It's The Economy, STUPID!.....

[FOTD]

Pizza and beer now cost an arm and a leg
Sure sign economy is headed for trouble: Even cheap eats are hard to find

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23415510/

"If you're looking for a sure sign the U.S. economy is headed in the wrong direction, all you need to do is look at the skyrocketing price of "recession-proof" foods: pizza, hot dogs, bagels and beer."

[FOTD]

UH OH!!!! This is big....

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a27ldweXtg0Y&refer=news

Carlyle Fund Expects Assets Will Be Seized -- LONDON — Shares of Carlyle Capital plunged on Thursday, losing most of their value, after the company said it expected its lenders to promptly take over all its assets after discussions with banks to refinance the fund failed.

The collapse of talks between Carlyle Capital and some of its lenders, which include Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, shows that a plan earlier this week by the Federal Reserve to back some assets like private mortgage bonds has not stopped banks from demanding more collateral. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/business/worldbusiness/13cnd-carlyle.html

[YoungTulsan]

quote:Originally posted by FOTD

Pizza and beer now cost an arm and a leg
Sure sign economy is headed for trouble: Even cheap eats are hard to find

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23415510/

"If you're looking for a sure sign the U.S. economy is headed in the wrong direction, all you need to do is look at the skyrocketing price of "recession-proof" foods: pizza, hot dogs, bagels and beer."

Pizza was 'recession proof'?

It has gone up probably 100% in the last 10 years.  It involves meat, cheese, tomatoes, flour, and transportation.  Probably one of the hardest hit things you can find.

[RecycleMichael]

Isn't Carlyle Capital the same company that included investments ranging from President Bush 41 to Osama bin Laden...

[FOTD]

The Bushiveks seem to be tied in tight....

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by RecycleMichael

Isn't Carlyle Capital the same company that included investments ranging from President Bush 41 to Osama bin Laden...

The Clintons probably had money in it as well.

They have become pretty astute investors.

[Double A]

Home foreclosures jump in state

By ROBERT EVATT World Staff Writer
3/13/2008

While national numbers improved in February, troubled Oklahoma mortgages rose 45 percent.


The number of mortgages going bust in Oklahoma skyrocketed in February, increasing 45.4 percent from the month before.

The Whirled Article

But, I thought Tulsa wasn't going to be affected by this?[sarcasm off]

[we vs us]

My prediction:  unless it gets much worse than it is, Tulsa dodges the worst of the recession. The dip in housing prices will be smaller than most of the rest of the country, though foreclosures will keep pace with the national average.  Energy will be at a premium for the foreseeable future, so Tulsa is in the catbird seat as far as its local economy goes.  The price of petroleum might slip from where it is now (losing some of the speculative froth off the top), but worldwide demand sure ain't goin' down, so we're in a good position.  

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by Double A

Home foreclosures jump in state

By ROBERT EVATT World Staff Writer
3/13/2008

While national numbers improved in February, troubled Oklahoma mortgages rose 45 percent.


The number of mortgages going bust in Oklahoma skyrocketed in February, increasing 45.4 percent from the month before.

The Whirled Article

But, I thought Tulsa wasn't going to be affected by this?[sarcasm off]

Tulsa is no different than any other city, plenty of unsophisticated borrowers and greedy, permissive lenders.

"Kevin Wheeler, president of Southern Hills Mortgage, said many Oklahomans also entered into high-risk, adjustable-rate mortgages, though not as many as in some other states.

"Lenders were offering loans to people that probably shouldn't have gotten them," he said. "People were getting into a house with virtually no money."

Those kinds of deals have now come to an end. Freddie Mac, which issues loans through Southern Hills, formerly offered plans with no down payment. At the end of March, the lender will begin requiring at least 3 percent of the total cost of the home.

Other tightening standards that are shutting out borrowers with bad or even borderline credit are forcing Wheeler to turn more people away.

"Our loans are down 25 percent from last year," he said.

