top 10... or 3... or whatever hidden tiger traps

The ECONOMY and YOU!!!!!!

1. Oil Dependency keeps us in the crosshairs. Fluctuations in the price of oil are a constant threat to a recovery path. Some say the past decade would have been better spent weaning ourselves off oil than spending those several trillion dollars in  waging war  nation building.

2. INSOLVENCY - in millions of mortgages and in various banks, except they are refusing to refi and hiding those mortgages from their official books to appear solvent as their Execs rape their institutions with record salaries and bonuses. SOUND FAMILIAR? Christopher Whalen harps on the subject non-stop, no one is listening.

3. GOP / Tea  Bagger  Party obstructionist Congress douchebags causing harm protecting Plutocrats while pretending to protect "real" Americans. What sane person would threaten sovereign default and then call the head of the Fed Treasonous when he uses his limited powers to mitigate the damage? An evil Texas Tea-Bagger Governor would, that's who.
That is like chopping some dudes arm off with a machete, throwing the arm in the river and then when a medic comes to wrap a bandage around the bloody stump, yelling at the medic, "hey, why are you hurting this dude?"
Ladie and Gentlemen, meet Rick Perry.
annnnnd RICK PERRY

Sick man walking

The hollowing of America's manufacturing capacity and other super horribleness

Is America the sick man of the globe?

if you peel the Band-Aid too slowly...

it only hurts MORE.

it doesn't end

up down up down up down

freakin yo yo

Click your heels together and chant "there's no place like home there's no place like home there's no place like home"

and by "change" what I meant was "no change"

Squelching uncomfortable fact in favor of political expediency is still business as usual under the Obama Administration.

do ya feel lucky punk? well do ya?

People who claim to know shit say the chance of a double dip recession has sunk to 20%. Some same the chances have increased.

Everyone predicts slow growth at best.

Obviously, no one knows for sure about anything.

But the consensus ranges from semi-crappy to horribly crappy.

the brutal part of this ongoing flogging has not yet begun

Are you happy about the rise in home prices that have occurred in some places these past few months?

Well...

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com in a Reuter's interview said, "Home prices, as measured by the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, will trough in the third quarter of 2010 after declining 38 percent"

here are some other stats he was spouting:

"about 25 percent of single-family homes with mortgages have negative equity"

"7.5 million foreclosure sales will have taken place between 2006 and 2011. The majority of these sales, however, have not emerged yet, with 4.8 million foreclosure sales expected between 2009 and 2011"

"Foreclosure sales will increase, and home prices will resume their decline by early 2010 as mortgage servicers figure out who will not qualify for a modification"

oy.

The Recovery in Zero Sum terms

The idea is simple: 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer spending.

The question is: On what will the consumer spend that money?

Gasoline to power our vehicles is one big expense. It is said that oil moving beyond 100 dollars per barrel can hamper recovery. Some say $80 per barrel is a danger sign, and that we were able to absorb the earlier (pre collapse) increase by using home equity like a bank account.

So with home equity annihilated, that gives us less of a margin.

$80 a barrel is that threshold according to Steven Kopits, managing director at energy market forecaster Douglas-Westwood in New York.

As of right now (November, Wednesday 18 2009 - 11:27:23) , oil is.....


tick friggin tock.

in blows the perfect storm

from CNN Money: double dip warning signs

A quick synopsis of these "things that could throw us back into recession".
1. If job losses continue deep into 2010.
2. Flat 2009 Christmas retail sales.
3. Oil in 2010 blasting through $100/barrel threshold.
4. Another year of weak auto sales.
5. Further foreclosures and further downward momentum on home prices.
6. another Bear Market... 20% price drop.

We're in recovery mode, but it's a shaky, fragile thing that can be taken down like a house of cards.

And Big Daddy has already shot his load.

unemployment rising

I got nothing snarky to add. This is all pretty clear.

Below is a comment from a post at the James Pethokoukis blog at Reuters - 12 reasons unemployment is going to (at least) 12 percent

I’ve had businesses for 30 years.

This is all very simple. Businesspeople are not stupid. They aren’t hiring because:

1. They don’t know what tax increases are coming.

2. They don’t know what new burdensome regulations are coming.

3. They don’t know what changes to the health care system are coming, and if perhaps they will be responsible for everyone’s COBRA or similar for years.

4. They don’t know if it will be harder to fire people in the future.

5. They don’t know if every employee will be allowed to join a union, increasing costs and headaches.

6. They don’t know what new procedures will be invented to upend the bond markets completely, overturning centuries of settled law.

7. They don’t know if Washington will unilaterally cut their compensation.

8. They don’t know if cap-and-trade will double their energy costs.

And on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

I can’t imagine hiring anyone until all this nonsense shakes out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see unemployment above 13%.

I can hold off generating taxable activity a lot longer than Democrats can retain Congress, that’s for damn sure.
- Posted by Chester White

mysterious correlation-ey

I was looking at New York Times interactive maps and spotted, what appears to my eyes, a high correlation between murder density and those who voted against Bloomberg.

What do you see? Clear as day, right?

Where the murder clusters, votes AGAINST Bloomberg clusters also.

click for nytimes interactive Homicide map (might require free registration to view)


click for nytimes interactive '09 Voting Results map (might require free registration to view)

The Recession is OVER!!!!

The DOW is holding 10,000 this week. Yay!

Let's look at other figures.

1 out of 136 homes in the U.S. are in foreclosure.

Over 970,000 homes entered foreclosure in the 3rd Quarter of 2009.

oil prices are spiking. (speculation much?)

Sound familiar?

Add to that the "4 week moving average" of new jobless claims cresting 530,000...

...and you got a world of hurt.

as icing to the cake let's add: no specific and measurable finance regulation  and   nor reform of any kind.

let's chant it now: "DOUBLE DIP! DOUBLE DIP! DOUBLE DIP!"

the Black Hole of High Frequency Trading

Forget about "Skynet becoming self aware" and the machines taking over.

They are already wreaking minor havoc today.

How HFT's are jacking up and diminishing confidence in the stock market.

Everything is OK

Monetizing carbon cleanup

Leave it to Big Business to create solutions.

as reported by Reuters:
New technologies may grab carbon right out of air

New Technologies?!!?!!? How about OLD technologies?

like TREES. Just plant more trees.

You know: replace the 80% of the trees that humanity has "monetized" murdered already.

WTF?

Horrible Quarter-2, 2009 economic figures

GDP is in the hole.
WAAAAY in the hole.
grrreeeeen shoots?

information is NOT a crime

Except in Britain it is.

The Home Gunsmith, a website disseminating information for homemade firearms. Now dormant. Killed by the British Government. It's owner, Phil Luty, thrown in a jail cell somewhere. No one knows. The British Government is not saying.

You can imprison and kill bodies, but you can't kill ideas.

Information has a life of it's own. The site lives on:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070317052350/http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/

The books are available as PDFs in those corners of the internet where files and information roam free... there for you to access should you need it, so that THIS doesn't ever happen again.