Free Republic

Geithner: The Deficit Is Gigantic, But We'll Deal With It Another Time Joe WeisenthalNov. 1, 2009, 2:35 PM On Meet The Press, Tim Geithner acknowledged the monster deficit, and said it had to be dealth with... but that was really a problem to be solved at some point down the road. ---- AP: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledges the federal budget deficit is too high, but that the priorities now are economic growth and job creation. Asked repeatedly on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether this means taxes will rise, Geithner avoided giving specifics. He did say President Barack Obama is...

At 3.5% Growth, Economy Won't Recover Until President Palin's Second Term Paul KrugmanNov. 1, 2009, 11:08 AM ...If we take 3rd quarter growth to be more or less equivalent to average Clinton-era growth, even after 8 years of growth at that rate we’d only expect unemployment to have fallen from the current 9.8% to a still uncomfortably high 6.3%. It would take us around a decade to reach more or less full employment. As I said in my previous post, that’s well into President Palin’s second term...[SNIP]

The New York Times neglects to inform its readers that an op-ed writer slamming Israel earns a handsome living courtesy of overseas Arab money. Henry Siegman is a self-styled Middle East expert who has a simplistic view of the Middle East: Israel is always at fault. He has called Israel an apartheid state -- but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In Monday's New York Times he characterizes Israelis as being pathological and filled with hostility toward Barack Obama because he wants to bring peace between Israel and the Arab world. Polls show that only 4% of Jewish...

Will The Current Economic Crisis Lead To More Retirements? Courtney C. Coile Phillip B. Levine 31 October 2009 Since the crisis began, the economy has shed millions of jobs. This column explains how stock, housing, and labour market fluctuations affect retirement decisions. While wealthier workers will delay retirement, a larger number of workers will be forced into retirement because of their inability to find new jobs. This increased involuntary retirement will likely exceed any work-seeking effect of diminished stock market wealth by 50%. Over the past year, numerous stories in the popular press have suggested that workers in the US...

Obama Goes Wobbly Over More Economic Stimulus Economics / Economic Stimulus Nov 01, 2009 - 06:34 AM By: Mike_Whitney The recession is over. Thursdays report from the Commerce Dept. confirmed that the economy expanded in the third quarter by 3.5 percent, better than most economists estimates. GDP had contracted in the four previous quarters in the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression. Massive government stimulus, cash for clunkers, and inventory restocking accounted for most of the surge in economic activity. Consumer spending grew at 2.36 percent while consumer credit continued to contract at a near-record pace of 4.5...

It Is Japan We Should Be Worrying About, Not AmericaJapan is drifting helplessly towards a dramatic fiscal crisis. For 20 years the world's second-largest economy has been able to borrow cheaply from a captive bond market, feeding its addiction to Keynesian deficit spending – and allowing it to push public debt beyond the point of no return. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Published: 5:33PM GMT 01 Nov 2009 The rocketing cost of insuring against the bankruptcy of the Japanese state is telling us that the model has smashed into the buffers. Credit default swaps (CDS) on five-year Japanese debt have risen from...

Source: Trade and TaxesRaymond L. Richman The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis issued a misleading report when it announced October 29, 2009, that annualized Gross Domestic Product, measured in 2005 prices, increased 3.5 percent from the 2nd quarter 2009 to the 3rd Quarter of 2009. The fact is that annualized GDP in the 3rd quarter was $13,014 billion compared with $12,901 in the 2nd quarter , an increase of 0.872, less than one percent. The number, 3½ , asserted by the BEA was obtained by multiplying 0.872 by 4, in other words by extrapolating the rate of increase in the...

Everything has a fundamental essence, a quality that makes it uniquely itself. Take an orange, for example. It's not only a citrus fruit -- it's an orange-colored citrus fruit. Horticulturists can alter its size, its texture, its sweetness, and even (to a limited extent) its color, but as long as its color is orange, the fruit remains "an orange" because that color is its definition. Change the color, however, and suddenly you have the un-orange, the anti-orange. You have something completely different that no longer contains the essence of the original fruit. Lose the essence and you lose the orange....

There's much debate about the efficacy of controlling pollutants with economic incentives, also known as cap-and-trade. Its advocates dress it up with a lot of moral indignation. Cap-and-trade would not achieve its goals—and it would put America on a ruinous course. Here's why: The price tag would be huge. Cap-and-trade would raise prices for the energy we get from natural gas, coal, and oil. Putting a tax on carbon means that every American who flips a light switch, turns a car key, or buys anything made or shipped in this country will pay more. The Treasury Department estimates that the...

