This shows just how precarious the situation is ....From the webLenders' funding fears see LIBOR rocket to 1%Mortgage StrategyThree-month LIBOR last week rose to 1% for the first time since July 2009 as lenders' funding and liquidity fears deepened on the back of the eurozone crisis. LIBOR has risen from 0.83% since August, steadily increasing the gap between it and the 0.5% base rate, which in normal trading ...Recommended by Google+
Once upon a time the US would have provided this finance..Brazil-China: too close for comfort?It is hard to say no to a trillionaire. That is what Brazil and its oil industry partners are finding as China continually steps up to the plate to provide much-needed capital for the development of g...
The head of China's biggest ratings agency, Dagong Global Credit Rating, is warning that it may downgrade the US's sovereign debt rating again because of Washington's failure to tackle the federal budget deficit. The remarks by Dagong's chairman, Guan Jianzhong, to be broadcast in an interview with al-Jazeera on Saturday morning, come at the end of another week of deep turmoil for the world economy. Dagong, which has maintained a pessimistic outlook on US fiscal policy, has been leading the charge to downgrade US debt over the last 12 months, lowering the US rating from AA to A+ a year ago. http://m.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/12/chins-threatens-us-with-new-debt...
The battle between money and the majority is the story of American politics and has been the central theme of the evolution of American democracy. It starts with the historic deal providing for representation of property or land in the U.S. Senate and representation of people in the House of Representatives. It continues through Dred Scott, slavery, the Suffragettes, the Voting Rights Act, and recent Supreme Court decisions equating the right to spend money with political speech.
The extreme concentration of wealth in the United States is not an accident, but a reflection of our political structure and a strong strain of American ideology and values that idealizes unregulated free enterprise. When the majority of Americans feel they have the chance to better themselves financially and that their children will someday live better than they do, they support the ideal of unregulated capitalism. When that hope disappears, the majority moves in the other direction, and we see politics like the New Deal and what I think will soon resume here in America.
The role of money in politics is not always obvious and is often quite subtle. Political scientists sometimes call this non-decision making the ability to keep issues off of the political agenda. For example, we see a concerted effort to delegitimize regulation. Politicos with their hands out for corporate donations keep talking about "job killing regulations." They are so effective that even our once "hopeful" President goes along and kills air pollution regulations that he knows create rather than destroy jobs. The impact of money in this case is that it sets the agenda and defines the issue of regulation in ways that benefit the short-term interest of a few wealthy interests. According to this definition, regulation is anti-freedom. You could say the same thing about traffic lights, but most of us are happy to comply with them.
Americans are being told they get the same choice that is offered to impoverished Chinese workers. You get a job, but the river turns orange, the air is toxic, and your family may get sick. But maybe one of your children will thrive and go to college. We in America already lived through that. Our rivers caught fire. The cars in Pittsburgh were once coated in orange dust every morning and taxpayers have spent over a trillion dollars in health care and toxic waste clean-up costs in the aftermath of America's toxic mess. The factories moved out anyway- not because of "job killing regulations" but because of cheaper labor and the opportunity to build newer, more competitive plants overseas.
While the deck is stacked against the majority, the rules still allow everyone to have a voice. Sometimes that voice acts in ways that money doesn't understand and can't control. Both rich and ordinary folks have made lots of money off of social media, the internet and cell phones, but it also turns out those technologies make it easier and far cheaper to organize political demonstrations. When my friends and I protested against the Vietnam War forty years ago, we lugged boxes of printed filers on the subway back to Brooklyn from print shops on the west side of Manhattan. Today, protestors just set up a Facebook page and email their "friends." Barack Obama raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small campaign donations through a viral internet campaign that required little purchase of expensive advertising time.
