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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Bob Hebert in the NYT:
We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top […]

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Nice piece by Frank Rich on Goldman Sachs, its “blood funnel” (actually Taibbi’s term) - and questions about what Obama actually thinks about all this:
The idea of investing in the real economy — the one that might create jobs for Americans — remains outré in this culture. Credit to small businesses remains tight. The holy […]

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But of course.

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Hm. If this is indeed what’s happening it explains a lot:
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a world in which banks are allowed by their regulators to pretend their default losses simply do not exist.  And, even more outlandishly, some of these banks are allowed to sell heavily damaged loans to their […]

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Taibbi:
I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so f****** what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a […]

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Yay! More people are losing their jobs but not as many as before so all is well! Green shoots! Green shoots!:
The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment insurance has fallen to the lowest level since early January, a sign the labor market is slowly improving.
And consumer price pressures remained mild in September […]

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We have all been here before…
-CSN
Ah, joy. Dow passes 10,000 and I suppose happy days are here again.
But is this sustainable, and is this indicative of a recovery in the real economy? Steven Pearlstein tells us: No.
What we’re witnessing here is pretty simple: another bubble in financial assets. All that “liquidity” created by the Federal […]

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Long but fascinating post over at Naked Capitalism on whether banking actually contributes to the good of society. Yves isn’t talking your local bank branch - she’s talking the finance sector, the Goldmans of the world. She cites a piece by Bill Black laying it all out:
The financial sector functions as the sharp canines that the […]

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Henry VI wanted to go after the lawyers first. Methinks the mortgage lenders ought to get some priority:
Never ones to let an opportunity go unexploited, mortgage lenders are taking advantage of a market fueled by low interest rates and massive government subsidies to turn record profits. Their secret: The return of “junk fees.”
The Mortgage Bankers […]

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