Six months of railing against business rather than finding ways to encourage entrepreneurs to expand and hire has left the Obama administration with egg on its face. "Pass my $800 billion Stimulus Plan and unemployment will not exceed 8%" was the Obama administration mantra. Well we passed it, and unemployment will soon exceed 10%. President Obama said his Stimulus Plan would save or create 3.5 million jobs in the next two years. This cornucopia of 1960's "Great Society" style social programs misbranded, as a Stimulus Plan has not produced jobs and worse still is unlikely to produce any permanent private sector jobs. Maybe a few hundred thousand temporary infrastructure jobs will be created over the next year or two but that is the best we can hope for from the…
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The first lesson every President learns is that in trying to please all his constituents he pleases no one, including himself.
President Obama sold the $800 billion Stimulus Plan to the American people as a strategy to create untold
infrastructure jobs. If fact, President Obama said the stimulus plan would save or create 3.5 million jobs in the next two years and that he hoped to limit the unemployment rate to a peak of 8% this summer. In typical political bait and switch fashion his democratic Congress allocated 8% of the stimulus money to infrastructure projects. Instead of infrasturture jobs Congress gave us cornucopia of social programs that have been on their wish list for decades, leaving the President with egg on his face.
The
unemployment rate has already reached…
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The Obama 10 year budget includes trillions in new spending programs at a time when tax revenues are declining at a precipitous rate.
The projected deficit in the
Obama Budget is $7.0 trillion for the decade 2010 to 2019. That's the good news!
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that, if the Obama budget were approved, the federal government would actually run even larger
deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year over the next decade. The cumulative deficit from 2010-19 would be $9.3 trillion, according to the report - $2.3 trillion more than the Obama administration's forecast. The main reason for the difference in budget estimates is a difference in economic growth, with congressional views of long-term growth less optimistic than those of the White House. …
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On average
home prices have fallen 32.2% since they hit their peak in the second quarter of 2006. In super housing bubble markets like Phoenix and Las Vegas home prices have plummeted by 50% from their all time highs. At the risk of being labeled a cock-eyed optimist I will predict - The end is near!
What makes me so optimistic? Traditionally home prices have tracked inflation. In fact, in the last 50 years home prices have appreciated approximately 1% faster than inflation. There is an internal logic to this trend. If housing prices appreciate at a rate that is appreciably faster than income, within a decade we would be unable to purchase our own homes. And that is exactly what has happened.
Fueled by political pressure from the left and…
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Now that Standard and Poor's has cut its outlook on the U.K.'s AAA
credit rating, can the U.S. be far behind. We're headed down the same primrose path, according to Bill Gross co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, who predicts that the U.S. "will eventually loose its top rating". How did we get to this sorry state of affairs?
Unbridled spending and borrowing - The U.S. is boosting its debt sales to $3.25 trillion for the fiscal years ending Sept 30th pushing the nation's "marketable debt" to an unprecedented $6.36 trillion. The Federal Reserve's custodial holdings of Treasuries for foreign accounts have already risen to $1.9 trillion.
But the past is only prelude to the Obama fiscal future. Further deterioration of the dollar and our credit rating is a virtual certainty as…
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The Democrat Party is in the hands of the Pelosi-Obama extreme left, the Republican Party is in the hands of the Bush-Limbaugh fanatic religious right and the mindless party faithful gleefully sing along, ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that there will be trillion dollar annual deficits for the next decade if the Pelosi-Obama left prevails, and the response from the right, narrow-minded religious platitudes.
Maybe its time for a third party that represents the rational, pragmatic majority of the country. I believe the founders would approve if we called our new party, The Enlightenment Party.
First let's look at what we can expect from the left:
In 2010 federal outlays will be a breathtaking $3.6 trillion, or 24.1% of…
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The stress tests appear to be boiling down to one critical measurement of bank capital, Tangible Common Equity (TCE). While the assets themselves may be tangible, the intangible result could be a tectonic shift to a politicized banking system. To avoid any confusion it is probably best that I define my terms at the outset:
1. Tangible Common Equity (TCE) equals
book value minus
intangible assets,
goodwill, and
preferred equity. Essentially this is the most conservative measure of bank capital and represents what common shareholders would have left if a bank were liquidated.
2. Tangible Book Value (TBV) equals
book value minus
intangible assets and
goodwill. This measure would include preferred shares held by the government and private investors and gives a broad view of…
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Through coercion and fiat His Royal Highness (HRH) Obama has forced the senior-secured lenders to take a secondary position to unsecured lenders in the "pre-packaged" Chrysler-FIAT bankruptcy plan. President Obama characterized the 20 or so lenders who were opposed to the plan as "a small group of speculators". His left wing "nut job" ally Representative Dingell characterized them as "vultures" and warned that they "will be dealt with in court". Their crime one can only assume is being moneylenders, but they are not the ones on trial.
Until this week senior secured lenders, those that held a contract that gave them first lien on a companies assets, had a preferential position in any bankruptcy proceeding unless of course they "voluntarily" give up that right. HRH Obama has by simple royal fiat…
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"A man younger than 30 who's not a liberal has no heart and a man older than 30 who's not a conservative has no brain" - Winston Churchill.
Spending his formative years in Paris and then returning to complete college and graduate school at the American University of Paris, my son became deeply steeped in French cradle-to -grave socialism, never failing to extol its virtues. A self proclaimed "caviar socialist", my caviar - his socialism, lamented how hardened we fiscally conservative "old people" had become to the wishes of the "people". The mean spirited American ideal of education, hard work and opportunity for all was just a bromide invented by the American bourgeoisie in a nefarious plot to stifle the true wishes of the "people".
"Ah, for those carefree days, when my…
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Obamanomics - a "Bush" league plan for job creation. Job creation was tepid during the Bush years and it is likely to be even less robust in the Obama years.
The respected
Blue Chip economic forecasters, expect the unemployment rate, which surged to 8.5% last month, to peak at 9.6% in first quarter 2010. For the unemployment rate to fall, we must not only increase the number of
jobs, but that increase must exceed the expected increase in the size of the
labor force. In other words, merely increasing the number of Americans working will not necessarily decrease the unemployment rate. Today there are
154 million Americans in the labor force and just to maintain the
status quo, 2.0 million new jobs must be created annually…
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