It was a good day. Glorious weather, lots of stuff I would have bought had I the money.

Did buy. however, exactly what I went looking for, plus one absolutely stunning slab of Java plume agate.

Pictures tomorrow, which is really today because today is tomorrow.

We're having a real, honest to god spring! It's been in the 50's for days.

European corporate defaults are widely expected to climb sharply this year despite the recent improvement in credit market sentiment as bank lending cuts and a deteriorating economic backdrop put many smaller or indebted companies under pressure

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/OZMCDD/16D58Z/HI3M9/4C5PTX/FK1K05/JY/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=6

Bankster betrayal.

According to one person close to the process, as much as half of the measures outlined in those plans do not look credible

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/U1767P/EKRAI/ORLMSF/AMR2XG/JY/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=6

Enforcement actions have reinforced the view that the UK is lighter on markets policing but that could be about to change with aggressive US-style tactics

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/U1767P/EKRAI/ORLMSF/SP2RLL/JY/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=6

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT...UNLESS THEY ARE TRYING TO MAKE FUN OF US.

S&P financials sector of banks and insurers trading above book value of assets for first time since July

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/U1767P/EKRAI/ORLMSF/NJ6ENA/JY/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=6

Tech group ‘needs a governance upgrade’ says pension fund and activist shareholder

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/U1767P/EKRAI/ORLMSF/FKU5E5/JY/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=6

Iran has indicated that its threat to cut oil supplies to European states in order to pre-empt an EU oil embargo may be only a symbolic one

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/NA70KK/C43IPP/YGZ3O/KQ32JJ/PF09PA/VU/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=6

YEAH, THEY'RE GOING TO ORGANIZE ANOTHER OIL EMBARGO AGAINST THE US, INSTEAD. 1973, HERE WE COME AGAIN!

http://www.theautomaticearth.org/

The link they have posted on their website at blogger doesn't work, but this one does.

Adjust your bookmarks.

Last edited Tue Feb 7, 2012, 09:58 AM - Edit history (1)

an entirely different format. I'm still getting used to it



edit to add that the link from the old site pointing to the new site, is working now

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30451.htm

Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment. The unadjusted data show a rise in the unemployment rate. The birth/death model, which estimates the net effect of jobs lost from business failures and jobs created by new start-ups was designed for a normal growing economy, not for a prolonged downturn four years old. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the BLS adds 48,000 new jobs per month to the payroll employment report based on the birth/death model even though the economy has not come out of the deep recession. In other words, over the course of a year, the birth/death model adds about 580,000 jobs to the reported jobs numbers. End of year benchmark revisions quietly take the nonexistent jobs out of the totals, but these revisions do not receive headlines and pass largely unnoticed.

The reported January jobs gains are contradicted by other official reports. For example, the January payroll jobs report shows 50,000 new jobs in manufacturing, but according to the recently released 4th quarter GDP, 81% of the reported growth consisted of undesired inventory accumulation. Normally, companies produce for sales not for inventories. Why would manufacturers be hiring people to produce goods for undesired inventories? Most of the new reported January jobs are in services. The January jobs report has 24,500 new jobs in wholesale and retail trade and 13,100 in transportation and warehousing. However the data shows that inflation-corrected real retail sales are down. Why does it take more people to sell fewer goods? The other remaining sizable components of the January jobs number are: professional and technical services (30,000), administrative and waste services (36,700), health care and social assistance (29,700), and leisure and hospitality (44,000) of which the largest component is food services and drinking places (32,800). The leisure, waitresses and bartender employment numbers seem high for January. Perhaps it was an excellent ski month in the US. However, accommodation (hotels) does not support this conclusion as accommodation lost 3,900 jobs. The BLS reports 21,000 new jobs in construction. However, the housing report says that housing starts dropped more than forecast in December, falling 4.1 percent. Why does it take more construction workers to produce fewer houses? Building permits, a proxy for future construction, were little changed.

As the adjusted data produce phantom jobs and employment, the BLS should headline the raw unadjusted data. With so many discouraged workers unable to find jobs, dropping discouraged workers out of the measure of unemployment seriously understates the true magnitude of the unemployment problem. If Americans were aware of the double-digit unemployment rate, would they be as tolerant of Washington’s multi-trillion dollar wars? Would Obama be facing a tougher re-election campaign? Would Republicans be pushing to reduce the federal budget deficit at the expense of the social safety net?

