I had a good Saturday, a terrible Sunday.

Spent most of Saturday in Mesa, AZ, at the Flagg Foundation Gem & Mineral Show in the parking lot at Mesa Community College. Absolutely perfect weather -- cloudless sky, temperature right around 70, no wind. Kept spending within my budget and brought home some wonderful material.

Today had just about the same kind of weather but otherwise not so great as I had to deal with the ugly disintegration of a friendship. However, I did find a couple hours to spend with my new rock purchases, and that's always a good thing.



TG

We had 20 guests over for an afternoon and well into the night Saturday dinner and cocktail party.

We made a TurDuckHen, and it was out of this world! And a lot of other good food, and snacks. We have two garbage cans full of wine and whiskey bottles. Not to mention the beer bottles, and I actually have more beer left than I started with.

So, Friday was pretty much tied up in set-up and preparation, Sunday was clean-up.

So, hopefully I'll have a little more to contribute this week.

never heard of that before. Oh, I can just Google



A turducken is a dish consisting of a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed into a de-boned turkey. The word turducken is a portmanteau of turkey, duck, and chicken or hen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken


So is this TurDuckHen purchased in this manner, or do you prepare it?

The cost of de-boning the duck and chicken would probably put it out of reach for popular consumption.

There are Instructables on the 'Net if you want to give it a whirl.

$49.00 for a 15 pounder. including the $20 off with their discount card. It came frozen, seasoned and stuffed with a choice of three different stuffings. We thawed it for three days, and it comes complete with it's own cooking bag. Bake at 400 degrees for 3 hours, and bon appetite.

I wanted it for Thanksgiving, but the wife wanted a traditional dinner, meaning her sisters beyond bland turkey and dressing. We didn't do it for x-mas, because there was just us, so we decided to throw a party.

Though it makes me read Jabberwocky compessively. (Ha! I was going to make a portmanteau out of repeatedly and compulsively, but it came out repulsively.)

I've come across a dusty collection of rocks in the basement, some are very nice but I'm not sure what they are.

Do you know of any web resources specifically geared towards identification?

If they are mineral specimens, the absolute best place is www.mindat.org. They are based in the UK and have active participants all over the world. They've resolved some ID problems I've had with a variety of items I've acquired. Go to their message board and then scroll down to "Identity Help."

If they're "just rocks," try www.rockhounds.com.

The rockhounds site, which has been online since just about Day One of the www, has what I consider to be one of the most cumbersome and awkward and difficult to use message board formats I've ever seen, but if you can deal with that, you should be able to get some pretty good info from them.

Mindat, on the other hand, has a great site, but they are more into mineral specimens than "rocks."

Personally, I'm more into "rocks"!

What you'll need, regardless which site, is good, clear photos.

Mindat's ID forum includes a couple of basic threads pinned to the top, both on submitting items for ID as well as how to reply to questions. I heartily recommend reading both threads to get an idea what the "experts" are looking for and what to expect in reply.

One of the items I picked up Saturday ---

am I right?

That'll make a nice piece.

thank you for those links! another reason to find the damn usb port for the camera so I can upload the shots I've already taken.

are iron and manganese.

This is a lovely piece of Montana moss agate I picked up for a very modest price. Montana moss is not particularly rare, but it is deliciously hard and requires a lot of patience to cut and polish.

Great website for browsing -- www.agateswithinclusions.com. I've met and chatted with Pat McMahan a couple times, have always found him enthusiastic and helpful. But I still won't tell him where I found sagenitic agate east of the railroad tracks. . . . . .


Tansy Gold, WILDLY off topic. . .. . .

Gold and silver? Shiny rocks, really, nothing more. Diamonds? Sparkly rocks.

yucky gooey viscous liquid rocks?

not to mention coal, of course, or uranium. . . .

The bottom one looks like a quarter someone left on the railroad tracks.

I leave the details to your imagination.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/more-msm-criticism-of-obama-nothing-illegal-here-move-along-stance-on-foreclosure-fraud.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29


CONCLUSION:

Yes, it isn’t hard to see that the Obama Administration is choosing to sit on its hands. But the interesting part is that the ranks of supine validators may be thinning a smidge. The more state level prosecutions and headline-grabbing private cases move forward, the more difficult it will be for the Team Obama to persuade the press that really, truly, nothing can be done about those big rich bankers.

ERIC HOLDER, RESIGN!

"Markeet"

Funny thing is, just a couple minutes ago I was arguing with one of my son's RW "friends" on the FB and made the same typo!

LONDON, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Signs of improvement in the German and U.S. economies helped offset concerns over the prospects for euro zone debt auctions later this week, lifting the single currency and European shares on Monday.

The FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares opened up by around 0.2 percent to 1015.88. The MSCI world equity index was also up over 0.1 percent despite a weaker session on Asian markets.

German exports jumped 2.5 percent in November, data showed on Monday, unexpectedly widening the trade surplus in a sign Europe's largest economy is still outpacing peers.

The euro, which fell to a 16-month low in Asian trade of $1.2666, recovered to $1.2748 in volatile trade to stand up around 0.2 percent for the day...

/... http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/markets-global-idUSL6E8C629Z20120109?rpc=401

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Asian stocks swung between gains and losses as shares of Chinese lenders and developers rallied after China’s new lending and money supply increased. Exporters dropped after a Federal Reserve official said the central bank probably won’t begin a new round of bond purchases...

... “It shows the government’s policy of fine-tuning monetary policies is taking effect,” Ha Jiming, vice chairman for China at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. “The government is able to engineer a soft landing, maintaining economic growth at around 8 percent. The market this year will have some opportunities.”

The MSCI Asia Pacific excluding Japan Index gained 0.1 percent to 396.65 as of 4:10 p.m. in Hong Kong, erasing losses of as much as 1.3 percent earlier. The measure gained 0.9 percent last week as manufacturing growth from the U.S., Australia, China and India added to signs the global economy may withstand Europe’s debt crisis.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 Index lost 0.1 percent after the country’s retail sales unexpectedly stalled. South Korea’s Kospi Index dropped 0.9 percent. Japanese markets are closed today for a holiday.

China’s Shanghai Composite Index climbed 2.9 percent on speculation the government is taking steps to improve liquidity as the economy slows. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index gained 1.5 percent, reversing earlier losses of as much as 1.6 percent.

/... http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-09/asian-stocks-swing-between-gains-losses-as-china-stocks-rally.html

... In Greece, where the crisis started over two years ago, the government is in a race against time to agree a bond-swap deal with banks that is crucial to a new 130 billion euro bailout package from European partners and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Without that package, Athens faces the threat of a debt default in March...

... In France, polls suggest there is a good chance President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has steered Europe's crisis response along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, could be pushed out of office by his Socialist challenger Francois Hollande...

...Fittingly, Merkel and Sarkozy kick off 2012 with a Monday meeting in Berlin to prepare an EU summit scheduled for January 30 that is expected to focus on efforts to boost growth...

"In the current market environment there is no room for using a Keynesian-type expansionary fiscal policy to boost demand in countries with low growth - the markets will simply not accept such a strategy," Deutsche Bank said in a confidential note on the crisis prepared for the German government late last year...

