tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62767432009-11-20T16:34:19.530-05:00Truth, Justice, Liberty, Humanity . . . .Dhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13359188353648713239noreply@blogger.comBlogger1860125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-74000222644813963922009-11-16T17:44:00.007-05:002009-11-16T19:57:12.991-05:00

Amigo can you spare a peso?Sirenia Avendano wept as she spoke of sending money to her sons in the United States. NY Times:Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives -- MIAHUATLÁN, Mexico — During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these,

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-39193755650747732312009-11-09T13:14:00.005-05:002009-11-09T13:32:08.191-05:00

Items of Interest:Times of London:I'm doing 'God's work'. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs -- Number 85 Broad Street, a dull, rust-coloured office block in lower Manhattan, doesn’t look like a place to stop and stare, and that’s just the way the people who work there like it. The men and women who arrive in the watery dawn sunshine, dressed in Wall Street black, clutching black briefcases and BlackBerrys,

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-79272147517161906612009-11-06T01:38:00.002-05:002009-11-06T01:43:42.872-05:00

Directors: William Hanna & Joseph BarberaRelease Date: 25 February 1948Genre: Animation/Short

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-30809042794401183472009-10-31T23:59:00.002-04:002009-11-01T01:08:34.559-04:00

Financial Times:Banking with Bird & Fortune [full 10 min video] via Calculate Risk

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-29688856992291982372009-10-26T00:11:00.005-04:002009-10-26T12:47:25.207-04:00

Items of Interest:James Howard Kunstler:Marching Toward Zombieland --The sense that Wall Street has pulled off a coup d'etat and taken over the machinery of the United States is the most powerful meme out there now, and its power is growing in magnitude every day among all classes of Americans...----The Mess That Greenspan Made:More reasons to hate big banks --numerous people who have been

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-26158347741970926562009-10-20T00:01:00.002-04:002009-10-20T00:35:12.489-04:00

Items of Interest:Wall Street Journal:Employers Hold Off on Hiring -- Companies across the economy are holding off on hiring even as the profit outlook improves, amid economic uncertainty and their own success at raising productivity in rough waters.Hiring always lags behind in economic recoveries, but the outlook this time is worse, many economists say. Most forecasters now expect a prolonged

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-63276222023297432552009-10-15T00:49:00.002-04:002009-10-15T01:00:53.561-04:00

Items of Interest:Arizona Republic:Experts: Plummeting prices have rendered condos nearly worthless -- New federal loan-guarantee rules imposed to fend off future government losses from plummeting condominium prices have rendered condos utterly worthless, Valley real-estate experts said.The Federal Housing Administration rules, which took effect Oct. 1, prohibit any new FHA-backed loans on condo

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-40029550388182478252009-10-12T23:19:00.000-04:002009-10-13T01:46:47.086-04:00

Items of Interest:Zero Hedge:Goldman Increases Ten Year Deficit Estimate To $10.5 From $9 Trillion, Sees Output Gap At 10% -- A comprehensive analysis by Goldman Sachs of the long-term US economic forecast discloses some rather unexpected pessimistic observations.Last week the US Treasury closed the books on fiscal year (FY) 2009, a year that will go down as a gamechanger in modern US budget

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-91836804294978135152009-10-02T22:51:00.008-04:002009-10-03T10:38:41.796-04:00

Items of Interest:Bloomberg:U.S. Job Losses May Be Even Larger, Model Breaks Down -- The U.S. economic slump earlier this year was so severe it short-circuited the government’s model for calculating payrolls, raising the risk that today’s jobs report may be too optimistic. About 824,000 more jobs may be subtracted from the payroll count for the 12 months through last March when the figures are

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-754800344112291772009-09-27T12:28:00.006-04:002009-09-28T21:19:34.348-04:00

Items of Interest:Ambrose Evans-Pritchard / Telegraph.co.uk:Money figures show there's trouble ahead -- Private credit is contracting on both sides of the Atlantic. The M3 money data is flashing early warning signals of a deflation crisis next year in nearly half the world economy. Emergency schemes that have propped up spending are being withdrawn, gently or otherwise...Western central banks

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-53264151961487112242009-09-17T12:45:00.005-04:002009-09-17T15:44:23.607-04:00

Items of interest:More evidence the world’s creatures are just waiting to feast on you.DiscoveryOn.com:Rare tongue-eating parasite found -- A rare parasite which burrows into host fish before eating and replacing their tongues with itself has been found off the Jersey coast.Fishermen near the Minquiers - islands under the jurisdiction of Jersey - found the isopod, a type of louse, inside a weaver

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-26209615938551364512009-09-10T10:44:00.005-04:002009-09-10T15:36:24.994-04:00

Items of Interest:American Banking News:Proposed Debit Card Regulations Could Cause 1,000 Banks and 2,000 Credit Unions to Fail -- Proposed legislation by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) would require notice be given to customers at the ATM or point-of-sale terminal when a purchase is about to trigger an overdraft – and would give consumers at the transaction point a choice of whether to accept or

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-15395883921400518182009-09-05T08:30:00.006-04:002009-09-05T08:52:24.469-04:00

Some light end of summer reading.Cecchetti, Kohler & Upper / Bank for International Settlements:Financial Crises and Economic Activity [36 page .pdf]-- Abstract:This paper studies the length, depth and output costs of a sample of 40 systemic banking crises in 35 countries since 1980 to assess the likely real impact of the current crisis. Most, but not all, systemic banking crises in our sample