Wheeler said that because lenders did not immediately limit their lending enough when the mortgage crisis came to light, they'll have to limit themselves even more in coming months.

"We're not on solid ground yet," he said. "I think there's more to be seen in the future." "

[FOTD]

Well, todays' sad news is all about a wonderful little brokerage house founded by a genuine Okie from OKC named Ace Greenberg. Ace built Bear Sterns into one of Wall Streets great success stories. But today, liquidity issues have demoralized the company. Let's see. Countrywide gets bailed out by B of A, then BSC gets bailed out JPMorganChase,then....we all pay for it in the end. Just ask Spitzer....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080314/bs_nm/bearstearns_dc_7

"The share fall of Bear Stearns, which specializes in mortgage finance and trading, roiled other financial stocks. Bear Stearns was recently trading at $31.27, down $25.73, or 45 percent."

Meanwhile, the market continues to get Bush whacked.

[FOTD]

Bushwhacked!
Dumbya is so slow. I guess he finally reacted. A true reactionary!


President Acknowledges Strains on the Economy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/business/15econ.html?th&emc=th


By STEVEN LEE MYERS and PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: March 15, 2008


President Bush on Friday acknowledged more starkly than ever that the economy has slipped into trouble, dogged by falling home prices and turmoil in financial markets, but he inveighed against government bailouts aimed at limiting the pain.

"Our economy obviously is going through a tough time," the president told the Economic Club of New York in a morning speech at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. "The temptation of Washington is to say that anything short of a massive government intervention in the housing market amounts to inaction. I strongly disagree with that sentiment.

"I believe there ought to be action," Mr. Bush added, "but I'm deeply concerned about law and regulation that will make it harder for the markets to recover."

Shortly after Mr. Bush spoke, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, issued fresh warnings about the gathering wave of home foreclosures while pledging new regulations to limit the impact and crack down on predatory mortgage lending.

"Foreclosure rates have increased substantially," Mr. Bernanke said during a speech in Washington before a meeting of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

"Behind these disturbing statistics are families facing personal and financial hardship and neighborhoods that may be destabilized by clusters of foreclosures," Mr. Bernanke said. "These realities challenge us to find ways to prevent preventable foreclosures" and "ensure a regulatory environment that promotes responsible lending."

Taken together, the two speeches underscored the degree to which Washington has moved beyond debating whether or not the economy is entering a period of duress to focusing on how to soften the consequences.

Mr. Bernanke's words were perhaps most notable for what he left unsaid, perhaps because of the sheer volatility of the present financial situation and the fear that almost anything specific he might say in advance of the Fed's expected interest rate cut on Tuesday could do more harm than good.

The severity of the crisis was brought home with stunning clarity by the early morning announcement that Bear Stearns, the venerable Wall Street investment bank, was leaning on emergency financing from JPMorgan Chase and the New York Federal Reserve.

"I had a busy morning," was all Mr. Bernanke said, prompting a flurry of laughter before going into his prepared text.

Indeed, analysts said that Mr. Bernanke was reluctant to tread further onto volatile ground because so many threats appear to be lurking in the global financial system that any poor choice of words could sow panic in some new quarter.

"When you're fighting shadows, the less said the better," said Robert Barbera, chief economist of the trading and research firm ITG.

Even before the distress call from Bear Stearns, markets assumed the Fed would drop its benchmark lending rate, currently at 3 percent, by at least half a point. With the Bear Stearns worries popping to the surface, investors now expect the Fed to cut by three-fourths of a percentage point.

In aggressively lowering short-term interest rates, the Fed has been seeking to stimulate economic activity: Lower rates make it easier for banks to get cash, which traditionally makes them more likely to lend, giving businesses the wherewithal to invest and hire workers.

But investors in long-term markets and other securities, more worried about inflation and fearful of taking unnecessary risks, have been pushing those rates higher, undercutting the Fed's effort to keep the economy from falling into a deeper hole.

