Jun 10 2009

We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

With all the bullshit being broadcast, you would think that some green shoots would indeed be sprouting somewhere sooner of later, but somehow it’s not all that convincing.  Remember those “stress tests” used to determine the health of the banks spreadsheets under various scenarios of economic growth and unemployment?  Hot damn!  What a confidence booster.  The banks passed them after renegotiating their grades.  Even though the then-current economic conditions were already worse than the worst-case scenario envisioned.  We can attribute that to “lag time,” or something.  In defense of the Masters of the Universe, things really are moving faster than the speed of thought.

At least someone in charge is catching up after the fact.  The woman in charge of overseeing the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program–what a sweet-assed name for a broken apocolypse condom!), Elizabeth Warren, suggests that we need to re-run the stress tests “right now” based on current conditions, because:

We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment.

In other words, the stress test results are about as valuable as the paper in the bank vaults.  Less than not very much at all.  We have already “blown past” those sunnier scenarios.

I appreciate Warren’s candor, which is certainly at odds with what we’ve been hearing from Obama and the MoUs.

Today is June 9th, one day after when the banks were to present their plans on exactly how they were going to raise capital to prop up their collapsing balance sheets.

One foreclosure tsunami down, two to go.  Seriously, what’s going to be left?

Let’s face it: Obama’s behavior in the face of this crisis has been abysmal.  He’s not unlike Bush during Katrina, except this is global.  The utter lack of transparency, the dissembling about the extent and nature of the problem, has been appalling.  Like everything else, from Guantanamo, to warrantless wiretapping, to torture, to states secrets, and all previous trangressions against humanity and law, Obama chooses to cover-up rather than ‘fess up.  Move along, nothing to see.  When Obama says he will always be open and honest with the American people, he is lying.

There was actually a half-way decent article in the NY Times the other day, entitled “The Economy is Still at the Brink.”  Some good questions were asked, such as:

Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid – the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth – when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?

Good shot, eh wot?  Seriously, what are the contingency plans to save the bottom of the pyramid when saving the top fails and all the downside has been transferred to the little people in the form of debt peonage?  Geithner: We don’t need a Plan B.  Confidence FAIL.

I sure hope this guy is wrong, wrong, wrong, even though so far he’s been right, right, right:

[faith in American capitalism and in our nation] can and will never be restored, there’s no going back, partly because it lost all credibility, partly because it lost its manufacturing base, and partly because it lost all of its money…

There will come a day, though it will come far, far too late, when the fact that this is not merely some financial crisis will be evident to many of us. That realization may well coincide with the one that spells out that if the only people capable of understanding and fixing a highly flawed system, mired in behavior on both sides of the line that defines criminal acts, are the ones that designed it, that whole system needs to be discarded. Which is the precise opposite of what we do now. In other words: we have a long way to go, and it won’t be a pleasant ride.

Obama is playing hide-and-seek politics to defend the financial parasites with so many other lives at stake.  I suspect his popularity would be somewhat dinged, dented, or perhaps even “totaled” if regular people realized this.  I don’t think Obama has bad intentions toward us regular folk, but I do think he has drunk the Wall Street Kool-Aid until his eyeballs are purple.

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  1. future prospects are much better for the dung beetle than for us.

    • Inky99 on June 10, 2009 at 00:14
    • #

    Spitzer: Green Shoots, Red Ink, Black Hole: Truly Terrifying Data About the Real State of the U.S. Economy


    I have an unfortunate sense that the “green shoots” in the economy that everyone is talking about are nothing but dandelions. Sure, forcing $1 trillion of taxpayer money-in direct capital, guarantees, and diminished cost of borrowing-into the banking sector has permitted the major banks to claim solvency for the moment. Yet we should not forget that this solvency has come not through a much needed deleveraging of the banking sector but rather from a massive transfer of the obligations of private banks to the public, with the debt accruing to future generations. And overall loan quality at U.S. banks is still the worst in 25 years and deteriorating at the fastest pace ever.

    It’s a terrible mistake to confuse the momentary solvency of the financial sector and the long-term health of our economy.

    While we have addressed the credit collapse, we have not begun to tackle the far more daunting, and more significant, structural problems in the economy. Instead of focusing on the green shoots, let’s examine the macro data that will determine our national prosperity in the next generation. These data are terrifying.

    In spite of Spitzer’s personal problems, the guy is a consummate pro and a real expert on Wall Street and all things economic.

    • Edger on June 10, 2009 at 00:38
    • #

    yesterday:

    Green Shoots or Yellow Weeds?

    New York – Recent data suggest that the rate of contraction in the world economy may be slowing. But hopes that “green shoots” of recovery may be springing up have been dashed by plenty of yellow weeds. Recent data on employment, retail sales, industrial production, and housing in the United States remain very weak; Europe’s first quarter GDP growth data is dismal; Japan’s economy is still comatose; and even China – which is recovering – has very weak exports. Thus, the consensus view that the global economy will soon bottom out has proven – once again – to be overly optimistic.

    After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the global financial system nearly melted down and the world economy went into free fall. Indeed, the rate of economic contraction in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 reached near-depression levels.

    At that point, global policymakers got religion and started to use most of the weapons in their arsenal: vast fiscal-policy easing; conventional and unconventional monetary expansion; trillions of dollars in liquidity support, recapitalization, guarantees, and insurance to stem the liquidity and credit crunch; and, finally, massive support to emerging-market economies. In the last two months alone, one can count more than 150 different policy interventions around the world.

    This policy equivalent of former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s doctrine of “overwhelming force,” together with the sharp contraction of output below final demand for goods and services (which drew down inventories of unsold goods), sets the stage for most economies to bottom out early next year.

    He goes on in the article to explain 9 factors that lead him to the conclusion that:

    …green shoots of stabilization may be replaced by yellow weeds of stagnation if several medium-term factors constrain the global economy’s ability to return to sustained growth. Unless these structural weaknesses are resolved, the global economy may grow in 2010-2011, but at an anemic rate.

  4. we would have 2009 Pecora commissions.

    If I were to steal $1,000 I would do prison time.

    An entire industry steals upwards of $30 trillion and no one wants to know how it happened? WTF?

  5. because it lost its manufacturing base

    We have to make stuff again and sell it around the world.

    When the Great Depression happened, one of the things that pulled us out of it was our manufacturing base.

    That is gone now, thanks to Reagan and his “service economy” bullshit.  From (roughly) 1940 until about 1990, what kept the U.S. economy strong was the fact that we made stuff other people wanted to buy.

    Now?  Not so much.

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