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-3543059937481615262009-08-27T09:02:00.006-04:002009-08-27T10:44:38.532-04:00

The new world order is becoming infected with parasitic anarchists.Minyanville:Anarchists Give Wealthy a Run for Their Money -- One a night, almost every night, for six months.This is the pattern Berlin police have been following since the spring in a bizarre series of arsonist attacks on area luxury vehicles, particularly Mercedes (DAI), BMWs, and Porsches.With 170 luxury vehicles reduced to

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-23324380472348161202009-08-24T14:44:00.009-04:002009-08-24T23:45:37.775-04:00

Goldman Sachs has perfected the art of front-running and cheating the investing public.Susanne Craig / Wall Street Journal:Goldman's Trading Tips Reward Its Biggest Clients -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. research analyst Marc Irizarry's published rating on mutual-fund manager Janus Capital Group Inc. was a lackluster "neutral" in early April 2008. But at an internal meeting that month, the analyst

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-73075023657906564392009-08-13T08:23:00.003-04:002009-08-13T09:38:24.852-04:00

Items of Interest:CNNMoney.com:Foreclosure plague: No cure yet -- The housing market is still sick, with a record number of foreclosure filings posted in July.The foreclosure plague continued to devastate last month.There were more than 360,000 properties with foreclosure filings -- including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions -- an increase of 7% from June and 32% from

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-10785516877607200672009-08-10T12:50:00.007-04:002009-08-10T13:27:51.063-04:00

Items of Interest:NY Times:Paulson’s Calls to Goldman Tested Ethics -- Before he became President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary in 2006, Henry M. Paulson Jr. agreed to hold himself to a higher ethical standard than his predecessors. He not only sold all his holdings in Goldman Sachs, the investment bank he had run, but also specifically said that he would avoid any substantive interaction

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-32479189046663621272009-08-07T16:41:00.007-04:002009-08-07T17:05:16.754-04:00

The picture for jobs growth stays grim.NY Times:In Last Decade, a Lack of Job Growth in the Private Sector -- For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring...through July of this year, when the economy was mired in the

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-20913663641778119992009-08-06T00:22:00.005-04:002009-08-06T00:44:48.636-04:00

"By Q1, 2011 a projected 48% of total mortgage borrowers will have negative equity." — Deutsche BankWill the people who have called an end to the Great Recession need to take a mulligan?Bloomberg:‘Underwater’ Mortgages to Hit 48%, Deutsche Bank Says -- Almost half of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage are likely to owe more than their properties are worth before the housing recession ends, Deutsche

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-66582630956327531412009-07-29T23:48:00.003-04:002009-07-31T09:48:24.173-04:00

Items of Interest:Nomi Prins / Mother Jones:How You Finance Goldman Sachs’ Profits -- As a recent New York Times article (and many other publications in different words) said, "For the most part, the worst of the financial crisis seems to be over." Sure, the crisis may appear to be over because the major banks of Wall Street are speculating well with government subsidies. But that's a dangerous

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-41359536736812081912009-07-29T00:26:00.003-04:002009-07-30T00:37:38.593-04:00

Daniel Gross / Newsweek:The Recession Is Over -- Now what we need is a new kind of recovery...The Great Recession, which rolled over our financial lives like one of P.J. Keating's giant pavers, is most likely over. Home sales, while still far below the levels of a year ago, have risen for three straight months—a first since 2004. The stock market has rallied 44 percent since March, thanks to

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-76479929117778068312009-07-27T23:40:00.006-04:002009-07-28T00:59:17.579-04:00

Items of Interest:“The god is Goldman. You subjugate yourself to that god, and in return we will make you a gazillionaire.”Joe Hagan / NY Magazine:Is Goldman Sachs Evil? Or Just Too Good? -- Inside Goldman Sachs, America’s most successful, cynical, envied, despised, and (in its view, anyway) misunderstood engine of capitalism...Salvation came on November 25, a few days after Goldman’s stock price

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-81518289075703592222009-07-22T21:52:00.007-04:002009-07-22T23:52:52.805-04:00

Items of Interest:Bloomberg:Goldman Sachs Payments to U.S. Give 23% Return to Taxpayers -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s repayments to the government of last year’s bailout money, including an agreement today to repay warrants, generated a 23 percent annualized return for U.S. taxpayers.Goldman Sachs agreed to the Treasury’s request for $1.1 billion to repay warrants the government received when it

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-10662096393237822162009-07-21T23:09:00.004-04:002009-07-21T23:54:51.556-04:00

Items of Interest:David Reilly / Bloomberg:Goldman Sachs Lack of Love Puts Profit at Risk -- Weathering the aftermath of the financial crisis may prove tougher for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. than surviving the storm.Long the Wall Street firm everyone loves to hate, Goldman saw the brickbats rain down last week after it posted blowout second-quarter results and set aside a record amount for

jbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276743.post-87139845085680066682009-07-20T13:28:00.007-04:002009-07-20T15:05:01.319-04:00

Items of Interest:Charlie Gasparino / The Daily Beast:Goldman's Outrage -- Wall Street giant used your money to make $3.4 billion in profits.They will never admit to this at Goldman Sachs (they don’t really fess up to much over there at the Big G) but in the fall of 2008, just after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy gave the world a lesson in systemic risk, Goldman, the world’s greatest risk taker,

jbnoreply@blogger.com