The phony data serve many interests, but not those of the American people.

http://www.governing.com/columns/eco-engines/gov-why-does-our-infrastructure-resemble-third-world.html

Take a look around your community and I bet you’ll see pothole-filled roads, rusting bridges and decaying train stations. It is rare, rather than the rule, to see unblemished asphalt, gleaming railings and bright platforms. Yet we are, by all estimates, one of the richest societies in the world. What gives?

First of all, although my evidence is largely anecdotal, I have no doubt that the state of affairs I describe above is true. Americans traveling to other developed countries notice the difference, as do foreigners when they come here.

A German graduate student once told me he was amazed at the poor roads, sidewalks and other features in Cambridge, Mass., where we were both living and studying at the time.

“It looks like a third-world country here,” he said. “Apparently, no one cares.”

Granted, we all know about the problems in Europe, but at least in the wealthier nations - France & Germany for example, the infrastructure dazzles rather than frazzles.
There are state-of-the-art suspension bridges, some for pedestrians only, spanning the well-banked rivers and litter-free freeways. There is ample public transportation on clean, well-run buses, trams, and trains.
Their antiquities are highlighted as attractions, not neglected to the point of destrucution.
Architecture is celebrated in new structures.
Throughout the continent high-speed rail connects the countries - a pie-in-the-sky dream in the U.S., but a long running taken-for-granted reality in Europe for decades now.
Streets, particularly in larger cities, can be dirty - but publicly accessible rest areas are easily found.
Smaller villages retain the storybook charm with well-kept and well-used public spaces and spotless sidewalks.

It's not that no one cares, it's that a large segment of our population is feverishly devoted to private enterprise at the cost of public well-being.

And it's worse in some states than others.

A couple of years ago, Dear Ole Pappy had one of his medical emergencies, and I had to fly up to South Carolina. I flew into Wilmington, NC, rented a car, and headed south.

I had rented a Dodge Caliber or something for a week, and driving around SC, I said to myself, this is the worst riding car I've ever been in. There were no visible potholes or anything, but it was just a rough ride.

A week later, I was returning to Wilmington and the second I crossed the NC-SC border, the ride smoothed out, like you wouldn't believe.

I flew up for my mother's 80th b'day. Rented a car and drove around some childhood haunts. Was appalled at the state of the roads, sidewalks, etc. I blame part of it on the weather, though.

Not sure why, but our roads in central AZ are fairly decent. That may be because we have to keep the snowbirds comfortable -- after all, they do provide a substantial part of our income!

to actually fix or maintain anything...where's the profit in that?

And why should urban black people or rural black people have decent roads? They shouldn't even have cars, or microwaves, or TV sets, according to the GOP.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-05/california-s-solo-mortgage-probe-complicated-by-2008-deal.html

California Attorney General Kamala Harris objects to giving banks broad releases of liability for predatory lending. At the same time, she may be locked into her predecessor’s 2008 settlement with the largest lender in the state during the mortgage boom that does exactly that.

Facing a Feb. 6 deadline to join a proposed multistate agreement over foreclosure practices said to be worth as much as $25 billion if California joins, Harris has said she won’t sign onto a deal blocking her from investigating whether the five largest U.S. mortgage servicers misled homeowners about the terms of their loans, among other issues.

One of the five lenders involved in the talks, Bank of America Corp., reached an agreement in 2008 with Harris’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, who is now governor, that bars its Countrywide Financial unit’s mortgage holders from pursuing claims of the type that Harris wants to investigate. Based on the “broad release” contained in the agreement, “it is unclear on what grounds Kamala Harris would pursue lending violations by Countrywide,” said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication.

Harris, 47, whose state is the most populous and leads the nation in foreclosure filings for housing units, has described as “inadequate” the proposed settlement state and federal officials have been negotiating for more than a year with Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Ally Financial Inc.

The foreclosure probe, which had involved attorneys general from all 50 states, began in October 2010 following disclosures that banks were using faulty documents to seize homes...

