Archive for the ‘Stock market’ Category
January 4th, 2011 | 
Author: Right Wing Fringe: How Can Obama Win ?
A new AP-GfK Poll says that 52 % of American believe that Obama does not deserve to be re elected. With support for Obama waning in all quarters, its difficult to see how he can win. He has lost independents, rumor has it he …
For the first time, the poll found that a majority of adults, 52 percent, said Obama should be voted out of office while 43 percent said he deserves another term. The numbers mark a reversal since last May, …
The Revisionist Hype
Firat of all, let’s ignore the revisionist hype in so many sections of the liberal media about President Obama staging some kind of mythical political comeback!
This is a presidency with an approval rating of around 50% (according to the RealClear Politics poll of polls), that presides over a nation where just 27% of voters think the country is moving in the right direction, and just 29% of Americans think he will be returned to power in 2012.
The White House may be claiming a couple of political wins in the dying embers of the lame duck Congress after expending a great deal of political capital in the Senate over the reckless ratification of the Moscow-friendly START Treaty and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but these are issues barely on the radar screens of most American voters in the lead-up to 2012, an election which will be dominated by the economy and health care reform, and the political landscape still looks strikingly bleak for the “transformational president” as he goes into 2011 and 2010 was an incredibly bad year for Barack Obama, no matter how much, The New York Times or The Washington Post might try to sugar coat it.
Here are four reasons why it was a year Obama will want to forget:
1. The midterm elections were a defeat of epic proportions for the Obama Presidency, and were the worst since 1948!
When Barack Obama spoke of a “shellacking” at the midterms, it was a huge understatement.
The Republicans scored a significantly bigger win than they did in 1994, with their biggest gain in the House of Representatives in sixty two years.
And fortunately for the Democrats only thirty seven Senate seats were up for election, which most likely prevented what would have been an almost certain handover of power in the upper house too.
Republicans also made huge gains at the gubernatorial level, with the GOP now holding twenty nine governorships to the Democrats’ twenty. Republicans also picked up 680 seats in state legislatures, which is the highest figure in the modern era.
2. Conservatism grew increasingly dominant in America!
The midterms were certainly no flash in the pan, but were definitely part of the much broader conservative revolution which swept America in 2010.
As a recent Gallup survey showed, 48% of Americans now describe themselves as “conservative”, compared to 32% who call themselves “moderate”, and just 20% who call themselves “liberal”.
Conservatives now outnumber liberals by nearly 2.5 to 1, a ratio that is likely to increase in 2011.
The percentage of Americans who now call themselves conservative has risen six points since 2006 and eight points since 1994.
Barack Obama, who is the most liberal US president of the modern era, only has a natural liberal constituency comprised of just one in five Americans, which certainly does not bode well for 2012.
3. The Left lost a huge amount of ground and also engaged in a brutal civil war
2010 was a monumentally bad year for the liberal establishment in the United States, not only in electoral terms but also in terms of increasing divisions within its ranks, as well as the continuing decline of the “mainstream” liberal media.
The conservative media, from Fox News to The Wall Street Journal, had a tremendous year with increasing market share, while establishment giants from CNN to network news outlets continued to decline.
The White House very unwisely (and werhaps stupidly) took on Fox in a major offensive, and spectacularly lost.
And Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and a constellation of conservative talk show hosts had a bumper 2010 too.
In the meantime, America’s disillusioned liberal elites are increasingly aiming their fire at each other, in scenes that are reminiscent of the bloodthirsty finale of Reservoir Dogs.
The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman perfectly captured the brutal post-midterm atmosphere on the Left in a fiery broadside against the president: “Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse and a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction".
4. The Tea Party became more powerful than the president at the ballot box
The Tea Party was the big victor of 2010 because it spectacularly humiliated the White House by running rings around it.
A small grassroots movement with barely any resources evolved into the most successful US political movement of this generation, sparking a national protest against the big government policies of the Obama administration, and a powerful call for a return to America’s founding principles.
The Tea Party, which was initially mocked and jeered by its political opponents, including the president, later came to be feared by the Left as it flexed tremendous political muscle.
A September, a CNN poll showed that “while just 37% of Americans are more likely to vote for a candidate if backed by Barack Obama, a far larger 50% will vote for a Tea-Party endorsed candidate".
The Tea Party continues to gain momentum following the midterms, where it scored significant successes, and a late November USA Today/Gallup poll showed the Tea Party virtually neck and neck with President Obama in terms of voter opinion on who should influence government policy.
Posted in 2012, administration, congress, democracy, Dow Jones, economy, finance, politics, polls, presidential elections, Stock market | 
No Comments »
World banks brace for euro collapse | GoldSilver.com
goldsilver.com12/26/11
Banks around the world are preparing for the possible collapse of the euro as fears of the European debt crisis increase.
What Will Happen if the Euro Collapses? A Few Scenarios | Global …
globalspin.blogs.time.com12/13/11
Despite the distracting political drama over the UK's outlier rejection at last week's European Union agreement on fiscal and budgetary coordination, it's now become clear that main objective of the collective effort–to ensure …
If you think that the European financial crisis resembles the American banking crisis of a couple of years ago then you’re underestimating the gravity of Europe’s problem.
The European sub-prime crisis of 2007 and 2008 was ‘solved’, although most likely only temporarily, by nationalizing bank debt, and whilst that calmed the markets, the bottom line is that bank debt was merely being transferred onto the public-sector balance sheets.
The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King perhaps summed it up best when he said:
“Dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough, but at least there were public-sector balance sheets onto which the problems could be moved. Once you move into sovereign debt, there is no answer; there’s no backstop”.
The investors who leapt back into the US markets in 2009 and fueled the biggest stock-market leap since the recovery from the Wall Street Crash in the early 1930s, are now quickly disappearing and the confusion on European bourses is even worse, and we are now in a similar position to that of 2008.
The crunch that is now happening in Europe was foreseen by a great many economists for many years however, because of the difference in approach by Germany and Holland who practice high saving and low spending, and the Mediterranean countries and southern Ireland who have exactly the opposite approach.
The Mediterranean countries and the U.K. too, borrowed cheap in order to raise their standards of living, ignoring the question of whether they could afford to take on so much debt, and that was one of the main causes of the sub-prime disaster.
The Big Danger
Whereas it was possible to bail out sub-prime households, and the banks that lent to them, the International Monetary Fund doesn’t have enough cash to bail out major economies like Spain, Italy or Britain.
The sub-prime property market in the US, together with its slightly less toxic relatives represented a $2 trillion mound of debt, but the combined public and private debt of the most troubled European countries which include Greece, Portugal and Spain is closer to $9 trillion.
If Greek and other government bonds collapse, then that country’s banking system would de facto become insolvent overnight and banks throughout the euro area would be at risk because they hold so much of their neighbors’ government debt.
The Prognosis
It took Britain just a few days in September 2008 for the Government to push through the semi-nationalization of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS, but as politicians are now discovering, organizing a European sovereign bail-out is far, far more difficult than rescuing a bank, or banks.
The euro continues to fall and European politicians who are torn between Brussels and their electorates are emitting confusing signals which only tend to destabilize the markets even further.
The single currency might possibly survive, but only if its members were to agree to an even closer political union, and the likelihood of that happening seems as likely as the survival of the Euro.
