Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Websites and blogs I recommend
Blog Archive
-
▼
2010
(353)
-
▼
December
(27)
- Barker's New Year's Eve Newsbites: 12/31/2010
- Happy, Happy, Happy New Year...!!!
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, December 30, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, December 29, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: December 28, 2010
- Happy Birthday, Jesus...!!!
- (*GRITTING MY TEETH*) (*BLOOD PRESSURE RISING*)
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, December 23, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, December 22, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, December 22, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Dec. 18 & 19, 2010
- Please Read Nick Carey's Full Piece
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, December 17, 2010
- Absolutely Irresponsible; A Pox on Both Their Houses
- Who's Lying?
- Two Californias (by Richard Davis Hanson)
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, December 16, 2010
- This "Newsbite" Deserves Its Own Stand-Alone Post!
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, December 15, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, December 14, 2010
- Barcelona Travelogue
- What It Means To Be Bill
- Back From Barcelona... (and Milan!)
- Barker's Pre-Vacation Newsbites: Friday, Dec. 3, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010
- As Everyone Who's Anyone Knows...
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010
-
▼
December
(27)
About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
8 comments:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704594804575649001391273386.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
The Federal Reserve pulled back the curtain yesterday on its emergency lending during the financial panic of 2008 and 2009, and the game to play at home with the kids is: Who didn't get a bailout?
(*RAISING MY HAND*) I DIDN'T...!!!
* ANOTHER POINT: LET'S PUT QUOTES AROUND THE TERMS "EMERGENCY" AND "LENDING." FRANKLY, BOTH WORDS ARE BEING MISUSED.
[T]he cream of Wall Street received even more multibillion-dollar assistance than previously advertised by either the banks or the Fed.
(*SMIRK*)
Goldman Sachs...
* OR AS I LIKE TO CALL THEM: GOLDMAN, SACHS, OBAMA, AND CLINTON...
...used the Primary Dealer Credit Facility 212 times to the tune of nearly $600 billion. Even in Washington, that's still a lot of money.
Morgan Stanley used the same overnight lending program 212 times from March 2008 to March 2009.
General Electric...from late October to late November 2008 tapped the Fed's Commercial Paper Funding Facility 12 times for more than $15 billion.
* BUSH... PAULSON... BERNANKE... GEITHNER... PELOSI... MCCAIN... (*SIGH*)... THAT'S "BIPARTISANSHIP" IN ACTION; THAT'S "OLIGARCHS FOR OLIGARCHS, INC." IN ACTION.
[GM] finished a close second to Citigroup as the heaviest user of the Fed's Commercial Paper Funding Facility from November 2008 to July 2009. (GE is lucky it was too big to fail, or it might have failed as smaller business lender CIT did.)
[W]hy did then New York Fed President Timothy Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke believe in March 2008 that an also-ran investment bank, Bear Stearns, was a systemic risk?
Why did Messrs. Geithner and Bernanke insist on bailing out AIG, despite apparent resistance within the Fed? (The central bank still refuses to release a memo to Mr. Bernanke from the Fed staff, which Senator Jim Bunning has said made the case that an AIG bankruptcy was not a systemic risk. The Fed and other regulators have continued to stonewall document requests on these cases.)
Our guess is that this is in part because Messrs. Geithner and Bernanke believe that systemic risk is whatever they say it is, and that they know it when they see it.
(*SMIRK*)
The authors of Dodd-Frank claim that their bill ends this bailout discretion, but that's not how we or the regulators read it. One task for the new House Republican majority is to explore how to tighten the too-big-to-fail criteria. If there is one overwhelming lesson of the Fed's bailout files, it should be that we never want to do this again.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704594804575649121695684294.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
The Senate waved through the largest expansion of food regulation since FDR on Tuesday - 73 to 25 - and maybe the bill won the votes of 13 Republicans because there was hardly any public controversy.
These days, the government needs to take over entire industries to get anyone to notice.
* I NOTICED, FOLKS; I PENNED A STAND-ALONG POST ON THE ISSUE.
The Food and Drug Administration will gain new powers over the 2.2 million farms and 28,000 food producers in America - including federal standards for agricultural practices and food processing, transportation and storage - as well as the authority to mandate nationwide recalls.
* NOTE: IT'S NOT A DONE DEAL YET... STAY TUNED...
High-publicity outbreaks like salmonella in eggs or E. coli in spinach have obscured the reality that food-borne illnesses have fallen by nearly one-third over the last decade - largely because businesses have every incentive to police themselves.
Meanwhile, Congress's increasing demands on the FDA - it regulates about 25 cents out of every dollar spent in the economy - mean that the agency does nothing well. (When the FDA mistakenly fingered tomatoes as the source of 1,300 illnesses in 2008, the tomato industry suffered $100 million in losses. The real culprit was tainted jalapenos.)
