Monday, June 07, 2010

Adding The Market Ticker To The Blogroll
It's become a daily read and today's post there is no exception. In fact, it's worth a RTWT. I'll be adding that momentarily but first a snip from the post linked in the first sentence:
That of course isn't the point of the complaint. The complaint rests (properly, in my opinion) on the premise that the so-called "boom" in many parts of Europe was financed with German capital, which was effectively appropriated under false pretenses.

Gee, where have we seen this before? Banksters lying and cheating (cough-liar loans-cough!) and trading in derivatives without any money behind them (cough-AIG-cough!) and when the smoke clears suddenly the national governments are told "hand over hundreds of billions right now or the puppy dies!"

Uh huh.

G20 governments are increasingly coming to the realization that "borrow and spend" doesn't - and can't - work in the intermediate and longer term. Despite the bleating of Geithner at the G20 meeting he got nowhere trying to jawbone people into more Keynesian-style games.

We blew $4 trillion in the United States over the last two years and change and got nothing for it, and as a consequence we are stuck with the debt and haven't solved the problem. $4 trillion, of course, is about 30% of GDP, and this "support" has amounted to roughly 11% of GDP over the last three years.
Denninger gets right to the heart of the matter. I was at first disinclined to blame the "banksters" because of the massive culpability of the government in pushing fraudulent mortgages but I've come to realize that the current state of affairs is the very embodiment of moral hazard: profits are retained and when the inevitable losses begin to mount, they are passed on to the taxpayers. It's the essence of what really angers me about President Obamabi. He speechifies and acts like he's going to go all hard-ass on wall Street but all he's done is pump taxpayer money into those exact institutions he pretends to be against. And this new "financial reform" legislation does nothing but institutionalize bailouts with a $50B fund for precisely that purpose. That's taxpayer money he's putting up for his faux capitalist crony "bankster" friends. And they know it.
Even more unfortunately, the mainstream media either doesn't understand it or, as is more likely, doesn't tell the truth about it. Political power for the left is more important for the MSM than eternal verities like truth telling. I've worked in both banking and journalism. Neither profession can be relied upon. One has your money. One has your flow of information. Or, more accurately now, "had" as the rise of the Internet has seriously disintermediated the left wing journalist info guards. The Market Ticker is precisely one of those reasons the web is killing print news. We get more truth from knowledgeable people who are both directly involved and providing direct information for people who seek it out.
I hope you make the site at least a frequent stop. It may have a little more technical information than the average blog reader is conversant with but by sticking to the reading it will become progressively easier to grok.

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