Global Markets In Review: Reversal In Financial Markets Prieur du Plessis November 01, 2009 Rewind the movie to before the stock market lows of March 9: Stocks down, corporate bonds down, commodities and gold down, emerging-market currencies down, safe havens in fashion, including the U.S. dollar and government bonds. In short, risky assets closed sharply lower over the past few days as concerns mounted over the outlook for central bank policy and the sustainability of the global economic recovery, with investors only warming momentarily to the U.S. emerging from recession as shown by the Q3 GDP report (announced on the...

The US Recession Is Not Over, But The Stock Market Party Is Economics / Recession 2008 - 2010 Oct 31, 2009 - 08:17 AM By: Andrew_Butter “Technically” it’s over, perhaps, but that 3.5% annualized was entirely due to the government borrowing money and giving it to people to spend on things that will not generate long-term economic value: Cash for Clunkers (1%) + $8,000 New Homebuyers (1%) + Government Spending (0.5%) + This and That (1%) = 3.5%. To achieve that superb magic trick the government took on how much debt? I’m not going to bother with trying to unpick...

Hey Staten Island! Wake up! Staten Island is one of NYC's five boroughs -- home to cops, firefighters and a mix of hard working blue collar and white collar families. Staten Island was hit real bad on 911. They have no clue how dirty the Working Families Party is. But we do. The Democrats are a racketeering organization using their proxies like the Left wing Working Families Party (how ironic), ACORN, and community organizing organizations to steal elections and usurp the will of free men. (more here) The NY Post came out with this story on the Working Families Party...

Will Obama save Christmas? How many of you are planning for your Christmas and devising ways to not spend? This has been a big theme for the past month or so in my family. Our family decided 'regifting' this year is the way to go. We're drawing names and giving something unused from our house that we don't need. Stuff like picture frames, platters, duplicate power drills or screwdrivers, and odd things that are nice, but we don't use. Presents we've gotten over the years. My junk in storage. Nice things we just don't need or use. This Christmas, I...

Bank Of England Called On To Increase QEThe Bank of England has been urged to increase its quantitative easing (QE) programme to a total of £225bn – more than the gross domestic product of Greece. By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor Published: 8:56PM GMT 31 Oct 2009 The Bank's Monetary Policy Committee, which is meeting this week, will be pushed by economists to raise the amount of bonds and gilts it plans to buy by a further £50bn, following the recent news that unlike almost any other major economy Britain remains mired in recession. The increase would mean the Bank would...

The Grim Reality Is That America Is Not Out Of Recession The emerging giants of the East are rising, but what's happening in the US still dominates global economic sentiment. By Liam Halligan, Economic Agenda Published: 6:28PM GMT 31 Oct 2009 So I was pleased last week when I heard that, after four successive quarters of contraction, America's economy grew by an impressive 3.5pc between July and September, compared to the quarter before. "The US is out of recession" numerous newspaper headlines screamed. No wonder share prices surged. As ever, the numbers warrant a closer look. For one thing, this...

(T)he Chinese are concerned about the viability of the American economic system and about the long-term value of their more than $1 trillion of investments in American bonds. They are also dependent on the market even a recession-mired America offers, with exports to the United States still near $300 billion a year. Americans are worried about the effect of lower-cost Chinese labor on U.S. jobs, even though most of the lost jobs were lost long ago and have as much to do with the corrosive effects of technology on labor as they do with cheap production in China. Meanwhile, China...

As I walked home recently from a weekend trip to the grocery store, I passed a total of 13 vacant offices with signs saying "for lease" or "for sale." These spaces ranged from approximately 500 to 5,000 square feet according to their signs, and they are stretched along a main, commercial street in the center of Tucson, AZ. There is also an eight-screen movie theater that sits empty as well. These empty commercial spaces ... are empty now, and have been for quite some time. I found it intriguing that both in the central portion of Tucson and also in...

United States Catching The Argentinian Economic Disease Of Hyperinflation? Economics / US Debt Oct 31, 2009 - 12:54 AM By: John_Mauldin I have been in South America this week, speaking nine times in five days, interspersed with lots of meetings. The conversation kept coming back to the prospects for the dollar, but I was just as interested in talking with money managers and business people who had experienced the hyperinflation of Argentina and Brazil. How could such a thing happen? As it turned out, I was reading a rather remarkable book that addressed that question. There are those who believe...