... The ECB's decision last month to provide cheap long-term loans to banks has helped assuage fears about the financial sector and could support sovereign debt sales going forward...

/... http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/us-eurozone-challenges-idUSTRE80809C20120109

(Reuters) - British financial firms plan to shed jobs at a faster pace after the escalating euro zone sovereign debt crisis dented their confidence during the final three months of 2011, according to a survey published on Monday.

The finance sector's planned retrenchment comes despite faster-than-expected growth in business volumes and rising profits last quarter, the survey by the CBI, Britain's biggest business lobby, and auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers showed.

"Firms are less optimistic than they were and they are employing fewer people," CBI Chief Economic Adviser Ian McCafferty told reporters. "There is the growing fear of less availability of finance and constraints of funding."...

... The CBI said the downbeat mood in Britain reflected worries over the euro debt crisis, which has pushed up borrowing costs for heavily-indebted euro zone members, sapping growth among Britain's major trading partners.

The crisis has also prompted banks across Europe to cut lending to their peers amid fears some could go under due to big exposures to distressed government debt, leaving many reliant on loans from the European Central Bank for their funding...

/... http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/uk-ukfinancials-cbi-idUKLNE80800220120109


( ... A key element of the summit package was a deal to funnel 200 billion euros to the IMF, money that could be used to offer precautionary credit programs to Italy and possibly Spain. But the euro zone is struggling to get the 50 billion euros it needs from nations outside the currency bloc to meet its goal. A senior German official told Reuters on condition of anonymity that securing the participation of Britain, which has shown no inclination to contribute, was absolutely crucial... - http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/us-eurozone-challenges-idUSTRE80809C20120109 )

Looking at today's papers, the Financial Times says David Cameron is heading for a major row with his eurosceptic backbenchers over Britain's contributions to the IMF.

The FT reports that government insiders say the UK could put more cash into an IMF eurozone rescue package if other countries, such as Japan, China or Brazil, also do so....

.. As you'll probably remember, in December the UK refused to put €30bn into an IMF rescue fund -- partly because Cameron only had parliament's permission to lend another €10bn to the IMF.

At the time, UK officially indicated that they might be prepared to discuss increasing the IMF's resources 'at a G20 level'. That would need parliament's approval - and there's every sign that Cameron would face a major firestorm if MPs felt the IMF was being forced to fund a rescue job that should really be handled by the European Central Bank.

/... http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/09/eurozone-crisis-merkel-sarkozy-fiscal-compact?newsfeed=true

The redistribution of global power modifies relations between great powers and invites them to reconsider their diplomatic priorities. While in the aftermath of World War II the future of Europe was proactively shaped by the United States, or more precisely, by a group of American "Wise Men", China is now in a position to have an unprecedented impact on the European integration. As Beijing fully develops its immense potential and becomes the world's biggest economy in the coming decade, its capacity to influence will certainly grow.

In this rapidly changing context, the leaders of the European Union and China should rethink the significance of trans-Eurasian links and open a new chapter in the relations between two of the world's most ancient civilizations. Whether the degree as well as the means of any Chinese action in Europe is compatible with the internal constraints of the world's largest developing country - and congenial with traditional Chinese principles of foreign policy - will have to be seriously discussed by Beijing's policymakers.

In parallel, the realization and just evaluation of China's new ability to influence will occupy increasingly more space in European public debates and stand as an issue of political campaigns.

With a mutual trade in goods and services which already reached 432 billion euros (US$548.6 billion) in 2010, the European Union and China form the second-largest economic cooperation in the world. This level of economic interdependence has been achieved in a very short period of time despite a Great Wall of mistrust separating two societies which have been evolving largely independently for millennia. As the speed of quantitative change exceeds the pace of qualitative transformation, time will certainly be needed to reduce the gap between trade and trust.

Obviously, it is the Chinese people's belief in the Chinese renaissance which conditions its success, and, similarly, the Europeans' faith in the renewal of Europe will determine its outcome. However, while self-confidence remains the most powerful internal force, mutual reassurance has the advantage to strengthen it, and it is in that perspective that both sides should not overlook what mutual trust can bring to the two poles of civilization and, beyond, to the world.

/... http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NA10Ad02.html

The U.S. presidential election has begun. No presidential aspirants can bypass the "three highs" challenges right now—high unemployment rate, high deficits and high national debts. To some extent, the "three highs" originate from the country's political and economic policies and its inherent system, which just appear more noticeable in the new century...

... In terms of decision making, the United States is stepping into an era of uncertainties...

... The seeming economic and financial problems of the United States are deeply rooted in its politics and society. It is imperative for the U.S. to identify where it goes wrong and finds out solutions...

... However, its predicament is an inevitable result of the times. Globalization yields U.S. huge wealth which, however, is distributed among its people in an improper and damaging way to its social bond. And the country's gratuitous use of violence repels...

/... http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90780/7700195.html

and fuddnik? you are too much fun!

cyber friends -- and dogs! -- are a whole lot better than the face-to-face losers I've been dealing with lately!

While there is always a first time.....I have yet to be dissapointed. I have enjoyed them all immensely. Of course I go to Nursing websites, financial websites and DU. No stalkers here. Maybe a few peeping toms, but no stalkers.

http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_33295.shtml

Moody’s rating agency has called for more cuts from the Spanish Government, and says that he needs to double the adjustment announced already. In his investiture speech Rajoy said the cuts would be 16.5 billion, but the agency thinks that 40 billion is needed to be saved this year.

Moody’s also considers that it will be difficult for the Spanish Government to recover the 8 billion € they have said they will recover from the submerged economy.

They say the 8% deficit for the end of 2011 represents a 22 billion € deviation from the plans, and they forecast the economy will shrink by as much as 1% of GDP in 2012.
However there are some words of relief for Rajoy, with the agency noting ‘The speed of the Government action reflects their commitment’.

Today the Deputy Prime Minister, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, called on the citizens for ‘a further effort’ to get out of the crisis and create employment. She guaranteed that ‘it will not be in vain’.

Read more: http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_33295.shtml#ixzz1ixxOs1eA

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/english/Cuts/will/ruin/growth/prospects/experts/warn/Rajoy/elpepueng/20120108elpeng_11/Ten

That the first interview given by new Economy Minister Luis de Guindos should be to the Financial Times rather than to a domestic newspaper, says much about the turbulent times in which we live. So does the fact that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Cabinet announced savage spending cuts to the tune of 15 billion euros, after barely a week in office, with more on the way. What's more, nobody is denying charges that this approach will do nothing to create jobs.

Hardly the best start for a new government, however much its hands may be tied by the current recession. It is a high-stakes approach both for the government and the country; as economists the world over are warning, cutting back spending risks deepening the crisis further, particularly if consumers stop buying and exporters find the world's markets are closed.

