This is somewhat disconcerting:
The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.
General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and AMC Theatres enjoy deals to
Evidence that the problem is government:
BCM Has Ceased Operations
Posted by Ann Barnhardt – November 17, AD 2011 10:27 AM MST
Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,
It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this
As I have pointed out, we are sooner than later going to have another economic disaster, because the politicians that caused it not only didn’t fix it with a massive expansion of their power to influence which companies are protected by government and which ones can be taken down, and only made it worse, and others seem to agree. In fact it seems even the LSM now is feeling forced to report on that.… Read more
Are you angry at Congress? Get angrier, my friends:
Peter Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. A year ago he began working on a book about soft corruption in Washington with a team of eight student researchers, who reviewed financial disclosure records. It became a jumping off point for our own story, and we have independently verified the material we’ve used.
Schweizer says he wanted
Part two of my posts on housing and banking.
If you want to know why I have some shred of sympathy for OWS despite some of their repugnant behavior (that Kos link is priceless, BTW), here is the reason:
Liberal protesters “occupying” Wall Street hate the big banks, which they see as the engine of capitalism. But conservatives ought to hate the big banks because they are the enemies of capitalism.
In addition to the … Read more
This is the first of two posts, one on housing, one on banking. I’ll post the second one shortly.
Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the financial waters our dumbass government decides to resurrect the housing bubble — or at least try to.
First, there is the effort to maintain the high limit on conforming loans — that is, the loans that Fannie/Freddie will backstop. The upper limit on these … Read more
Building on Rich’s post on debt, I stumbled across this article that summarizes Harrisburg, PA’s recent attempt to declare bankruptcy. Essentially, the city got themselves $310 million in debt (that’s $6,000 per resident) on an incinerator. Yes, a fucking incinerator. They took on a bad obligation, compounded it by signing a deal with the lowest bidder for renovation (lowest bidders always cost more) and are now trying to impose a commuter tax to get … Read more
“Never a lender, or a borrower be”, what was Shakespeare smoking? The moving of money is now the drivers of world economies, and if too much of a good thing is a bad thing, debt-that ultimate result of an unbalanced ratio- has become more than a world problem:
Happy Monday!!
It’s like trying to read a link and those pesky commercial videos on the side keeps popping up, those turning numbers are so annoying. … Read more
Matt Taibbi, one of the key members of the More Clever than Smart Club, has an essay on what he would have OccupyWallStreet demand. It’s making the rounds. Let’s go through it. I’ve almost finished reading The Big Short, a book you really should read to understand the recent financial crisis. So this will serve two purposes: responding to Taibbi and talking about what I learned from Michael Lewis.
1. Break up the monopolies.
Because it didn’t limit the debt ceiling at all, that’s why. It simply put in place a nearly automatic raising of the ceiling as long as Republicans couldn’t overcome an Obama veto. Come Monday, 9/12/11, another $500 BILLION will be added to the ceiling, and all Boehner et al did was provide themselves political cover for that predetermined increase on that predetermined date. If there’s still any Boehner and Super Committee apologists out there, explain … Read more