I, for one, will not go down without a fight, nor will I go quietly. Last January, I lost my middle-management position in an importer which sold goods to television networks. I had to apply for state aid by going to the New York State Department of Labor to collect unemployment insurance. My weekly benefits were approved, but I frowned at the fact that they would be less than one third of my regular salary. I began my job search two days after being let go. Fast forward to March. After submitting close to fifty résumés and not receiving even...

The GDP numbers out yesterday, which showed economic growth at 3.5% in the third quarter, brought a deafening chorus from public and private economists who all agreed that the recession is officially over. With such a strong report, they are happy to tell us that not only has the Fat Lady finished her aria, but she has left the building and is sipping champagne in the bath. As usual, it falls on me to rain on the parade. Even the giddiest commentators admit that the upside GDP surprise resulted almost entirely from government interventions. But, by pushing up public and...

UTICA, New York - Eight months after passage of the economic stimulus bill in February, likely voters are feeling a bit more positive about U.S. economic policy than they did in early March. However, there is no change in voters' assessment of their personal finances and job security; they are a bit more pessimistic that their children will have a better life than they have had. Those are among the results of Zogby Interactive surveys of likely voters conducted from October 23-26 and from March 2-5 of this year. The most recent poll included 3,544 likely voters and had a...

Steven MalangaFeral Detroit Nature is reclaiming the Motor City. Autumn 2009 We usually apply the word “feral,” which means “reverting to a wild state,” to domesticated animals that are abandoned and must survive on their own. But in rapidly shrinking Detroit, where tens of thousands of structures have sat empty for years, people are starting to describe houses and neighborhoods as feral—that is, as places where human activity ceased so long ago that nature has reclaimed them. Two Detroit residents writing for the blog Sweet Juniper describe these feral houses as places that “for a few beautiful months during...

NEW YORK (AP) -- YRC Worldwide said Friday it lost money in the third quarter, but the financially fragile trucking company is still working with lenders to stay out of bankruptcy. Despite a weak economy and competitors nipping at its heels, YRC CEO Bill Zollars said in a conference call with analysts that he's confident the company will be able to rightsize itself next year. But he expects the economy to remain weak through the first half of 2010. "I don't think there's anything that would make us think we can't be back there at some point," Zollars said. "The...

STAND UP AMERICA, GET OUT OF THE FETAL POSITION AND MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD. Welcome to the GLENN BECK television thread...Shake the cobwebs out of your brain...We are another day closer to the REVOLUTION that will change the 2010 elections. All comrades, infidels, sick twisted freaks and lurkers are welcome and are encouraged to participate in the thread! We have a whole hour of Lord Monckton and John Bolton, join us won't you!

Despite the first signs of economic growth in more than a year, many factors will keep a jobs recovery from occurring for a long time. The economy is growing again. So when are the jobs that go with growth going to get here? Not anytime soon, unfortunately. The consensus forecast is that job losses will continue through the end of this year, with many economists not expecting unemployment to peak until next summer. That will add to the 7.2 million jobs already lost in this downturn. Even with Thursday's report that showed the economy grew at a 3.5% annual rate...

Stocks tumbled Friday afternoon, erasing most of the previous session's big gains. Financials and energy shares were among the hardest hit. The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 220 points, or 2.2%, with about three hours left in the session. The Dow had lost as much as 225 points earlier. The S&P 500 (SPX) index fell 25 points, or 2.4%, and the Nasdaq composite (COMP) shed 44 points, or 2.1%. The selloff was broad based, with all 30 Dow components declining and most stock sectors sliding. Energy prices and stocks were hit hard as the dollar turned mixed; the financial...

When Katie Couric and the folks at CBS start doubting what the Administration says about how effective February's economic stimulus package was, you know President Obama is in trouble. "Well, Katie, that report is going to claim that the stimulus has already created or saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, but if the administration`s first effort at counting stimulus jobs is any guide, tomorrow`s numbers could be hard to believe."

Data showing the U.S. economy is growing again has renewed the debate about where interest rates are headed—a question with big implications for both the economy and investors. The U.S. gross domestic product report released Oct. 29 showed that the economy grew by 3.5% last quarter, a higher percentage than many were expecting, and fixed-income markets took it as a sign that a rate increase will happen sooner. Treasury prices fell after the release of the GDP figure, and the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries rose 0.08 points to 3.5%. That's still a historically low rate, reflecting the fact that...