MORE

http://www.theautomaticearth.org/Finance/who-killed-the-money-printer.html

HE BLAMES THE ELECTION FOR THE INCREASED LYING ABOUT EMPLOYMENT...

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?get_gallery=2712

http://www.theautomaticearth.org/Finance/paying-for-protection.html

When creditors start paying high-quality borrowers to hold on to their money at debt auctions, you know the world is in the midst of an unprecedented debt deflation...the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee has unanimously recommended that the Treasury officially allow investors to bid negative rates at bill auctions, and it looks likely this advice will be adopted. Note that the Committee is comprised of the 21 primary dealer financial institutions, so it’s not as if Wall Street is being forced into anything here. As the following Reuters report makes clear, investors are actually clamoring for this option...

We have now reached the stage where the return of capital, rather than return on capital, takes precedence over everything else. The near-term HI advocates will say this development is a clear sign that gold is the only asset worth holding any more, but they are not thinking like the big money investors. The latter not only have investment guidelines to follow, but they also want to stay as liquid as possible and avoid the risk of another 2008-style price collapse across all risk assets, including commodities and precious metals.

MORE MADNESS AT LINK

Struggling to deal with customer withdrawals and margin calls in the run-up to its bankruptcy filing, the futures broker drew on the money a day earlier than previously believed

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/XYEWFF/08K5YW/B49CK/JENZXB/TUZ1L1/RF/t?a1=2012&a2=2&a3=7

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/expats-lured-by-brazils-booming-economy/2012/01/13/gIQA4jnasQ_story.html?hpid=z6

It just made sense to be in South America’s economic heart, Jonathan Rosenthal reasoned, no matter that he had been working on Wall Street with some of the investment world’s most heady firms.

The fact was, the United States was in a sustained slump and Europe was tanking, but there were promising opportunities in Brazil. So like a growing number of young, highly educated professionals, Rosenthal made the leap to Brazil’s Wall Street, Faria Lima Avenue, to start a hedge fund that has ridden the country’s economic boom.

With an economy that recently surpassed Britain’s to become the world’s sixth largest, Brazil is offering a sunny and often lucrative alternative to the downcast prospects in the United States and Europe. In a sort of reverse brain drain, foreigners are flocking to Brazil.

The number of foreigners residing in Brazil reached nearly 1.5 million last year, up from 961,000 in 2010, said Paulo Abrao, the government’s highest-ranking immigration official. Work authorizations shot up 32 percent in the first nine months of 2011 compared with the corresponding period in 2010. Americans have led the way, with 7,550 receiving work permits in 2010. In addition, 2 million Brazilians who had been living overseas have returned home since 2005....


WELL, IF THE SPAWN OF GOLDMAN SACHS ARE MOVING TO BRAZIL, SO MUCH THE WORSE FOR BRAZILIANS...

ALL I CAN THINK OF IS THAT IMMORTAL LINE FROM CHARLIE'S AUNT:

"BRAZIL, WHERE THE NUTS COME FROM"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577207601101417664.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Regulators are completing a controversial proposal to shore up the $2.7 trillion money-market fund industry, more than three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sparked a panic that threatened the savings of millions of investors and forced the federal government to intervene.

The Securities and Exchange Commission in the coming weeks will unveil a two-part plan to stabilize money funds, which invest in short-term debt instruments and are designed to be safe and readily accessible to investors, according to people familiar with the matter. At least three of five SEC commissioners would need to approve the proposals to submit them for public comment.

The SEC's aim is to minimize any losses for shareholders in the event of another financial panic. Investors for months have fretted over how a Greek government-bond default might affect U.S. money-market funds. In recent months, these funds have moved to reduce their exposure to European banks, especially French ones, amid fears over their financial health.

But fund-industry executives say the rules could damp returns for millions of investors, prevent them from getting all their money out during a crisis and reduce confidence instead of bolstering it.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/spinozas-vision-of-freedom-and-ours/

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch thinker, may be among the more enigmatic (and mythologized) philosophers in Western thought, but he also remains one of the most relevant, to his time and to ours. He was an eloquent proponent of a secular, democratic society, and was the strongest advocate for freedom and tolerance in the early modern period. The ultimate goal of his “Theological-Political Treatise” — published anonymously to great alarm in 1670, when it was called by one of its many critics “a book forged in hell by the devil himself”— is enshrined both in the book’s subtitle and in the argument of its final chapter: to show that the “freedom of philosophizing” not only can be granted “without detriment to public peace, to piety, and to the right of the sovereign, but also that it must be granted if these are to be preserved.”

