Political Economy category archive

Management sucks, the working stiff gets, well, you get the drift.

Walter Brasch lays it out at ASZ.

By screwing up the economy so much that illegals are going home on their own.

But they don’t tell you who’s on it:

The FDIC identified 171 problem banks as of Sept. 30, the most since December 1995, compared with 117 in the second quarter. The agency does not identify the problem banks.

. . . promised Herbert Hoover.

By the end of his administration, not only were there no chickens.

There were no pots.

Sort of like today.

The 200 pantries served by nonprofit Food Bank have seen a 41 percent increase in need this year, Traore said. Shelves are often bare at the Pennsauken warehouse.

Food Bank officials estimated that Burlington, Camden, Gloucester and Salem County residents would require four million pounds of food in 2008, but as of Oct. 31, the warehouse already had distributed 4.2 million pounds.

My daughter worked here. Now it might go dark.

Brandywine School District officials told the school board Monday that the long-running radio station at Mount Pleasant High School might have to sign off for a while as its fate is determined in a district cost-cutting measure.

Looking for ways to save money in a tight economy, the district is giving closer scrutiny to WMPH, a 100-watt radio station at the school that first went on the air in 1969.

I guess WMPH can’t expect a blank check from Uncle Sugar. It needs maybe a few hundred bucks.

But it’s in a school. Not in a mega-bank. And nobody there wears a three-piece suit or has a private jet.

Definitely not bailout material.

Robert Reich on the CitiBank thingee:

If you had any doubt at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street; the utter lack of transparency behind the biggest government giveaway in history to financial executives, and their shareholders, directors, and creditors; and the intimate connections the lie between Administrations — both Republican and Democratic — and the heavyweights on Wall Street, your doubts should be laid to rest.

(snip)

Meanwhile, more than a million workers in the automobile industry, along with six million homeowners in danger of losing their homes, and a millions of Americans who depend on small businesses and retailers for paychecks, are getting nothing at all.

A song, just as much for these times as for those:

Conclusion: We’re not there yet.

Down the hall and to the Left, at Brendan’s.

How it happened (via Digby).

What’s to come.

The Republicans want to buy another bank.

No lick-spittle running dog capitalists here folks.

Move along now. Nothing to see.

(I think it’s called fee enterprise, folks. We pay the fee. They get the enterprise.)

Afterthought:

However necessary this sort of stuff may be in the big picture, it is truly galling to see incompetence, venality, and unconscionable greed excused and rewarded.

Ford, GMAC, and Chrysler.

All the rest will be gone.

Via Atrios.

Truth.

Will Bunch (emphasis added):

. . . The real problem is that the legacy of Ronald Reagan — of deregulating the world of risky finance and leaving a giant mess for all of us to clean up — is betraying the American people, again.

In a way, Reagan was the grandfather of the financial bailout in America. Because it was Reagan who pushed to deregulate the savings-and-loan industry, back when credit default swaps were still a gleam in the eye of the Lehman Brothers.

”All in all, I think we hit the jackpot,” Reagan said on Oct. 15, 1982, when he signed into law a bill that lifted many restrictions on the savings-and-loan industry, giving thrifts the power to make larger real-estate loans and compete with money market funds. Some jackpot. It turned out that the deregulation of the S&L’s unleashed a corrupt rush into risky and often corrupt real-estate dealings, often involving insiders, and the nation’s thrift industry teetered on the edge of collapse just months after the Gipper left the Oval Office in January 1989. Within months, Reagan’s hand-picked GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, was forced to push through a bailout package with a value of $160 billion – which would be a lot of money now but was a huge amount of money 19 years ago. This is what Craig Shirley calls “Reagan’s legacy of small government and deregulation.”

(Gee, sort of sounds familiar, doesn’t it.)

No reconciliation.

Bonddad on the new unemployment figures:

Remember, I’m working from the assumption that the worst we’ll see in job losses is a 50% loss of all jobs created during the last expansion. Accelerating job losses indicate we’re moving into phase 2 of the recession — the period when companies start laying off larger numbers. Compounding this issue is we’re at the end of a fiscal year for most companies. Management is thinking, “let’s just get this over with before the end of the year so it’s reflected on this year’s earnings.” It’s akin to ripping the bandage off quickly simply to get it over with.

I ran out to the local liquor store today.

The owner got talkative. He told me that, for the first time in the 17 years he’s owned the store, he is having to roll and deposit loose change in his daily bank deposits.

All the time in the past, he’s had to withdraw change so his cash drawer would be ready for business the next day.

People are buying their sixpacks with loose change. Which means they probably shouldn’t be buying the sixpacks.

It also means they really, really need that drink.

Bonddad is such a little optimist.

Millions for Millikens. Not one cent for millworkers.

Several years ago, when I was out on the Left Coast doing a training gig, I registered with the L. A. Dogtrainer (as Harry Shearer calls it).

From time to time, seldom more than once a month, I get email notifications from them.

This one is truly special.

Bonddad looks at a possible unintended positive consequence of the crash in consumer spending:

Banks are starting to attract customers the old fashioned way; they are luring people by paying them a meaningful rate on their deposits. Simply put, banks must return to standard, nuts and bolts banking. They need to increased their deposit base to make loans. And the way to do that is to acquire depositors. So while the retail news is bad in the short run, it looks as though an important and fundamental change may be starting. And that’s a good thing.

Unemployment at the highest total in seven years.

Local mall drowning in debt (not that I care all that much–I use the other local mall).

Leyland trucked.

QVC not so qute any more.

And ya know what?

On January 21, 2009, it’s not going to magically change into Obamanomics.

We’re gonna be celebrating Bushonomics for years.

James Galbraith on Radio Times discussing The Predator State on how the Republican Party sold–and sold out–the country. From the Radio Times website:

Monday 11/10/2008
Hour One
We discuss the economic crisis with JAMES GALBRAITH, Professor of Government and Business at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of several books, most recent being “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.”

To listen, go to the website and use the “search” feature to go to 11/10/2008 or click here (Real).