An analyist is suggesting that this will be the number of bank failures over the next 3-5 years.
This compares to 534 banks being closed in 1989, the height of the S&L debacle, but the banks are now much larger with broader reach, so multiply that number by 2, or 3, or 10, or 20, to get the real effect.
Just go and read the shrill one’s latest:
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?
A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.
Good writing. Go Read.
So Nancy Pelosi, or actually her staffer Karina, shows us what 3.6 million jobs lost looks like.
It’s falling off a cliff, with no signs of bottoming.
We’ve lost 3.6 million jobs, as opposed to 1.6 in the early 1990s recession, and 2.7 million jobs following the dotbomb bust.
I heard all of it, but I was multi-tasking, helping my son buy algae for the science fair, so you may want to read the Rude Pundit’s version….He’s is a better writer than I am anyway.
Ghod! It’s nice not having a drooling moron (mostly) dry drunk there anymore.
One thing that the Rude One missed though: Chuck Todd is a complete fracking moron.
Seriously. He asked if maybe now it’s the time for Americans to save, as opposed to spending.
Does this man even read the paper, and listen to even the most conservative economists, who say that right now paying down debt is the kiss of death?
Jeebus….This guy makes Jonah Goldberg sound like Albert Einstein (the actor, not the physicist*).
*Albert Lawrence Einstein the actor changed his last name to Brooks when he went into acting, to avoid confusion.
Well, in terms of the stuff I put here, there was very little today. My guess is that everyone is waiting on Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner’s bank bailout plan.
We do have a rumor on the plan though, and it’s that Geithner has dropped the federally funded bad bank, and instead any disposal of the financial dioxin out there will be handled by encouraging private money to drain the cesspool, which, when I last checked, was paying about 35¢ on the dollar for the top tranches of this.
Good luck with that.
He was supposed to release it today, but he put it off a day, which pushed the dollar down and it also pushed oil down, despite OPEC talking about more supply cuts.
I will post a bit about Nancy Pelosi’s scary graph.
Hmmmm….It appears that his 2006 Senate campaign paid $37,000 to Brown Sugar Unlimited, a catering company run by his sister.
OK, that is unseemly, why is it likely illegal? Because the company had filed to dissolve 11 months before the payment.
There also appear to be questionable money transfers, which pissed off the Maryland Republican Party, and significant payments to a law firm for work never done.
How did the Washington Post find out about this?
The U.S. attorney’s office inadvertently sent the confidential document, a defense sentencing memorandum filed under seal [for Alan B. Fabian who was being prosecuted under unrelated fraud charges], to The Washington Post after the newspaper requested the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum.
Which seems to me to be a hit job, and the motivations could be:
Note, however, that the US Attorney is still a Republican appointee, so if it’s a hit, it’s an internecine affair.
It’s only a one paragraph blurb (paid subscription required), but it appears that Robert Gates is moving toward more cooperation with Russia on missile defense, “In his first appearance before Congress as a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, he says mutual missile defense projects with Moscow are not as far-fetched as recent events would suggest.”
When this is juxtaposed with the fact that the Czech parliament has placed an indefinite delay on a on a vote approving the missile defense radar, it would appear that using BMD to poke Russia in the with a stick is no longer the order of the day.
It appears that the F-35 cost overruns have already placed the program in Nunn-McCurdy breach in all but name, and a lot of the problem is that the program was poorly managed from the very beginning:
The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer says the huge cost increases and delays incurred on the F-35 joint strike fighter program were inevitable because the Defense Department didn’t spend enough money upfront to build realistic prototypes.
….
For the JSF program, the Pentagon contracted with Boeing and Lockheed to build “technology demonstrators” and not “true prototypes.”
As a result, Young said, “the future of JSF cost growth was largely written in 2001 when budget and pricing decisions were made . . . based on inadequate knowledge gained from the JSF technology demonstrators.”
I’m so not shocked. In fact, I think that the DoD in general, and the USAF in particular do this on purpose to conceal the true cost of a program until it is too far along to cancel.
I’m beginning to think that the Pentagon needs to have its contracting authority pulled like the Coast Guard’s authority was late last year.
So, the Navy is looking at a ‘future surface combatant’ (FSC) to replace the DDG-1000 Zumwalt.