Today we may be seeing the start of a new mass political movement in protests in New York and Boston. While the message is not going out without distortion by the corporate funded mass media, the protestors on Wall Street and on the Brooklyn Bridge are getting their message out about the extreme concentration of wealth and the decline of opportunity. The smarter elected officials like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recognize the danger of a nation without economic opportunity for its young people. Last month on his radio show he observed that:
"You have a lot of kids graduating college who can't find jobs. That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."When faced with demonstrations here in New York last weekend, Mayor Bloomberg took the interesting approach of arguing that the protestors were attacking the wrong target, trying to pretend that they were attacking the typical Wall Street office worker. That is of course nonsense. The protests are acts of symbolic political speech. They are the low-cost way of getting the message of economic distress and injustice on the political agenda. Modern communications technology makes them difficult to stop. But it is also difficult for the protestors to control how their message is disseminated to the American public through the mass media.
The voices promoting unregulated capitalism dominate the airwaves as they argue for the end of the social safety net begun during FDR's time. While conservatives advocate for the elimination of government programs and regulation, other voices are starting to be heard as well. Unlike the Tea Party, these other voices do not have the advantage of being amplified by the corporate funded mass media and elected officials. But they have the advantage of grass roots legitimacy.
It is actually the message of FDR that the wealthy in this nation ought to be remembering. Roosevelt was considered a "traitor to his class" for proposing the New Deal. However, he understood that unregulated free enterprise without a safety net for the less fortunate could not survive. Obviously, the New Deal did not kill America's free enterprise system, it saved it. The advantages of free enterprise were obvious to Roosevelt and they are obvious today. The technology that today's protestors rely on are products of a global economic system that combines public resources with private entrepreneurship. The food we all eat comes from the same source. We need the productivity and creativity of private enterprise and the profit motive. But we also need the long-term perspective, protection, and safety that typically comes from the public sector. We need a well-balanced, well-managed mixed economy. We need to avoid both unregulated corporations and unresponsive, rule-laden governments.
The American public is used to economic growth and opportunity. The global challenges of emerging economies and sustainable development require new thinking if America is to thrive. I think President Obama's broad support in 2008 came from people who sensed the need for such a new approach and hoped that he might be the transformative figure that FDR was in the 1930s. The roots of the Tea Party and of the protests in Lower Manhattan can be found in our collective disappointment that such a transformation was never even tried. Someone should tell the President that it's not too late to start.
Follow Steven Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earthinstitute
Canon's S95 was our favorite pocket camera. Um, it's probably not anymore. Meet the S100. What's new? Oh, Canon's first Digic V processor. A wider 24mm zoom lens. A 12-megapixel CMOS sensor (up from a 10MP CCD). 1080p video. And GPS built-in
Since the return of convertibility among the currencies of most major industrial countries at the beginning of 1959, a crisis affecting at least one major currency has threatened each year; the U.S. balance of payments has been in continuous large deficit; and the stability of the convertible gold-dollar and sterling system has been increasingly questioned. With the transition to convertibility proving to be so turbulent, doubts have arisen over the adequacy of liquidity arrangements for the future and calls for a great reform of the international monetary system have quite understandably been intensified.
Since QE2 ended today (and they are still proceeding with zero Fed Funds Rate and reinvestment of MBS and Agency Bond principal payments into Treasuries), the wisdom is the there will be NO QE3.
Yes, probably for July. But I predict that QE3 will be coming shortly. Why? Who wants to buy our debt when The Fed (more specifically, The Fed on New York) stops buying it?
Greece will ultimately default, despite votes for austerity. It’s just a waiting game. Like the James Bond movie, “Die Another Day,” Greece’s Parliament, the ECB, the IMF and others are simply stalling on Greece’s economic death. Along with other peripheral members of the European Union. The collapse of Europe will send money our way — as long as we as the reserve currency for the world.
But China wants to be the Global Reserve Currency, or at least another reserve currency. Why, because China is facing a hard landing because loan losses are huge and growing. Those phantom cities are expensive and don’t generate a heap of rental income to cover debt service. So, China is against a hard wall in terms of THEIR debt issuance. Again, the world will come to us since there isn’t a lot of love for China’s reckless spending policies.