The Fed has acknowledged concerns that its easing could worsen inflation but has concluded that the immediate threats to the economy demand freer credit now. Data released Friday by the Labor Department appeared to give the Fed extra latitude: the Consumer Price Index showed inflation was essentially flat in February. That lent credence to the case that as the economy slows, this will diminish demand for goods, damping price increases.

But many analysts argue that the February figure was an aberration. Gasoline and food prices have been rising sharply, which could well be reflected in the data for March, removing whatever cushion Friday's numbers appeared to provide.

None of this occupied Mr. Bernanke's time at the podium. Instead, the Fed chairman focused on the widening crisis in real estate, while advertising the merits of a set of proposed rules he introduced in December. They include barring lenders from making loans that borrowers cannot repay and demanding that lenders verify the incomes of borrowers.
In his speech, President Bush cast the slowdown — he did not indulge the word "recession" — as a natural product of the laissez- faire economic policies that he cited as a core national strength.

"In a free market, there's going to be good times and bad times," Mr. Bush said. "In the long run, I'm confident that our economy will continue to grow, because the foundation is solid."

Some economists, however, noted that the labor market appeared to be breaking down, with the number of jobs shrinking the last two months and the income of the typical American household being eroded by inflation.

"The fundamentals appear to be dangerously imperiled," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute. "The current economic trajectory is likely to do significant damage to the average family's living standards."

Only last month, the president said he was unaware of the possibility that gasoline prices could reach $4 a gallon. On Friday, he validated consumer fears.

"Prices are up at the gas pump and in the supermarket," he said. "Housing values are down. Hard-working Americans are concerned. They're concerned about their families, and they're concerned about making their bills."

But the fix is already on the way, Mr. Bush said, pointing to tax rebates scheduled to be mailed to roughly 130 million households over the next few months.

"The challenge is not to do anything foolish," Mr. Bush said, flatly rejecting proposals on Capitol Hill for the government to buy up abandoned and foreclosed homes to stop prices from plunging.

At the same time, he warned against impeding flows of foreign investment reaching the United States, including those held by sovereign wealth funds — vast pools of state-controlled investment that have accumulated in China, Russia and among Persian Gulf oil exporters.

"It makes no sense to deny capital, including sovereign wealth funds, from access to the U.S. markets," Mr. Bush said. "It's our money to begin with. It seems like we ought to let it back."

Democrats fired back that continuing to lean on the market as opposed to a more interventionist approach would leave the nation more vulnerable to the ravages of recession.

"It seems like the president is on a different economic planet than most Americans," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "This president is beginning to resemble Herbert Hoover in his hands-off approach."

[FOTD]

PUBLISHED ON MARCH 27, 2008:

Danehy

George W. Bush absolutely deserves the blame for the economic mess the country is in right now

By TOM DANEHY  


"I recently used the phrase "the Bush economy" in a column, and I received several e-mails taking me to task for making a simplistic attack on President Bush.
To summarize the e-mails: Supposedly, after one reaches a certain level of sophistication, he comes to the realization that the president of the United States has no real impact on the national or global economies, which are much too large and complex to be affected by one person, no matter how powerful that person's position is. Well, as Val Kilmer said in the movie that's been on Encore so many times in the past two weeks that they're thinking of changing the cable outlet's name to the Tombstone Channel, "I beg to differ, Sir."

Economics being what it is--an unscientific mishmash of sociology, voodoo, skullduggery and naked greed--it pretty much begs to be misunderstood, if not ignored completely, by the average American. In many ways, it's akin to laws that are all too often written by lawyers in an unnecessarily cryptic style that can only be read by other lawyers. Something that cannot be accurately predicted or even agreed upon by so-called experts is unlikely to be seen as relevant by the layman.

Take, for example, the fact that "uncertainty in the marketplace" always causes the price of a commodity to rise. Does that make sense? Why should it always go up? And how does one even begin to define "uncertainty?" At least in physics, we know that "a case of the jitters" isn't going to prevent an Einstein-Bose condensate to form near absolute zero.

