Hughesair (Inflection Point)

Like another elegant French lady, La Belle Poule, (The elegant French frigate fighting off the British blockade 1778) Christine, the director of IMF calls attention to US poverty, one in seven living in poverty, unsustainable, and the polarization of wealth. Christine Legarde is the first out of this whole political season to mention productivity as a solution. Our first quarter GDP growth fell to 0.5%, just short of going backwards. Christine suggests childcare and maternity leave to bring more women into the work force and increase minimum wage, some tax credit at the low end to encourage greater participation in the economy, but the cornel of wisdom was her call for productivity. How few pay any attention to the antecedents of productivity. First a cheap, sustainable, abundant resource, second the human resource, then capital and entrepreneurial ability, both of which we have in abundance. It is the first two where we stumble with misunderstanding and misdirection. Think what a ...

Xtratufs, if you don’t already know, serve most of Alaskans as the boot déléguer . Calf length with good tread, all rubber and truly tough, these waterproof boots serve to keep out the mud, snow and slush like no other -- for a couple of generations of Alaskans. They are warm and flexible in the cold -- serving us year round. Fishermen especially consider them a necessity. They use to be distributed almost exclusively in Alaska. They were made by a small company in Illinois but were recently sold to a company in China. Yes, the manufacturing immediately moved to China, and the Illinois workers lost their jobs. A big schism erupted yesterday making national news. Even Mark Begich, Alaska Senator, got involved. It seems the new, made in China, XTRATUF boots leak and tend to fall apart. Everyone up here is screaming about the problem. The new owner in China promise to fix it, but that is not the point. I think we could do something about this economic mess we are in, and the boots...

Yea, folks in the big city on the hill just don't get it. The business class / middle class, lost most all of its wealth to the upper / polutaclass. What's left they are hanging onto for dear life. The upper class does not create jobs, they export them. The growing reality is that the wealth accumulated by the upper class was based on over-leveraged paper. (spell that, "house of cards.") The wealthy, however do not hold the paper. They have taken outlandish salaries and bonuses and converted their lute into hard currency, solid equities and precious metals, not to mention fast cars, jet planes and fifty foot yachs. There are little or no jobs in those assets, save the equities, but those solid ones are solid by hiring cheap forign labor or exporting/outsourcing manufacturing. So, there you have it, no jobs. The only way I know that the wealth will get back into circulation is through total disaster ie complete bank failure or other. One crazy idea I had was to forgi...

Outrage of the day, and Rush says, "The Occupy Wall Street mob are whiners." I say they have a point, and both polarized parties can surely agree on this one. That is, unless both parties are getting so much money under the table from banks as to agree to do nothing. By MARK DECAMBRE   Last Updated: 4:44 AM, October 21, 2011   Posted: 11:34 PM, October 20, 2011 in the New York Post   "A plan by beleaguered Bank of America to foist trillions of dollars of funky Merrill Lynch derivatives onto its depositors is raising eyebrows on Wall Street. The rarely used move will likely save the bank millions of dollars in collateral but could put depositors’ cash behind the eight ball. The move also brought to light fissures between the nation’s top banking regulators, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve, in the wake of new regulations meant to curb the free-wheeling habits that fostered the worst crisis in a generation back in 2008. At issue...

It should come as no surprise. The monthly trade deficit in excess of 10 billion for as long as I can remember drained the endless wealth of America's middle class, "going on empty." OK, you say that money comes back as investment into our economy and that is partly true. You say, free global trade will benefit us all, and that too would be partly true. However. The money that came back, bought treasury bonds over financing our unrestrained National debt and our banks creative investment instruments designed to over leverage foreign investment. And, secondly, We did not engage in free trade; it was one sided. The entire world was living high on our unbalanced trade, some more than others. Furthermore we allowed American industry to outsource jobs and manufacturing to lower foreign labor cost, thus placing an even greater drain on American worker wealth. It is no surprise that the wealth that did return to our economy profited only the big business and banking class th...

For too many years, students have taken out too large a loan for their higher education. The government guarantees many of these loans. This situation amounts to an exact parallel to the housing crisis. Massive student-loan-debt in the face of unemployment will soon lead to default and yet another banking disaster. The student-loan bubble will soon pop. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs sought government-backed areas of lending. With a banking relationship, what amounted to a marketing enterprise, promoted the loans on a massive scale. Because student loans became so readily available, colleges and universities had no qualms about raising their tuition. Banks accepted these loans because of government backing and the more the better, but just to be sure, they spun the loans off into the murky world of hedge funds and credit default swaps leveraging the loans to an even higher degree whilst spreading wide the liability. This student loan racket amounts to criminal collusion and extortion o...

The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going (Single Page) - ProPublica

The market is a song, and it keeps on singing. Today’s vibrato was no exception. Markets date back to the ancient Chinese rice markets. Civilizations and empires come and go but the market goes on. It’s the last thing to close when over-run by war, floods or pestelence and the first to open when crisis ends. US equities markets are no exception, except the US cherishes a rather more robust equities market, driving capital into the hands of our small innovative technologically oriented companies. American ingenuity comes to fruition largely due to the ready availability of that capital. One cannot rely on banks in most of the world, -- or here either -- and most of the world lacks our kind of stock market. Millions of investors, like democracy, vote with their savings on good ideas. The market liked Black Berry’s release of free enterprise server software and RIMM – that’s Black Berry’s code name -- came roaring back. The market tanked this morning with naysayers wringing their hands, b...

I can’t believe the CEO of Goldman Sachs claimed before the congressional committee, looking into the causes of the banking crisis, that Goldman Sachs was in the business of risk management. Is that putting spin on it or what? I’m not a rocket scientist, but I don’t see the difference between derivatives and the ponzi scheme that Madoff ran. A real physicist working on Wall Street recent said in an interview, “It’s a third derivative world; Let’s face it.” I guess that’s what you get when you cross a bank, an insurance company and a brokerage. Remarkably, the World’s emerging economies create new wealth that seeks a safe haven. Hedge funds and derivatives grew. A conservative estimate was 57 trillion in equivalent US dollars. -- The hedge funds, credit default swaps and other highly creative derivatives create so vast an amount of new wealth that the US Treasury should get into the business. They could pay off our National Debt as well as our taxes. -- Derivatives give an elusion of s...

Rotary.org: The Rotarian If Western Civilization has a sole, this young lady exposes it. "If music be the food of love--" We are seeing the last gasp of a failed industrial age with its degenerate behavior: drugs, baggy pants, gangs and in your face super stars killing themselves and us with their defiant greed. Katherine heralds a new civility and culture; hopefully it will accompany a technological revolution and a new beginning. Katherine the Great hints of a positive future. You can see it in the smiles of these British troops.

Wall Street & Technology: Blog: Why Liquidnet IPO Isn't An Electronic Auction Process Two names worth watching, routs whereby institutions trade behind the sceens invisible to traders like you and me.