Spinoza was incited to write the “Treatise” when he recognized that the Dutch Republic, and his own province of Holland in particular, was wavering from its uncommonly liberal and relatively tolerant traditions. He feared that with the rising political influence in the 1660s of the more orthodox and narrow-minded elements in the Dutch Reformed Church, and the willingness of civil authorities to placate the preachers by acting against works they deemed “irreligious,” “licentious” and “subversive,” the nearly two decades-long period of the “True Freedom” was coming to an end. The “Treatise” is both a personally angry book — a friend of Spinoza’s, the author of a radical treatise, had recently been thrown in prison, where he soon died — and a very public plea to the Dutch republic not to betray the political, legal and religious principles that made its flourishing possible.

In this work, Spinoza approaches the issue of individual liberty from several perspectives. To begin with, there is the question of belief, and especially the state’s tolerance of the beliefs of its citizens. Spinoza argues that all individuals are to be absolutely free and unimpeded in their beliefs, by right and in fact. “It is impossible for the mind to be completely under another’s control; for no one is able to transfer to another his natural right or faculty to reason freely and to form his own judgment on any matters whatsoever, nor can he be compelled to do so.”

For this reason, any effort on the government’s part to rule over the beliefs and opinions of citizens is bound to fail, and will ultimately serve to undermine its own authority. A sovereign is certainly free to try and limit what people think, but the result of such a policy, Spinoza predicts, would be only to create resentment and opposition to its rule...It can be argued that the state’s tolerance of individual belief is not a difficult issue. As Spinoza points out, it is “impossible” for a person’s mind to be under another’s control, and this is a necessary reality that any government must accept. The more difficult case, the true test of a regime’s commitment to toleration, concerns the liberty of citizens to express those beliefs, either in speech or in writing. And here Spinoza goes further than anyone else of his time: “Utter failure,” he says, “will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions … The most tyrannical government will be one where the individual is denied the freedom to express and to communicate to others what he thinks, and a moderate government is one where this freedom is granted to every man.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-07/irish-urge-children-to-leave-as-export-recovery-masks-lost-jobs.html

Anthony Roche is urging his unemployed son to emigrate to Australia from Ireland to escape joblessness stemming from the country’s economic collapse.

“I’ve seen the good times and the bad and these are the worst,” Roche, 45, who works a day or two a week after closing his business laying floors for bars and restaurants 18 months ago, said outside a welfare office in Dublin. “There are plenty of people there to work, but there isn’t any work out there. That’s why people are leaving these shores again.”

While signs are emerging that Ireland is beginning to recover 15 months after an international bailout, the government says the economy is in the midst of the worst crisis since World War II. The nation’s unemployment rate, at 14.2 percent in January, is close to the highest level since the 1980s when the country last endured similar austerity measures. Only Spain and Greece have a higher jobless rate in the euro region.

Unemployment may climb to 14.6 percent this year, the central bank forecast on Feb. 2, as companies such as Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Allied Irish Banks Plc prepare to shed more workers. Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Feb. 5 that the government is finalizing policies to provide assistance to people at risk of being out of work for the long term and to help small businesses with loans.
‘Huge Problem’

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-07/right-to-work-laws-won-t-bring-back-manufacturing-commentary-by-ron-klain.html

***snip

Republican Approach

The opposite approach is embodied by the Republican who delivered that party’s response to Obama’s speech, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. His single-minded and simple “manufacturing plan” wasn’t a feature of his response -- a doom-and-gloom affair that offered little in the way of true alternatives -- but rather was contained in Daniels’ decision to sign a right-to-work law in the days that followed the speech.

Daniels said that Indiana needed “a right-to-work law to capture jobs for which, despite our highly rated business climate, we are not currently being considered.”

There are two problems with right-to-work laws as simple solutions for our manufacturing woes: They aren’t right and they don’t work.

