(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
(*STRUGGLING NOT TO THROW MY GUTS UP*)
So... more pumping... more "money" out of thin air...
On Wall Street they're jubilant! And why shouldn't they be? $85 billion a month generates a lot of commissions...
The Dow hit new heights... even as Bernanke was "justifying" the Fed's action as a reaction to the Fed's own downgrade of their economic outlook for the U.S. economy!
(*BLOOD SHOOTING OUT OF MY EARS*)
The inmates are running the asylum folks, and robbing "We the People" blind to enrich themselves as they run our economy into the ground.
So... "You Whose Name Dare Not Be Mentioned"... what's your reaction to all this? Yes... I know... you're not today the Obama fan you were in 2008... but... do you really still hate Romney more than you hate Obama? Romney ran on firing Bernanke. Obama has been urging Bernanke to continue literally creating money out of thin air.
One of yesterday's newsbites noted that gas prices have broken a new record - they've been over $3/gal. for more than 1,000 days now. (And yet "officially" there's next to no inflation!)
(*SPITTING ON THE GROUND*)
Again... to "You Whose Name Dare Not Be Mentioned"... I know you hate Wall Street! Do you at this point acknowledge that Obama and the Democratic Party are the Party of Wall Street nowadays?
(And please don't come back at me by pointing to the GOP; you know that "my" Republicans are the Tea Party... the "Main Street Republicans"... and you know this has been my position more or less since George Herbert Walker Bush (Pappy) became the Republican president who first pushed me to re-register as an independent and vote for Ross Perot.)
Folks... we're in deep doo-doo.
8 comments:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fed-downgrades-outlook-us-economy-180029632.html
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday downgraded its outlook for the U.S. economy for 2013 and 2014.
Fed officials decided to continue their $85-billion-a-month bond purchase program...
Twelve of the 17 officials on the Fed's policymaking committee think the Fed shouldn't begin raising rates until 2015. And two think the Fed shouldn't do so until 2016 - one more than in June. Three chose 2014, the same as in June.
The Fed doesn't say which policymakers made which forecast.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/18/us-markets-forex-idUSBRE98F0L120130918
The dollar plunged to a seven-month low on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve shocked investors by deciding to continue its massive stimulus program...
http://freebeacon.com/muslim-brotherhood-official-former-clinton-foundation-employee-arrested/
A senior Muslim Brotherhood official who, until recently, had been employed by the William J. Clinton Foundation...
* NOPE. UNFORTUNATELY NOT THE OPENING LINE TO A JOKE. (...GOES INTO A BAR...)
* HERE'S HOW THE SENTENCE ACTUALLY ENDS:
...was arrested in Cairo on Tuesday and charged with inciting violence.
Gehad el-Haddad served as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s top communications officials until Egyptian security forces seized him as part of a wider crackdown on officials loyal to ousted former President Mohamed Morsi.
Before emerging as a top Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation...
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
Before emerging as a top Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation...
El-Haddad served as the Clinton Foundation’s city director from August 2007 to August 2012, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Just a month after El-Haddad left the Clinton Foundation to work full-time for the Brotherhood, former President Morsi was invited to deliver his first major speech at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), the high profile political family’s other nonprofit.
El-Haddad’s employment at the Clinton Foundation overlapped with his official work for the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in Cairo in February 2011 when he assumed control of the Renaissance Project, a Brotherhood-backed economic recovery program.
El-Haddad officially became a senior adviser for foreign affairs in Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party in May 2011, when he was still claiming to be employed by the Clinton Foundation.
El-Haddad was quoted in the Guardian newspaper in March 2012 as “one of the Brotherhood’s senior advisers.” USA Today referred to him as “a senior adviser to the Muslim Brotherhood” in May 2012.
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130917/AUTO01/309170122/1148/auto01/U-S-exit-Fisker-hefty-taxpayer-loss
The Energy Department said Tuesday it will auction off its outstanding $168 million loan to the now-closed electric vehicle manufacturer Fisker Automotive Inc., a move that will likely mean significant losses to taxpayers.
It would be the second automaker to fail after receiving loans that were later sold by the government at a loss.
