Monday, August 22, 2011

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 22, 2011


Another fine dancin' tune!

Yee-Haa! Swing your partner! Do-ce-doe!

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4 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html

Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.

* AND YET...

By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

* GOTTA LUV THE SPIN... "FORCED." ALSO, YOU'VE GOTTA LUV HOW THE WRITER SKIPS THE PART ABOUT WHY THE HOUSING MARKET COLLAPSED!

(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)

The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

* "...WHICH TILL NOW HAVE REMAINED SECRET."

* SO... FOLKS... HOW'S "FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE" WORKING OUT FOR YOU?

(*SMIRK*)

It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG, which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

The largest borrowers also included Dexia SA, Belgium’s biggest bank by assets, and Societe Generale SA, based in Paris...

* NICE...

The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 - the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg - was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

* OH! AND SPEAKING OF "DATA"... (READ ON...)

[This] Bloomberg News compilation of data [was] obtained [only] through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

* O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! SMELL THE... er... HOPE, FOLKS! JUST BREATH IT IN!

The Fed has said it had “no credit losses” on any of the emergency programs, and a report by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staffers in February said the central bank netted $13 billion in interest and fee income from the programs from August 2007 through December 2009.

* OH, PLEEEASE!

* FOLKS... ASK YOURSELVES... IF ALL THIS HAPPY TALK WAS BASED IN CONCRETE REALITY WHY ARE WE STILL IN WHAT AMOUNTS TO THE WORSE ECONOMIC CRISIS SINCE THE '70's? WHY IS UNEMPLOYMENT (OFFICIALLY!) 9.1%...? WHY ARE THE CHINESE AND EVEN OUR OWN RATINGS AGENCIES DOWNGRADING US...? WHY IS THE DOLLAR STILL IN FREE-FALL EVEN WITH THE ONGOING ECONOMIC COLLAPSE OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY...?!?!

* FOLKS... THEY'RE SCAMMING US! THEY'VE BEEN SCAMMING US EVERY SINCE TARP! MONEY LOANED TO BANKS AT NEAR-ZERO INTEREST RATES ARE THEN "INVESTED" BACK INTO TREASURIES PAYING HIGHER INTEREST RATES! IT'S A FRIGG'N SCAM...!!!

While the 18-month U.S. recession that ended in June 2009 after a 5.1 percent contraction in gross domestic product was nowhere near the four-year, 27 percent decline between August 1929 and March 1933...

(*ROLLING MY EYES*)

* HEY, FOLKS... RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU BELIEVE THAT THE RECESSION "ENDED" IN JUNE 2009 IN ANY REAL SENSE (AS OPPOSED TO A TECHNICAL STANDARD.)

* FOLKS... READ THE FULL ARTICLE. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, I'M HERE FOR YOU.

August 22, 2011 at 10:09 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903327904576522382504681992.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

* IF YOU GET BLOCKED BY THE PAY WALL, SIMPLY GOOGLE "How Not To Grow An Economy" AND YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO SIDESTEP THE PAY WALL FROM THERE.

August 22, 2011 at 10:44 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/582160/201108191853/Exxon-Fights-Regulatory-Pirates.aspx

Five hundred years after the Caribbean was explored, oil is being discovered in unheard-of quantities - 230 miles into the Gulf of Mexico in waters so deep its retrieval would have been impossible even five years ago.

ExxonMobil, and its Norwegian partner Statoil made the biggest discovery of all - a field worth a billion barrels of oil - 7,000 feet below sea level in its "Julia" field in 2007.

Exxon tried to keep its discovery secret to keep [competitors] away. Sadly...U.S. regulators [are attempting to stop ExxonMobil and Satoil from exploiting this rich new find before foreign competitors - including foreign governments - do].

Instead of marvel at the continuing [oil] treasures [being discovered], or hail the human ingenuity that made retrieval of so much oil possible, or simply quantify how this discovery will boost U.S. energy security, Interior Department bureaucrats moved instead to snatch Exxon's permits and shut the whole thing down.

* FOLKS... YA CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP!

Employing an extreme technicality, [Obama administration] regulators claimed that Exxon's request in 2008 for a short suspension of activity to upgrade and make safer its drilling operation amounted to an abandonment of three of its five permits, simply because Exxon hadn't signed a contract with another partner, Chevron, by the time the suspension was completed.

In the past, such glitches were no problem; after all, it's obvious Exxon, which spent $300 million on exploratory wells, hasn't abandoned the operation. But in the Obama era, which demonizes oil production in American waters by American companies, the bureaucrats came up with this permit technicality to effectively expropriate the entire operation.

(*HEADACHE*)

Exxon is now fighting the permit action in a federal court in Lake Charles, La., calling it "arbitrary," "capricious" and "an abuse of law." It's also a textbook case of the anti-business climate fostered by the Obama administration which should be bending over backward to help Exxon create jobs and profits.

(*NOD*)

It's a sorry spectacle to see Exxon - which willingly endured the risk, put in vast infusions of investment capital, sent out brave men to watery no-man's land to drill, and invested massive amounts in R&D - lose its entire operation over a petty permit dispute.

August 22, 2011 at 4:04 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/582154/201108191845/Green-Jobs-Red-Faces.aspx

The fact that President Obama's "green jobs" campaign has been an enormously expensive failure is now so glaringly obvious even the New York Times can't ignore it any longer.

In a surprisingly candid article headlined "Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises," the Times' Aaron Glantz reports that "federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show," and that Obama's goal of 5 million new green jobs in 10 years is a "pipe dream."

Glantz notes, for example, that Obama's much-heralded weatherization program "never caught on." California still has spent only about half its $186 million in federal weatherization funds, creating a grand total of 538 full-time jobs.

He also points to the $59 million spent in California on green job training that resulted in just 719 placements.

For anyone who's followed this story, these failures shouldn't be news. The weatherization program, for example, has long been plagued by scandal and needless red tape. [T]he landscape is increasingly littered with failed "green" companies unable to survive in the marketplace even with huge government subsidies.

[I]f the Times can see the light...

(*SHRUG*)

August 22, 2011 at 4:09 PM

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