Such laws aren’t right because they entitle a worker to all the benefits of a union-negotiated contract without paying any dues. In other words, they grant a free ride, aimed at undermining the desire of anyone to pay their fair share. Regardless of how you feel about unions, the unfairness of this legislation should offend you.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_best_policy/2012/02/the_romney_rule_raising_capital_gains_taxes_is_both_morally_right_and_good_for_the_economy_.html

The U.S. tax code: Never has so much been done by so many for so few who need so little. The recent public debate about the inequities built into the tax code—triggered by the disclosure of Mitt Romney’s tax returns—is all for the good. So is the call for a “Romney rule” mandating that capital gains be treated as ordinary income, and so be subject to the same top marginal rate of 35 percent that applies to ordinary income, rather than the current top rate of 15 percent.

But we shouldn’t raise the capital gains tax just because it’s a popular idea. The rate should rise for philosophical, economic, and political reasons, as several colleagues and I argued in a recent debate at the Maxwell School of Public Policy at Syracuse University.

The philosophical argument for higher capital gains taxes is not tough. Modern American political philosophy is essentially a battle between John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls, whose famous dictum is that we should maximize the well being of the least well-off member of our society, is generally understood consequently to support progressive tax structures that shift income from the wealthy to the less fortunate—with the proviso that marginal rates that were disincentives to work could over time diminish the well being of the least well off. So progressivity is bounded by that practical limit.

Anybody who is a Rawlsian—which means most Democrats—should favor a Romney rule that would raise his effective 14 percent tax rate to something approaching the 35 percent rate applicable to ordinary earned income.

http://sfgate.bloomberg.com/SFChronicle/Story?docId=1376-LZ0IVD6JIJUO01-2TV7JH3N4BBQQM8HJLDSPNGED3

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- France’s trade deficit widened to a record in 2011, underlining a drop in competitiveness that President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to counter with a cut in corporate payroll taxes.

The shortfall swelled to 69.6 billion euros ($91 billion) last year from 51.5 billion euros in 2010, the trade ministry in Paris said today. Exports climbed to 8.6 percent to 429 billion euros, outpaced by a 12 percent increase in imports to 498 billion euros.

As the euro-area crisis enters its third year, and with a presidential election less than three months away, the deficit has become a political issue as a symbol of France’s decline. Sarkozy wants to raise the nation’s sales tax rate to finance a cut in payroll levies that he says penalize industry. Socialist candidate Francois Hollande instead wants to create a public investment bank to finance research and development.

“France’s trade deficit has been deteriorating for a decade, and it’s about competitiveness, it’s obvious,” said Michel Martinez, an economist at Societe Generale SA in Paris. Whoever wins the election needs “to address this.”

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_GERMANY_ECONOMY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-02-07-07-50-48

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- German industrial production fell 2.9 percent in December from the month before, according to official data released Tuesday, suggesting the country's economic slowdown could be worse than expected.

The number reported by Germany's statistics agency was below market expectations for output to remain steady.

Signs for the Germany economy, Europe's largest, have been mixed of late. Readings of consumer and business confidence have risen, and industrial orders reported Monday were up as well. That had sent a positive signal that the economy's slowdown will not be as bad as feared and that the bottom might already have been passed.

But Tuesday's figures cast doubt on those hopes because the industrial sector is the backbone of the country's economic prowess. The statistics agency said it expects a slight fall in output when fourth quarter figures are announced.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/why-france-might-copy-americas-new-deal-in-a-very-french-way/252546/



Should France get a New Deal of its own? How about a "French dream"? Americans watching the French presidential election and listening to Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy's leading challenger, are likely to find a lot of his terms and ideas strangely familiar.

"Culture is part of the French dream," Hollande declared at an event in Nantes in January, echoing a familiar campaign slogan. The French Dream is also the title of his collection of speeches, released last August. "Culture is not a cost, not an expense, but an investment," Hollande continued at Nantes. Culture is the antidote to the current "fear of the other, the sense of decline," and "French culture abroad is a way to make our language, our production, and paradoxically our economy more prominent," he said.

