The growth in people who cannot find a full time job, and who are surviving on part time jobs, is the worst in 40 years.
Remember, however, when you look at U3, what the press normally represents as “unemployment”, these folks are not counted.
Basically, after years of no support for their unions, and bankruptcy laws that do nothing to reign in executive compensation, pilot salaries have become so low that pilots frequently have to work 2nd jobs, and no small number are on food stamps.
You get what you pay for, and right now, we are paying for lots of airliners crashing by not paying pilots enough.
Here’s a sample:
I told the guys that I have a whole section in my new movie about how pilots are treated (using pilots as only one example of how people’s wages have been slashed and the middle class decimated). In the movie I interview a pilot for a major airline who made $17,000 last year. For four months he was eligible — and received — food stamps. Another pilot in the film has a second job as a dog walker.
“I have a second job!,” the two pilots said in unison. One is a substitute teacher. The other works in a coffee shop. You know, maybe it’s just me, but the two occupations whose workers shouldn’t be humpin’ a second job are brain surgeons and airline pilots. Call me crazy.
There has been an aggressive war on the wages of people who actually do useful stuff, as opposed to bosses and investors, since the Carter administration, and this is not a good thing.
With the exception of the Wall Street Journal editorial, I can think of no OP/ED section in the country that contains more ignorance, flat out lies, and sociopathic ideation than that of the Washington Post.
That being said, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the Post is right when they argue against additional aid to bolster housing prices.
Here is the money quote:
The financial crisis was partly the result of years of government-encouraged over-investment in residential real estate. When will the federal government start working on an exit strategy and a new, more rational housing policy — one in which individual homeownership occupies a central, but less heavily subsidized, position?
I would note that they were big into Bush’s “Ownership Society”, which included a lot of government subsidies for home ownership, so it is not unreasonable to think that the reason that they oppose current measures, and supported old measures, is because IOKIYAR* is a way of life for these folks.
*It’s OK If You Are a Republican.
Unemployment Numbers, Actual v. Seasonably Adjusted
Philly Fed Graph Pr0n Courtesy Calculated Risk
NY Fed Graph Pr0n Courtesy The Bonddad Blog
So, Seasonally adjusted first time unemployment claims fell to 514,000, the lowest level since January, the 4 week moving average fell by 9K to 531,500, and continuing claims fell 75K to 5.99 million, the first time that the number has been below 6 million in 6 months.
Well, sort of anyway. As Brad Delong notes, the non-seasonally adjusted number actually went up:
Unemployment Insurance claims rose from 452,000 last week to 504,000 this week, but the seasonal adjustment factor fell from +72,000 to +10,000, leaving seasonally-adjusted claims falling from 524,000 to 514,000.
Considering the strangeness of the times that we are currently going through, this does mean that the SA numbers have a bit of flakiness.
Still these numbers, as well as the New York and Philadelphia Federal Reserve activity indices are definitely trending better.
The reason that I think that this is a pause, rather than a recovery, is because the underlying problems remain unresolved, with foreclosures hitting an all time high in the 3rd quarter.
About 1 out of 136 homes got a foreclosure notice in the past quarter.
That along with the fact that the CPI numbers are showing that “Owners’ Equivalent Rent” is falling, which implies that home prices have even farther to fall before the rent/own ratio is back to where it should be imply to me that the real estate crash is still on the down slope.
Additionally, it’s clear that consumers are still stretched, with Capital One credit card defaults rising in September.
30 year fixed mortgage rates remain below 5%, though they are up a bit this week.
In energy, oil is now at a 2009 high, and in currency, the
dollar rose against the Yen, but fell against the Pound Sterling and Euro.
Un-Dirtyword-Believable.
Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace for Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana just denied a marriage license to a couple because they were interracial:
A justice of the peace in northern Louisiana has refused to grant a marriage license to an interracial couple because he believes it would harm any children born of that relationship.
“I’m not a racist,” Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in the state’s Tangihapoa Parish, told the Hammond, Louisiana, Daily Star. “I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.”
Ummm….Dude, You Are a Racist, and with a little bit of justice in this world, you will shortly be a convicted felon.
As to what Rush will say? I’m not sure, but not that he won’t be part owner of the Rams, I’m pretty sure it won’t be “sensitive new age” stuff.
Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan is saying that regulators should consider breaking up the large banks:
Those banks have an implicit subsidy allowing them to borrow at lower cost because lenders believe the government will always step in to guarantee their obligations. That squeezes out competition and creates a danger to the financial system, Greenspan told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Greenspan said today. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”
I would note that Greenspan’s mentor, Ayn Rand, saw the breakup of Standard Oil as evil, with the wealth of the “prime movers” being confiscated by the “parasites,” “looters,” and “moochers”, to use her terms (from the Wiki on Atlas Shrugged, I read Virtue of Selfishness, and that ‘s quite enough Rand for me…It was worse than reading Emanuel kant)
OK, so we have some anonymous adviser to Barack Obama saying that people who want more substantive action on LGBT rights are a pajama clad left wing fringe:
For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.
There are a lot of people out there who are claiming that this is not official White House policy, and it’s an anonymous source, and maybe John Harwood is flat out lying.
It’s clear from the discussions that Harwood is a turd: The idea that moving in a direction that a majority of the country supports is dangerous, and that Obama has to fear Letterman, Leno, and O’Brien is ludicrous. (see video)
That being said, he did not just make this up from thin air while on the air. Harwood is standing by his statement, but does now offer that perhaps it was more about the people who want us out of Afghanistan.
Barack Obama and his people have done a very good job at keeping some groups on the reservation, to the degree that Andrew Sullivan describes the Human Rights Campaign as having “Battered Wife Syndrome”, and Glenn Greenwald correctly describes the administrations dealings with liberal organizations, particularly in the case or Rahm Emanuel, as being liberal veal pen.
So, the question here is what is going on, and I think that Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog nails it: this is a deliberate attempt to send out contradictory messages:
The deliberate muddying of the message was the message.
That’s what’s going on now. Obama reached out to the gay community — and yet he wants to be seen as not being tight with gays or the angrier lefties. So a friendly journalist leaked this remark — this deniable remark — which has since been, um, denied. And now the message is muddied. The mixed signals are meant, I think, to confuse supporters of gay rights and wavering but potentially Democratic-voting non-liberal voters (including non-white social conservatives) in, oh, say, New Jersey and Virginia.
What is going on here is that Obama’s staff is populated by old Clintonistas, and if there was a defining characteristic of the Clinton Administration, it can be summed up in three words, Sister Souljah Moment.
You see Republicans prove how macho they are they attack their opponents, but Democrats, particularly those who came to politics under Bill Clinton, prove how macho they are by attacking their allies. They make a fetish of it.
There are people in the Obama White House who are terrified at what might happen if people started to think that the administration supported civil rights, because that would likely mean that they would lose the white male vote in the south….Never mind, already lost…Lose the white evangelical vote….Never mind, the Republicans have that one locked down…Lose the white evangelical vote….Never mind, the Republicans have that one locked down…Lose the foaming at the mouth bigot vote….Never mind, the Republicans have that one locked down…Lose the voters who want to criminalize abortion….Never mind, the Republicans have that one locked down…
Gee, I’m beginning to sense a pattern, and I think that it means that there some really stupid folks playing politics in Obama’s white house.
Whatever those words are that apparently sound a lot like Camp Keating, the combat outpost where US troops were greatly outnumbered and besieged 5 days ago, resulting in 8 US fatalities, and well over 100 Taliban dead.
So, now, after the many words about the “casualties inflicted on the enemy,” the US Army is bugging out of the camp.
I do not mean in any way to diminish the bravery and the sacrifice of our troops, rather I am disparaging the leadership and competence of senior officers. The location of this forward base appears to have been an invitation to disaster.
This entire affair sounds like the Battle of Khe Sanh in miniature: It was a day, instead of months, and it was perhaps 500 combatants on both sides, as opposed to about 30,000 on both sides, but you have the siege, the asymmetric fight, the declaration of victory by the US military, and then the withdrawal from the position.
The echos of Khe Sanh are eerie.
So, Newscorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley of USA Today, are whining yet again about how Google News is stealing their “content” by posting links when a search comes up.
As Weston Kosova ably notes they don’t have to stand for this:
Google doesn’t force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google’s results with a few keystrokes. All they have to do is go to the Web site’s robots.txt file and type this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Poof, the site becomes invisible to Google. Their stories will no longer show up in Google searches. It will be as if they don’t exist.
Of course, that’s not what they really want.
What they really want is a law that:
Because if they don’t get both, then they won’t get traffic and money.
The award goes to the Secretary of State’s spokesman, Assistant Secretary PJ Crowley:
Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.
(emphasis mine)
Meow.
PZ Myers notes on his Pharyngula blog that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is an incompetent hypocrite, which is not a tough call.
In this case, it was during arguments in Buono v. Salazar, during which Fat Tony basically said that everyone uses crosses to memorialize the dead, and when the counsel for the ACLU Peter Eliasberg notes that you won’t find crosses in Jewish cemeteries, Scalia finds it, “an outrageous conclusion,” that people would consider the symbol of Christianity to be….Well …. Christian.
