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  1. #1901
    Guest Member S Landreth's Avatar
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    From CNN money,…………

    More than 700 banks, or nearly one out of every 11, are at risk of going under, according to a government report published Tuesday.

    The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said that the number of banks on its so-called "problem list" climbed to 702, its highest level since June 1993.

    The number of banks under scrutiny by regulators has moved steadily higher since the recession began. Just 76 financial institutions were on the list in the fourth quarter of 2007.

    Banks that end up on the problem list are considered the most likely to fail because of difficulties with their finances, operations or management.

    Still, few of the lenders that are on the list actually reach the point of failure. In fact, just 13% of banks on the list have been seized and shuttered by regulators.

    The names of the banks on the list are never made available to the general public by regulators out of fear that depositors at those institutions may prompt a so-called "run on the bank."

    Link: Number of banks on problem list tops 700 - Feb. 23, 2010

    ....may prompt a so-called “run on the bank.” May prompt?
    Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

  2. #1902
    Thailand Expat raycarey's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by S Landreth
    The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said that the number of banks on its so-called "problem list" climbed to 702, its highest level since June 1993.
    and who had just left office in jan '93?
    george h.w. bush

    and who left office in jan '09?
    george w. bush.

    and when you consider neil bush's problems with bank failures, you have to ask....

    what is it with the bush family and failing banks?

  3. #1903
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    Max Keiser calling for the head of Paulson literally. And announcing that US bonds are counterfeit because they are not collateralized.


  4. #1904
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    Warren Buffet's business party: "It's over for the US."

    Basically, It's OverA parable about how one nation came to financial ruin.

    By Charles MungerUpdated Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010
    In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature's bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas. Reflecting its lack of civilization, they named this island "Basicland."

    The Europeans rapidly repopulated Basicland, creating a new nation. They installed a system of government like that of the early United States. There was much encouragement of trade, and no internal tariff or other impediment to such trade. Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple. It adapted to a national ethos that sought to provide a sound currency, efficient trade, and ample loans for credit-worthy businesses while strongly discouraging loans to theMoreover, almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investment incompetent,

    including real estate and tangible personal property. The one exception was the widespread presence of secured, high-down-payment, fully amortizing, fixed-rate loans on sound houses, other real estate, vehicles, and appliances, to be used by industrious persons who lived within their means. Speculation in Basicland's security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small. There was no trading in options on securities or in derivatives other than "plain vanilla" commodity contracts cleared through responsible exchanges under laws that greatly limited use of financial leverage.

    In its first 150 years, the government of Basicland spent no more than 7 percent of its gross domestic product in providing its citizens with essential services such as fire protection, water, sewage and garbage removal, some education, defense forces, courts, and immigration control. A strong family-oriented culture emphasizing duty to relatives, plus considerable private charity, provided the only social safety net.

    The tax system was also simple. In the early years, governmental revenues came almost entirely from import duties, and taxes received matched government expenditures. There was never much debt outstanding in the form of government bonds.

    As Adam Smith would have expected, GDP per person grew steadily. Indeed, in the modern area it grew in real terms at 3 percent per year, decade after decade, until Basicland led the world in GDP per person. As this happened, taxes on sales, income, property, and payrolls were introduced. Eventually total taxes, matched by total government expenditures, amounted to 35 percent of GDP. The revenue from increased taxes was spent on more government-run education and a substantial government-run social safety net, including medical care and pensions.

    A regular increase in such tax-financed government spending, under systems hard to "game" by the unworthy, was considered a moral imperative—a sort of egality-promoting national dividend—so long as growth of such spending was kept well below the growth rate of the country's GDP per person.

    Basicland also sought to avoid trouble through a policy that kept imports and exports in near balance, with each amounting to about 25 percent of GDP. Some citizens were initially nervous because 60 percent of imports consisted of absolutely essential coal and oil. But, as the years rolled by with no terrible consequences from this dependency, such worry melted away.

    Basicland was exceptionally creditworthy, with no significant deficit ever allowed. And the present value of large "off-book" promises to provide future medical care and pensions appeared unlikely to cause problems, given Basicland's steady 3 percent growth in GDP per person and restraint in making unfunded promises. Basicland seemed to have a system that would long assure its felicity a
    and long induce other nations to follow its example—thus improving the welfare of all humanity.

