Hm. Via Ilargi at the Automatic Earth:
On a final note, I wanted to point out Goldman is also shorting a Euro index (betting against that currency) as well as two gold mining companies (Barrick and Agnico Eagle Mines). This indicates that Goldie is bearish on both the euro and gold which hints that Wall Street’s […]

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Capitalism so rocks:
For Citibank credit card holders, there is one way to escape the bank’s rate hikes currently under way: Meet a monthly spending requirement.
Those who meet the spending minimum — in some cases $750 a month — will be able to get a rebate on their total interest charges for that month. The rebate […]

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Via Atrios, here we see a forecast that mortgage foreclosures will peak - peak! - in 2011. Not end by then; peak, as in, the problem will get worse and worse until then.
Aside from causing a ton of personal misery, this is fertile political ground for Republicans. Too bad they’re averse to a populist economic message. If Sarah Palin ever […]

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…also happens in Atlantic City. And there ain’t much happening at all:
It’s that potent one-two punch that has had Las Vegas and Atlantic City reeling all year long: the bad economy and slashed discretionary spending.
But the desert gambling mecca, with more than 150,000 hotel rooms (easily overshadowing Atlantic City’s 17,107) and heavily dependent on convention […]

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Right-wingers are buying gold. It’s advertised all over Glenn Beck’s TV program; a wise investment usually, though the price of gold has skyrocketed as the value of the dollar has fallen in recent months; up to $1,150 per ounce this week, a new high. The dollar is generally expected to keep falling, and with recent […]

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Noting that the national debt has topped $12 trillion (”and make no mistake, that is a disaster,” he writes), John Cole both predicts that right-wingers will “pretend that Obama spent all 12 trillion in the last nine months propping up ACORN and SEIU union thugs” - and issues a challenge:
I would love to hear how […]

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Ilargi on our twisted priorities:
Still, before any of these developments had even started, back in 2008 49.1 million US citizens had trouble finding enough food to eat. That probably means 15-20 million children. And don’t forget that if they could have fed themselves, much of the food would have been of an inferior quality, since […]

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Good piece by Bruce Bartlett:
The only thing holding this country back from having a welfare state as large as Europe’s, conservatives argue, is the low level of taxation that most Americans are loath to abandon. Thus in their own minds, conservatives believe that holding the line on taxes, no matter how large the deficit, is […]

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Via Atrios, Bob Herbert gets it exactly right.
If Democrats get crushed in the 2010 elections, it won’t be because America has suddenly rediscovered its conservative roots! though wingers like Rush and Glenn Beck will certainly claim this. It will because the jobs situation for a huge chunk of the country sucks, and the Democratic Party […]

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Interesting. Krugman has a column today wondering aloud (in print?) why it is that Germany is weathering the downtown so much better than we are:
Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries. Both have suffered a severe recession and lost jobs as a result — but not on the same scale. In Country A, […]

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Krugman slaps down the persistent nonsense that the financial crisis was entirely caused by gub’mint forcing poor innocent banks to loan money to unqualified poor minorities:
The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The […]

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Simply unbelievable.
Employees of Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health standpoint. In particular, Goldman has gotten more than Lenox HIll hospital, which needs it not just for the sick but more important, for workers
Update: More, from Reuters:
New York City […]

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Greed is love, and taking is sharing.
And Jesus would have loved Goldman Sachs!

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Once again.
Another half-million people are out of work! And this is GOOD news!!!
The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits last week fell to the lowest level in 10 months, evidence that job cuts are easing as the economy slowly heals.
Call this Endless Sunshine reporting, happy always. Boost your confidence; ring up those […]

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Via Matt Y., interesting piece over at Ryan Avent’s DC Streestblog on how government policy might actually be bailing out sprawl:
Foreclosures have been concentrated on urban fringes, so federal efforts to modify mortgages and otherwise reduce defaults have tended to direct more aid to exurbs than inner suburbs and city centers. In addition, rates of […]

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Been saying this around here for quite some time; Eliot Spitzer gets it, too:
Imagine this: by next spring, an intellectual consensus will have emerged that the concentration in the banking sector that developed from the 1980s until the crash of ‘08 was misguided. Voices as disparate as Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Bank of England […]

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Ah, joy:
In the wake of the recent financial meltdown, it sounds like a reasonable idea: A proposal granting the White House broad new authority to take over when a failing institution threatens to drag others — perhaps the whole economy — down with it.
Yet that proposal, included as a part of wide-ranging finance reform legislation […]

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Whee! The recession’s over! Except…
Going forward, many analysts expect the pace of the budding recovery to be plodding due to rising unemployment and continuing difficulties by both consumers and businesses to secure loans.
All this focus on “securing loans” - it’s ridiculous. Can’t speak for what businesses are doing but as for consumers - hell, I […]

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Patriot News writes about how your electric bill is going up come January:
To cash-strapped PPL customers, the only aspect of electricity deregulation that will seem important on Jan. 1 will be the 30 percent jump in your bills.
This is a bad time to add more expenses to home budgets already on tilt — yet the […]

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One of conservativism’s greatest failures, and there are many, is its simultaneous insistence on personal responsibility! while at the same time it absolves some folks of all personal responsibility.
As in, the Masters of the Universe.
John Kay makes a point in his Financial Times column that we ought to repeat here every day of the week, […]

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