I am guessing that we won’t see a surge in non-Fed Treasuries purchases. So either Treasury will have to offer HIGHER interest rates on their bonds (might be explain Geithner’s hints at leaving as Treasury Secretary), or the Fed will step in and do QE3. We will be watching closely over the summer.
So, either Treasury rates will rise or The Fed will set sail on QE3. Take your pick.
Ex-President Bill Clinton, the architect of the massive surge in mortgage financing through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which ultimately blew up) is now offering his opinions on how to clean up the mess that he helped create. Austerity? Tighten your belts? Move to less expensive rental property? Nope. He is suggesting that Bank of America (and other banks) write down principal on mortgage loans.
Of course, Clinton is not alone. A number of advocates exist for massive principal write downs (including Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of Columbia University and Laurie Goodman of Amherst Securities). They have mixed motivations (including saving second liens for hedge funds), but the question I always have is the same one: WHO pays for the principal write downs?
Answer: The American taxpayer. That is why Ed DeMarco of FHFA (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s Regulator) is against principal reductions. It is VERY expensive with no clear evidence that it would work. And it would create a “Fool’s Gold” Rush of borrower’s threatening to default on their mortgage. Throw in the massive borrower fraud problem and you have a fiasco on your hands.
Then again, President Clinton didn’t foresee the fiasco that he pushed into motion with Fannie, Freddie and the Affordable Housing Mandates. So, why would he correctly foresee the fiasco of pushing Bank of America or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into making principal reductions.
Imagine the amount of Tier 1 capital that banks would have to raise to meet the demands for principal reductions? Hint: look at the difficulty Treasury is having issuing debt. Suppose that a run on principal write downs leads to systemic bank failure because the banks can’t handle the requests?
President Clinton, stick to the Clinton Foundation. If the Foundation wants to fund principal reductions, that would be fantastic. Otherwise, stick to whatever else you do. Your housing policies were ultimately devastating.
The chummy pow wow between Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany this week seemed like all peas and gravy. Fourteen economic deals? Great. Twenty-two cooperation agreements? Even better. Any business is good business in a fragile global economy, right? Not so much. Growing ties between Beijing and Berlin don't all bode well for the U.S., not to mention greater Europe.
For their part, Europeans fear China is taking over their continent by buying its way in. China's recent purchases of Spanish and Greek bonds, for instance, have made it the flailing eurozone's lender of last resort. China's interests are clear: a surviving euro fuels demand for Chinese goods and allows China to diversify its massive dollar holdings. All the better for Germany. China's "bond diplomacy" toward Greece is a godsend for Greek-debt-laden German banks that fear a Greek default.
As Europe's ringleader, Germany could express its gratitude by softening its stance towards China on trade, the environment, and human rights. For example, China wants the EU to designate it a "market economy" within the WTO, which would make trade disputes against China more difficult, a demand the EU has so far resisted. Germany is also vying for the EU to drop its long-held arms embargo with China, a move the U.S. has long opposed.
Ultimately, growing trade ties to China could pull Berlin away from the West. As Marcus Walker argues in the Wall Street Journal this week: "When you've carved out a lucrative niche selling precision machinery and luxury cars to fast-growing emerging economies such as China, who needs stodgy old Europe?" There are already small signs of Germany peeling away. Germany sided with China and Russia in abstaining from NATO's Libya intervention, and it has walked away from the ailing eurozone on numerous occasions.
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Greece's current debt problems were created by government officials who used underhanded financial mechanisms to hide the size of the nation's debt and exposure to risky assets from their foreign creditors. Once these problems were revealed, the Greek economy began an endless downward spiral.
In order to protect its own banks from exposure to debts in Greece and other fiscally struggling nations, the European Central Bank created the European Stability Fund to provide bailouts. But these payments are conditional on recipient nations adopting very stiff austerity policies.
The latest round of Greek austerity measures is meeting with violent resistance on the nation's streets. The next vote could support or sink the entire bailout enterprise, with potentially huge consequences for the ECB's financial sectors and the survival of the euro.