Not surprisingly, this bill's main critics have been the small farms and local and organic food outfits that don't have the profit margins to comply with new regulatory burdens like the "risk-based preventative controls" that the FDA will soon enforce. The House version applies even to farmers markets and roadside stands. Naturally, agribusiness and the processed food industry (and their legal departments) couldn't be happier, and it's not the first time big business has leveraged government to weigh down smaller competitors.
* FOLKS... (*EXASPERATED SIGH*)... WE'RE LOSING OUR COUNTRY!
Less understandable is the support from so many Senate Republicans, who must know that the Obama Administration plans to pursue its agenda through regulation in the next two years now that it has lost the House. The 13 GOP "ayes" - including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Richard Burr of North Carolina - have enabled those regulators.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575644600277647166.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
These columns criticized Tom DeLay before it was cool...
* AS DID I!
...but the former House Majority Leader's defeat in court last week looks to us like a case of campaign-finance law run amok.
(*NOD*)
His conviction for money laundering shows how far the campaign-finance scolds must now stretch in their quest to limit political speech.
(*NOD*)
Tom DeLay isn't a sympathetic figure, but playing political hardball is not a crime. His case shows how easy it is to exploit the legal murkiness of the campaign-finance rules for political retribution.
After the 2002 legislative elections and a big GOP victory in Texas, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle spent months looking for a charge that would stick to DeLay, getting a grand jury in 2005 to charge the Democratic Party's bete noire with conspiracy to violate state election law. A Texas judge later tossed that indictment, and the state's highest criminal court upheld the dismissal in 2007.
Never fear, creative prosecutors are here. Mr. Earle also came up with the bright idea of using a money-laundering statute intended for drug dealers and the mob to go after routine campaign-finance practices.
In 2002, DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority had donated $190,000 to the RNC, which then donated the same amount to Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives. Because DeLay's political action committee got its funds from corporate donations, DeLay was charged with assisting the RNC in "laundering" the money to influence the Texas races.
* YET NO ONE IN THE RNC WAS CHARGED WTH, LET ALONE CONVICTED OF, MONEY LAUNDERING. (*SMIRK*) (*SIGH*)
Campaign finance goo-goos are dancing with joy at DeLay's conviction, hoping more prosecutors will pick up the money-laundering charge. But their elation merely shows how desperate they are now that the Supreme Court is dismantling their decades-long quest to regulate campaign speech.
Since their regulatory apparatus has been declared unconstitutional, the goo-goos now want to inflate routine legal campaign-finance maneuvering into felonies.
Don't be surprised if DeLay's conviction is overturned on appeal, but in any case you can expect more such creative prosecutions in the future against political opponents.
(*SIGH*) FOLKS... IS THIS REALLY THE AMERICA YOU WANT FOR OUR CHILDREN...???
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646933169513078.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecondBucket
The disability insurance component of Social Security was created in 1956 to provide income support to individuals aged 50 to 64 who were permanently disabled. As is typical with government programs, eligibility and benefits were greatly expanded over the subsequent decades.
SSDI, which is funded through a 1.8% payroll tax on all workers, was recently described by the Congressional Budget Office as "not financially sustainable."
SSDI benefit payments have soared 119% since 1995 in real or inflation-adjusted terms.
What was supposed to be a narrowly tailored program to help individuals who could no longer work has blossomed into a gigantic budgetary burden that acts more like an unemployment program. Indeed, the number of individuals receiving SSDI benefits has jumped more than 10% in the last two recessionary years. [A] large number of people seem to be abusing the system... What makes the problem worse is that, unlike standard unemployment insurance, there's no time limit for how long an individual can receive SSDI.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703377504575650832806235318.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond
The GOP is bidding to end the Nancy Pelosi era with procedural changes large and small. One example of the latter is a plan to impose stiff restrictions on official Congressional commemorations that the House now regularly dispenses.
(*CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
These non-binding measures typically congratulate a sports team, honor an anniversary or recognize some other symbolic triviality with the main goal of getting members some good press in their home districts.
The exercise has long aggravated Republicans who say the time would be better spent on more important issues.
* YA THINK...?!?!
* AGAIN, FOLKS... JUST TO REMIND YOU... THE DEMS DIDN'T EVEN PASS BRING A FEDERAL BUDGET TO THE FLOOR FOR A VOTE THIS YEAR!
The lame-duck Congress is moving all kinds of last-minute bills, but yesterday the [Pelosi] House spent the better part of an hour on a resolution "honoring and saluting golf legend Chi Chi Rodriguez for his commitment to Latino youth programs."