Nevertheless, there are facets to economic theory that do work more often than not, and can therefore be exploited. I contend that George W. Bush, his administration and his cronies have done so to the outrageous benefit of a select few and to the great detriment to the rest of us.

We'll start with energy, the cost of which is having a devastating ripple effect throughout our economy. Remember how one of the first things Bush did was to have Dick Cheney set up that fake energy board, ostensibly to explore ways to make America energy-independent? It was quickly unmasked, but it sent the message to the oil giants that they could do just about anything they wanted as long as a Texas oilman sat in the White House. This has led to staggering profits, the consolidation of power and oil prices that get more ridiculous by the day.

This is not to say that Bush controls the price of oil, but rather that he won't try to do anything to exercise any control over it. Left alone, corporations will act as corporations do. (I have absolutely no doubt that, just as Ronald Reagan's laissez-faire-on-steroids policies in the 1980s led to the savings-and-loan debacle that cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up, Bush's wink and nod to business has played a large part in the housing mess we're in now, as prudent lending policies were either relaxed or ignored altogether, and lenders engaged in an orgy that has this country reeling and the government buying banks to keep them afloat.)

The Bush administration has had an effect on oil prices in other ways, including resisting increases in fuel-efficiency standards for nearly a decade. It's absolute insanity that people are still driving new vehicles that get 15 miles to the gallon. As fuel-efficiency technology advanced, standards should have risen to reflect those advances and/or to nudge the industry to even greater heights.

But, somewhere along the line, it became a matter of hubris. Fuel efficiency was not a broadly American concept; it was for those who couldn't afford a Hummer or an Escalade. How dare the peasants dictate what we drive!

And I don't want to hear the Sean Hannitys of the world whining about the language of class warfare. It is never the poor or the middle-class who seek to distance themselves from the rest of the society; it's the rich. Either we're all in this together, or we're not.

Finally, the combination of the Bush tax cuts and his misadventure in Iraq may yet serve to drive the final nails in the American economy's coffin. I'm not even mad that the tax cuts benefited the rich; that's his core constituency, and he was doing the politically expedient thing. The folly is throwing more than a billion dollars a week down the Baghdad abyss and insisting on keeping the tax cuts in place. Even Lyndon Johnson had enough sense to raise taxes to pay for Vietnam. Isn't it amazing how the one-time Republican mantra of balancing the budget has become suddenly quaint and outdated?

The toxic mix of runaway oil prices, unrealistic tax cuts, a war that may never go away and a blind eye toward corruption on an unprecedented scale has left this country reeling. I have no doubt that George W. Bush shares in the responsibility for every facet of this mess. He did it; he knows it, and the only thing he's sorry about is that it didn't wait another year before it came crashing down around us.

America elected this guy to do a job for us. He ended up doing a job on us. "

I disagre. We did not elect him....The Supremes did it!

[FOTD]

Can a human being, let alone a president of the U.S., be so incredibly stupid? I know it is a rhetorical question, but the answer is yes. Roughly 1/3 of the US still thinks that moron is a leader. What does that tell you about the collective intelligence of Americans?

http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2008/04/economy-just-keeps-getting-worse.html

"Gas and food prices are at record high levels. Housing starts have dropped by 36% and foreclosures are at a record level. Over a million more people will lose their homes this year. Food banks can't keep up with the ever-increasing demand. Wages are stagnant, and going down when adjusted for inflation. And an unnecessary war is sucking billions of dollars out of our economy every week."

I think it would serve this country welll if the Chimp did nothing for the next 9 months.....

[rhymnrzn]

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/04/01/credit_default_swaps_q/

quoting from the interview:

"They've created this incredibly enormous shadow financial system, if you will, that's virtually hidden from investors and analysts and regulators.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion.

The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion.

The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion.

The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion."

[FOTD]

OMG! pancakes?

Fed: Severe downturn possible
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080408/bs_nm/usa_fed_minutes_dc_5

Yes, hard to set policy with the republican controlled congress and President.

Do you really want 4 more years of this to continue under McBush?