That’s the subtext to Congress making changes to Bush’s proposed Latin American drug enforcement plan.
In addition to cutting dollars, some of the money was also conditioned on meeting human rights goals.
I think we are seeing the collapse of political power at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
It’s realized that Bush is a lame duck, and one so unpopular that you want to have him campaign for your opponent.
Already covered the real story, but this cartoon was too good not to show.
It hasn’t. Look at this own/rent chart, courtesy of The Big Picture:
And what this chart also shows is that you get overshoot.
Over the past few years, Bush and His Evil Minions™ have aggressively expanded a program called, “deferred prosecutions” where the companies avoid a court case by paying a fine and agreeing to supervision.
Well, it now appears that in addition to helping along one goal of the Bush adminsitration, slaps on the wrist for corporate law breakers, they have gotten a twofer by creating lucrative private contracts for former political allys, in the form of “corporate monitors”.
You may recall that John Ashcroft got a $52,000,000.00 contract to do this, for example.
They just audited $8.2 billion in Iraq spending, and once again no oversight to the people paid.
Money quote:
those results meant that almost 95 percent of the payments had not been properly documented.
**sigh**
The employment data is done for the week, so we have energy news, where Oil, after breaking $135/bbl then settling around #131, is now back above $132/bbl, and gas prices are trending up again, though some of the latter is no doubt due to the upcoming 3 day weekend.
The dollar is trending down against all major currencies, hitting $1.5755:€1.0000, a bit below the $1.60 record, but not by much.
In real estate, we have existing home sales falling 1% in April, no signs of the foreclosure rate abating, and inventories soaring.
Is it any wonder that mortgage lenders are tightening standards to where they were a few deccades back?
This credit tightening is going to take an economy already in recession*, and throw it down a well.
On the brighter side, it appears that the municipal bond market has finally shaken itself out a bit, recovering from the auction rate security implosion of a few months back.
*Yes, I know that it’s not official yet, but we know the reality when it bites us on the ass.
They are looking at 1,000,000% inflation, which means that prices double every roughly 30 days.
On the bright side, Morgan Tsvangirai is to return tomorrow, so that he can start campaigning.
As this Washington Post article notes, U.S. Absence Seems To Make Difference:
Sadr City is a largely impoverished section of Baghdad that is home to about 2 million people, many of whom support the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a onetime backer of Maliki who has become his chief rival. Sadrist officials negotiated the entry of Iraqi troops, apparently winning agreement that U.S. forces would stay out.
This is not by accident. While the American public is shielded from this, it is clear that American deployment stirs up nationalistic violence, and it is also clear that, notwithstanding US protestations of precision, the carpet bombing of whole neighborhoods that provide any level of threat make the violence a couple of magnitudes worse beyond that.
We need to leave now.
The campaign just made McCain’s medical records available:
If I had something to conceal, and knew that I had to release something, this is how I would do it. If you have a problem, even seemingly innocuous records can show a red flag, but if you have non-medical political reporters who have about 90 seconds to review a page, those flags get missed.
This time, it’s Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Bill Gross, who has been called, ” Called “the nation’s most prominent bond investor” by the New York Times.”
You can read his essay here:
The U.S. seems to differ from the rest of the world in how it computes its inflation rate in three primary ways: 1) hedonic quality adjustments, 2) calculations of housing costs via owners’ equivalent rent, and 3) geometric weighting/product substitution. The changes in all three areas have favored lower U.S. inflation and have taken place over the past 25 years, the first occurring in 1983 with the BLS decision to modify the cost of housing. It was claimed that a measure based on what an owner might get for renting his house would more accurately reflect the real world – a dubious assumption belied by the experience of the past 10 years during which the average cost of homes has appreciated at 3x the annual pace of the substituted owners’ equivalent rent (OER), and which would have raised the total CPI by approximately 1% annually if the switch had not been made.
Me, I’d argue that he’s conservative in his estimates, and place the error closer to 3% than to 1%.
Note that as a bond trader, he is in a segment of the market most effected by these aberrations, and by virtue of being Bill Gross, the financial press will cover this.
Joe Lieberman is saying that he is, “considering legislation to place limits on large institutional investors in commodities markets“.
Even if he weren’t a complete asshat, nothing would come of this, because he is from Connecticut, and with New York City being the world’s capital for such activities, and with many of the people who make a living on the trade living in Southern Connecticut, there is no way that he would really press this.
While I believe that one of the problems with any market today is excessive speculative capital in and out flows, Lieberman’s proposal is rather limited, directed at limiting pension funds and closing a few loopholes, and won’t do much good, because there is already an industry full of people who find ways of ignoring such restrictions.