    But even a country as cautious, sound, and generous as Basicland could come to ruin if it failed to address the dangers that can be caused by the ordinary accidents of life. These dangers were significant by 2012, when the extreme prosperity of Basicland had created a peculiar outcome: As their affluence and leisure time grew, Basicland's citizens more and more whiled away their time in the excitement of casino gambling. Most casino revenue now came from bets on security prices under a system used in the 1920s in the United States and called "the bucket shop system."

    The winnings of the casinos eventually amounted to 25 percent of Basicland's GDP, while 22 percent of all employee earnings in Basicland were paid to persons employed by the casinos (many of whom were engineers needed elsewhere). So much time was spent at casinos that it amounted to an average of five hours per day for every citizen of Basicland, including newborn babies and the comatose elderly. Many of the gamblers were highly talented engineers attracted partly by casino poker but mostly by bets available in the bucket shop systems, with the bets now called "financial derivatives
    Link & Entire: A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin. - By Charles Munger - Slate Magazine

  5. #1905
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    The stage may be set for a Greek Tragedy:

    By Patrice Hill
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ng-on-us-debt/

    With uncharacteristic bluntness, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned Congress on Wednesday that the United States could soon face a debt crisis like the one in Greece, and declared that the central bank will not help legislators by printing money to pay for the ballooning federal debt.


    Recent events in Europe, where Greece and other nations with large, unsustainable deficits like the United States are having increasing trouble selling their debt to investors, show that the U.S. is vulnerable to a sudden reversal of fortunes that would force taxpayers to pay higher interest rates on the debt, Mr. Bernanke said.

    "It's not something that is 10 years away. It affects the markets currently," he told the House Financial Services Committee. "It is possible that bond markets will become worried about the sustainability [of yearly deficits over $1 trillion], and we may find ourselves facing higher interest rates even today."

    It was some of the toughest rhetoric to date about the nation's fiscal and budgetary woes from the Fed chief, who faces a second round of questioning Thursday before a Senate panel.

    Mr. Bernanke for the first time addressed concerns that the impasse in Congress over tough spending cuts and tax increases needed to bring down deficits will eventually force the Fed to accommodate deficits by printing money and buying Treasury bonds — effectively financing the deficit on behalf of Congress and spurring inflation in the process.

    Some economists at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere have advocated this approach, suggesting running moderate inflation rates of 4 percent to 6 percent as a partial solution to the U.S. debt problem.

    But the move runs the risk of damaging the dollar's reputation and spawning much higher inflation that would be debilitating to the U.S. economy and living standards.

  6. #1906
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    A good talk and interview by Max Keiser. Interest rates, and T-bills.


  7. #1907
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    An interview with Senator Gregg, the (R) Senator from New Hampshire.

    He claims a US financial meltdown within 5-7 years.

    Must click link to see the video, and brief article:

    FT.com / US / Politics & Foreign policy - US senator warns of ?financial meltdown? risk

  8. #1908
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    Paul Craig Roberts agree with Warren Buffet's business partner, that the US is finished.


  9. #1909
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    Roberts says -- "If the $ goes, so does American power". He was referring to US printing (inflating) its way out of debt and how it would affect the $USs status as the worlds reserve currency.

    I think thats a fundamental flaw in Roberts theory of USAs impending financial collapse. The reason why USA has become a nett consumer rather than a nett producer, with all the problems of jobs going offshore and loss of tax revenue, is simply because the $US is unnaturally overvalued. And its overvalued simply because its the worlds reserve trading currency (as gold once was).

    Roberts says USA inflating its way out of debt would cause a loss of the $US as the world reserve trading currency and therefore "a loss of American power".
    But he doesn't state what he means by "loss of American power".
    --- Loss of US consumer purchasing power for sure. Loss of profits for US companies now based overseas? More expensive oil, well certainly.
    If and when the $US trading value falls its going to mean Americans will be paying more for just about everything. A drop in living standards for everybody as foreign imports costs more. But is that really such a bad thing for a country which has been living above its means on credit for so long? As domestic products become more competitive, home grown industries will reemerge and create jobs to manufacture products for the worlds biggest consumer market (USA of course!).
    More industry with more jobs means more govt tax revenue. And on the international trade side of things, a reduced $US value is going to mean increased export competitiveness with increased trade revenue.