Well, Dr. Meyers has a suggestion, which I endorse with one caveat:
Since Scalia is such an open-minded syncretist, I suggest that when he dies, right after all the partying and celebration, we atheists pass around a hat and get a collection going to erect a huge Muslim crescent over his grave. Not only will it honor the dead man, but it’ll let us do double-duty when we all line up to piss on it. Everyone wins!
My only request is that he be buried near enough to Ayn Rand that I do not need 2 beers to “show my respects” to both of them.
I guess that I am over a week late to this game, but there has been a very significant case in Kansas that could completely reshape the fact of mortgage securitization.
Basically, the Kansas Supreme Court has ruled that the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS), which is basically an electronic yellow pages for securitized mortgages, has no standing in foreclosure cases.
Considering that MERS records about ½ of the mortgages in the US, this is a very big deal.
While the precedent only applies to Kansas, it’s a state court after all, it is likely that their decision might influence other courts in other state:
The development of “electronic” mortgages managed by MERS went hand in hand with the “securitization” of mortgage loans – chopping them into pieces and selling them off to investors. In the heyday of mortgage securitizations, before investors got wise to their risks, lenders would slice up loans, bundle them into “financial products” called “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs), ostensibly insure them against default by wrapping them in derivatives called “credit default swaps,” and sell them to pension funds, municipal funds, foreign investment funds, and so forth. There were many secured parties, and the pieces kept changing hands; but MERS supposedly kept track of all these changes electronically. MERS would register and record mortgage loans in its name, and it would bring foreclosure actions in its name. MERS not only facilitated the rapid turnover of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, but it has served as a sort of “corporate shield” that protects investors from claims by borrowers concerning predatory lending practices.
….
The real parties in interest concealed behind MERS have been made so faceless, however, that there is now no party with standing to foreclose. The Kansas Supreme Court stated that MERS’ relationship “is more akin to that of a straw man than to a party possessing all the rights given a buyer.”
What this means is that the original lender, who sold the loan and transferred the title, has no standing, and that MERS has no standing, since they are not the title holder, and that the owner cannot actually be determined, since it has been abstracted into a sort miasma of Mortgage backed securities.
So in many cases, no one has standing to foreclose on the house, at least not in Kansas. (insert Toto joke here).
Matt Tiabbi, in his always amusing style describes this as, “Waking up to discover the mortgage market was a giant criminal enterprise.”
Barry Ritholtz notes another feature of MERS, that, “MERS also acts as a shield, making it all but impossible for many borrowers to deal directly with whoever happens to be holding their mortgage at the moment, which is why, to a large degree that I think it exists, so that you can f%$# over the homeowner, and they have no one to sue, so this is not a bug, it’s a feature, only, with the prices of homes falling, it’s become a bug.
While MERS does technically save some transaction costs by ignoring about 500 years of property laws by not requiring the physical transfer of a title, the real advantage here is that it means that the investors have become completely insulated from, and completely passive to, the realities of the underlying mortgage.
As Karl Denninger summarizes it rather pithily:
They [MERS] may as well have said “we have decided that we can abrogate state law with impunity.” Oh wait – they did, didn’t they?
Sorry folks, life doesn’t work that way.
If state law requires an unbroken chain of recorded assignments in order to document ownership of a mortgage and thus standing to foreclose, MERS cannot override this state law by fiat.
Can this be fixed on a case by case basis? Absolutely.
If you were someone who recorded and researched titles to property, given enough time and effort, could track down the paperwork (which is all electronic and does not exist), and then get the original paperwork, or a certified copy (like they do with so-called “original” birth certificates), and then get each and every person to whom the title was assigned over the life of the loan, you should be able to do it, except, or course, this information is not there is a coherent way, because it was considered to be inconvenient to keep.
But remember, this is what you would need to do each and every time that someone defaulted on a mortgage.
You are probably looking at something in the low 5 figure dollar range, and probably something in excess of 90 days, just to find out who has standing, which makes the foreclosure even more ruinously expensive.
And once again, the plaintiff trying to claim that software is a license, and not a physical product is Autodesk, and the court just ruled that the software in question had been legally purchased from a legal licensee, and that the purchaser had an absolute right to then resell the software:
“The Autodesk License is a hodgepodge of terms that, standing alone, support both a transfer of ownership and a mere license,” said the ruling. “Autodesk expressly retains title to the ‘Software and accompanying materials,’ but it has no right to regain possession of the software or the ‘accompanying materials’. Licensees pay a single up-front price for the software. Autodesk can require the destruction of the software, but only as consideration in the later purchase of an upgrade.”
“The court concludes that Wise leads to the conclusion that the transfer of AutoCAD copies via the License is a transfer of ownership,” it said.