"The experiences of the past year throughout Europe show that cutbacks simply deepen recessions. It is a dream to hope that tax hikes will have any impact, particularly given current levels of personal debt, unemployment, and the situation in the rest of Europe. The worst of all this is that these policies will make it impossible to meet the unrealistic objectives of reducing the deficit, as the data for 2011 show," says Jorge Uxó, a lecturer in economics at the University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The incoming government has justified its first measures - nine billion euros in cuts, withsix billion to be raised by tax hikes - citing the "unexpected" failure to reduce the deficit down tosix percent in 2011. Instead, it stands ateight percent. We are now seeing the result of the spending cuts on growth: tax rates are down due to the economic slowdown.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165515/republican-candidates-attack-labor

Concord, NH—Gearing up for their January 21 primary in the notoriously anti-union state of South Carolina, Republican presidential candidates have recently begun demonizing organized labor. On the campaign trail in more liberal New Hampshire, which votes Tuesday, these same candidates often avoid any mention mention of the subject.

Last week when President Obama made some long overdue appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, the GOP outrage machine went into overdrive. Newt Gingrich immediately blasted out a statement saying, “The answer to an imperial president is a Congress which stands on its own rights. And the correct response to what the president just did would be for the Congress to zero out and refuse to fund the National Labor Relations Board.” The same day Mitt Romney released a commercial picturing him talking to a gaggle of white guys on a factory floor. “The National Labor Relations Board, now stacked with union stooges appointed by the president, says to a free enterprise like Boeing ‘you can’t build a factory in South Carolina because South Carolina is a ‘right to work’ state. That is simply un-American. It’s political payback of the worst kind.” This is a false representation of the NLRB’s decision in the Boeing case. The NLRB never said that Boeing can’t build factories in states with the anti-union laws called ‘right to work’ on their books. What it said was that Boeing cannot retaliate against unionized workers in another state exercising their right to bargain collectively by closing their plant and moving to one where the law favors management over unions.

Obama’s appointments are also being misrepresented. The Republican Senate minority was blocking Obama’s appointments to the NLRB, not because they were unqualified but simply to deny the NLRB a quorum. Without enough members, it could not do its job. This kind of obstructionist behavior is being replicated by Senate Republicans across hundreds of appointments, most notably for the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In order to block recess appointments, which the president uses to keep the government running when necessary, Republicans have been pretending never to go on recess, when in fact they have been on vacation for weeks. So Obama finally appointed Richard Cordray to run the CFPB along with the NLRB positions because he had no other choice.

Meanwhile, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s opponents and fiscally conservative critics are attacking him for an obscure vote fifteen years ago. Santorum, who very occasionally deviated from Republican orthodoxy to support workers in the manufacturing sector, voted against the National Right to Work Act of 1995. That bill would have outlawed closed-shop union workplaces, as state-level right to work laws do. Ron Paul has been relentlessly attacking Santorum for that vote, and the Club for Growth is siding with Paul. (For a complete guide to the Republican attack on labor in its full context, read this excellent piece by my colleague John Nichols.)

http://wepartypatriots.com/wp/2012/01/09/new-jersey-minimum-wage/

The recession that allegedly ended in June of 2009 continues to plague the state of New Jersey. Now, Garden Staters are looking to Democrats in the legislature to fight for a minimum wage increase.

Despite the fact that the federal minimum wage is already $2.60 below where it should be, the cost of living is almost 30 percent higher in New Jersey than the national average, and eight states began 2012 by raising their minimum wage, New Jersey remains at $7.25.

The income gap is widening in New Jersey. Many residents enjoy higher wages due to the accessibility of New York City, but those who work locally as cashiers in grocery stores or in small neighborhood businesses must incur the same metropolitan spikes in cost while earning much less.

New Jersey state law requires a commission to review the minimum wage annually. This year’s review found no reason to raise it; this left many puzzled:

By state law, an appointed commission must assess the adequacy of the minimum wage each year, with the tie-breaking vote going to the commissioner of Labor. The latest report makes for some head-scratching moments. It found that the wage lagged badly behind the costs of necessities such as housing, health care and child care. It found the wage was way too low to support a family, and failed to account for New Jersey’s high cost of living, roughly 30 percent above the national average.

And then, by a 3-2 vote, the commission voted to let these unskilled workers eat cake. The wage remained unchanged.

1/9/12
Swiss National Bank Chairman Philipp Hildebrand is resigning with immediate effect after a scandal over a controversial currency trade made by his wife, the SNB said on Monday.

The SNB said in a brief statement that Hildebrand would speak about his decision at 1415 GMT at a media briefing in Berne and make available a number of unspecified documents.

Hildebrand's wife Kashya, a former hedge fund trader who now runs a Zurich art gallery, bought 400,000 Swiss francs ($418,000) worth of dollars on Aug. 15, three weeks before her husband oversaw steps to cap the rise of the franc.

Hildebrand last week rejected calls to step down, saying he only learned of his wife's trade the following day, rejecting claims by the Swiss magazine Weltwoche that he had personally authorised the currency deal, which made a big profit.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/switzerland-hildebrand-idUSWEA738320120109

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513604577146891543333510.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

The Bank Council of the Swiss National Bank said Saturday it will launch a review of all recent bank transactions of the SNB's key members and introduce new control measures, reacting to a controversy that erupted over some currency deals of SNB president Philipp Hildebrand and his wife, Kashya, last year.

The council said it decided at its meeting Jan. 7 that with the support of external specialists it will undertake "a comprehensive revision of the regulations and directives on own-account transactions involving financial instruments by members of the enlarged governing board."

The council gave no exact time frame for the introduction of the new measures but said the "draft regulations and the revised directives for SNB employees are to be submitted to the council as soon as possible."

....The controversy erupted after an IT employee of Swiss private bank Bank Sarasin & Cie leaked confidential bank data from Mr. Hildebrand to a lawyer, who later provided the information via a lawyer to former Swiss minister Christoph Blocher, giving the controversy a political hue....

I got me a part time job. I start next Monday.

and maybe a smidgen of hope...

are you rowing on the inside row, middle, or do you see the ship coming toward us.....How come you got the longer chain??????

That is good news!!!!!!!

Huge corporate structure (kinda creepy). Global mechanical design, engineering, and fabrication Co.. They are trying to break in to structural steel. Just three of us steel detailers in a sea of a couple of hundred mechanical and piping people. I'm used to working with the really small business man. All I want is my own little cube, leave me alone and let me draw steel and then go home. Don't want to get involved in the politics. I'm on probation and part time for 90-days.
Thank you all for the well wishes.

Congratulations, and best of luck with it!

A foot in the door sure beats a swift kick in the behind.
Here's to just a bit of hope!

I am hoping to be right behind you.

Heres to the new gig!

http://www.truth-out.org/gaming-global-economy/1326059931

While members of the 99 percent made New Year’s resolutions to shave a few bucks off the grocery bill, turn the heat down, or maybe donate a few dollars to a local food bank, the titans of finance are throwing around some of their newfound booty to game the system even more in their favor. Their 2012 resolution involves a new transatlantic fiber-optic cable specifically designed to give its owners and users a five-millisecond market jump on their competition. In the hyperkinetic world of global trade, a one-thousandth-of-a-second jump on receiving financial news is worth, according to an estimate in the London Telegraph, about $100 million per year to a typical hedge fund. When you do the math, this five-millisecond advantage will translate to billions of dollars per year in profits for clients using the new cable, thus rendering the $300 million dollar cost of construction negligible. And of course, since this money has to come from somewhere, it also translates into a monumental loss for institutions whose trades are based on toxic, last-millisecond data....a snaky hedge fund could score billions of dollars by hitting the currency market one millisecond faster than news of a devaluation. With all transactions computerized and automated, a millisecond might as well be an eternity, with fortunes being made and lost in this relative aeon of time.