It appears to be an improved version of the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke, with possibly a hull stretch and a new engineering plant, and definitely a new radar, the the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), which was originally intended to be first fielded on the nuclear powered CG(X) cruiser, which now looks to be pushed back a couple of years.
The idea that they are doing this to the DDG-51 implies that part of the problem with the Zumwalts was insufficient robustness to battle damage.
What is shows however, is that the Navy really does not have a coherent path forward.
Well, NASA is big on them to improve efficiency, and the Boeing’s sub scale demonstrator, the X-48B continues apace, with the development team looking at stall characteristics, and the Europeans are conducting validation studies on a BWB with 1000 passengers. (paid subscription required for all links)
It will require rather a lot of validation and test in both structures and control surfaces.
In any case, here is some picture pr0n:
More advanced serpentine duct arrangement.
Structural Test Item
X-48 B
Rachael Maddow on the stimulus.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
So, based on my not so informed analysis, what the Senate now has a deal on sucks. It appears that the only criteria used by those “wise people” in the middle was what had extensive lobbying support.
Cuts:
Kept or increased:
Total spending is down by around ¼, and tax cuts are up.
Without some Republican style shenanigans in the conference committee (how about stripping out all the tax cuts?) this will really suck.
That’s 9 for the year, a pace that would put us at 59 failed banks. There were 26 failures in 2008, and just 3 in 2007.
As you can clearly see, after a few months of testing with the aircraft powering just the coaxial rotors, they are not ramping up power to the tail propulsor.
The plan is to put drag-reducing fairings on the rotor, and then slowly transition to higher speeds, which would put more and more power toward the tail thruster, with the retreating blade stall being handled by offloading the blade as it moves aft.
They want to hit about 250kts by year’s end.
Video pr0n below:
Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have agreed to form a joint quick reaction force with a, “joint command and be based permanently on Russian territory.”
It does not appear to be a particularly large force, it looks like perhaps a brigade, but it does imply an upgrade to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which appears to be an attempt at a counterweight to NATO.
Russia and India now have an in-service date for their joint next generation fighter program, the PAK-FA, 2017.
This simply is not going to happen that soon, particularly when India is still unsatisfied with the level of technology transfer, and they haven’t yet agreed on the number of crew (Russia wants a single seater, India a 2-seater).
They may have a demonstrator, at a maturity level of the MiG MFI, or the BAE EAP in the next 5 years, but the former never saw production, and the successor to the latter the Typhoon, did enter service until more than a decade after it rolled out.
If this ever enters service, I’d my guess is that it would be closer to 2025 than 2017.
And the P-80 was 180 days from proposal to first flight……
In this case, it’s the Marine Corps, who have found a disaster besides the EFV, the Growler, which is basically a stunted version of the Jeep Cherokee designed to fit in the cargo bay of the V-22 Osprey.
It’s supposed to serve for basic transportation, and to tow a trailer for a mortar.
As Paul McLeary notes, “Well take a look at the vehicle and tell me if you would want to tool around IED alley in Afghanistan in this thing.” (Emphasis Original)
In addition to being dangerously exposed in combat areas, it’s cost has skyrocketed:
The inspector general report said that the average cost of a single Growler has risen 120 percent, from about $94,000 when the contract was awarded in 2004 to $209,000 in 2008. The unit cost for the vehicle with mortar and ammunition trailer has grown 86 percent, from $579,000 to $1,078,000.
It turns out that part of this has been the Marines adding features, “air suspension … a new cooling system, power steering and power brakes, along with a beefed-up General Motors engine…,” of which only the air suspension would be considered crucial to the mission (it allows the vehicle to squat to fit in the Osprey).
Note that this contract was awarded in 2004, when it was clear that a thin skinned vehicle would not be acceptable in current conflicts.
It’s one of those orginary stories that might raise some bigger issues. The US Navy has retired the last S-3B Viking from fleet service.
This means that there is no dedicated fixed wing anti-submarine aircraft in service any more. This is more than just a story about the retirement of an aircraft affectionately known by its crew as “the Hoover.”
Given the expansion of capabilities of non nuclear submarines, such as air-independent propulsion (AIP) , improvements in anti-ship missiles, and the reports that the Russians have been working on a low cost “hybrid” nuke boat, I would think that submarines are more of a threat to the CVBG than they have ever been.
I really can’t say anything beyond that it is completely work safe, and don’t drink anything while watching this.
So says yet another person who just writes better than I do, John Cole of Balloon Juice.