The notion of cultural revival as stimulus has plenty of precedent in American history. A gloss on the current "French dream" discussion, written by director of public radio institution France Culture, Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, for Le Monde, links the two explicitly:

An effective cultural policy involves continual reinvention. In the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression, America invented the New Deal: as the crisis and unemployment raged, far from sacrificing the arts budget of his country, President Roosevelt proposed to raise the nation's morale and boost employment with a new cultural package. Through an ambitious program, he ordered dozens of thousands of public works and financed artistic creation in theatre and music.


Of course, there are other examples of this approach throughout history, but there's a way in which Hollande attaching himself to Roosevelt in particular, insofar as that's what he's trying to do, makes a lot of sense. As Yale political science professor David Cameron pointed out to me a few months ago, the French left has struggled in the past year to come up with a coherent response to the fiscal crisis. It's hard to be a Socialist Party candidate when austerity and a sharp, even magical, economic upturn are the flavors of the day. Hollande has frequently come under fire for the costs of some of his proposed programs.

Vive la France!

[font color="red"]S&P 500 1,335.50 -3.50 -0.26%
DOW 12,763 -13.00 -0.10%
NASDAQ 2,520 -6.25 -0.25% [/font]

let's see how long that lasts.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0207/breaking6.html

?ts=1328623446
Police try to disperse protesters during a rally against austerity in front of the parliament in Athens today. Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters

The Digital Affairs Commissioner Neelie Kroes said today that while She hoped Greece would remain in the euro zone the currency union would survive if it left.

She told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant : “It’s always said, if you let one nation go, or ask one to leave, the entire structure will collapse. But that is just not true.”

In response to these comments a Commission spokesman said: “The commission position has not changed and is very clear".

"We want Greece to remain in the euro area. We are fully confident that the euro with survive the storm and come out of the crisis stronger".

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/07-0

Greece is being hit by a 24-hour general strike today amidst increased pressure for the country to accept further austerity measures imposed by the "troika" -- the IMF, European Central Bank and EU. Thousands of strikers are protesting the harsh measures they see as a "death sentence" for the country.

Agence France-Presse reports:

Protesters vented their anger at their government, at yet another round of cuts to incomes, at the EU and IMF, and at what they see as a hard line spearheaded by Germany.

"No to public sector layoffs!", "No to to cutting the minimum wage!", protest banners said as thousands braved short spells of rain on Syntagma Square in Athens.

One group of protesters burned a German flag in front of parliament, and tried to set fire to one that portrayed the Nazi swastika, in reaction to calls from Berlin for strict budgetary discipline. [...]

"Unemployment, poverty, impoverishment of the country: the fault of agreements with the EU, IMF and ECB," another banner said.

Yesterday Greece had accepted the demand to slash 5,000 public jobs this year.

brent - WTI

was trading in the $10-$12 range, now over $21, which means something.

Pretty revealing. And the link to the SNL skit on the second page is hilarious.



http://www.alternet.org/economy/154031/has_personal_finance_goddess_suze_orman_lost_her_luster_/

If she doesn't find a way to offer a mea culpa, some of her devotees may desert her shrine and find another idol.

February 7, 2012 |

Famous for flogging the financially feckless, celebrity personal finance guru Suze Orman may have finally fallen from her pedestal. In fact, with the controversy surrounding the January 2012 debut of her fee-laden prepaid debit card, she set up what is known in her own TV-lingo as a "smackdown" – a come-to-Jesus moment of truth. Only this time, Orman is on the receiving end. Media outlets from the New York Times to Fox Business to the Wall Street Journal have run scolding pieces on the woman whose FICO-4-You Kit and other products are supposed to deliver us financial freedom. Former supporters have dropped her like a hot potato. Flurries of nasty tweets have erupted between Orman and her detractors. How did this happen and what is the reality behind the perma-tanned façade that Americans have come to idolize?

Suze Who?

Peruse Orman’s Wikipedia page and you will find an appealing Horatio Alger story of a Chicago-born girl raised by working-class Jewish immigrant parents; a girl who rose to become one of the most powerful media personalities in America. You will also discover something curiously absent from the background of a person on Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" list for her work as a financial expert; namely, a formal education in finance. Orman, you'll find, got a B.A. in social work and worked as a waitress (until age 30, you can learn elsewhere) before landing an unlikely job as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. Not the usual path to financial expertise, but what of it? There are many places to learn besides a classroom. The trouble is, teasing out the details of Orman’s education is a tricky business.

