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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I don’t really want to rain on anyone’s parade here - especially because this parade helps pay my salary - but while it’s nice to see that local home sales have rebounded so well, here, as elsewhere, it’s due almost entirely to the $8,000 federal tax credit.
Which means that if we want home sales to […]

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The world according to Goldman Sachs.

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Spent this past Friday night watching PBS’s “The Warning,” and all the other video available online at the PBS site. Just goes to show how exciting my Friday nights are these days…
But - block out a few hours and watch it. All of it. To say it’s enlightening is an understatement; anyone with a soul will […]

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Via Taibbi - Man. Can’t put it here because the language alone will melt your face. But that’s about one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever seen.

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Via Sullivan, David Weigel puts his finger on it:
The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk […]

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Ah-yep:
Sure, not baling out the broke banks would have been a start. It would, however, not have solved the problem, not even close. The libertarian class, of which Paul poses as a great defender, and to which Mike Shedlock is a proud subscriber, claims that the issue is not capitalism or the free market. (After […]

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Taibbi rips Obama and the Democrats. And it’s well-deserved:
We’re coming up on the one- year anniversary of Barack Obama’s election. I think it’s maybe time that we asked ourselves how he’s doing.
He didn’t close Guantanamo Bay, and not only didn’t reject the idea of pre-emptive detention but added spice to his own new version of […]

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Via Calculated Risk - gee, what a great recovery:
The percentage of employee separations labeled permanent is at a recorded high.
Underneath the usual total unemployment numbers are the reasons an individual is unemployed: You are on temporary layoff; you quit your job; you have reentered the labor market and have yet to find a job; or […]

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You know, it’s great that Obama should go after executive salaries at the companies that got bailout funds and all, but what is this really besides a PR move, some populist window dressing to show America that he’s ticked off too?
Yves Smith:
First, recall Feinberg’s hollow mandate. He is limited to only TARP recipients, not the […]

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Unbelievable.
A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.
“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime […]

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Political journalists can be so stupid.
Case in point being this GOPolitico piece on Drudge’s “fascination” with the declining dollar, noting that stories of the greenback’s descent have been all over Drudge this October, and gee, why might that be?
I give you one guess. And to its credit, even GOPolitico figures it out - in the […]

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