There is a limit to how much taxpayers can bear... that limit gets ever closer
Mired in excruciating negotiations over the budget and the debt ceiling, President Barack Obama
might reflect that things didn't have to turn out this way. The impasse grows mainly out of one major decision he made early on: pushing through a giant stimulus.
When he took office in January 2009, this was his first priority. The following month, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with a price tag eventually put at $862 billion.
It was, he said at the time, the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history," and would "create or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years."
The president was right about the first claim. As a share of gross domestic output, it was the largest fiscal stimulus program ever tried in this country. But the second claim doesn't stand up so well. Today, total nonfarm employment is down by more than a million jobs.
What Obama didn't foresee is that his program would spark a populist backlash and give rise to the tea party. Where would Michele Bachmann
To say it has not been is to understate the obvious. The administration says the results look meager because the economy was weaker than anyone realized. Maybe so, but fiscal policy is a clumsy and uncertain tool for stimulating growth, which the past two years have not vindicated.
Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we’ve seen before. One significant component is a continuous scroll called “the stream” that’s an alternative to Facebook’s news feed — a hub of personalized content. It has a companion called “Sparks,” related to one’s specified interests. Together they are designed to be a primary attention-suck of Google users. Google hopes that eventually people will gravitate to the stream in the same way that members of Facebook or Twitter constantly check those continuous scrolls of personalized information.
The second important app is Circles, an improved way to share information with one’s friends, family, contacts and the public at large. It’s an management tool that’s a necessary component of any social network — a way to organize (and recruit) fellow members of the service.
But as I learned in almost year of following the project’s development, with multiple interviews with the team and its executives, Google+ is not a typical release. Developed under the code name Emerald Sea, it is the result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company’s products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.
The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. In an approach the company refers to as “rolling thunder,” Google has been quietly been pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy — there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren’t ruffled at all — lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.
They're back.
In the past few months, it appears, shadow banks, financial firms that make loans but aren't actual banks, seem to be making a come back. In case you have forgotten about these things already, shadow banks are financial firms, like hedge funds or money market funds or even insurance companies, that aren't real banks - no deposits, no branches, no ATMs - but make loans nonetheless. And, oh yeah, they might have caused the financial crisis.
Paul Krugman said, shortly after the financial crisis was over, that one of the main things financial reform must do was to bring "non-bank banking out of the shadows." But Dodd-Frank, according to some recent reports, is doing exactly the opposite. Here's why:
Earlier this month, the NYT's Dealbook reported that a number of start-ups were turning to hedge funds to get loans after being rejected by their bank. The company in the article Rentech, which is in the clean energy business, got $100 million loan from a hedge fund. The NYT says the business was moving to hedge funds because banks were worried about making risky loans. But an article in Financial Times today puts the revival of shawdow banking square at the feet of Dodd-Frank.
Many believe, along with Wes Edens, founder of Fortress Investment Group, that this is the golden age of non-bank financial companies; a lot of smaller companies and individuals need credit but rather than do it through banks hamstrung by regulation, they can provide it far more profitably and flexibly through non-banks.
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Greece's government faces an electorate vehemently opposed to austerity measures which must be passed in Parliament next week to avert default, but progress is being made in persuading banks to take part in a second bailout.
An opinion poll on Friday put Greece's conservative opposition -- which is refusing to support the plan -- 2.1 points ahead of Prime Minister George Papandreou's PASOK party and showed three quarters of Greeks were opposed to the raft of tax hikes and spending cuts that will hit them hard.
European Union leaders meeting in Brussels promised more money to help Greece stave off looming bankruptcy, provided its Parliament enacts the debt-cutting plan, finalised in fraught last-minute talks with international lenders.
"We have agreed that there will be a new programme for Greece on which the Greek Parliament will have to vote next week," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters at an EU summit in Brussels.
If Parliament does not pass the measures, the EU and International Monetary Fund have said they will not release a vital €12-billion funding tranche and Athens will run out of cash within days.
Papandreou, who won a confidence vote this week with 155 votes in the 300-strong Parliament, has ditched his former finance minister and appointed party rival Evangelos Venizelos to sell the five-year plan to his party and a sceptical public.