The new cable achieves its five-millisecond advantage by following a new route, scoped out by a team of survey ships measuring the ocean floor, which cuts 310 miles off the 4,051-mile route followed by other transatlantic fiber communication cables. With light in fiber-optic cables traveling at 62 miles per millisecond, the new, shorter cable shaves about five milliseconds off of the transmission time for a computer-generated message, such as “Buy 50 billion yen now.” The new cable, being built at a cost of $300 million, essentially will provide five milliseconds of what I can only term insider information to clients willing to pay to play on this gamed roulette wheel. Of course, insider information, like when Martha Stewart gets a phone call telling her to buy or sell a stock, is theoretically illegal. But in this case, somewhere in the lawless zone between the continental shelf and the British Isles, everything magically becomes copacetic, as if blessed by a transnational elite immunity.

The cable, called “Project Express,” is being built by Hibernia Atlantic, ostensibly a communications infrastructure company, whose chairman, Ken Peterson, is also CEO of Columbia Corporate Ventures of Vancouver, a director of the Washington Policy Center (a “think tank” and lobbying group for corporate and financial industry interests), and a director of American Capital Strategies, which is the largest US publicly traded private equity fund, specializing in funding corporate buyouts. Other corporate players, who Hibernia Atlantic coins “Express Partners,” will also have access to this inside track—at about 50 times the going cable message rate. Financed primarily financed by the China-based Huawei Marine Networks, Project Express promises to rewrite the rules for international trade. If this insider information is indeed legal, then the market would dictate that everyone who wants to stay in the game would have to pay Project Express tolls in order to play. No doubt other fast cables will soon sprout their tentacles across the ocean, in an ever growing web.

This social waste of spending $300 million to build what is essentially a redundant, albeit infinitesimally quicker, fiber-optic cable raises a plethora of questions. The whole notion of Project Express exposes the reality that financial companies do not “make” money in any real sense of the word “make,” but instead get rich simply by “taking” money that already exists on someone else’s balance sheet, using whatever advantages a gamed system offers.

http://www.truth-out.org/keyness-predictions-proven-spectacularly-accurate/1325619206

The economist Dean Baker is once again justifiably mad at Robert Samuelson at The Washington Post who, in a column titled “Bye-Bye Keynes?” published on Dec. 18, writes: “Were [John Maynard] Keynes alive now, he would almost certainly acknowledge the limits of Keynesian policies. High debt complicates the analysis and subverts the solutions. What might have worked in the 1930s offers no panacea today.”

Mr. Baker, in a blog post for the Center for Economic Policy and Research, pointed out the next day that “Samuelson actually wants to say goodbye to Keynes, but he would have had a better case if he was talking about Darwin and the theory of evolution. After all, when we have seen nothing but confirming evidence for years, why should we still accept the theory?” It is indeed frustrating that after three years in which Keynesian predictions have been spectacularly correct, pundits insist on reading the evidence as a rejection of his work. What do I mean by saying that predictions were correct? Three things:

1. There has been no crowding out; interest rates outside the euro area have remained low despite massive government borrowing, which is what you’d expect in a liquidity trap.

2. Inflation has been quiescent despite huge increases in the monetary base, again what you’d expect in a liquidity trap.

3. Fiscal austerity has deepened the economic downturn everywhere it has been put in place.

Were these predictions different from what non-Keynesians were saying? And how. Go back to Niall Ferguson, or Brian Riedl, etc., and you’ll find confident assertions that all that government borrowing would send interest rates soaring. Go back to the likes of Allan Meltzer or the Austrians, and you’ll find confident predictions that all that money printing would cause an explosion of inflation.And just about everyone on the right bought into some version of the doctrine of expansionary austerity....

...bear this in mind: no country has driven itself into a debt crisis with stimulus — nor has any country with significant debt regained investor confidence through austerity. Look, I know that many people can’t bring themselves to even consider the possibility that Mr. Keynes was right — or, for that matter, that I personally might have gotten anything right. But reality has been really clear here.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/quelle-surprise-banks-plan-to-fob-off-some-of-the-costs-of-multi-state-mortgage-settlement-on-to-investors.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Never underestimate the ability of banks to find new and creative ways to steal.

The latest brazen scheme comes in a report from the Financial Times on the current state of play on the so-called multi-state mortgage settlement negotiations. Readers may recall that even though a nominal settlement total of $25 billionish has been bandied about for some time, comparatively little of that is to be in cash. The bulk of the amount is to come from credits for principal modifications. We’ve said this is patently inadequate, since the damage done by servicer driven foreclosures (something yet to be dimensioned adequately), bogus charges to investors, and damage to land records goes way beyond the amount under discussion. Catherine Masto of Nevada got somewhere between $27,000 and $57,000 per homeowner from one servicer, Saxon, which puts the amounts being discussed here to shame. And even though we took issue with how the CFBP came up with its math, it went through an exercise intended to determine how much the servicers should pay as disgorgement. The amount they should pay for damages has never been estimated, and by any logic should be considerably larger.

But not only are they not going to pay enough, and not much in hard money, the banks are now trying to shift the cost of their settlement on to investors. Their passivity in the face of rampant abuses proves they make for great stuffees. Per the Financial Times:



This idea is ludicrous. It is one thing to have discussed a solution that involves principal mods (which we favor) with investors as party to the negotiations. As we have indicated, with loss severities in private label mortgage securitizations running at 75%, there is a lot of room for deep principal mods that would leave investors better off than a foreclosure. They could have helped make sure any modifications had processes in place that protected their interests....By contrast, this latest iteration of the settlement plan is guaranteed to come largely out the hides of investors in so-called private label deals, meaning non-Fannie and Freddie. The idea that only private investors take losses and not the GSEs is bad enough, but the basic premise that the banks get to dump the costs of settlement of their own malfeasance on already abused investors is a travesty...And the notion that the banks will take the losses themselves rather than shift losses onto third parties because they’d only get a 50% credit shows that someone has a screw loose. Come on! If the people involved in the talks really don’t understand the difference between spending your own money versus someone else’s money, they should not be allowed near a checkbook, much the less a negotiation.

In fact, I can tell you exactly what will happen: all the mortgage mod money will come out of investors, and it will come out of the very biggest loans, since the bigger the loan, the fewer the number of mods the bank has to make (the cost of making a mod is not related to the size of the loan). So that means that this approach assures that the mods will go to comparatively few people in big ticket homes and will do nada to help middle and lower middle class people...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/speculators-raise-wagers-on-price-gains-by-most-in-17-months-commodities.html

Hedge funds raised their wagers on higher commodity prices by the most since July 2010 after signs of accelerating U.S. growth bolstered optimism that demand for raw materials will strengthen.