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
http://www.ajc.com/news/cobb/hundreds-line-up-in-763455.html
* HMM... FUNNY HOW THEY ONLY SHOW A PHOTO OF TWO PEOPLE EVEN THOUGHT THE HEADLINE REFERS TO "HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE."
* HMM... CAN ANYONE... ANYONE AT ALL... HAZARD A GUESS AS TO WHY A WIDE ANGLE SHOT OF THE "HUNDREDS" WASN'T FEATURED?
(*SMIRK*)
“We’re freezing,” said Lecher Eady, a Marietta mother who arrived at midnight seeking help with her bills. “Our hands are cold, our feet are cold.”
Eady, the mother of triplets in diapers, said she has been out of work since August.
“I’ve had three jobs this year, and I’ve been laid off from all three,” she said. “I’m grateful just to get any type of help they’ll give me.”
* HMM... NO MENTION OF A FATHER IN THE PICTURE.
(*SMIRK*)
Eady said she is trying to start a nonprofit organization, “Babies Need Diapers,” that would provide diapers to low-income single mothers. “We have assistance for food, we have assistance for clothing, but we don’t have assistance for diapers,” she said. “That’s my biggest struggle right now.”
* FOLKS... THESE PEOPLE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY. I'D CONTRIBUTE SERIOUS MONEY TO A FUND WHICH WOULD GIVE PEOPLE LIKE THIS A $10,000 STAKE AND A TICKET TO WHATEVER COUNTRY WOULD HAVE THEM.
Joining Eady near the front of the line that had grown to about 30 people by 7:30 was Isata Kamara, a single mom of a 3-year-old.
* "ISATA," HUH...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Lakesha Charles, who has been out of work for two years, was number 16 in the Marietta line Thursday, which, she said, is “better than number 100.” The mother of six said she “heard it was ridiculous” on Wednesday, when only 30 people at a time were let into the assistance center.“Hopefully, we can get in and get help,” she said.
* "LAKESHA," HUH... "MOTHER OF SIX..."
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/taxpayer-risk-impossible-to-know-for-some-fed-financial-crisis-programs.html
The Federal Reserve withheld details on individual securities pledged as collateral by recipients of $885 billion in central bank loans, denying taxpayers a measure of the risks they faced from its emergency aid.
* AIN'T THE AGE OF OBAMA GRAND...?! OLIGARCHS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
The central bank yesterday released data on 21,000 transactions from $3.3 trillion in emergency lending to stem the financial crisis.
* THAT'S "TRILLION" WITH A "T".
July’s Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to disclose the names of borrowers, the size and interest rates of loans, and “information identifying the types and amounts of collateral pledged or assets transferred.”
For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on "groups" of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. ... “This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that.
(Fed spokeswoman Susan Stawick in Washington declined to comment.)
(*SMIRK*)
It is “specifically impossible” to know how much risk taxpayers were taking by looking at pools of collateral grouped by asset class and rating, said Sylvain Raynes, a principal at R&R Consulting in New York... “The spirit of Dodd-Frank was not respected, and they used the vagueness in the wording of the law to weasel out of fulfilling their duty to the American people.”
* PAR FOR THE COURSE WITH OBAMA IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/01/reid-angers-gop-pushing-versions-dream-act-hearing/
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has pushed four different versions of the...immigration bill known as the DREAM Act without a hearing on any of them...
* YEP. SURE SOUNDS LIKE OL' HARRY. (*SMIRK*) BUSINESS AS USUAL.
"We now may have a fourth version of the DREAM Act," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday. "We haven't had a hearing on that in seven years." He decried the bill as "amnesty" and pledged to fight it "with every strength and every ability that I have."
A statement to FoxNews.com put out by the Republican side of the Senate Judiciary Committee [notes] "Democrat leaders, in their rush to pass an unpopular bill during the lame-duck session, have completely bypassed the Judiciary Committee. They have introduced four separate versions of the same bill and, without any committee review, placed each and every one of them on the legislative calendar," the statement said. "This unusual approach creates a chaotic situation, one that makes it more difficult for the public and their representatives - as well as the press - to review this deeply controversial measure."
A representative from Reid's office could not be reached for comment.
(*SMIRK*)
The latest version of the bill [is] not [even] available online...
(*SIGH*)
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) wrote in a column on his Senate website that he would oppose the plan to give "hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants" a path to residency. "I'm not going to support any legislation that I don't think adds to jobs, or to the military or to the economy. Consequently, I won't support any motion to proceed or any kind of cloture measure on the DREAM Act," he wrote. "In addition, I think that it must be part of an overall comprehensive solution to immigration once we have the border secured, and not until then."
Post a Comment