Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Time	Event
12:18a	I have too many damn tabs open Okay, so, what tabs has solarbird kept open but not written anything about? Let's see! DavidKC writes about why he can't figure out why queers are supposed to like Senator Clinton more than Senator Obama. He has some of the same issues I do with her claiming of the previous Clinton legacy and all that entails. He has other issues as well. Also, the useless and horrible Human Rights Campaign can't bring itself to endorse the queer candidate in a race because it's not what the DSCC wants, which gets Dan Savage all cranky, and Jesus made journalist Matt Taibbi puke. A mostly-uncovered story went by about how Pulitzer-winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein's kangaroo court trial went all pear-shaped on the US military. They're now claiming he was released as part of an amnesty; Mr. Hussein's lawyer says that's bullshit, and that the military knows it but is using that as cover. Eric Boehlert discusses how much of the military's broken case came from authoritarian warbloggers. PRWatch.org answers a question I've been asking myself since the (continually ignored by most media!) story about the Pentagon and Bush Administration's massive domestic psy-op/propoganda campaign came out; doesn't this break the law? Oh yes, it does, quite clearly, though, again, nobody gives a fuck because there is no Constitution and there is no law. The closest there's even been to a response from any of the most guilty media parties has been Brian Williams's blog, saying that they did nothing wrong and they're proud of their coverage, and generally spewing crap like that. What a sham. Oh, and Glenn Greenwald reports that an assortment of telecom-purchased Democrats are quietly working to revive the PAA for the sole purpose of providing retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking. Again. Finally, Iran claims to have dropped the last of its dollar-based oil transactions. Note the timing of that with the upswing in sabre-rattling against Iran. Fun times. (13 Comments | Comment on this)
12:44a	oh look, more open tabs! Okay, so what else do I have open still, in my econ browser? Let's see! The Federal Reserve is moving to accept a wider range of funds, including those backed by credit cards and automobile loans as collateral. Jesus, why not just take IOUs? If you add this move - and yet more expansions of the latest rounds of new "liquidity" vehicles - that's $462 billion in cash and Treasuries plus the discount window plus the PCDF and that all adds up to somewhere around US$600Billion with a B in liquidity injection. That's a fuckload of dollars. Oh, and late Friday night, student loan funds got added to the list, just a few days after Bernanke said that wouldn't happen. So it was going to happen, just after a denial and late in the news cycle. A mostly non-reported story (except over at Market Ticker) is that a bunch of the "improvements" in bank financial situations over the last month or so has been a mass migration of funds from "Level 2" asset categorisation (distressed market, but sellable) to "Level 3" (no functional market or no sale desired, describe according to model). This lets banks take funds with a paper (or face) value of $N but which are selling for the much smaller $Y and pretend on paper that they're actually still work $N, thus letting them pretend none of those market losses have actually happened. How is this possible? Magic! Plus US$600B in "liquidity injection," as above. How long does this work? I don't know. But the Fed wants vast new powers to do even more, powers that Mish calls fascist, stating that the "proposal essentially would grant vast authority to the Federal Reserve and the government to virtually control markets. It will give them the ability to gather private market information and unilaterally decide if positions taken with that private money for private investment is somehow negative for the financial system. It could then force the unwinding of those positions. Initially the powers will be used to supposedly prevent over leverage in the system (that the Fed created itself). But it doesn't exclude the situation where a hedge fund that is long puts can be forced to unwind those puts at the government's discretion." Meanwhile, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research notes a new vacancy record, and states outright that "The rate of price decline will destroy almost $6 trillion in housing wealth this year." There's some discussion of the LA market here, and a Case-Shiller graph of interest here. Good times. No link for it, but the majority of credit-card users carry a balance month-to-month. That average balance is US$17,000. That makes my eyes bleed. Here's a story about the great business pawn shops are doing, talking about how people are pawning anything and everything to pay for gas. (Or selling things outright on eBay and Craigslist. Or both.) Brad Setser notes that sovereign investors continue to treasury market afloat. Oh, and Mish finally took apart that jobs report that showed "only" 20,000 jobs lost in the latest reported month. (A gain of 150,000 is needed to keep up with population, btw.) That number is a farce; with almost all sectors actually surveyed showing major job losses, the Fed jiggered the "birth/death model" to create 267,000 jobs statistically, including 45,000 new jobs in construction and 72,000 in professional services, all of which are sectors in continued rapid contraction. You can read the details here. Noriel Roubini provides a similar (tho' smaller) breakdown of the first-quarter GDP results here. Current Mood: sleepy (2 Comments | Comment on this)

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