Instead, I suggest a transaction trading tax on financial instruments. It’s easily implemented, hard to avoid, and penalizes those who trade the most.
The new GI bill passed by a vote of 75-22 in the Senate, and so was attached to Bush’s Iraq war supplemental.
Republicans, including the sick old man running for president, John Sidney McCain III, argued against this, saying that it was “too generous”, and so might lure soldiers out of the military because they would want to go to school and better themselves now.
Note also that McCain couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the damn vote.
They included some other extras too:
The bill also includes money for housing and levees devastated by Hurricane Katrina, heating subsidies for low-income families, the space shuttle program, the Food and Drug Administration, biomedical research, roads and bridges, federal prisons, grants to local police departments, aid to rural schools, suppression of wildfires and preparations for the 2010 census.
The bill would extend unemployment benefits by 13 weeks nationwide, with an additional 13 weeks for workers in states with high unemployment.
The only thing that surprises me here is the fact that we aren’t already paying for preparations for the 2010 census.
The Bush Blue Dogs in the House are insisting that there be some sort of tax to offset these costs, but I think that they will fold, as this is ready made for the campaign slogan, “Congressman voted not to support our veterans”.
I think that this OP/Ed is a pretty good indication that this discussion has entered the mainstream, which is good, and the fact that the “Paper of Record” has come out in favor of network neutrality is better.
In order to raise cash following its disastrous investments in the US mortgage market, UBS is holding a fire sale on its own stock, in order to raise needed capital.
UBS AG said Thursday that it would raise $15.5 billion in a rights issue at a 31% discount below the current share price.
UBS (UBS), hard hit by its exposure to the U.S. mortgage market, said it will sell new shares at $20.09 each to existing shareholders, compared with the closing price of $29.31 on the Zurich exchange Wednesday.
Shareholders will receive one subscription right per share held, with 20 of the rights entitling the holder to buy seven new shares. The new rights will be tradeable, the bank said.
Needless to say, this serves to dilute share holder equity, and it shows that there is just a bit of desperation here.
I already noted that the original complaint call leading to the raid was a hoax, and now the appeals court has ruled unanimously that, “the the state did not establish proper grounds to remove the children from their families.”
The ruling — an unusual mandamus opinion granting relief in a case not yet decided — came on the application of 38 women who challenged state custody and another 54 who filed a second action. But lawyers said the burden was on the state to show why it should not apply to the rest of the children as well.
It sounds to me like someone was cowboying way too much on this.
Someone screwed up, big time.
It’s pretty clear that if Bank of America does not go through with the purchase, Countrywide is insolvent, and it gets shut down, because it is, by any standard, insolvent without a white knight of some kind.
Nouriel Roubini considers this to be a distinct possibility:
The views of Whalen are – based on a survey I made of banking experts – shared by most bank analysts. On May 2nd S&P cut Countrywide’s rating to junk; while on May 5th a number of analysts recommended that BAC walk away from this lousy deal. BAC is already sitting on a potential loss of about $1.3bn from its initial $2bn stake in CFC but as one analyst put it: “I hope Bank of America isn’t throwing good money after bad”.
Thus he raises the question as to what exactly such a collapse might mean, given that Countrywide has originated nearly 1/5 of the mortgages in the US in recent years.
He takes a look at the bigger picture:
Of course the bust of CFC is only a symptom of a much bigger systemic banking problem in the US: with 47% of the assets of all large US banks being related to real estate (residential, commercial, etc.) and with 67% of assets of smaller banks being related to real estate hundreds of smaller community banks and dozens of regional banks and a few national banks will be bankrupt in the likely scenario that home prices fall at least 20% (they are already down 14.7% from peak based on the Case and Shiller/S&P Index) and possibly as much as 30% by the time they bottom out in 2009-2010.
That’s hundreds of banks, some of them of a fairly significant size, that end up liquidated and under FDIC stewardship.
If he is 10% right, then we aren’t even half way through the down slope on this thing.
So far, it appears that Iraqi troops have now been able to enter the city and set up check points, though they did find a weapons cache.
I’m not optimistic. Both sides are waiting for the right moment to restart this, though my money is on Maliki doing it, because if he does not disrupt the Iraqi provincial elections, which have now been oh so conveniently pushed past the November US elections, it’s pretty clear that his party Dawa, and that of the his Hakeem allies, will get shellacked.
I keep hearing chatter about a rockin’ post-partisan general election campaign with Obama-Hagel and McCain-Lieberman duking it out in the fall.
What do you think?”
I’m tasting bile right now.
Congress leaves 34 pages out of the farm bill that Bush Vetoed, so they will have to pass it again, have Bush veto it, and then do the override.
Someone should get fired because of this, but no one will be.