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This news came out last Friday that Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was considering eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing [...] President Obama used his bully pulpit on Thursday to chastise banks and bankers while announcing a punitive tax on them to assuage an angry populace. Is his rage against the big paydays justified? Not for the reasons he [...] By Jeff Harding. The new jobs bill negotiations are apparently getting under the skin of our politicians. As reported in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, the Republicans and Democrats were rather testy with each other during a meeting with the President. Here’s part of their exchange: Republicans pushed Mr. Obama to freeze federal spending, a plea the [...] By Jeff Harding. As my readers know, every so often I get fed up with what comes out of Washington (Our Nation’s Capital) and feel the need to vent. My recent irritation is a letter Christina Romer, the president of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, published in the Wall Street Journal. The letter is an apologia for the economic policies [...] By Jeff Harding. The Obama Administration knows it didn’t “create or save” 640,000 jobs but they use the Big Lie to justify the huge waste of taxpayer dollars through the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009. But on Friday the government says that it did: … The new data come from information tens of [...] By Jeff Harding. Check out this report on the Obama Administration’s latest gift: free golf cart! This is from the Wall Street Journal. I really can’t add much to this. We thought cash for clunkers was the ultimate waste of taxpayer money, but as usual we were too optimistic. Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy [...] The FDIC is proposing new rules that will allow banks to lower underwriting standards and capital requirements in order to encourage them to rewrite commercial real estate loans. This will cause more deflation, stagnation, and tightening of credit and lengthen the [...] Japan vs. U.S.: Compare and Contrast By Jeff Harding. Japan has been in decline, or at least stagnation, for 19 years. Their GDP has not grown, unless you consider 0.6% (avg.) robust annual growth. They have experienced a deflationary economy, and now, it’s happening once again. They now [...] By Jeff Harding. You just can’t make this stuff up. Obama Open to Newspaper Bailout Bill The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses. “I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” [...] By Jeff Harding I am an avid reader of Martin Wolf’s columns in the Financial Times. I disagree with him quite a bit, but I find him to be perceptive, bright, and one who can think on his own. As you may know, Wolf is the Chief Economics writer for the FT, and is rather [...] By Jeff Harding New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman says (“The Joys of Sachs”) that record profits are good for Goldman Sachs and bad for the country. Professor Krugman’s view is that the economy has been “financialized” since the “deregulation” of the Reagan Administration. That is, more and more [...] By Jeff Harding Just in case you missed this, Neil Bardofsky, the guy in charge of auditing TARP and related programs, said yesterday that “U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $2.37 trillion to bolster the economy and bail out financial companies.” This includes all obligations by the Fed and Treasury, including [...] By Jeff Harding I am on my high horse right now. Refreshed after a week off I come back to an economic mess. And I’m angry. I like to think that I’m an optimist. That attitude has been difficult to maintain with the news out of Washington. Nouriel Roubini claims he’s not “Dr. Doom,” just a [...] By Jeff Harding “Do we need an automobile industry?” was the question posed on CNBC Monday night, the day that GM filed for bankruptcy. I was watching it while doing my workout so I was too tired to throw things at the screen. It’s the wrong question to ask. GM, with a 101 year [...] By Jeff Harding Ken Lewis, the CEO at Bank of America, is now being hailed as “a master at playing the government.” The article in the NY Times DealBook column suggested that Lewis needed to be good at government relations in order to save him from the bad deals he negotiated for the [...] By Jeff Harding I wasn’t going to report on the bank stress tests because I saw it as political theater rather than as anything significant. I knew it wasn’t going to be a rigorous test. It’s like the physical education requirements in public schools where they have lowered the standards [...] By Jeff Harding General Motors Corp. doesn’t plan to make a $1 billion payment due June 1 to bondholders since by that point it expects either to have cut its debt through an exchange for shares, or to have decided to seek bankruptcy-court protection, GM Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said. Mr. Young, speaking to reporters on the [...] By Jeff Harding Larry Summers worked for hedge fund D. E. Shaw for one day a week for a year and received $5,200,000. Assuming they gave him a couple weeks off, that’s 50 days of work. $104,000 per day is pretty good work if you can get it. He also made a lot of [...] |
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