The EFF is crowing about this.
Well, it’s been about a month, so it’s time to review again how screwed things up are in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.
On the bright side, we are seeing push-back from various institutions in Zimbabwe, which seem all to be tied to the knowledge that Robert Mugabe, who is 85, will not be around for much longer.
The most obvious sign is the struggle within the ZANU-PF over who the next Vice President should be. It’s clear that everyone out there feels that whoever has this post is likely to succeed Mugabe, particularly given the earlier reports of his ill health.
On a more significant note, we are now seeing that banks are no longer considering Mugabe’s land grab letters as sufficient collateral for loans:
Zanu (PF) officials, for long used to free agricultural implements and inputs from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe after taking over large-scale commercial farms, could be facing a gloomy year.
Not only is the government prioritising small-scale farmers this time around, but banks have resisted pressure to accept ‘offer letters’ and 99-year leases as collateral for loans.
President Robert Mugabe and Zanu (PF) have been lobbying banks to accept as collateral the ‘offer letters’, which purportedly authorise the holder to forcibly take over a farm.
However, at the weekend, the Bankers’ Association of Zimbabwe reiterated that banks required “asset-based security”.
Basically, the banks are seeing Mugabe as not being long for this earth, and so they don’t want to be left holding the bag.
The push back is getting severe enough that even the criminal courts are actually starting to apply the law in something resembling a non-corrupt manner, with the Zimbabwe Supreme Court dismissing terrorism charges against human rights Jestina Mukoko, and declaring that she was terrorized by the state security apparatus, and, perhaps more significantly, the Office of the Attorney General declining to represent government officials who have been sued by her.
These are little steps, however, and we are still seeing things like Roy Bennett, the MDC’s nominee for Deputy Agriculture Minister, being indicted and imprisoned on what are clearly trumped up charges of terrorism….Gee…there are a lot of terrorism charges flying about the Zim courts, huh?
In the economy, we are continuing to see improvements in the economy, with inflation continuing to moderate, but the looting by ZANU-PF apparatchiks continues.
Most notably, we have seen the seizure of Meikles Group, a hospitality and import/export firm, and has placed the firm under government control, which, if the earlier seizure of Shabanie Mashaba Mine Holdings, where looting has been so extensive that workers and utilities are not being paid.
We are also similar actions against Nestlé, where the firm has stopped buying its milk from Mugabe’s wife’s farm in order to comply with Swiss sanctions, and the government has frozen the firm’s bank accounts.
Finally, we have the fact that Central Bank governor Gideon Gono and Finance Minister Tendai Biti tusseling over the spending of the recent IMF loan, with Gono, a Mugabe Ally, basically wanting to shovel money to Mugabe cronies, and Biti wanting the money to things like roads, bridges, and healthcare. (here and here)
OK, I dropped Haloscan/JS-Kit because it created a hit on loading time, and went back to blogger comments, which killed my old comments, and that could not do trackbacks,or edit my comments, which I do occasionally to correct my spelling.
Well, it appears that the removal of the old haloscan comments, and the reinstallation from JS-Kit, as opposed to the old Haloscan, restored everything, and eliminated the performance hit.
HTML magic of some kind, I guess, or perhaps it’s just because the JS-Kit folks were not upgrading the old Haloscan servers, or the hand-off between Haloscan and JS-Kit was slow, or maybe just some old code.
I don’t know, and I don’t care, but for now, at least, Haloscan is back, and so are all the old comments.
Sorry for any confusion.
This is odd. He will be resigning in January to take a job at a Washington think tank.
Thankfully, the district is very blue, but his decision is out of the blue, so I’m wondering if something odd is going here, and I do not mean the coke and prostitutes:
It goes without saying that Stephen Colbert is a genius.
I give it a 7 out of 10.
You know, despite all those folks in Washington, DC helping him and raising money for him, the people of Pennsylvania really do not like Arlen Specter, with only 31% of voters wanting him reelected.
And in New Jersey, the governor’s race is too close to call, with Christie and Corzine separated by just 1% in the Quinnipiac poll. There is the same margin in the PPP poll. (PDF link)
Pat Leahy has introduced a bill to eliminate the insurance companies antitrust exemption, and the entire Sentate Democratic leadership is cosponsoring it.
Here is Chuck Schumer explaining the basics:
According to accounts of the minutes, not only are they not looking at winging down their sh$%pile for cash program, but there are a number of members who want the program expanded. (See also here and here)
Unfortunately, boosting stock prices by giving money to banks for worthless assets does not get people back to work, and it could be argued that it creates the illusion of a recovery that makes banking reform that much more difficult.