In her first book, The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, Orman recounts life lessons about money. One is a touching tale of her hard-working father, once burned in a fire trying to remove a safe from his store, who dies peacefully having achieved wild success with a new store and having provided for his family. Readers are to be inspired by his never-give-up tenacity. But years later, Orman admitted that her father committed suicide on Father’s Day, broken by financial worries. When questioned about the discrepancy, Orman brushed it off: “Who knows what I said in the book?"

Back in 1998, Forbes reporter William P. Barrett questioned the credibility of the rising star, who had just made the bestseller list for the first time with 9 Steps. He noted that some of her advice was obvious (use the self-service pump at the gas station!) if not downright silly (search your closets for missing money?), and he disdainfully recounted Orman’s self-promotion in the form of plugs for charitable giving on PBS. Barrett cast doubt on the nature and duration of Orman’s financial planning career and pointed out that her income mostly came from selling insurance, a product which, he noted ominously, tended to receive a great deal of attention in her books.

(snip)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120206a1.html

NEW YORK — What shall we make of the surprise pronouncement in President Barack Obama's State of the Union address that a belated investigation has been launched into the role of fraud in the financial crisis?

This much is clear: Despite rampant illegalities, bank fraud and countless cases of perjury, the response to date — at the federal level and from most, but not all, states — has been underwhelming, cowardly even.

A few principled holdouts — the attorneys general of Delaware, New York, Nevada and California — refuse to rubber-stamp a pre-investigation settlement with banks, but that's all.

So, four years after the great financial collapse, three years after the recovery began and in the last year of Obama's term — and the president has finally decided to investigate the role of fraud in the great global financial crisis. Hence, this new task force — the unit of Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses — begins behind the curve. The statute of limitations is, in many cases, close to elapsing.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/07-2


(bold emphasis added)

(note the MASSIVE spike in HFT activity from Aug 5, 2011 and later)

Presenting The "Rise Of The HFT Machine" - Visual Confirmation How SkyNet Broke The Stock Market On.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/presenting-rise-hft-machine-visual-confirmation-how-skynet-broke-stock-market-us-downgrade-day

Guest Post: Has Derivatives Deleveraging Fueled The Stock Rally?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-has-derivatives-deleveraging-fueled-stock-rally



HFT traders creating a "market" that will save them from themselves??

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-07/greek-officials-working-on-final-draft-to-meet-international-rescue-terms.html

Greece’s government and international creditors are working on the final draft of an agreement on budget and structural measures needed to free up a second aid package, a Greek official said.

The document is being drafted at a meeting between Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos and representatives of Greece’s creditors and will be discussed by political leaders later in the day, the government official told reporters in Athens today on customary condition of anonymity.

Caretaker Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos plans to convene the nation’s political leaders to seek consensus on the cuts required for a bailout, as unions called a strike to protest and European leaders pressed Greece to reach a deal. Papademos hasn’t yet set a time for the meeting with leaders.

While the prime minister and party chiefs have agreed to make further cuts this year equal to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, they have yet to close gaps over measures demanded by creditors for a 130 billion-euro ($171 billion) rescue. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said “time is running out” to reach an accord, while unions derided the conditions as “blackmail.”

and there's a new board committee forming tonight that I'm aiming to help birth...if I don't sign in until tomorrow, it's not because I don't want to.

The Kid and I are okay, though. We've got winter scheduled for the next week, it seems. It tried to snow earlier...but it couldn't put any heart into it.

me too. Well, without the winter.

Someone on DU just gave me a heart. As I rarely venture out of this area, I figger it had to be one of youse guyz. :grin:

Seriously, thank you very much.
hamerfan

Is that not only do they represent our affection for one another here on DU, but that we have made the CHOICE to donate in each other's names to Planned Parenthood. This isn't so we can have access to special DU features or let everyone else know we're a "donor." This is to send a message to the anti-CHOICERS out there.

So for all my stars, thank you for thinking of me and more important, thank you for thinking of the women, men, children, and families who are served by Planned Parenthood. Remember, it's not Planned Motherhood, but Planned Parenthood. This is about families, all families, including our special little cyber family here on DU.

and return your feelings. You are all great.