Final Days: Jon Stewart Tears into President Bush
January 19, 2009 11:04 am

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Deflation?
January 19, 2009 5:09 pm

Bonddad

Above is a chart of the year over year change in CPI for all goods. Notice we are approaching the 0% level. That is something we haven't done for over 50 years. This is one of the primary problems of the Great Depression -- a deflationary spiral. Now prices are moving into that direction which has everybody understandably concerned.

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Roubini Predicts U.S. Losses May Reach $3.6 Trillion
January 20, 2009 12:20 pm

"I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers," Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. "If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis."

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How Obama Won the Presidency
January 20, 2009 7:06 pm

Gary Grimes, EWT

....There is also some evidence that religion becomes more important to people as bear markets progress and less important as bull markets progress.... In extended periods of social depression, such as the Dark Ages, religion is generally a central aspect of people’s lives. In long periods of social ebullience, religion plays a secondary role."

Whether Obama knew it or not, he was playing right into the social mood of many Americans by standing up for his religion. In America, where according to some statistics only 15% of adults have no religious affiliation, the belief in a higher power is perhaps the greatest unifier.

Another example is Obama’s campaign stance on abortion - an especially polarizing topic between the conservative right and liberal left, even more polarizing among groups of varying spirituality. While abortion was not a hot topic throughout the 2008 campaign, when it was discussed, Obama again was able to appeal to the masses. With his unquestionably pro-choice record, he was careful to promote an " 'abortion reduction' agenda - helping reduce unintended pregnancies through education and birth control," Waldman writes. Again, this helped unite moderate and right-leaning voters disenfranchised with the Grand Old Party (more specifically, its leader of the past eight years) to Obama’s cause.....

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What Will Be "The Word of the Year" For 2009?
January 20, 2009 7:13 pm

By Robert Folsom, EWT

.....The central bank's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets around eight times each year to decide monetary policy. A few weeks later they publicly release a summary ("minutes") of their meeting, and usually the minutes would bore any normal person to tears. But that's not true of the minutes from the FOMC's most recent meeting (December 15-16), when they lowered the Fed funds rate to ZERO.....

....The D-word ("deflation") actually appeared only once in the minutes, which must be for the same reason that nobody wants to say "Voldemort" in Harry Potter novels (Voldemort is "he who must not be named"). The quotes above make it clear that the FOMC thought it better to use the word "inflation" in more than 16 paragraphs, if only in close proximity to phrases like "continued to fall" and "lower than had been anticipated.".......

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Heckuva Job, Robie!
January 20, 2009 10:03 pm

By Josh Marshall

Now hearing that Roberts tried to get through the oath from memory without the text in front of him.

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At Long Last
January 20, 2009 10:09 pm

John and Abigail Adams arrive at the White House

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Krugman: Employee Free Choice Key to Economic Recovery
January 23, 2009 8:40 pm

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economist Paul Krugman has written an open letter to President Obama detailing the steps needed to end our economic crisis and turn the country around.

Krugman’s prescription includes quick and large-scale actions to save jobs, rebuild infrastructure and protect those whose health care, housing and retirement have been put at risk—but it also includes longer-term strategies to make sure America is “a more just and secure society.” High on Krugman’s list? In addition to health care reform and an economic recovery package, he stresses restoring workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

…you can do a lot to enhance workers’ rights. One is to start laying the groundwork to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to join a union…the legislation will enable America to take a huge step toward recapturing the middle-class society we’ve lost.

Krugman looks at another time when the United States and the world faced a serious threat to economic prosperity—the Great Depression—and says one of the most important factors to help the economy rise out of the Depression and into growth was what he describes as the “Great Compression”—the change from an unequal and economically divided society, rife with poverty, to a strong middle-class society. The ability of workers to form unions and bargain, made real by reforms to labor law, pulled the economy into prosperity:

…one important factor was the rise of organized labor: Union membership tripled between 1935 and 1945. Unions not only negotiated better wages for their own members, they also enhanced the bargaining power of workers throughout the economy. At the time, conservatives warned that wage gains would have disastrous economic effects—that the rise of unions would cripple employment and economic growth. But in fact, the Great Compression was followed by the great postwar boom, which doubled American living standards over the course of a generation.

