Quoting the Crisis23/11/2009
Quote posted at 17:58
21/11/2009
Christopher Taylor, former executive director of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board in Alexandria, Virginia, quoted by Dunstan McNichol in Goldman Sachs Still Paid for Swaps on Redeemed Bonds (Update2) - Bloomberg.com
Quote posted at 21:08
Edward Harrison in Food insecurity in America skyrockets « naked capitalism
Quote posted at 09:00
20/11/2009
Caitlin Kenney in Mortgage Defaults Hitting Record Highs - Planet Money Blog : NPR
Quote posted at 22:47
Chris McGreal in Record numbers go hungry in households in the US | World news | guardian.co.uk
Quote posted at 20:46
It may be the world’s richest nation, but the US is no stranger to startling poverty. A new report from the US Department of Agriculture says that food insecurity is the highest in America since the survey began.
Food insecurity - defined by the USDA as when “food intake … was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food” - afflicted 14.6% of Americans in 2008. Ie, some 50 million people were too poor to guarantee being able to put food on the table.
„Simon Rogers in Hungry America: food insecurity, state by state | News | guardian.co.uk
Quote posted at 14:46
19/11/2009
» UC expected to raise student fees 32%
Regents are expected to approve yet another increase, arguing it’s needed to avoid further course reductions and staff furloughs. The plan draws statewide protests. Police arrest 14 at UCLA.
If they cut the salaries of higher level administrators across the board, including Pres. Mark Yudof (I thought the name was familiar—he used to work at UT) who makes over $900,000/year in pay and benefits, it would seriously help to fend off further furloughs and course cuts. You could cut Yudof’s salary alone by half and save the UC system almost half a million dollars. This site lists the salaries just of the chancellors of the various schools within the UC system. Not only have the salaries of administrators increased at a rate far beyond that of inflation, but the “perks” that go along with these salaries have increased as well. And by perks, I mean things like $125,000 relocation bonuses to move 70 miles.
Higher education “executives” (they used to be simply called administrators) have increasingly begun to use the universities as their own personal piggy banks, and this phenomenon is hardly limited to the UC system. I know how outraged I was when, year after year, tuition went up because the university supposedly couldn’t pay its professors or electricity bills or what have you, but on the coattails of these massive tuition hikes, there was often a pay raise included for administrators.
Public universities raised presidents’ pay an average of 7.6% in 2008. Tuition at public universities raised in kind: an average of 7.6%. When students are being told that these annual tuition increases that add hundreds of dollars to their bills every month are necessary to keeping university doors open, it seems unconscionable that the salaries and benefits packages of “executives” and higher level admins continues to go up.
But they do.
Humorously, the UC “executives” argued that their 5% pay cuts were helping them “share the pain” with their other employees and students. Nevermind that some employees experienced up to 10% pay cuts on far smaller salaries. Nevermind that they continue to jack up tuition prices on their students.
It’s offensive. I’m glad those students were out there protesting. More of us should be doing the same, if we are interested in seeing higher education become more affordable and reducing the absurd amount of debt so many students leave school with.
Link posted at 21:35
18/11/2009
Donald Tsang, chief executive of the city of Singapore, quoted by Christopher Anstey and Michael Dwyer in Fed May Cause Next Crisis, Hong Kong’s Tsang Suggests (Update2) - Bloomberg.com
Quote posted at 17:06
Mitchell Bean, director of the Michigan House Fiscal Agency, quoted by Sara Murray in State Finance Directors Warn of More Trouble Ahead - WSJ.com
Quote posted at 15:03
17/11/2009
The authorities are completely responsible for the messes on two different fronts that intersect to create monetary policy dilemma. Going below 2% for Fed funds was a huge error (well maybe you could justify 1% as a very short term expedient), but the Fed is now painted in a corner. But second, and the much bigger issue, is that (as everyone can see) all this cheap money is not going into the real economy. A few very high quality borrowers are getting good rates; everyone else finds credit scarce and costly. So spreads are higher than before, and even absolute rates are often higher expect in markets like mortgages where the Fed has intervened.
Now some readers will correctly say that overly loose lending is what created the problem, and we need to undo that, but they are conflating two issues. Tightening up on WHO gets credit and HOW MUCH they get is separate from pricing. If this was mere improved standards, you’d expect to see more discrimination within various types of borrowers. But instead, across entire swathes of borrowers, particularly consumers and small businesses, banks have simply turned off the spigot. This has little to do with a return to prudent practices. In fact, it illustrates a real cancer: that across consumers and many small business owners, old-fashioned multi-variable decision-making (which included some verification of income) has been replaced by heavily or entirely FICO based systems. Those systems failed utterly. But they were cheap to operate, banks have no intention of reverting to earlier, more costly approaches. So we have a credit assessment process that is broken, but no one wants to admit it.
„Yves Smith in China Lambastes Dollar “Carry Trade,” Diverting Attention from Its Currency Manipulation « naked capitalism
Quote posted at 22:51
Yves Smith in Krugman on the Need for Jobs Policies « naked capitalism
Quote posted at 11:02
Germany’s jobs miracle hasn’t received much attention in this country — but it’s real, it’s striking, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. government is doing the right things to fight unemployment.
Here in America, the philosophy behind jobs policy can be summarized as “if you grow it, they will come.” That is, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy. The theory is that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring.
„Paul Krugman in Op-Ed Columnist - Free to Lose - NYTimes.com
Quote posted at 09:02
16/11/2009
If Michael is going to make crap products he should at least be making them in the USA
{Michael Dell comes in the room}
Me: “Now Michael, I have a hard enough time accepting what a pile of crap your company has become. I think I’ve spent about 3 years too many buying your garbage before I finally realized that you suck. Anyway, my main beef is, if Michael is going to make crap products he should at least be making them in the USA and bringing back manufacturing jobs.”
Premier Hu: {Spitting out water} “What..you can’t do that. It would not be in the spirit of free trade!”
Me: “Yeah, well the way we see it in the USA is the last thirty years has just been a huge mistake. We convinced ourselves, including yours truly, that we could let all our manufacturing jobs go because we were replacing them with ‘Service’ jobs. Besides emptying bedpans and working at McDonalds the service economy was in large part a huge mirage. Most of the stuff we were ‘servicing’ was a bunch of bull-sh*t financial products that built an entire industry around themselves. That’s gone now and we need our manufacturing base back. Therefore, I am going to give Michael here, along with our other companies that actually make tangible things, huge tax breaks to move a good amount of their production back to the USA.”
Dell: “But Mr. President, you would have to give us a tax REBATE to equalize the cost of producing our products in America as opposed to China!”
Premire Hu: “And if you moved millions of manufacturing jobs out of China you would cost us millions of jobs!”
Me: “Well gentlemen, the way I see it is, Dell, maybe it will cost you, with the tax break, 30% more to produce your computers that don’t turn on when you buy them. But sh*t Mike, if we don’t produce real jobs in the USA who the hell is going to buy your products? You may have to raise prices some and eat into your profit margins, but in the long run it beats the alternative.
— excerpt from What I Would Tell Premier Hu If I Were President by Eric Salzman
Text posted at 21:31
Nouriel Roubini in RGE - The Worst is yet to Come: Unemployed Americans Should Hunker Down for More Job Losses
Quote posted at 19:17
15/11/2009
Dennis Kucinich (via afghanibanani) (via opparaics) (via robot-heart-politics)
Quote posted at 09:00
