fasten your seatbelts its gonna be a bumpy ride

at a receent speech Atlanta Fed Vice President and Senior Economist John Robertson commented about the report, " NFIB small business economic trends"

http://www.nfib.com/Portals/0/PDF/sbet/SBET200911.pdf

looking at that report and capital outlays and inventories current and projected

pages 16-18

robertson's optimism is not supported

the data and graphs indicate over supply and lack of demand

small businesses responding to the survey not expecting much change too soon

heres my take

we, as a country embarked upon a supply side strategy more than a quarter century ago

im not arguing that supply side or demand side, is either, better than the other..both have their place

but this is what we get when we go all the way down the road to the bitter end following any one paradigm

supply side taken to the limit leaves us with declining wages, declining prices (until the dollar is destroyed then... we go stagflation

and ebbing demand, leaving the BRIC countries to fill in the void

and wasnt that the plan all along...hahahaha

fasten your seat belts its gonna be a bumpy nite

(as bette davis said)

YouTube
- Fasten Your Seatbelts

phill gramm wanted for gutting the fire department

Basel Too wrote

"phil gramm has a somewhat valid argument. most of the institutions that have failed, or under government conservatorship, participated in activities that would have been allowed irrespective of GLBA.

----

basel that is total nonsense

"theGramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies to consolidate."*

ie travelers and citigroup one of the biggest infestations out there!

this multiplied counter party risk and systemic risk

"Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued that the Act helped to create the crisis in an article in The Nation has made the same argument."

"Contrary to Phil Gramm's claim that "GLB didn't deregulate anything" (see Defense), the GLB Act that he co-authored explicitly exempted security-based swap agreements (a derivative financial product based on another security's value or performance) from regulation by the SEC by amending the Securities Act of 1933, Section 2A, and similarly the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Section 3A,"*

didnt you watch the warning re brooksley born two weeks ago on frontline....sheesh

*quotes are from wikipedia GLBA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bliley_Act

sorry hommie

but i gotta call BULL SHIT on this claim

blaming clinton for demise of glass steagall

a friend wrote today, lamenting the re blowing of the financial bubble, saying,
"If you could pin this bubble on one event (besides the Bill Clinton repeal of the 1934 banking reform act)...it would be...911."

i chose to ignore the 911 comment as obviously silly, but blaming bill has credence in the world of wing nuts so i responded:

its so kind of you to give bill clinton the credit

especially since the glass steagal act had been violated for years before clinton signed the gramm leach bliley act

by the way

the senate vote overturning glass steagall, was 92 to 2 with 6 abstaining

not much room for a veto there

besides, this was around the time clinton was being tried by the senate on charges of impeachment for lying about a stain on a blue dress

but .hey its ok, give all the credit to bill

im sure he could use the love

but please...remember the travelers-citi merger happened, with fed approval,BEFORE GLASS STEAGAL.. the law was dead before it hit the ground thanks to greenspan

and all the "i hate regulation" crowd was there to make it so cause you know clinton couldnt have done it alone.

remember phill and windy gramm...the banksta whores who brought this to our doorstep

im ok with you blaming bill clinton...i do too... for a lot

but you do him too much honor to give him so much credit. :)

is the fed driving the equities market?

i visited and read a post at information arbitrage

regarding the article

"barking up the wrong tree"

the authors defense of the equities market made no sense to me and i submitted comments

which may or may not get posted on the site

pending administrative "approval"

where i quired the author as follows:

you seem to be claiming that equity markets are level, open and fair

furthermore you separate these markets from what you see to be more egregious behavior committed in other markets

would you please responds to 3 of my concerns

do you see any evidence that major brokerage firms making big profits by front running the buy and sell orders of their clients? for example goldman seems to have generated a plus 90% success rate in playing the market during Q3...a mathematically extraordinary event!

consumers who are 70% of the economy are tapped out, no longer can get much in the way of home equity lines of credit, and are paying down debt and saving and in general consumers are pulling way back and yet the stock market booms while P/E ratios are way up over 125...does the fed use primary dealers to indirectly enter the equity markets and effect the market price of individual stocks and even entire sectors of the market such as banking? how can the equity market moves of the past 6 months be justified?

even without a "pecora commission" there is evidence that the price of lehman stock was destoyed by people who purchased credit default swaps against lehmans demise an then those same people drove the stock down with naked short selling...is this you idea of a fair and balanced equities market? or do you dispute this happened?

thanks in advance for your responses
best wishes
mock turtle

flip of the coin

i was asked if i thought the price of gold might be bubblelicious right now

here was my answer

go to kitco.com

scroll down till you see the graph of one year gold on the right side

click just below that, on the 5 year graph link

check out the slope and decide ,

given what you know about inflation 3 or 4 years ago

and present destruction of the US dollar

whether or not things look frothy

then ask yourself why india and china are accumulating gold

and what the end of us dollar hegemony might mean

finally... to help you decide

flip a coin...

preferable a gold coin if you have one...... Smile

nouriel warns of the dollar snap back

Fri, 11/06/2009 - 11:46
#122558

dr doom is one of my favorite characters in this nightmare we call reality

he sounded the warning along with other notables

but lately he has been sounding a warning about a collapse in the dollar carry trade...the fall of a commodities bubble and a snap back of the dollar??? what?

...dollar "snap" back...look im not half as smart as roubini so who am i to say

but

hey, how the hell is the USD gonna snap back when the fed and the whitehouse and congress are pumpin like a teenage boy into his hat at a porno theater

is the fed gonna liquidate its portfolio of ABS (that big bag of mark to model crap)

and , or is the fed gonna soak up liquidity with reverse repos...or raise the fed funds rate...or stop supporting treasuries?

some combination of those actions, for the foreseeable future, would smash this country to pieces like a wooden row boat onto the rocks of the portland lighthouse in a gale

and in the midst of the deepest recession since the GD what commodity bubble does nouriel have in mind

no doubt gold, oil and a host of other flight to safety commodities will rise, some dramatically...and then fall...but i think (guess) the rise aint done risin and the fall is even farther away

ffedresrv

bank of the united states of america

a concept ive been arguing for on these pages for almost two years

i found this excellent contribution at yves smiths site, naked capitalism

here is the direct link to the author...an excellent argument for ending the federal reserve

Washington's Blog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/