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Goldman principal PT shares transacted increased by over 40% from the prior week: 550 million to 765 million, clocking at near 50% of total NYSE principal volume. - This information will disappear next week...
The new debt binge might buy a little time, maybe even a spell of economic growth. But once the gears churn up the lube and sawdust, the old jalopy will grind to a stop.
Now is the payback time. We should be expecting growth to be below trend for the next seven years, with a few outliers tossed in for good measure to keep everyone excessively optimistic.
Ron Paul gets interviewed by Aaron
Task from Yahoo Finance. Looks like the main stream media is starting to
get it. Ron Paul was right all along. The interviewer seems
perplexed that Ron Paul would give such seemingly simple answers to what the
pundits have categorically determined that the public is too stupid to
understand.
What most of these people do not
understand is that the market is infinitely smarter than anyone of these
politicians who in the end are only doing what is good for them and their
friends. The market is self correcting and when these politicians meddle
in the system it prevents the system from correcting itself. The long the
system is not allowed to correct itself the greater the ultimate correction
will be. It is inevitable!
"They are simply jaw dropping" Barry Ritholtz
Bank of America joined other major banks in reporting better-than-expected second quarter income, earning $2.42 billion even as losses from failed loans continued to rise. "But big consumer banks, and Bank of America is the biggest, they are the ones who have the most to lose in a prolonged consumer-oriented recession."
Citigroup Inc. surprised Wall Street, reporting a $3 billion second-quarter profit instead of the big loss analysts expected. Citigroup became the fourth big bank to report strong results for the quarter.
“With every passing day, the state’s credit rating moves closer and closer to the junk pile,” Lockyer said in a statement. “If the Governor and Legislature dump us on that pile, they will end indefinitely the state’s financial ability to...
The fact is that California needs to create a state bank similar to that of North Dakota just to insulate itself from the type of reckless behavior now smashing up the US banking system. They comment on North Dakota’s long history. For what it is worth, you step across the border and you enter a hotbed of experimentation created by the great depression
"What makes me very pessimistic in not seeing any leadership or awareness on parts of government on what has to be done, which is deleverage $40-to-$70 trillion," Taleb said.
These charts provide a little clarity on the unemployment rate.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) now projects the total shortfall at $26.3 billion.
• Chrysler Group 42% decline; • General Motors slipped by 33.4% • Toyota Motor reported a 32% drop;
• Birth Death Adjustment contributed 185k in June 2009 (versus 165k in June 08) • Hours worked fell 0.8%, bringing the average workweek down 0.1 hours to 33; This is a record low going back to 1964;
Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, driving the
unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent, suggesting that
the economy's road to recovery will be bumpy.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. mortgage applications plunged to a seven-month low last week as demand for home refinancing loans tumbled 30 percent, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.
The drop does not bode well for the hard-hit U.S. housing market, which has been showing some signs of stabilization, with sales rising and home price declines moderating in many regions of the country.
The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, for the week ended June 26 decreased 18.9 percent to 444.8, the lowest reading since the week ended November 21, 2008.
California's lawmakers failed to agree on a balanced budget by the start of its new fiscal year Wednesday, clearing the way to suspend payments owed to the state's vendors and local agencies, who instead will get "IOU" notes...
As many as one in five U.S. hotel may default on their loans by the end of 2010 as the recession forces companies to spend less on travel and perks, according to Kenneth Rosen, an economist at the University of California.
Nonresidential spending is off 3.3% on a year-over-year basis, and will turn strongly negative as projects are completed. Residential construction spending is still declining YoY...
With a day to go until a cash crisis would force the state to stop
paying its bills, lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked into
the night Tuesday but failed to reach a budget agreement.
The state Senate voted several times as midnight
approached in a last-ditch effort to approve $3.3 billion in cuts to
education and other programs and stave off, at least temporarily, the
IOUs that California Controller John Chiang is set to begin issuing
Thursday in lieu of some payments.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has left elderly borrowers vulnerable to abusive lending practices because of shortcomings in programs that offer reverse mortgages, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. Reverse mortgages, which are usually backed by HUD's Federal Housing Administration, enable seniors to withdraw equity from their homes. The loan and the accumulated interest do not have to be paid back until the owner dies or sells the home. But the upfront costs are substantial....
The new hallucination for most strapped McMansion owners is that they'll "rent the house for a year and then sell when the market comes back." The happy theory here is that, yes, prices are temporarily depressed, but when the green shoots really take hold, we'll go roaring right back to 2006 levels again. Most real-estate agents will be eager to tell you that they agree with this theory. What they won't be able to tell you, as Mark Hanson of the Field Check Group points out, is why.
Metro areas posting large gains were: Bend, Ore., where the jobless rate rose to 15.2 percent, an increase of 8.8 percentage points; and North Carolina's Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton saw its unemployment rate rise to 15.4 percent...
Time is running out for the legislatures in Arizona, California, Indiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania to solve budget gaps.
If no plan is adopted by 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, the state plans to issue IOUs to contractors, vendors, local governments and taxpayers expecting refunds beginning Thursday.
Americans saying jobs are "hard to get" increased to 44.8 percent from 43.9 percent the previous month, while those saying jobs are "plentiful" slid to 4.5 percent from May's 5.8 percent.
California is preparing to issue IOUs to its creditors this week as it grapples with an unprecedented cash crunch and prepares to begin its new fiscal year deep in the red. Once the US’s richest state, California now has the dubious distinction of having the worst credit rating in the country. It is facing a budget deficit of $24bn (€17bn, £14.5bn) yet Arnold Schwarzenegger, its governor, and the state assembly cannot agree on a budget that would address the shortfall. California’s fiscal year ends on Wednesday but as the state’s cash reserves are empty, IOUs will be issued to a range of creditors, including contractors, such as information technology companies and the food service groups that cater for prisons. “On Wednesday we start a fiscal year with a massively unbalanced spending plan and a cash shortfall not seen since the Great Depression,” said John Chiang, the state controller. “Unfortunately, the state’s inabilit
If a new General Motors emerges from bankruptcy as planned, U.S. financial aid for the company will expand to nearly $50 billion, but neither the government nor the company is forecasting how much of the public money will be repaid.
It's sure to be a stretch. For the United States to fully recover its investment, the value of General Motors stock will have to reach levels it has never before attained.
I joked that with public spending out of control and the piling
on of the international bailout bill, economic collapse seems to be the
goal of Congress. It is getting harder to joke
about such a thing however after Congress passed ....
What makes her fiscal crisis relevant to us all is not only that California is our most populous state, with one in eight Americans living there, but California has a gross domestic product larger than Canada's.