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-06-24-athens-struggles-to-win-backing-for-austerity-plan/
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Stelios, a 28-year-old electrician, has been spending several evenings a week at a tent camp outside the Greek parliament run by Indignant Citizens, a new protest movement. He joins hundreds of others attending a self-styled “popular assembly” – a nightly open-microphone event at which Greeks vent their anxieties and frustrations with the country’s disastrous economic and political situation.
“I’m lucky because I’m still in work,” he says. “But my mother’s pension was cut last year and she’s struggling. It’s a relief to get out there and discuss stuff – and maybe the protest will help make things less bad.”
In addition to promoting public debate, the Indignants have succeeded in reducing violence at demonstrations by chasing off hooded extremists who mingle with marchers and trigger clashes with riot police. They have even scrubbed the tarmac around the square to remove the chemical residue left by tear gas. But Stelios admits the protesters’ chances of persuading MPs to vote down a €28bn ($40bn) austerity package are slim. “Greece is broke – we need the money, so the European Union and the International Monetary Fund hold all the cards,” he says.
If the package is rejected, George Papandreou, the prime minister, will have to call a snap election. Greece would not receive a €12bn loan tranche due in July and would risk defaulting on repayments of principal and interest on its debt.
With various states debating measures to elevate the monetary status of gold, the gold standard is more politically relevant now than it has been in decades. When the LA Times (to pick just one example) runs an article stating matter-of-factly that "economists" uniformly oppose gold, you know the defenders of the current system are getting nervous.
Precisely because a gold standard is such a hot topic lately, it's important for people to understand its rationale. In the present article I'll try to clear up a few misconceptions.
Last night (June 11th) the popular assembly of Syntagma square announced a call to blockade the Greek parliament ahead of the voting of the so-called Mid-term agreement between the Greek government and the troika (IMF/ECB/EU). The new agreement includes wild tax increases, the further slashing of wages and pensions and the lay-off of approximately more 100,000 civil servants in the next few years.
The call-out for the blockade below is one of the most important acts we have seen by the Syntagma assembly so far. June 15th is gearing up to become a historical day in Greece, a crucial chance to block off the charge-ahead of neoliberalism here.
Don’t be a spectator to this – translate and disseminate the text below; organise a gathering where you are, or come join us at Syntagma. This is the struggle for and of our lives.
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Even after at least 1,300 deaths and more than 10,000 detentions, according to human rights groups, "selmiyyeh" still resounds on Syrian streets. It's obvious why protest organizers want to keep it that way. Controlling the big guns and fielding the best-trained fighters, the regime would emerge victorious from any pitched battle. Oppositional violence, moreover, would alienate those constituencies the uprising is working so hard to win over: the upper-middle class, religious minorities, the stability-firsters. It would push the uprising off the moral high ground and thereby relieve international pressure against the regime. It would also serve regime propaganda, which against all evidence portrays the unarmed protesters as highly organized groups of armed infiltrators and Salafi terrorists.
The regime is exaggerating the numbers, but soldiers are undoubtedly being killed. Firm evidence is lost in the fog, but there are reliable and consistent reports, backed by YouTube
International Monetary Fund lending to Greece has already blown away any previous borrowing records based on country contributions to the world’s last-chance bank.
That fact, along with the increasing likelihood the IMF will lend the failed economy even more cash and hasn’t required talks with private creditors, is underscoring concerns by emerging markets that the fund favors rich countries and may further undermine the bank’s perceived legitimacy.
The IMF says the extraordinary lending is not just to save Greece, but the world economy. “Our programs are designed to of course support an individual country so that they can restore financial stability, but the goal is to support the global international system,” said fund spokeswoman Caroline Atkinson.
IMF officials say the risk of European contagion is ring-fenced. But economists say the sheer size of the loan compared to Greece’s contribution to the fund, called its quota, indicates how scared the IMF is about Greece’s failure affecting the euro zone.
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