Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

this was interesting imo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n10/donald-mackenzie/how-to-make-money-in-microseconds

I should have started a bank back when the getting was good.

professor, what's another name for pirate's treasure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE

this is a pretty amazing article about how goldman lost 98% of a $1.5 billion sovereign wealth fund practically overnight. oh yeah, and which country's sovereign wealth fund was it? step forward, libya.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/goldman-tries-fails-to-sell-soul-with-libya-deal-20110602

Having managed to get their bankers out of Libya with their heads still attached to their shoulders, Goldman decided to make up for losing $1.5 billion of Qaddafi’s money by offering the international pariah a $3.7 billion equity stake that would have made him one of the largest single owners of the bank.

In con-man parlance, this is called the reload. You beat someone in a Ponzi scheme for his life’s savings, and when he shows up at your door with an axe, you get him to mortgage his house to buy a stake in the Brooklyn Bridge. After blowing $1.5 billion of Libya’s money almost instantaneously, Goldman’s solution to the problem was to immediately get Qaddafi reaching back into his pocket for a cash sum over twice the size of the original losses. It’s really hard not to admire the sheer balls of the whole deal.

I've talked to a lot of people who got on the wrong end of a bad Goldman deal, and I never heard any hint of Goldman coming back with flowers and chocolates after the date rape. What makes the Libyans deserve such special attention? One wonders if you get better service from an American investment bank if the threat of beheading is behind your business deals.

krugman and wells on jeff madrick's new book, age of greed

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/busts-keep-getting-bigger-why/?pagination=false

The great financial crisis of 2008–2009, whose consequences still blight our economy, is sometimes portrayed as a “black swan” or a “100-year flood”—that is, as an extraordinary event that nobody could have predicted. But it was, in fact, just the most recent installment in a recurrent pattern of financial overreach, taxpayer bailout, and subsequent Wall Street ingratitude. And all indications are that the pattern is set to continue.

yeah, they're gonna kill us all with more floods if we let them. And we will, til we have fascism.

new bay bridge pre-fabbed at bargain rates.

Pan Zhongwang, a 55-year-old steel polisher, is a typical Zhenhua worker. He arrives at 7 a.m. and leaves at 11 p.m., often working seven days a week. He lives in a company dorm and earns about $12 a day.

“It used to be $9 a day, now it’s $12,” he said Wednesday morning, while polishing one of the decks for the new Bay Bridge. “Everything is getting more expensive. They should raise our pay.”

welcome to america

yeah pretty much fascism is the only way to explain shit like this

"It has now become orthodoxy on the right—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not Angelo Mozilo and Countrywide Credit, are to blame for the subprime mess."

California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the “Buy America” provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.

and if there were no buy america provisos, they likely would have got the $ from the feds and STILL bought that shit from china, right?

xpost

If most Americans are no longer needed by the American rich, then perhaps the United States should consider a policy adopted by the aristocracies and oligarchies of many countries with surplus populations in the past: the promotion of emigration. The rich might consent to a one-time tax to bribe middle-class and working-class Americans into departing the U.S. for other lands, and bribing foreign countries to accept them, in order to be alleviated from a high tax burden in the long run.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete

I watched the old HBO film Barbarians at the Gate last night for the first time. Pretty good--James Garner has to speak in forced witticisms the whole way, but otherwise I liked it. I'm wondering if it's the forgotten beginning of the recent spate of economic-meltdown films (going back a few years to the Enron doc).

I've thought of that film more than a few times over the years -- very stagy by Gelbart's intent but not without merit. Fred Thompson's prominent role is cause for a roffle or two.

As the head of Amex--he gets fired during the end credits. Ran for president, didn't fare any better.

You kind of have to blame Obama for doing nothing in regards to bank regulations

hmm where have i seen this before

There are implications for the environment, too. The technology used to get gas flowing out of the ground — called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — can require over a million gallons of water per well, and some of that water must be disposed of because it becomes contaminated by the process. If shale gas wells fade faster than expected, energy companies will have to drill more wells or hydrofrack them more often, resulting in more toxic waste.

In fact, as this very newspaper covered in depth just a few months ago but is for some reason reluctant to make explicit now, a bunch of toxic chemicals are making their way into drinking water supplies, and state regulators are doing jackshit

Are shale gas and hydrofracking synonymous or is hydrofracking a specific kind of shale gas extraction?

and EPA isn't fully regulating it because Dick Cheney managed to convince congress to exempt it from the Safe Drinking Water Act, lol!

hurting - the latter

Remember how the EPA tested the air around ground zero and "tests revealed the dust to be extremely alkaline with a pH of 12.1 (out of 14) and that some of it was as caustic as liquid drain cleaner" (Gregg Swayze USGS); but in all, the EP-motherfucking-A issued five news releases within ten days of the attacks and four more by the end of 2001 reassuring the public about air quality.

