quickly the recovery has lost steam. Just weeks ago the Fed was mapping out withdrawal of stimulus.

(*SNICKER*) (*ROLLING MY EYES*)

Usually the dollar serves as a safe haven whenever the world takes fright, and there was plenty of sobering news from China and other quarters on Thursday. Not this time. The US itself has become the problem.

"The worm is turning," said David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC. "We're in a world of rotating sovereign crises. The market seems to become obsessed with one idea at a time, then violently swings towards another. People thought the euro would break-up. Now we're moving into a new phase because we're hearing alarm bells of a US double dip."

Mr Bloom said a deep change is under way in investor psychology as funds and central banks respond to the blizzard of shocking US data and again focus on the fragility of an economy where public debt is surging towards 100pc of GDP, not helped by the malaise enveloping the Obama White House. "The Europeans have aired their dirty debt in public and taken some measures to address it, whilst the US has not," he said.

The signs of a deep and sudden slowdown in the US are becoming ever clearer as the "sugar rush" from the Obama fiscal stimulus wears off and the inventory boost fades.

Thursday's plunge in the Philadelphia Fed's July index of new manufacturing orders to –4.3 suggests that the economy may have buckled abruptly, as it did in mid-2008. The Economic Cycle Research Institute's ECRI leading indicator has tumbled, reaching –8.3pc last week. This points to a sharp slowdown or recession within three months.

The US workforce has shrunk by a 1m over the past two months as discouraged jobless give up the hunt. Retail sales have fallen for the past two months. New homes sales crashed to 300,000 in May after tax credits ran out, the lowest since records began in 1963. Mortgage applications have fallen by 42pc to 13-year low since April. Paul Dales at Capital Economics said the "shadow inventory" of unsold properties has risen to 7.8m. "The double dip in housing has begun," he said.

July 16, 2010 at 11:17 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38089

Rescuing itself from the obscurity it richly deserves, the NAACP has found a way back onto the front page: accuse the tea party movement of harboring racists.

Is it not an absurd world we live in? Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal - advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race - accusing another organization of being motivated by race.

If discrimination means favoring people or opposing people based on race, two questions arise. Is that not pretty much the job description of the NAACP?

(And when has the tea party advocated hirings, promotions or school admissions based on race?)

In the South Carolina gubernatorial primary, the tea party backed a woman of Indian-American descent, Nikki Haley, who was raised a Sikh, over three white men with superior resumes.

In the GOP primary in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, African-American Tim Scott, with tea party backing, routed Strom Thurmond's son three to one.

In Florida, the tea party vaulted a Hispanic, Cuban-American Marco Rubio, into so strong a lead over favorite Gov. Charlie Crist in the race for the U.S. Senate that Crist quit the GOP.

And the NAACP?

In the year 2000, the organization ran an ad using the daughter of James Byrd, the victim of a dragging death by white racists, to imply Gov. George W. Bush's opposition to a hate crimes bill meant that Bush was indifferent to the lynching of James Byrd. This was as nasty a piece of political advertising as has been run in our time.

In the last month, the major story with a racial dimension has been the charge that Eric Holder's Justice Department dropped an open-and-shut case against members of the New Black Panther Party of Philadelphia, two of whom were caught on tape...

(*SMIRK*)

A tape has now turned up where New Black Panther Minister King Samir Shabazz, one of the two charged with voter intimidation, rants before a small crowd: "You want freedom. You're gonna have to kill some crackers. You're going have to kill some of their babies."

* IMAGINE IF THE MSM HAD A TAPE OF A TEA PARTIER CALLING FOR THE MURDER OF BLACK BABIES... JUST IMAGINE... (*SIGH*)

July 16, 2010 at 11:35 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/15/army.suicides/?hpt=T2&om_rid=Nd8RbA&om_mid=_BMQFPPB8O3vjUO&

More U.S. soldiers killed themselves last month than in recent Army history...statistics show that 32 soldiers killed themselves in June, the highest number in a single month since the Vietnam era.

Twenty-one of them were on active duty, while 11 were in the National Guard or Army Reserve in an inactive status. (Seven of those soldiers killed themselves while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Army numbers.)

Including the June numbers, 145 soldiers have killed themselves this year, more than half of the total number for all of 2009, according to Army statistics.

In 2009, a record-breaking year for suicides in the service, 245 soldiers killed themselves.

* PAY ATTENTION, PEOPLE... FOR GOD'S SAKE, PAY ATTENTION...

July 16, 2010 at 12:26 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704682604575369360615508520.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Democrats turned the financial regulation bill into a monstrosity.

What started as a promise to streamline and modernize the financial system turned into 2,300 pages of new agencies and new powers for the very authorities that fomented the financial crisis. The bill is laden with uncertainty and brimming with costly regulations on small businesses.

[L]ike stimulus and health care, this is legislation that has overpromised. The bill does nothing to address the root causes of the crisis. Yet Mr. Obama recently assured the nation that it not only fixes the system's problems, but was "good for businesses, it's good for the entire economy."

(*ROFLMAO*)

This is the same White House that just launched a new campaign to convince Americans that its stimulus bill—which it promised would keep unemployment below 8% - is working.

(*SMIRK*)

It's the same White House struggling to explain why health-care costs continue to rise, and benefits continue to disappear, after grandly promising that it would stop all that.

The White House got this far by trashing Wall Street and greedy CEOs.

* OFTEN THE SAME WALL STREET PLAYERS AND GREEDY CEO TYPES IT RELIED UPON FOR CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS.

(*SIGH*)

July 16, 2010 at 12:26 PM

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