This article is on dog packs and dogs that run with coyotes. Is the economy adding to the numbers? I think so. Instead of feeding the dogs or turning the dogs over to the humane shelter, people are just "dumping" the dogs. Not only is this not the "right" thing to do, it's a dangerous thing to do.

Treasurues-Bonds Jump As Mixed Data Fuels Recovery Doubts Fri Oct 30, 2009 11:29am EDT By Richard Leong NEW YORK, Oct 30 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasuries debt prices rose on Friday after a batch of mixed signals fanned skepticism about the strength of an economic recovery, rekindling a safety bid for bonds. Concerns that the the world's biggest economy could contract again hammered Wall Street, a day after the government said the United States posted its first quarterly growth in more than a year. With the economy still fragile a year after the global credit crisis, the Federal Reserve will likely...

The recession is over, supposedly. The preliminary estimate of the 3rd quarter's Gross Domestic Product was announced Thursday, and it showed the economy growing at an annual rate of 3.5% from July through September, after four consecutive quarters of decline.  As the Associated Press reported, waiting for the official call from the National Bureau of Economic Research -- specifically, its Business Cycle Dating Committee -- is all but a formality. That's funny; GDP growth was not used as the measure for timing the beginning of this recession. So why would it be used to time its end?GDP last peaked in...

Fed's Massive Secret Wall Street Bailout Still Going Strong Posted Oct 30, 2009 08:53am EDT Henry Blodget Remember last fall, when our government explained that the reason we needed to give $800 billion to Wall Street was so the banks could lend it back to us and shock the economy back to life again? That was a happy story! And we fell for it. What happened, of course, was that the banks took the money, stopped lending, and used it to pay themselves and their shareholders through the nose.[snip]

The Obama administration's new proposal for tackling financial risk in the U.S. economy, unveiled just two days ago, came under attack on Thursday from Congress and regulators, with questions raised about its funding and scope. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner scrambled in a congressional hearing to defend the plan against critics who said it would give too much power to regulators and enshrine government bailouts for troubled financial firms in law. Released by the Treasury Department and Democratic Representative Barney Frank on Tuesday, the plan is an bold attempt to make sure the Bush administration's confused handling of last year's...

my favorite part: "The real shocker that we discovered some time ago is that the FDIC ‘funds’ were never even held in a segregated bank account – the fees collected from the banks are accounted for as a part of the government’s general revenues that go towards military spending, bailouts, interest costs and other government programs. The FDIC ‘fund’ merely consisted of IOU’s from the general revenues accounts. And now that the Deposit Insurance Fund balance as of September 30, 2009 is negative13 the FDIC wants the institutions to prepay their assessments for all of 2010, 2011 and 2012. In...

House Minority Leader John Boehner appears with a copy of the Democrats’ version of the health care bill during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg) Washington - The health care overhaul bill produced by House Democrats would impose an array of new taxes, fees and government mandates on major players in the health industry, including insurers, doctors and drugs and medical devices makers. In most cases, the pain has been meted out with an eye toward raising the money needed to finance President Barack Obama's plan for reshaping the health system but...

Though Thursday's new economic figures indicated the nation's recession is technically over, there didn't seem to be anyone singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." Certainly not in the state's employment offices. "The crisis isn't over," said Annie Young as she filled out applications on-line at a Nebraska Workforce Development career center in Omaha. "We still have a long way to go." At the office of the state's laborers' union, the latest economic news was greeted by Tami Tietsort with a "Yeah, right." "I don't mean to be sarcastic, and I hope we're coming out of this," said Tietsort, a clerical...

The US economy has unofficially pulled out of the worst recession in 70 years, showing growth after four consecutive quarters of contraction. The US commerce department said on Thursday that it had estimated that gross domestic product had increased at a 3.5 per cent annual rate in the third quarter of 2009, the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2007.However, Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, acknowledged that the recession remained "alive and acute" for millions of Americans still struggling to cope with the financial downturn. "Unemployment remains unacceptably high for every person out of work, for every family facing foreclosure, for every...

Further analysis on this story from Ed Morrissey: posted at 9:30 am on October 30, 2009 by Ed Morrissey Share on Facebook | printer-friendly By which we should deduce that over a million jobs got saved or created, indirectly, according to the White House. The official report will come out later today, but Jake Tapper grabs the advance leak from the White House and runs it down. Pay very close attention to the sources of this data: The Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus bill directly saved or created about 650,000 jobs as of the end of last month, administration officials...

fierce urgency about right now is the economy and jobs,

Former officials are often more honest than current ones, since they aren't under pressure to spread happy talk. Former European Central Bank chief economist Otmar Issing recently said what current officials aren't addressing: Nobody can be sure that we have a self-sustaining recovery. The challenges facing the ECB are tremendous. "Money multipliers have collapsed everywhere. What M3 is telling us is that confidence is missing. I don't see any way to stabilise M3 in such circumstances. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes: Data from the European Central Bank shows that the M3 broad money supply has contracted over the last six months,...

