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The case of a computer programmer accused of stealing the secret codes
used in Goldman Sachs’ rapid-fire stock trading platform shows that
even a titan of Wall Street can be caught napping at the switch. [smell setup?]
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will consider new measures to curb speculation in the markets for energy and other commodities, the agency is set to announce today.
The move aims to reduce the volatility of prices but faces resistance from top Wall Street firms, which fear the efforts could cut into profits. Regulators and lawmakers increasingly worry that these firms have used their size and power to inflate the prices of commodities, booking profits in the process.
"The folks who are going to end up paying the price are not investors, not the governor, not the legislature, but the taxpayers," Dresslar said
This list comes nowhere close to portraying how severely the Greatest Depression has hit the restaurant industry. There are scores of businesses that closed between Dec. 2007 and Dec. 2008 that remain empty.
A downtown San Francisco office building that sold for $400 a square foot in 2006 has traded for just $172 a square foot, a 57 percent decline that industry experts see as an important milestone...
And now the poor man is groveling. Begging. Imploring the banks to take his state’s IOUs. He says they are “rock solid.” California is the world’s 6th largest economy. But it was a world-beater when it came to debt-based bubble illusions.
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression (Publisher: I suggest this article to you - Rolling Stone has video with Matt Taibbi about writing of article)
Because so many swaps are informal, the size of the small business barter economy is hard to gauge. But Bob Meyer, publisher of Barter News in Mission Viejo, Calif., was willing to take a crack at it. Meyer estimates that 1 million small businesses are involved in barter, either informally or through exchanges, with a volume of transactions approaching $20 billion annually. This figure combines the $10 billion that IRTA attributes to exchange trades with Meyer's conservative estimate that informal barter accounts for another $10 billion.
Typically, bartering activity spikes during economic downturns. Meyer expects the total volume of U.S. barter transactions to grow 10% this year (historically the annual growth rate has hovered around 5%). "Right now many small businesses
Of all the anti-free-market proposals out there, turning equities into a one way bet is by far the least defendable, most ignorant, most damaging to the markets we have seen.
Song for the new depression, the title deriving from a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Madison Square Park, NYC 6/17/09
I am quickly running out of possible scenarios to prevent a severe deflationary depression from taking place. By "severe" I mean 20%+ U3 unemployment, GDP contraction of at least 25%, and a possible loss of federal funding capacity...
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Seven banks were shut down by authorities Thursday, pushing the tally of failed banks for 2009 to 52, more than doubling the failures in 2008.
Six regional banks in Illinois and one in Texas closed their doors, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.The rash of Illinois failures are interlinked: All six banks were controlled by one family and followed a similar business model that “created concentrated exposure in each institution,” according to the FDIC.
The agency said that the six failures stemmed from the banks’ investments in collateralized debt obligations and other loan losses.
Forty-six soldiers — fully 25 percent of the company — have no work awaiting them, including many whose jobs vanished while they were heeding their nation’s call.
Six banks in Illinois and one in Texas were seized by regulators as the deepening financial crisis pushed the toll of failed U.S. lenders this year to 52, the most since 1992.
This is a different way to look at the job loss situation: This chart reveals the change in Unemployment across the past 7 recessions...
I have been hearing more and more from senior Obama economic team members about the jobs they hoped for coming at the very tail end of an economic recovery. Others are talking about a GDP recovery — but not a jobs recovery.
When you do that, you have a race to the bottom as rising prices mask the steady decrease in quality. For example, how easy would it have been to progressively pull the land value component out of the equation as demand and process began to rise? It would be simply a matter of accepting only land values set in say 2000 for lending purposes. The drag would have halted speculative leveraging in its tracks. Today deleveraging is reducing those same land values to something approaching zero in a new market in which value is assigned to the replacement of the building and available rents. This example alone shows us that a market can be readily managed and secondly, it must be managed to optimize results.
A dour report on job losses in June sent stocks sharply lower Thursday.
Major stock indexes fell more than 2.6 percent after the government
said the U.S. unemployment rate hit a 26-year high. The Dow Jones
industrials closed at their lowest level in six weeks.
Trading on the New York Stock Exchange was extended until 4:15 p.m.
Eastern time in order to execute customer orders impacted by system
irregularities, an NYSE spokeswoman said.
What are the odds that the economy loses another 1.16 million jobs over the next 6 months? Pretty high. That would mean no net jobs added to the economy for the naughts: Naught for the Naughts!
"What makes me very pessimistic in not seeing any leadership or awareness on parts of government on what has to be done, which is deleverage $40-to-$70 trillion," Taleb said.
These charts provide a little clarity on the unemployment rate.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) now projects the total shortfall at $26.3 billion.
• Chrysler Group 42% decline; • General Motors slipped by 33.4% • Toyota Motor reported a 32% drop;
• Birth Death Adjustment contributed 185k in June 2009 (versus 165k in June 08) • Hours worked fell 0.8%, bringing the average workweek down 0.1 hours to 33; This is a record low going back to 1964;
Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, driving the
unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent, suggesting that
the economy's road to recovery will be bumpy.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. mortgage applications plunged to a seven-month low last week as demand for home refinancing loans tumbled 30 percent, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.
The drop does not bode well for the hard-hit U.S. housing market, which has been showing some signs of stabilization, with sales rising and home price declines moderating in many regions of the country.
The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, for the week ended June 26 decreased 18.9 percent to 444.8, the lowest reading since the week ended November 21, 2008.
California's lawmakers failed to agree on a balanced budget by the start of its new fiscal year Wednesday, clearing the way to suspend payments owed to the state's vendors and local agencies, who instead will get "IOU" notes...
As many as one in five U.S. hotel may default on their loans by the end of 2010 as the recession forces companies to spend less on travel and perks, according to Kenneth Rosen, an economist at the University of California.
Nonresidential spending is off 3.3% on a year-over-year basis, and will turn strongly negative as projects are completed. Residential construction spending is still declining YoY...
With a day to go until a cash crisis would force the state to stop
paying its bills, lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked into
the night Tuesday but failed to reach a budget agreement.
The state Senate voted several times as midnight
approached in a last-ditch effort to approve $3.3 billion in cuts to
education and other programs and stave off, at least temporarily, the
IOUs that California Controller John Chiang is set to begin issuing
Thursday in lieu of some payments.
