One spring morning a couple of years back, toward the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, I was walking across Central Park from my hotel on West 75th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I had an epiphany.
Germany has its own JP Morgan, the bank that could do no wrong and got bailed out by the Fed and the taxpayer while CEO Jamie Dimon walked on water with a nimbus floating above his head, at least in the eyes of regulators and the government. Until someone had the gumption to peel away layers of obfuscation. What emanated was the acrid stench of internal putrefaction from the top down. After a series of legal battles, fines and settlements are piling up in the magnitude of tens of billions of dollars.
There have been numerous theories attempting to explain China’s stock market’s lackluster performance in recent years.
http://www.engrish.com/2012/03/with-fiends-like-these/
Tote bag found in Moscow.
“Prosperity” based on serial asset bubbles and near-zero interest rates is neither real nor sustainable.
Loan growth in the US continues to slow. Credit expansion is certainly not nearly as bad as what has transpired in the Eurozone (discussed here), but the slowing trend is unmistakable. The current rate of loan growth is now significantly below the nominal GDP expansion.
Signs of the entire industry in a heap of trouble are everywhere. Rumors just bubbled up that Dell would axe 25% of its global sales staff – over 9,000 souls. HP is sacking 34,000. PC shipments, including laptops, have been awful for three years …
A fix-it, doing-more-with-less community economy can create decentralized, localized, non-state, non-corporate employment and trade.
Today’s payrolls shocker (see story) sent treasury yields sharply lower. As discussed last month (see post), speculative investors have piled into the market and were forced to cover their shorts after the jobs report. Going forward, until there is more visibility on the labor markets, investors will be more cautious shorting treasuries.
This is the fourth article in my evolving series of pieces prompted by the Kansas Regents’ new policy that eviscerates academic freedom and tenure. In my third installment I explained that the Regents’ action, while cowardly, unconstitutional, and self-destructive, was not taken on their initiative but in response to extortion by Kansas legislative leaders.