“When the federal government picks winners & losers, the American people are left on the hook,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House’s No. 3 Republican, said Tuesday in a Twitter posting.
Earlier this month, the Energy Department sold its unpaid $50 million loan to Allen Park-based VPG to AM General for $3 million, which agreed to acquire VPG’s MV-1 wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Taxpayers lost about $42 million on that sale.
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/156801
Thanks to bad government policies, we are not fully out of the recession yet.
* "NOT FULLY...?!?!" THAT'S A FRIGGIN' UNDERSTATEMENT!
Four years ago, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the U.S. recession of 2007-2009 ended.
(*GUFFAW*)
Nearly all recoveries following severe U.S. recessions have featured robust economic recoveries that rapidly restored real income, output, and employment to their pre-recession trends.
But this recovery has not.
Income, production, and jobs have not only failed to recover, but have continued to deteriorate.
In the last four years, the fraction of the adult working age population (16 years old and over) has declined from 59.4$ in June 2009 to 58.6% in May 2013, and per-capita inflation-adjusted gross domestic product is now 12% below its pre-recession trend compared to about 9% below trend at the recession trough of June, 2009.
* AND, FOLKS... SPEAKING OF INFLATION... AGAIN... THE GOVERNMENT DELIBERATELY DOWNPLAYS INFLATION. YOU KNOW THIS! (NOT COUNTING FOOD AND FUEL PRICES...)
* HERE'S THE TRUTH:
Since late 2007, the U.S. economy has lost about 4 years of growth and is more than 10 million jobs below normal.
So why is the current recovery so weak? [O]ur view is that poorly designed and implemented government policies have impeded capital and technological investments and hiring, and that bad government policies – not underlying problems with the U.S. market economy – are the primary reason why the economy has not recovered.
Since the fall of 2008, the U.S. government has adopted dozens of policies that were advertised as being necessary to restore prosperity. These policies impacted many key economic channels, including monetary and fiscal policies, commercial and investment banking, manufacturing, housing, and the environment. But many of these policies have depressed growth by distorting the normal forces of supply and demand that are critical for a market economy to function well and create new jobs.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
Many of the policies that were implemented were based on old Keynesian models that advocate temporary spending increases and one-time tax rebates, while others created new regulations of economic activity in key sectors. But both of these policy responses misdiagnosed the problems facing the American economy. The spending policies had little impact on the economy other than to increase government debt, and regulatory policies raised business costs and depressed growth.
The centerpiece of the old Keynesian stimulus policies was the 2009 $821 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which combined temporary tax cuts with federal funds for national, state, and local government spending.
President Obama's economic advisors stated that the ARRA would keep unemployment from rising above 7.9%, and would restore employment to its pre-recession trend around 2013. But the U.S. labor market remains severely depressed today, and is nowhere near its pre-recession trend.
There are two important reasons why the ARRA failed to restore jobs. One is that attempts to stimulate spending likely had a much smaller impact than was advertised. The second is that the type of spending that was supposed to be undertaken – including investment in government infrastructure – simply did not materialize in any significant way. State and local governments did not use these federal funds to significantly expand infrastructure spending. Instead, these governments increased transfer payments and reduced debt, and the nation’s employment rate continued to decline.
Other spending policies were aimed at propping up the hard-hit auto and residential construction industries. These policies included “Cash for Clunkers”, which provided some new car buyers with payments between $3,500 and $4,500 by turning in an old car that was scrapped, and the Homebuyer Tax Credit, which provided some buyers of houses a tax credit of $7,500. These policies did little to strengthen either industry. Sales of autos and homes temporarily increased while these policies were in place, but then sales declined sharply once the policies ended. These policies were pure subsidies to some auto and home buyers, with little if any impact on the industries that were supposed to be helped.
* HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED BENEFITED BY CASH FOR CLUNKERS!
Other policies imposed new regulations on key sectors of the economy, including the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation that regulates many aspects of banking and financial intermediation. Dodd-Frank was intended to solve the nation’s “too big to fail” problem, in which very large and complex banks would be bailed out should they face insolvency. But Dodd-Frank codifes the too big to fail problem. It allows regulators to identify banks deemed to be too big to fail, thus giving them certain advantages over small banks, and at the same time the legislation substantially raises the costs of doing business, particularly to smaller banks and particularly in the area of making home mortgage loans.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
* ONE MORE TIME...