Money managers expanded their combined net-long positions across 18 U.S. futures and options by 25 percent to 671,915 contracts (.MMLOSH) in the week ended Jan. 3, Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. Bullish bets on cotton rose the most since April 2009 and those on coffee doubled. Crude-oil holdings reached a three-week high.

Prices for metals and bulk commodities such as coal rose at least 85 percent of the time since 2004 when global industrial production strengthened, Macquarie Group Ltd. estimates. U.S. unemployment fell to the lowest in almost three years, and it joined China, Australia, Germany, India and the U.K. in reporting manufacturing gains. Almost $253 billion was added to the value of global equities last week on speculation economies will skirt a slump as Europe’s debt crisis deepens.

“You’ve been seeing a risk-on trade across the board, not just in commodities,” said John Bailey, the founder and chief executive officer of Stamford, Connecticut-based Spruce Private Investors LLC, which advises investors holding about $3 billion of assets. “Between a calming in Europe and better-than- expected numbers in the U.S., including employment and housing, that has led to a risk-on attitude among managers.”

JUST SEE THE OIL PRICE CHART

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-06/natural-gas-rises-on-cold-weather-forecast-commodities-at-close.html

..Natural gas climbed, capping the first weekly gain since early December, on forecasts for below-normal temperatures later this month that may increase heating-fuel demand.

MDA EarthSat Weather in Gaithersburg, Maryland, predicted colder-than-normal weather in the Northeast and parts of the northern Midwest from Jan. 16 through Jan. 20. About 51 percent of U.S. households use gas for heating, according to the Energy Department.

Gas futures for February delivery rose 2.8 percent to $3.062 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price gained 2.4 percent this week...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/08/uk-hungary-imf-orban-idUKTRE8070GH20120108


Budapest faces tough negotiations with officials from the International Monetary Fund and European Union, who have made it clear Orban needs to change his stance on a new law they say curbs the independence of the country's central bank. The Fund's Managing Director Christine Lagarde has said Hungary's legislation on its central bank will be a key issue at the upcoming talks with the country.

"From our part the talks have no precondition whatever," Orban said in an interview with the state news agency MTI. "All issues can be discussed (at the talks) that the negotiating partners feel important," he added. A Hungarian delegation is expected to visit the IMF on Wednesday. Earlier informal talks with the IMF and the European Commission were cut short over the central bank bill. The bill was amended by parliamentary approval late last month, but the amendments did not fully take into account the criticism of the European Central Bank.

The ECB and the European Union had said that the bill -- which adds two members including a deputy governor to the central bank's seven-seat Monetary Council -- could hurt the bank's independence, breaching EU rules. Orban repeated in the interview that he saw no legal problem with the bill particularly because the European Commission did not complain in 2004 when the bank's Council was enlarged under a previous Hungarian government.

Hungary's credit rating was cut to junk by Fitch on Friday, the country's third downgrade since November. The prime minister said Hungary's downgrade by Fitch was part of a wave of rating cuts in Europe in which "downgrades have a season.""We are in the period of downgrades but the season of upgrades will come too," he added.

Orban also said in response to questions that changes in his centre-right government were not on the agenda.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-07/imf-to-adjust-greek-aid-package-on-worse-economy-spiegel-says.html

Greece will not be able to bear its debt burden under the current restructuring plan because of a worsening economy, Der Spiegel said, citing an internal International Monetary Fund document.

IMF experts plan to adjust key points of the current rescue plan as part of the next Troika mission, set to start in mid- January, the magazine said.

Greece must do more to consolidate its finances, or private creditors must write off a larger share of their claims or euro area countries have to add more funding, Der Spiegel cited the IMF document as saying.

The trouble for the US president is that the slide in unemployment has come too soon and is unlikely to be sustained..


http://link.ft.com/r/J0VG55/ZG5P5Y/ULCJB/QNLZQQ/OR83SK/XL/t?a1=2012&a2=1&a3=9


AND THEN, THERE'S THE WHOLE ISSUE OF BOGUS-ITY

http://econompicdata.blogspot.com/2012/01/men-at-work.html

The NY Post details (hat tip Eddy):

Since the US economic recovery started in mid-2009, a whopping 97 percent of the new jobs — all but 43,000 of 1.4 million positions created — have gone to the guys, according to data released yesterday by the National Women’s Law Center, which analyzed jobs data between June 2009 and December 2011.

By my calculation, using figures from the BLS, the numbers are even more striking. Since June 2009, women have lost ~750 thousand jobs while men have gained ~1.5 million. Since the bottom in BLS data (December 2009), men have gained 93% of all new jobs (2.62 million of the 2.82 million).



It is important to note that men have simply regained employment they had lost, as the recovery still puts job losses by men above women since the beginning of the recession.

AND IT'S NOT A HAPPY REPORT

http://my.firedoglake.com/deanbaker/2012/01/07/more-on-the-celebration-over-decembers-job-report/

The disclosure threatens to inflame the row over bankers’ bonuses as the lender prepares to dramatically scale back its investment banking arm

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/ZE9K33/VLARMA/4VXHZ/VL8WPY/II19IY/D5/t?a1=2012&a2=1&a3=9

Corporate earnings for S&P 500 constituents set to break a run of eight quarters of double-digit gains as outlook for world economy darkens

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/ZE9K33/VLARMA/4VXHZ/VL8WPY/PF6PRI/D5/t?a1=2012&a2=1&a3=9

US banks should publish much more detail on their exposure to European debt, improving disclosure that has been ‘inconsistent in both substance and presentation’

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/ZE9K33/VLARMA/4VXHZ/VL8WPY/R3013F/D5/t?a1=2012&a2=1&a3=9

http://www.theonion.com/articles/all-of-area-mans-hard-work-finally-pays-off-for-em%2c26957/

Following seven straight years of long hours at the office and sacrificed weekends and holidays, all of account manager Sam Hemstead's hard work and single-minded devotion to Pinnacle Automotive Insurance has finally paid off for CEO Charles Pardahee, Pardahee said Friday.

"There were definitely some nights I'd lie awake in bed and wonder, 'Is Sam absolutely killing himself day in and day out for nothing?'" Pardahee told reporters while driving to his weekend home in a recently purchased 2012 BMW luxury sedan. "But Sam just put his head down and never looked back, and this year his blood, sweat, and tears have proven profitable to the tune of a 15 percent larger bonus for myself....It just goes to show that if you're really passionate and dedicated, eventually it all comes back around to your superiors," Pardahee continued...The stress-related physical and psychological tolls for Hemstead, 34, have been high, but the hypertension, weight-gain, and crippling migraine headaches he has suffered due to his rigorous work schedule have been worth the rewards he has reaped for his employer, Pardahee confirmed. "I'm sure there were times when Sam wondered if it was all really worth it, especially considering he had to pay for a lot of his medication and doctor's visits out of his own pocket," said Pardahee, who in 2009 forced all his account managers to become contract employees so he would no longer have to provide them with health care benefits. "But he never complained once, and now that Sam has helped Pinnacle earn record profits by not taking a single day off for more than five years, I can finally relax and take another long vacation to Turks and Caicos. After all, Sam earned it for me."