When the historians finally finish sorting through the appalling decisions that have been made in the past two years, this one will probably be at the top of the heap. Last fall, as AIG began to realize how screwed it was, it started negotiating with the counterparties to all the credit default swaps it had written. One of the AIG's goals was to persuade these counterparties- These sorts of negotiations are exactly what should happen when a company gets in trouble. It goes to its creditors and says, look, we can't pay you everything, so here's your choice: Take something,...

To hear President Obama crow in vindication of his Stimulus Bill, one would think the light at the end of the tunnel is visible on the economic front. Obama has taken credit for the third quarter GDP growth of 3.5% as well he should. However, we need to examine what that growth was based upon and whether it was a bona fide growth of the economy or the counting of stolen booty. The increase in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, private inventory investment, federal government spending, and residential fixed...

Buy Food – Price Rises Are Almost Guaranteed By Garry White Published: 7:50PM GMT 25 Oct 2009 There are two main drivers of commodity prices – supply and demand. This is just as true with soft commodities such as wheat, rice, sugar and cocoa as it is with copper and tin. The big problem for your weekly shopping budget in the future is that there are problems on both sides of the equation that are likely to squeeze prices higher, permanently. However, this also provides a great investment opportunity and now is a good time to buy into many areas...

Nothing’s Over: The Top Reason GDP Does Not Show Recovery By Rocky Vega 10/29/09 Stockholm, Sweden – In order to juice the US into recovery the economy has been stimulated all over the place. The mainstream media is wild with cheerleading that the 3.5 percent third quarter GDP growth is a sign that the day is saved. Is it? No. The single clearest reason the GDP figure is hugely misleading is the Cash for Clunkers program. That particular government hand out caused motor vehicle output to spike almost 160 percent when compared to last quarter. That’s easily the highest quarter...

The U.S. Economy grew at a 3.5% annual rate in the third quarter, ending a string of declines over four quarters that resulted in the most severe slide since the Great Depression.

STAND UP AMERICA, GET OUT OF THE FETAL POSITION AND MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD. Welcome to the GLENN BECK television thread...Shake the cobwebs out of your brain...We are another day closer to the REVOLUTION that will change the 2010 elections. All comrades, infidels, sick twisted freaks and lurkers are welcome and are encouraged to participate in the thread! Join us tomorrow for a full hour of Lord Monckton and John Bolton. Join us now as Glenn ponders if we are witnessing the death of Freedom of Speech.

Here's a riddle: If a scientist or engineer is laid off, does it affect gross domestic product? The third-quarter GDP figures, released on Oct. 29, showed the economy growing at a 3.5% annual pace, breaking a string of four consecutive negative quarters. The growth was driven mostly by a surge in the production of motor vehicles and other manufactured goods. This number was greeted by many economists and journalists as confirmations that the recession is over. What's more, the rise in real GDP, combined with a sharp fall in employment in the third quarter, implies that productivity also soared during...

Is economic growth the highest priority in Obama's Washington? That's not a trivial question: in 1972, the Club of Rome, a global think tank whose current members include Mikhail Gorbachev, issued a report entitled The Limits to Growth, challenging the primacy of wealth creation. In arguments later taken up by President Jimmy Carter, the book's sub-text is that unbridled growth leads to population expansion, but also pollution, resource depletion, famine, and capitalist exploitation...

What would happen if any other political party pushed for a cap and trade bill that could create green jobs of which 9 out of 10 created would be unsustainable, require government subsidizing and cost the nations economy millions of real jobs? And this is not to mention the increase in manufacturing costs that would be passed on to us in time of depression. No matter if you are a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or an Independent, what do you think is going to happen when the government revenues are down and spending is quadrupled? As one senator from Florida was...

The Associated Press noted last week that the federal deficit reached a record $1.42 trillion for the fiscal year that ended September 30. Up until now, most of the mainstream media have either ignored the exploding deficits or declared them a good thing, since they were supposed to lift us out of the recession. But now that the full figures have come in even some Obama-friendly media stalwarts are struck by their enormity. Read the Full Article.