Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

If/when the dow goes back over 9,500, we'll probably be at a sustainable recovery; if/when it goes under 7,500, we're probably looking at a loooooooong trough. arbitrary numbers, obviously, but...

The Groundhog Industrial Average

The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Treasury has not yet decided whether to write down the debt principal for the estimated 15 million families with negative equity (and perhaps 30 million by this time next year as property prices continue to plunge). No doubt a similar deal will be made: For every $100,000 of write-down in debt owed by over-mortgaged homeowners, the bank will receive $100,000 from the Treasury. Government debt will rise by $100,000, and the process will continue until the Treasury has transferred $50,000,000 to the banks that made the reckless loans.

There is enough for just 500,000 of these renegotiations of $100,000 each. It may seem like a big amount, but it’s only about 1/30th of the properties underwater. Hardly enough to make much of a dent, but the principle has been put in place for many further bailouts. It will take almost an infinity of them, as long as the Treasury tries to support the fiction that “the miracle of compound interest” can be sustained for long. The economy may be dead by the time saner economic understanding penetrates the public consciousness.

In the meantime, bad private-sector debt will be shifted onto the government’s balance sheet. Interest and amortization currently owed to the banks will be replaced by obligations to the U.S. Treasury. Taxes will be levied to make up the bad debts with which the government is stuck. The “real” economy will pay Wall Street – and will be paying for decades!

...Today it is easier to see that the Western economies cannot go on the way they have been. They have reached the point where the debts exceed the ability to pay. Instead of recognizing this fact and scaling debts back into line with the ability to pay, the Obama-Geithner plan is to bail out the big banks and hedge funds, keeping the volume of debt in place and indeed, growing once again through the “magic of compound interest.” The result can only be an increasingly extractive economy, until households, real estate and industrial companies, states and cities, and the national government itself is driven into debt peonage.

...Today’s neoliberalism paints a false picture of what the classical economists envisioned as free markets. They were markets free of economic rent and interest (and taxes to support an aristocracy or oligarchy). Socialism was to free economies from these overhead charges. Today’s Obama-Geithner rescue plan is just the reverse.

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson02172009.html

It's funny to hear how far more vehemently opposed Republicans are to this package than the one that went through last fall. I understand the critiques about no-bid contracts and wasteful spending but didn't they just write a huge TARP check made out to 'Cash' with nearly this amount?

― Adam Bruneau, Friday, 13 February 2009 00:05 (5 days ago)

This. The only damn difference is who the fat check is going to. Investment banks? Great! Too big to fail! (Try to get a loan from a bank now, though.) GM or Chrysler/Cerberus? Of COURSE! Why didn't you ask sooner? States, municipalities, and the rest of the country? Well, um, no.

Well not exactly - remember that the car companies had been way too nice to the evil, decadent unions and so didn't deserve to get bailed out.

ayo tracer going way back to re: banks did you read steve lohr's analysis in the times??

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/economy/13insolvent.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

lays out some of the +/- pretty well i think

i hear swedish models are involved

yes i think we should all look to the swedish models for guidance here

The Geithner bikini team.

they might have some things to say about soft landings

Lamp i just read that and didn't learn very much that i didn't know before - what struck you about it?

I think we need a screen capture of Kenan Thompson's wacked-out "fix it!" economist here.

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/greenspan-said-to-support-some-bank-nationalizations/?hp

does anyone have a crying ayn rand jpg handy?

http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/photos/2009/02/019731.html

i still haven't quite digested the fact that circuit city is out of business

I know right? Stores like that don't GO out of business. They're eternal.

Lamp i just read that and didn't learn very much that i didn't know before - what struck you about it?

i just thought it laid out the situation in a clear, useful way. if you've been following the various avenues and cul-de-sacs this argument has taken then its not some omg moment obv but, yeah, idk i thought it was plainly-stated summation of the situation

i'm still not convinced btw that nationalization is anything other than messy red-herring

so what would you consider the best way to get banks to extend credit again?

or, put another way, the best way to get creditworthy borrowers the money they need in order to make the kinds of investments that are required to lift the economy out of recession?

google ad:

Obama Is Giving You Money - www.GovtEconomicStimulus.com - Read How I Got a $12K Check From The Economic Stimulus Package.

links to this idjit:

http://www.govteconomicstimulus.com/about-me/david-brown/

Feel free to wager how many of the comments are sockpuppets

Pretty sick, considering Obama's stimulus bill only got signed a day or two ago and he claims he's got his check already! Since when did the government ever move that fast?

http://www.masculinehygiene.com/d/m/moneyfail.jpg

TIME is such horse hockey...

Dow Jones Industrial falls more than 100 points to a 12 year low.

So I guess putting my inheritance into a mutual fund in the summer of 2007 was a bad idea?

nytimes.com i love but your bringing me down

btw tracer i keep putting off typing a response i think in large part because my opposition to nationalization is purely negative - i dont have an alternate strategy.