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On the Road to 33% Unemployment?
January 24, 2009 6:47 pm

Excerpted from The Elliott Wave Theorist, January 22, 2009

"As we have long argued, because the current bear market is of one larger degree than that of 1929-1932, the depression it creates will be deeper, which in turn means that the unemployment rate will exceed that of 1933. The peak rate in 1933 was 25 percent. Therefore, unemployment in the U.S. should rise to about 33 percent at the trough of this depression. Fitting this expectation, U.S. job losses in the fourth quarter were greater than at any time since 1945, when World War II ended and defense factories shut down to re-tool.

Even after this plunge, however, the 'official' unemployment rate is just 7 percent. But the true unemployment rate, as it would have been measured before the era of government support payments and statistics-fudging such as omitting the number of people who give up looking for work, is currently 17 percent. (This figure is courtesy of John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics at http://www.shadowstats.com.) So we’re halfway there.

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GOP Blocks Obama's Labor Nominee, Pushes Big Lie on "Card Check"
January 24, 2009 9:42 pm

Art Levine

Despite rising unemployment and a cratering economy, the GOP has placed a hold on the nomination of President Obama's choice for Secretary of Labor, the pro-worker Hilda Solis. The issue at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to give workers a level playing field by allowing workers to choose a majority sign-up approach, dubbed "card check" by anti-union flacks, for selecting a union -- rather than keeping that option in the hands of employers.

But the original Wagner Act in the 1930s gave workers the right to use a majority sign-up process if they so choose, rather than the current election system that allows widespread intimidation by employers.

Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants. Employers are still free under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act to hold intimidating one-on-one "sweat" sessions to legally discourage workers from joining a union. And, as I found out while going undercover to a unionbusting seminar, it's equally legal for employers to just lie about the dire consequences facing workers if they join a union, from closed plants to somehow losing seniority and benefits. That's the system the Employee Free Choice Act was designed to reform, by increasing penalties for corporate lawbreaking, allowing employees to choose the majority sign-up approach but still retaining the employees' rights to hold a secret-ballot NLRB election if they want.

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George W. Is No Martyr
January 24, 2009 10:28 pm

Thomas Frank // Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

......But now we find that Truman has a second amazing historical quality: Not only is he the patron saint of floundering presidential campaigns, but he is the star of hope for presidents leaving office at the nadir of their public approval ratings.

As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a "Near Great" even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.

And if Truman made that grand comeback, then so can George W. Bush. That's why the Truman comparisons continue, although campaign season is long over, with the ever-dwindling supporters of Mr. Bush discovering significant similarities between their man and President 33. After all, both of them were in the White House at the beginning of big conflicts -- the Cold War, the war on terrorism -- that were not quickly resolved.

Let me be blunt. Let me be blunt like Harry Truman was blunt: Comparisons like this are nonsense. Not only do they depend on the hollowest, most superficial sort of resemblance, but they are easy to refute.

Faced with the Communist invasion of South Korea, for one thing, Truman did not make his stand against some uninvolved country, as Mr. Bush did with Iraq after 9/11. What's more, Truman fought Joe McCarthy and the other demagogues of his day; McCarthy's spiritual descendants, meanwhile, made up part of Mr. Bush's base. But let us take the one thing Truman was known for before he became Franklin Roosevelt's vice president: rooting out waste and fraud in defense contracting as World War II got under way.

Under the Bush administration, on the other hand, contracting waste was apparently so robust, so spectacular, that we might well think of it as an official element of administration policy: waste in New Orleans, waste in Iraq, waste in Homeland Security. And I say "apparently" because we will probably never know the extent of the problem. That quaint Trumanesque notion of accountability will almost certainly not be applied to the now departed Bush & Co......

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Fair and Lovely Ad
January 25, 2009 7:40 pm

I've got to admit this ad horrified me.

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