    So, far from being a BAD thing for USA, a decrease in the world trading value of the $US would be a VERY GOOD THING.
    Such is the reason for the US governments current "spend, borrow and print" policy while the going is good with credit from the rest of the world. USA wouldn't be able to get away with such a reckless financial policy if it wasn't for the fact that the rest of the world holds so much of their debt in $USs and so much of their own financial reserves in $USs. That is the dilemma the rest of the world finds itself in if they dump the $US hegemony. A sudden drop in the value of the $US would mean a sudden drop in the value of reserves held in $USs by most countries around the world. And of course countries like Japan and China who hold $trillions in US debt would see their $US debt wealth in real tangible product terms severely diminished if the $US devalued. Ironically, a big part of the problem of an overvalued $US is out of the hands of the US government since the $US was floated on the free market when its links to the gold standard were abandoned 39 years ago. The value of the $US is now more in the hands of international creditors and investors like Japan and China than it is under the control of the US government itself these days. About the only thing the US government can do to debase the value of the $US is to print more of it, borrow more of it and spend more of it. But still, even while this whole house of cards is falling down around us the rest of the world clings to the $US paper money hegemony as if it really was "as good as gold." Which is of course the greatest scam in modern history that tricky Dick Nixon successfully pulled off way back in 1971. An experiment, (or rather a con job), that was always doomed to failure. But one now that has so entangled the whole world economy that no country wants to let it go.

    The biggest problem now is not just getting rid of the $US paper money hegemony, but rather what to replace it with so as not to create some major financial crisis in all the worlds most powerful countries.

    Meanwhile, while the world governments wrestle with this problem of coming up with a suitable replacement for the $US hegemony, they only dig the hole deeper for all of us with their procrastination.

  10. #1910
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    Folks this must mean, that things are bad. Very bad.

    Kansas City, Mo., closing nearly half its schools

    KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The Kansas City school board narrowly approved a plan Wednesday night to close nearly half the district's schools in a desperate bid to avoid a potential bankruptcy.



    The board voted 5-4 after parents and community leaders made final pleas to spare the schools even as the beleaguered district seeks to erase a projected $50 million budget shortfall. The approved plan calls for shuttering 29 of 61 schools — a striking amount even as public school closures rise nationwide while the recession eats away at academic budgets.
    Link & Entire: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35806883...ews-education/

  11. #1911
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    A short clip on the 3rd wave, and sovereign default.


  12. #1912
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    Support the (unemployed) troops:

    Unemployment rate hits 21.1 percent, well above that for non-veterans

    Video

    By Kimberly Hefling
    updated 4:48 p.m. ET March 12, 2010

    WASHINGTON - The unemployment rate last year for young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans hit 21.1 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, reflecting a tough obstacle combat veterans face as they make the transition home from war.
    The number was well above the 16.6 percent jobless rate for non-veterans of the same ages, 18 to 24.
    Link & Entire: Young veterans returning home to few jobs - Careers- msnbc.com

  13. #1913
    I don't know barbaro's Avatar
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    One thing after another.......

    Payback Time

    Junk Bond Avalanche Looms for Credit Markets

    By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

    When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 — at least in the Hollywood telling — they didn’t count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster.


    The New York Times



    Payback Time

    Articles in this series will examine the consequences of, and attempts to deal with, growing public and private debts.




    Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.



    With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.



    The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.
    Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings.



    Sovereign debt aside, the approaching scramble for corporate financing could strain the broader economy as jobs are cut, consumer spending is scaled back and credit is tightened for both consumers and businesses.



    The apocalyptic talk is not limited to perpetual bears and the rest of the doom-and-gloom crowd.



    Even Moody’s, which is known for its sober public statements, is sounding the alarm.


    “An avalanche is brewing in 2012 and beyond if companies don’t get out in front of this,” said Kevin Cassidy, a senior credit officer at Moody’s.


    Private equity firms and many nonfinancial companies were able to borrow on easy terms until the credit crisis hit in 2007, but not until 2012 does the long-delayed reckoning begin for a series of leveraged buyouts and other deals that preceded the crisis.