Yeah :/

lets take all the money from the banks and use it to fund the construction of a time machine that will allow us to go back in time and prevent deregulation

and also to warn tracer not to put his inheritance into a mutual fund

It was "low risk" and is now worth a bit more than half of what it started as

i had some leftover college money in a mutual fund that is also at around 55% of what it once was. also a 'low risk' fund btw.

i am a master of the market

yeah lol paying for med school with my savings at this point

google ad:

Obama Is Giving You Money - www.GovtEconomicStimulus.com - Read How I Got a $12K Check From The Economic Stimulus Package.

links to this idjit:

http://www.govteconomicstimulus.com/about-me/david-brown/

Feel free to wager how many of the comments are sockpuppets

― kingfish, Thursday, 19 February 2009 17:54 (Yesterday) Permalink

Pretty sick, considering Obama's stimulus bill only got signed a day or two ago and he claims he's got his check already! Since when did the government ever move that fast?

― Aimless, Thursday, 19 February 2009 18:00 (Yesterday)

Those ads were popping up on Facebook 2 weeks before the bill was signed!

for yr entertainment

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/

Christ, I haven't been able to watch frontline in like, what, 4 years plus now?

i didn't really learn anything from that frontline show that i didn't already know (nor would, i suspect, most of the posters on this thread) -- it was useful to show just what a massive, gaping asshole henry paulson is and squarely pins most of the blame for our current mess on him (esp. in its implication that he didn't bail out lehman bros. in no small part b/c he didn't heart dick lol fuld), but again most of us here already knew that.

it may be helpful for less-than-astute folks, though.

it's great storytelling at any rate.

so...6000's by close today or?

Dow Jones Industrial Average is down more than 200 points at 7,159, a total not seen since the close of October 27, 1997.

currently 7,128.48

7,114.22http://i.mktw.net/mw3/quotes/arrow-dn-lg.gif at close wow

Was down to 7,105.94 at one point.

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/images/2008/12/28/down_arrow_red.jpg

lowest close for s&p 500 since December 1996

so are we back to the pre-"irrational exuberance" days then?!?

irrational malaise

stock market spring '09: across the boards markets host '80s revival

Hath not a douche eyes?:

Dating in the time of the pink slip means feeling the squeeze of the drastically reduced paycheck, the sudden sting of the layoff. From investment bankers to real estate developers to construction workers, no job means no buying rounds of $15 martinis for a pretty woman and her girlfriends. No hosting parties in the bachelor loft. And often, no idea how to present one's new self on the dating market.

"It's been incredibly stressful for me," said Neil Welsh, 27, the guy in the suit, who until last year was marketing director for a booming real estate company. "I was so used to using my financial situation to leverage my dating."

Ah, even better:

Alexandria native Niko Papademitriou, 27, became an investment banker with a Cleveland firm soon after he graduated from college. The money was steady enough for him to fly regularly to Manhattan to see his girlfriend and take her to upscale restaurants such as Bond Street and Cafe Gray.

"A large aspect of my life -- three out of the first five conversations that we had -- I told her, 'You're not going to see much of me in the next 15 years if we start dating, because I'm going to be making a lot of money.' " He thinks that worked in his favor, "not so much for the money, but for the drive. It's one of those things in men that women find attractive."

Since being laid off in November, he has moved back to Alexandria to live with his mother. He now takes the Chinatown bus -- for as little as $5 each way -- to visit his girlfriend. Round-trip airfare between Cleveland and New York City averages more than $200.

"It's definitely putting stress on our relationship," he said recently, sitting in an Old Town cafe. "It comes back to this whole manhood thing. Like, can you be the provider, not just for yourself but for others?"

It's been tough on his girlfriend, he said. "She knows that she needs to be this understanding, positive influence in my life. At the same time, there is a lot of fear on her part, knowing that my industry and the one that we had kind of mentally projected ourselves and our way of life on could be over, or at least on pause for a while."

so are we back to the pre-"irrational exuberance" days then?!?

this makes sense to me, cuz my layman's crude and oversimplified take on the current economy is that the dot-com era boomtown artificially inflated the value of the US economy. after the internet bubble burst, all the "money" was moved into an equally overvalued real estate bubble in the US which subsequently burst, dragging the global economy down in the process. we're out of assets to overvalue, there's no place to hide anymore, and the economy can only contract back to more realistic pre-dot-com values.

board economists feel free to expose my hapless naivete.

No I think that's the accepted state of things.

It's funny - peculiar, not ha-ha - that the stock market is down to where it was in 1997 - before the dot-com boom had really taken off - yet houses are still at 2003 levels. Surely 2003 levels are still wildly overpriced.

Ned where are you finding those golden nuggets?