It's estimated that the number of people with medical problems linked to 9/11 has risen to at least 15,000. More people will die prematurely because of the toxic dust than will have died by the actual attacks.

if the actual attacks ever happened, you mean

hurting - the latter

― Z S, Sunday, June 26, 2011 11:06 PM Bookmark

Asking because I thought the biggest environmental issues were particularly with hydrofracking and not all shale drilling but I guess maybe I'm wrong

max, you can suck a dick

he could...

yep, but the vast majority of shale drilling, at least in the U.S., is now performed using hydrofracking

he could...

― jag goo (k3vin k.)

are you trying to call dibs?

still waiting on your big 9/11 presentation, captain.

14th amendment, section 4

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

jack balkin on its in the debt ceiling farce:

Like most inquiries into original understanding, this one does not resolve many of the most interesting questions. What it does suggest is an important structural principle. The threat of defaulting on government obligations is a powerful weapon, especially in a complex, interconnected world economy. Devoted partisans can use it to disrupt government, to roil ordinary politics, to undermine policies they do not like, even to seek political revenge. Section Four was placed in the Constitution to remove this weapon from ordinary politics.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/06/legislative-history-of-section-four-of.html

sorry, "its relevance in the debt ceiling farce"

Krugman sez

Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece.

I had not known that..?

oversimplification alert but this whole debt ceiling thing feels like a huge knock-down drag-out vase-throwing argument between mommy and daddy over whether to cut up the credit cards when the bank has already issued it's final foreclosure notice on the house..

huh?

kerm, that's wrong. interest rates are historically low. bond investors are totally willing to lend to US for cheap. however, they wont be after a default. it's like drunk daddy warning that your house could burn down at any moment while running through the house with a torch.

the debt is a real medium to long term problem. it has nothing to do with the antics taking place right now. it is very scary behavior by gop.

Hunter otm. kerm way off the mark.

In kerm's analogy the bank, far from issuing foreclosure edicts, is thrilled to keep lending mom and dad money at very low rates, because m&d have never missed a payment, have plenty of income and own massive assets. The bank sees nothing but profit in this arrangement.

As soon as the mom and dad's argument results in any disruption in the flow of payments the bank will quickly reconsider this position, not because m&d's income or assets are any less, but because their mental instability has become a threat to its cash flow.

uh yeah creditors keep loaning you more and more money as long as you make the payments and service your debt... which has nothing to do with whether you should keep borrowing ever increasing sums of money.

ok my example was off because we're still making all our minumum payments - my point is the debt ceiling debate and "controlling costs" that amount to tiny fractions of what this government spends and owes seems like an absurd distraction from a crisis looming just around the corner... unfunded entitlement programs and massive ever increasing deficit spending.

worrying about the crisis around the corner makes little sense when there's a more important crisis happening right now - 9.1% unemployment, no real growth prospects

THe key to solving "unfunded entitlement programs" is not to kill the programs, it's to fund them properly.

well technically it's one or the other.. this government does neither. you have to raise taxes or cut programs and these criminals do the exact opposite. they cut taxes and spend even more..

^^^ otm ^^^

will steal for my regular Facebook "thumb in conservative bro-in-law's eye" post.

xp

feel like we should keep an eye out for killer asteroids too

speaking of looming crises

(could do a little of both but who wants that???)

also, i dunno if anyone else has noticed, but ive been seeing a lot of advertisements in spanish?

believing that the debt is the crisis to be addressed now (and by spending cuts, no less) is on par with imminent dangers of saddam's chemical/nuclear arsenal on 02/03.

there are significant structural problems with with our revenue/spending. but you need a realistic plan to get through this, and fake ass austerity is neither necessary nor productive to short term recovery. also, i light of the likely further, unnecessary economic contraction that will result, it is far from optimal in addressing the middle to longer term deficits that are predicted.

this is a straight political play by the "brainpower" of the gop, and it's a panic/hissy fit by teatards. i'm pretty pissed they wanna sink the ship to "save" it.

so mommy and daddy argued about cutting up their cards, because they weren't making progress paying down their balances. but daddy was pissed. he sold mom's car, and now she can't get to work, and is gonna lose her job.

daddy's also pissed that his kids seem ungrateful. when they go hungry because mom lost her job, he's just gonna have to tell those brats- "it serves you ungrateful lazy bastards right- you think money grows on fucking trees? we gotta live within our means here!" then daddy gets in the beemer he refused to trade in for something less fancy.

also daddy keeps trying to ban sharia law inside the house

^^^ basically a bruce springsteen song