Archive for the ‘Wall Street’ Category
June 2nd, 2011 | 
Author: Community Organizer Obama on Republican Economic Theory: “It …
www.thegatewaypundit.com12/7/11
President Obama, in one of his most expansive speeches to date, declared on Tuesday that supply-side economics is a failure and called “gaping inequality” across the country a moral shortcoming that is distorting American …
Obama says economic 'inequality' hurts everyone – CNN Political …
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com12/6/11
(CNN) — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that economic inequality in America is at "a level we haven't seen since the Great Depression" and "hurts us all.
Here are four recent headlines.
“U.S. Manufacturing Growth Slows Substantially!”.
“Housing Imperils Recovery!”.
“Private Sector Added Few Jobs in May!”.
“Moody’s!”.
And they are all very bad news for Obama’s reelection chances in 2012 !
Obama Now Owns The Economy
Jimmy Carter owned the 1980 election-year economy and George H.W. Bush owned the 1992 election-year economy and both were one-term presidents.
Barack Obama however, has seemingly taken ownership of the 2011 economy, a full year and half before he has to face the voters which is great news for the GOP!
Obama’s self-confidence is famously limitless, but is almost certainly founded on vanity and not on facts.
During his hyper-partisan deficit speech at George Washington University in April, Obama raised major expectations of economic seriousness and then somewhat unexpectedly, dropped them over a cliff.
The day before that speech, most of Washington expected Obama to make a major policy statement about the big deficit-reduction debate that was then unfolding, but the president sadly contributed nothing.
Instead he ridiculed and derided the Republican leadership seated before him and with that speech, Mr. Obama effectively kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign, and in so doing politicized the economy.
Whether you agree or disagree with it, Paul Ryan’s budget which was released just one week earlier, was all about policy, and the Republicans were actually offering to take part-ownership of the economy by spending the year in dense discussions about the deficit and spending.
Bad Timing For Obama
Obama’s timing was not good to say the least because Americans are starting to panic about the economy, the persistently high unemployment and persistently weak growth.
Private forecasters have reduced their estimates for economic growth the rest of the year well below the 3%-plus the Federal Reserve predicted in April and the Fed’s 2012 growth forecast runs as high as 4.2% meaning that they must be using high-powered binoculars or telescopes.
The Failed Stimulus Package
The policy most explicitly intended to reboot the economy was 2009′s $814 billion stimulus, plus successive budgets that raised federal spending to 25% of a $14 trillion economy.
But in this year’s first quarter, the economy grew at only1.8% !
And What’s Worse
The housing sector, which is a monumental and intractable mess is choking the economy; and how did the White House respond?
The president allowed (or told) his “adviser” Elizabeth Warren of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to involve banks and mortgage servicers in negotiations over a complex regulatory scheme whose goal is literally, “to fix their business model”.
And Worse
The White House now says the free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea will be delayed absent payouts of more money for “trade adjustment assistance”, which means that unless the Republicans can force a change, that the last two years of uncertainty for trade commitments, will be extended 
Is It Fair To Blame Obama?
Yes it is!
Because the US president made conscious policy choices during a deep recession to vastly reorder vast swaths of American industry and economic growth, like a long gray day, sits still below 3% !!!
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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.