The CEO added that nothing is more satisfying than a job well done by someone else.

While Hemstead's total devotion to the company has come at a steep personal cost, these too are reportedly acceptable considering the immense financial gains and professional accolades he has garnered for Pardahee. "When Sam's wife filed for divorce and eventually won custody of his two daughters, he completely threw himself into his job in an attempt to cope as his life fell apart all around him," Pardahee said. "That was great, because it allowed me to drastically scale back my workload and spend even more time with my wife and children....Seeing most of his paycheck go to child support has made me really value all the things I can do with my kids because of Sam's hard work," Pardahee continued. "Considering all he continues to do for this company without even thinking about taking a break, he's afforded me all the time in the world to just enjoy life and not be defined by my job."

According to the CEO, Hemstead's contributions to Pinnacle Insurance will pay even greater dividends when he is let go and replaced with a college graduate willing to work for half the salary, allowing Pardahee to give himself a substantial raise.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204331304577147750253122844.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

A dismal year means Wall Street is about to take a big hit to its wallet.

As banks prepare to report fourth-quarter results and make final bonus decisions for 2011, total compensation is likely to be the lowest since 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed some firms and left many survivors on government life support.

While still lofty compared to the rest of the U.S., pay for some Wall Street workers will be the lowest in years, at a time when critics have been lashing out at what they deem excessive finance-industry compensation...

EVEN AT GOLDMAN'S, MONEY WILL BE TIGHT!

and not just satire from the Onion.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/cohan-how-wall-street-turned-a-crisis-into-a-cartel.html

Almost 65 years ago, in 1947, the U.S. government sued 17 leading Wall Street investment banks, charging them with effectively colluding in violation of antitrust laws. In its complaint -- which was front-page news at the time - -- the Justice Department alleged that these firms had created “an integrated, overall conspiracy and combination” starting in 1915 “and in continuous operation thereafter, by which” they developed a system “to eliminate competition and monopolize ‘the cream of the business’ of investment banking.” The U.S. argued that the top Wall Street investment banks - - including Morgan Stanley (MS) (the lead defendant) and Goldman Sachs -- had created a cartel by which, among other things, it set the prices charged for underwriting securities and for providing mergers-and-acquisitions advice, while boxing out weaker competitors from breaking into the top tier of the business and getting their fair share of the fees. The government argued that the big firms placed their partners on their clients’ boards of directors, putting them in the best possible position to know when a piece of business was coming down the pike and to make sure that any competitors were given a very hard time should they dare to try to win it.

The government was spot on: The investment-banking business was then a cartel where the biggest and most powerful firms controlled the market and then set the prices for their services, leaving customers with few viable choices for much needed capital, advice or trading counterparties. The same argument can be made today. Indeed, following the destruction of Bear Stearns Cos., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Merrill Lynch and countless smaller and foreign competitors during the financial crisis that began in 2007, the investment-banking business is an even more powerful and threatening cartel than it was in 1947. Today, there are far fewer than 17 firms in control of the investment-banking business. After Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Morgan Stanley, JPMorganChase & Co. (JPM), Citigroup Inc. (C), Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), one is pretty much at a dead end. The investment-banking business is now both much, much bigger -- in terms of revenue and profits -- and much, much more concentrated than it ever was close to being in 1947.

How could that have happened? Unfortunately, in October 1953, Harold Medina, the presiding federal judge in the case, threw the antitrust lawsuit out of court. In an extraordinary 417-page ruling -- a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Wall Street -- Medina decided that the government’s case rested solely on “circumstantial evidence” and that the banks didn’t violate antitrust laws. Yet Medina’s ruling also laid bare the extent to which the 17 Wall Street firms would go to defend their turf and prevent other banks from getting access to lucrative, fee-paying clients. It wasn’t a pretty picture.


....In a rare show of backbone toward Wall Street, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department flexed its muscles last year when it sued to block the merger of AT&T Inc. (T) and Deutsche Telekom AG (DT), causing it to be scuttled and hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to be lost. The administration should build on that success. Sixty-five years late, let’s break up the Wall Street cartel and re-establish the integrity of the capital markets.

***************************************************************************

(William D. Cohan, a former investment banker and the author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-22/nothing-predicted-happened-as-men-conspired-with-nature-in-2011.html

FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/shale-bubble-inflates-on-near-record-prices-for-untested-fields.html

Surging prices for oil and gas shales, in at least one case rising 10-fold in five weeks, are raising concern of a bubble as valuations of drilling acreage approach the peak set before the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Chinese, French and Japanese energy explorers committed more than $8 billion in the past two weeks to shale-rock formations from Pennsylvania to Texas after 2011 set records for international average crude prices and U.S. gas demand. As competition among buyers intensifies, overseas investors are paying top dollar for fields where too few wells have been drilled to assess potential production, said Sven Del Pozzo, a senior equity analyst at IHS Inc. (IHS)

Marubeni Corp. (8002), the Japanese commodity trader, last week agreed to pay as much as $25,000 an acre for a stake in Hunt Oil Co.’s Eagle Ford shale property in Texas. The price, which includes future drilling costs, exceeds the $21,000 an acre Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO) paid last year for nearby prospects owned by KKR (KKR) & Co.’s Hilcorp Resources Holdings LP. In the Utica shale of Ohio and Pennsylvania, deal prices jumped 10-fold in five weeks to almost $15,000 an acre, according to IHS figures.

“I don’t feel confident that the prices being paid now are justified,” Del Pozzo said in a telephone interview from Norwalk, Connecticut. “I’m wary.”

Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation

AND HERE I THOUGHT IT WAS THE FLAGRANT ABUSES OF THE CHURCH THAT DID THE HEAVY LIFTING...

http://www.economist.com/node/21541719

IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.

Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation...Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message...



Although they were written in Latin, the “95 Theses” caused an immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel, paid for by Luther’s friends to whom he had sent copies. German translations, which could be read by a wider public than Latin-speaking academics and clergy, soon followed and quickly spread throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther’s friend Friedrich Myconius later wrote that “hardly 14 days had passed when these propositions were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.”

The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/15/occupy-anarchism-gift-democracy

The US imagines itself a great democracy, yet most Americans despise its politics. Which is why direct democracy inspires them...As the history of past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those running America more than the danger of true democracy breaking out. As we see in Chicago, Portland, Oakland, and right now in New York City, the immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions and brutality. Our rulers, anyway, seem to labor under a lingering fear that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism really is, they may well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary.

Almost every time I'm interviewed by a mainstream journalist about OWS, I get some variation of the same lecture:

"How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what's with all this anarchist nonsense – the consensus, the sparkly fingers … ? You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!"