But Dodd-Frank codifes the too big to fail problem. It allows regulators to identify banks deemed to be too big to fail, thus giving them certain advantages over small banks, and at the same time the legislation substantially raises the costs of doing business, particularly to smaller banks and particularly in the area of making home mortgage loans.
And it is not only the policies that have been implemented that harmed the U.S. economy. In some cases, uncertainty about economic policy has also depressed growth. Specifically, there has been considerably uncertainty about tax rates, with key tax provisions expiring each of the last several years and with little clarity on how tax rates would change over the long haul. Between 2009 and 2011, roughly 250 tax provisions expired, about 10 times the number of provisions that expired in 1999. These expiring provisions make the tax system highly unpredictable, which in turn depresses the incentive for business to make long-term investments in capacity and technology, and holds business back from significantly expanding their workforce.
(*NOD*)
The U.S. has made some useful policy changes in the last few months. Government spending is no longer growing at the rate of previous years, and in fact, the sequestration budget cuts that were automatically imposed at the start of 2013 because the President and Congress were unable to agree on a budget appear to have had no negative impact on the economy, as old Keynesian models had wrongly predicted.
(*POINTING MY RAISED MIDDLE FINGERS AT WASHINGTON D.C.*)
Getting the U.S. economy back on track requires restoring transparency and simplicity to the tax code, including reducing the U.S. corporate income tax rate, and reducing marginal income tax rates - which now exceed 50% in some states.
In addition, growth will be enhanced by labor, energy, and environmental policy changes that make it less costly to hire workers and reduce the cost of becoming energy independent.
[W]ithout these changes, the U.S. economy will continue to significantly underperform, just as it has for the last four years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/politics/reaping-profit-after-assisting-on-health-law.html?hp&_r=1&
The health care industry now spends more money on lobbying in Washington than any sector of the economy — more than $243 million last year alone, slightly higher than the $242 million spent by financial, insurance and real estate companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics here.
Of the “revolving door lobbyists” profiled by the center, those specializing in health care account for 12%, more than any other economic sector. Critics say these former officials are cashing in, trading on the relationships and expertise they acquired while working for the taxpayers, and cite such career moves as proof that Mr. Obama has not lived up to his promise to change the culture of influence peddling in the capital.
Washington’s health care revolving door is spinning fast as the new online health insurance marketplaces, a central provision of President Obama’s health care law, are set to open Oct. 1. Those who had a hand in the law’s passage are now finding lucrative work in the private sector, as businesses try to understand the complex measure, reshape it by pressing for regulatory changes — or profit from it. That means boom times for what might be called an ObamaCare cottage industry, providing work for dozens of former administration and mostly Democratic Congressional officials whose immersion in health policy minutiae, and friendships, make them invaluable to private business.
“The tentacles of ObamaCare touch everybody — health insurance companies, doctors, the payers,” said Ivan Adler, an executive recruiter with the McCormick Group who specializes in K Street, Washington’s lobbying corridor. “This law is so complicated that you really have to have somebody playing sherpa in order to follow it, because it is fluid and changing. And the supply of people who understand it is way smaller than the demand.”
* SOUNDS LIKE A WONDERFUL FUCKING LAW, DOESN'T IT? OBVIOUSLY IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST... (*SMIRK*) (*SNORT*)
James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University here, called all the activity “a natural phenomenon,” and one that is hardly limited to Democrats. After Republicans passed Medicare prescription drug legislation in 2003, Billy Tauzin, one of the bill’s major Republican supporters, resigned from Congress to head the pharmaceutical industry trade group.
* AND TWO WRONGS MAKE A RIGHT...??? (AND IN ANY CASE, AS FAR AS I'M AWARE THE MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG LEGISLATION OF 2003 WAS SUPPORTED BY BOTH PARTIES.) (OH... AND ALSO AS FAR AS I'M AWARE... THE MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG LEGISLATION WAS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD.)
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