    That is because the record number of bonds and loans that were issued to finance those transactions typically come due in five to seven years, said Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at Standard & Poor’s.



    In addition, she said, many companies whose debt matured in 2009 and 2010 have been able to extend their loans, but the extra breathing room is only adding to the bill for 2012 and after.

    Link & Entire: Payback Time - Avalanche of Maturing Junk Bonds Looms for Markets - NYTimes.com

  14. #1914
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    This is one of the many reasons why I do *not* see a recovery happening in the US. Higher unemployment, longer unemployment, under-employment, and many middle-aged people with skills, experience, and education, not being hired because they are "over-qualified."

    For many of these people, retirement won't be possible.

    Overqualified Workers Struggling In Job Market


    By RUTH MANTELL MCT March 15, 2010


    WASHINGTON —
    He has worked in construction for almost two decades, and Maurice Paul can't get a job as a cashier at Home Depot.

    "I went in for the interview, and followed up a week later, and the person said I was too qualified," Paul said. "They were looking at me as if I'm gonna leave as soon as I can get a better job. And in all honesty, that's what I would have done."

    Paul, 37, was one of hundreds of unemployed workers at a jobs fair in the nation's capital recently. Like many others, Paul has found that his rich experience is a hindrance as prospective employers deem him to be overqualified.


    Paul, who has worked almost continuously in construction since he was 17, was laid off as a construction manager in October 2008. Since then his old boss has offered him a few days of work, but that's just not enough.

    "I don't need part-time work. I need full-time work," he said.

    Workers with years of experience, a master's degree or doctorate, or coming from a relatively high position or salary face a perverse situation: The characteristics that made them hirable in good times can be a hindrance when competition is fierce for positions at all levels, and workers such as Paul are finding that employers are wary of taking a chance on those who may quit as soon as the economy improves.
    LInk & Entire: Overqualified Workers Struggling In Job Market - Courant.com
    ............

  15. #1915
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    For all of the above reasons . . . wasn't it fun laughing at all the Euro-weenie countries with their social support net and high taxes? At least the Euro-weenies are not laughing in Schadenfreude the way many US 'folks' did and would.

  16. #1916
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    For all of the above reasons . . . wasn't it fun laughing at all the Euro-weenie countries with their social support net and high taxes? At least the Euro-weenies are not laughing in Schadenfreude the way many US 'folks' did and would.
    I don't know any Americans that were "laughing" at "Euro-weenies" whatever that means.

    I also don't know of Europeans "laughing" or "not "laughing" at unemployment in the US or elsewhere "in Schadenfreude."

    I've never read about it either.

  17. #1917
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    Quote Originally Posted by Milkman
    I don't know any Americans that were "laughing" at "Euro-weenies" whatever that means.
    You haven't been reading TeakDoor to give you an example?

  18. #1918
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    I am referring to news data. Only a few people post on Teakdoor. ^

  19. #1919
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    So you are saying you have never heard snide remarks about the 'old world' euro-weenies from the media or politicians or the general population?

    Geez, Milkie, you must read more

  20. #1920
    I don't know barbaro's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    So you are saying you have never heard snide remarks about the 'old world' euro-weenies from the media or politicians or the general population?

    Geez, Milkie, you must read more
    I reat a minimum 3 hours per day. I am sure those sentiments exists, but I focus on economics, mostly.

    No point in discussing this anymore. I don't follow these Op-Ed opinions.

    If people want to talk about opinion on Europe we can go to the Europe thread.

  21. #1921
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    Quote Originally Posted by Milkman
    I don't follow these Op-Ed opinions
    Yet you start threads on Op-Eds . . .

  22. #1922
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    Quote Originally Posted by panama hat View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Milkman
    I don't follow these Op-Ed opinions
    Yet you start threads on Op-Eds . . .
    On certain topics, yes. But not on opinions about Europe that you describe.

  23. #1923
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    Ah, so some are acceptable and others not, depending on your criteria. Ok, sums it up

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    Take it to the Euro thread, we're way off from the US economy.

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    I remember when this thread was started by the flag-waver, Storekeeper.
    Now.....the thread title is kinda like an absurd, sick joke

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