It is hard to imagine worse advice. After all, since 2007, just about every previous attempt to kick off a nationwide movement against Wall Street took exactly the course such people would have recommended – and failed miserably. It is only when a small group of anarchists in New York decided to adopt the opposite approach – refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the existing political authorities by making demands of them; refusing to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal order by occupying a public space without asking for permission, refusing to elect leaders that could then be bribed or co-opted; declaring, however non-violently, that the entire system was corrupt and they rejected it; being willing to stand firm against the state's inevitable violent response – that hundreds of thousands of Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa began rallying in support, and a majority declared their sympathies.

This is not the first time a movement based on fundamentally anarchist principles – direct action, direct democracy, a rejection of existing political institutions and attempt to create alternative ones – has cropped up in the US. The civil rights movement (at least, its more radical branches), the anti-nuclear movement, the global justice movement … all took similar directions. Never, however, has one grown so startlingly quickly...To understand why, we have to understand that there's always been an enormous gap between what those ruling America mean by "democracy", and what that word means to almost anyone else...But one thing overwhelming numbers of Americans do feel is that something is terribly wrong with their country, that its key institutions are controlled by an arrogant elite, that radical change of some kind is long since overdue. They're right. It's hard to imagine a political system so systematically corrupt – one where bribery, on every level, has been made completely legal. The outrage is appropriate. The problem was, up until 17 September, the only side of the spectrum willing to propose radical solutions of any sort was the right. But Occupy Wall Street has changed that: democracy has broken out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/15/anti-capitalist-occupy-pigeonholing

A RUN-DOWN OF VARIOUS FORMS OF CAPITALISM IN PRACTICE AROUND THE GLOBE

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/sarkozy-wins-merkel-backing-for-introduction-of-financial-transaction-tax.html

French President Nicolas Sarkozy won the backing of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a tax on financial transactions, a levy that Britain maintains won’t work unless it’s applied worldwide.

The French government, long a proponent of the tax, stepped up its campaign last week, going so far as to suggest that France would impose the levy even if others didn’t. At a joint press conference in Berlin with Sarkozy today, Merkel threw her weight behind the tax.

“Personally, I’m in favor of thinking about such a tax in the euro zone,” Merkel said. “Germany and France both equally view the financial transaction tax as a correct response.”

The European Commission in September suggested a tax of 0.1 percent on equity and bond transactions, and 0.01 percent on derivatives, which it said could raise 55 billion euros ($71 billion) a year. European Union finance ministers are due to discuss the levy in March.

at least until March...we need a black swan to disabuse them of this fantasy...but after all the black swans we've seen, maybe a black Godzilla?

i posted a thread about OWS deriding both parties for being under the influence of corporate money -- and the thing fell apart w/ accusations of 'they're the same!'

why don't people think money buys influence -- even if that party is supposedly on our side? i don't get it.

They are lunching out of exactly the same troughs.

then they would have to admit they made a mistake and people do not want to admit that. For example, I freely admit I voted for Richard Nixon. I also add that I was a first time voter and did not know his history very well. The break-ins were just rumours etc. But I admit I made a mistake and have since learned from it. Now, Nixon won by a landslide, but try fining anyone else that will admit they voted for him...esp a Democrat.

Money buys votes and influence. Anyone that dosen't believe is a fool or a liar (at least to themselves).

n/t

And what are we gonna do when they find BLACK albino black swans?

This10 Stocks Analysts Say to Sell

By JACK HOUGH
On Wall Street, "sell" recommendations are exceedingly rare. Perhaps for that reason, they tend to be worth following.

This Instead Among companies with the most sell recommendations is Eastman Kodak, which the Wall Street Journal reports this week is edging closer to a bankruptcy filing (see "Kodak Teeters On the Brink&quot .

The large, mid-size and small companies in the S&P Composite 1500 index together have attracted more than 20,000 published analyst opinions on what to do with their shares. Barely 200 of these say to sell. Why? One innocent explanation is that clients of these analysts' firms are more interested in hearing about stocks to buy than ones to sell, because most retail investors don't engage in short-selling, or betting against stocks.

Another, not-as-innocent explanation is that the same firms that issue opinions on shares also court the companies under their coverage for lucrative investment banking business. Over the past decade, regulators have taken steps to reduce conflicts of interest among analysts, and studies show the link between investment banking relationships and "buy" recommendations has weakened. Analysts have also become a bit less optimistic in their recommendations, but a culture of sticking with "buys" and "holds" and avoiding "sells" remains.

Research by Kent Womack, a former Goldman Sachs executive who taught at Dartmouth for 16 years before heading to the University of Toronto in 2010, suggests two things to keep in mind when using analysts recommendations to inform stock-picking decisions. First, fresh recommendations are more telling than longstanding ones. That is, recent opinion changes tend to have more predictive power than the overall consensus of opinions. Second, "sells" tend to be more prescient than anything else. Analysts who take this rare stance, it seems, often have good reason.

more at link......


http://www.smartmoney.com/invest/stocks/10-stocks-analysts-say-to-sell-1325857663716/?cid=djem_sm_WeekontheStreet_h


edited to add that Jack Hough is a straight talker and gives no nonsense advice. I like him.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/big-banks-binge-bush-obama-venture-socialism#.TsHU92vW_XA.gmail

NOT FOR THOSE WEAK OF STOMACH

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/14/130253/latin-america-better-prepared.html#ixzz1dm2UGIgE%20

AND WHY WOULD THAT BE, FOLKS?

...With a few exceptions, the analysis that countries more linked to the faltering U.S. economy, such as Mexico and those in Central America and the Caribbean, have shown slower growth and commodity-rich countries whose trade is tied to Asia, especially China, have outpaced their northern neighbors still holds up.

But with jitters about the euro zone crisis spreading, fears that a Greek default may still be in the cards and the possibility of a slowdown in the Chinese economy, questions loom for Latin America and the Caribbean.

“The European crisis will end badly and there will be some impact but not as much’’ as the old days when a global slowdown would push the region into a downward spiral, said Victor Manuel Rocha, former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and now a senior international business advisor in the Miami office of Foley & Lardner. “What happens in China is more important to Brazil than what happens in Europe,’’ he said.

Latin America also is better prepared to handle an economic storm than it was in 2008-2009. Not only has the region learned lessons from that crisis, but many countries have built up their international reserves and continued economic reforms. That’s especially true for countries blessed with iron ore, copper, oil and vast expanses of land for production of the soybeans, wheat and cattle that China buys...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/14/ireland-and-greece-blackjacked-by-the-banks/

...Illusions of a new European order are evaporating. Once countries like Greece and Ireland, with histories of poverty, emigration and foreign domination, believed they had finally caught up with the British, French and Germans and would enjoy the same standard of living.

The collapse of these hopes makes the shock of the financial crisis all the greater in places where people believed that it would. The worst affected economies may eventually stabilize, but they will not wholly recover. “Greece would like to rebound to its old pre-crisis level,” Tassos Teloglou, one of Greece’s leading investigative journalists, told me. “But this is impossible because this was based on us having the same triple AAA credit rating as Germany and pretending we had a similar level of debt. You can’t go back to that because they [foreign countries and international banks] don’t trust us anymore.”

I spent the last month in Greece and Ireland. In most of Europe the financial crisis is only slowly beginning to deaden economic life, but in these two countries calamity has already arrived. I grew up near a small town called Youghal on the Blackwater river in county Cork. In the 1960s the town had a large carpet factory and several textiles factories, and workers had to be bussed in from far away. Today, after many ups and downs, Youghal has no factories and the largest employer is the local mental asylum. The careers officer at a local school told me “there are no jobs for students anywhere. The best placed are those who come from small family farms they can go back to.”

On the island of Naxos in Aegean at the other end of Europe the prospects are equally gloomy. Katrina Sideri, in charge of vocational training in the mountain village of Chalki, says that highly qualified people speaking two foreign languages are retraining to take jobs in tourism, the only industry which still provides employment. “People are scared,” says Vasilis Krasas, the head of an association of farmers herding sheep and goats in a nearby village. “They are shut up in their homes and don’t come out. They are even having to send food parcels to their relatives in Athens.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/nyregion/patience-grows-thin-for-banks-foreclosure-excuses.html


The Bank of America lawyer laid down a patented rhetorical move heard in courts across America. Your Honor, this Orange County, N.Y., homeowner — a New York City police officer — didn’t make enough money to qualify for a mortgage modification. He didn’t send us the right documents.

He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, and so we should be allowed to foreclose.

Justice Catherine M. Bartlett of New York State Supreme Court cut off the lawyer. You, she said, are telling me lies. “Bank of America got a bailout, and this is an outrage, how this man has been treated,” she said. “Hard-working, middle-class Americans are trying to make it, trying to refinance with your bank.” Either bank officials show up in person, the justice said, or I’m going to order them “here in handcuffs.”

MORE

But I think our theme for the day should be...

Beer for our Horses....Toby Keith with a little help for Willy

Well a man come on the 6 o'clock news
Said somebody's been shot, somebody's been abused
Somebody blew up a building
Somebody stole a car
Somebody got away
Somebody didn't get too far yeah
They didn't get too far

Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street for all the people to see that

(Chorus)
Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we'll sing a victory tune
We'll all meet back at the local saloon
We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces
Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
We've got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets
It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send 'em all to their maker and he'll settle 'em down
You can bet he'll set 'em down 'cause

Repeat chorus x2





That one line..Justice is the one thing you should always find has stuck with me ever since I first heard this song. So let us here it for a little justice.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/11/13/big-banks-turn-unemployment-benefits-into-a-profit-center/

Despite big banks putting up a brave front, there’s a good deal of anecdotal evidence that individual managers are trying desperately to stop customers from moving their money. Whether it’s just throwing up additional hurdles like a $10 closure fee, or outright begging customers to stay, or bad-mouthing credit unions or community banks, or simply refusing to allow people to close accounts, it’s clear that at the local level, bank managers are trying to hold onto deposits, which even in this go-go age remains an important tool for maintaining capital requirements and funding the risky bets banks continue to make...And if you needed any more of a reason to move your money, consider that many firms, such as Bank of America, have turned the truly indigent into profit centers, by making money off of debit card fees for unemployment benefits.



BofA isn’t alone in this practice. US Bank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and others have seized control of public benefits in the states, forcing beneficiaries to use their services. And if those banks aren’t available in their areas, or even if they are, they get hit with fees. Banks have seduced state governments with the lure of budget savings from not having to cut checks and mail them out. And they’ve generated this profit center for the banks out of imposing fees on the unemployed and food stamp recipients. For example, the swipe fees that were limited on debit card purchases? Not on the prepaid debit cards used in conjunction with unemployment benefits. The banks can charge whatever they want on those purchases. And that pales in comparison to what they charge the recipients.

Banking experts say the real money lies in the fees the bank collects for a range of services. When (South Carolina) first contracted with Bank of America, the list of potential fees the bank was allowed to collect included a $1.50 charge when a customer visited a bank ATM or teller more than once per week, a $1.50 charge for use of an out-of-network ATM, a $1.50 charge for speaking to a customer service operator more than once per month, and 50 cents for entering the wrong PIN number at an ATM more than four times or requesting more funds from an ATM than remained on the card.

Needless to say, this is a part of the frustration ordinary Americans feel with a banking industry that ruined the economy and now gouges them to make up the difference. It surely animated the Treasurer of the Democratic Party of Georgia to burn his Bank of America debit card, as if it were a draft card in protests gone by. It’s animating the backlash you see with citizens by the tens and hundreds of thousands moving their money.

I want one!!!!!

set it up where ever they go in NYC just to send a message. (use a dull blade so they don't get in trouble)

SEE THE CARTOONS AT LINK!

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/12/31/2568230/dave-barrys-2011-year-in-review.html


It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the Gulf oil spill....

...It was a year in which a significant earthquake struck Washington, D.C., yet failed to destroy a single federal agency....

But all of these developments, unfortunate as they were, would not by themselves have made 2011 truly awful. What made it truly awful was the economy, which, for what felt like the 17th straight year, continued to stagger around like a zombie on crack. Nothing seemed to help. President Obama, whose instinctive reaction to pretty much everything that happens, including sunrise, is to deliver a nationally televised address, delivered numerous nationally televised addresses on the economy, but somehow these did not do the trick. Neither did the approximately 37 million words emitted by the approximately 249 Republican-presidential-contender televised debates, out of which the single most memorable statement made was, quote: “Oops.”

As the year wore on, frustration finally boiled over in the form of the Occupy Various Random Spaces movement, wherein people who were sick and tired of a lot of stuff finally got off their butts and started working for meaningful change via direct action in the form of sitting around and forming multiple committees and drumming and not directly issuing any specific demands but definitely having a lot of strongly held views for and against a wide variety of things. Incredibly, even this did not bring about meaningful change. The economy remained wretched, especially unemployment, which got so bad that many Americans gave up even trying to work. Congress, for example.

MUCH MORE AT LINK

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/us-usa-china-outlook-idUKTRE80821120120109

(Reuters) - China's economy won't crash but a shrinking trade surplus will likely keep its currency, the yuan, from appreciating over the next year or two, a Chinese economist said on Monday.

Huang Yiping, economics professor at the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, told a conference in New York it would be hard to argue that the yuan was undervalued when the trade surplus was only 2 percent of China's GDP.

"In the long run I think the currency should still appreciate but the potential currency appreciation might be more limited in the short term," Huang said.

"Be careful what you look for from China. I suspect the currency will be going down for a little while."

Twinkies Maker Preparing for Chapter 11 Filing

By MIKE SPECTOR And JULIE JARGON

Hostess Brands Inc. is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter, a move that would mark the second significant court restructuring for the Twinkie and Wonder Bread baker in the past several years.

The privately held Irving, Texas, company, which employs roughly 19,000 people and carries more than $860 million in debt, has been facing a cash squeeze amid high labor costs and rising prices for sugar, flour and other ingredients, according to people familiar with the matter. Those costs together have proved higher than the company's roughly $2.5 billion in annual sales, creating losses and cash shortfalls, they said.

Hostess also currently owes more than $50 million to vendors, which have been demanding payments on shortened timeframes because of Hostess's financial condition, one of the people said.

more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204124204577151211961572458.html