MOP
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Posts posted by MOP
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I spoke to a former work mate today and the company I used to work for (decent sized structural engineering firm) has just notified all staff of another wave of cuts in the next couple of months. Around 20% went last year and another 15-20% are going now with a decent pay cut for all staff.
He also spoke to a friend who works at another firm and they are about to do the same.
Anyone else seeing this?
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Would sound about right.
And you are a bull?
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Almost impossible to predict a peak, but I would say the market is due a pull back sooner rather than later, probably to around 4,200 - 4,400. It's very overbought. It needs to stay above July's low of ~4,100 to confirm the a long-term uptrend.
Good luck with that.
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I don't think McStalin will be able to keep the plates spinning until the election. Too many of them are starting to wobble.
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HSBC recently said that the Krone will be the safest currency in the world over the coming years.
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I'm increasingly of the opinion that Mr Ranta is just a bored unemployed person taking the michael.
It looks that way to me.
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er thats how I shake hands..... but Im not a mason!
Don't give me that shit! A normal handshake has the hands vertical and the thumbs interlocked.
If you do it like a mason then your mother must have dropped you on your head because it doesn't come naturally to do it that way.
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I had a meeting with my manager at HSBC yesterday. The suggestion was rising rates towards the end of this year/early next year.
This was her opinion on it anyway, not sure if it was based on any inside knowledge.
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"Sh1t, there's me thinking that some hedge funds, investment funds and insurance companies have been making money by buying and selling things all these years.
Are you trying to tell me they have to put their money into a single market and just leave it there hoping that the market will make them richer?"
How many of them outperform their respective benchmark, net of costs, over the long term?
"Please tell me you don't work in finance?"
No, still at school (see below)
"it's just you've started coming over all 24 year old smart ****,"
I am 14, and posting from the school IT department (inbetween surfing p**n)
"I'll stick a fiver in the post if its something a moderately intelligent 13 year old couldn't have thought of."
I am educationally subnormal, so am in a class of 12 years olds
As an aside, is there anyone that fails to beat the market on here?
Nope. Just you Noel.
We have all the secrets and we're not telling you, so there!
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Geithner: Auditing the Fed is a "line that we don't want to cross"
The Corbett Report
25 August, 2009
In an interview released today by Digg and the Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressured about the growing popular movement to Audit the Fed spearheaded by Texas Congressman Ron Paul. A visibly uncomfortable Geithner attempts to dismiss the question by stating "I'm sure people understand that you want to keep politics out of monetary policy." When Geithner is again pressed on the issue, he makes the stunning assertion that conducting an audit of the Federal Reserve—something never before done in its 96 year history—is a "line that we don't want to cross," proclaiming that such a move would be "problematic for the country." Watch the interview in the player below:
Geithner's response that auditing the Fed would give politicians dangerous control over American monetary policy is mistaken at best and a deliberate lie at worst. Allowing the public to know what happened to their $24 trillion in bailout money does not give undue control of monetary policy to the people's elected representatives. Instead, such an audit would finally allow the public to see how their money has been spent in the midst of the largest spending binge in the history of the world's economy, hardly an unreasonable demand given the well-documented revolving door between the Treasury and Goldman Sachs, the main recipient of bailout funds. Ultimately, the Treasury Secretary is left spewing the absurdity that "I think even the sponsor of that bill recognizes how important it is to us to have the Fed independent of politics," which can only be said to be true insofar as Ron Paul—the sponsor of House Resolution (HR) 1207— wants to abolish the Federal Reserve system altogether.
That the Wall Street Journal would even pressure the Treasury Secretary on serious issues like the Audit the Fed movement may be surprising, given that the Wall Street Journal is a mouthpiece of the financial oligarchy and that editor Paul Gigot, like Geithner himself, is a Bilderberg attendee. Needless to say, this was not a typical inside-the-beltway interview. Instead, questions were submitted and voted on by the Digg community, with the top 10 questions being posed to Mr. Geithner.
As a result, the Secretary was bombarded by pointed questions about his documented tax evasion from 2001-2004, the wisdom of spending trillions of dollars in the light of long-term dollar devaluation and even, in the words of one particularly irate questioner, "Why are you running the Treasury Department?" Despite presumably having had time to prepare responses to each question well in advance, Geithner is still visibly discomfited by the entire exchange, picking at his shirt cuff and coughing nervously throughout the interview.
In one particularly telling moment, Geithner even admits "We have been forced to do just extraordinary things and, frankly, offensive things to help save the economy."
That these questions are only being asked now, almost a year into the bailout and several months after the new administration has taken office, further highlights how the controlled corporate media is doing everything in its power to keep to well-trodden and uncontroversial areas in their interviewing of key administration officials. This interview is testimony to the power of the citizen journalism movement that is attempting to hold those in power accountable for their actions. We can only hope that the Obama Administration lives up to their promise to be the "cyber" administration by allowing more such question-and-answer sessions in the future.
http://www.corbettreport.com/articles/2009...thner_audit.htm
Video interview at the above link.
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How do they plan on spotting asset bubbles? They completely missed the last and biggest one, so how will they do better next time?
What they need to do is require full bank reserves and then just leave the monetary system alone! All they do is make things worse with their meddling! :angry:
+1
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No, sorry,you must be mistaken...the BBC ( or Brain Bending C**nts as I know them ) have told me, via their web portal, that the recession is over and everything will be okay...and oh it would appear...they've released a mad airline bomber back to his homeland, sends out all the right messages...i'll be getting the ferry on holiday this year It's probably okay as he's not al kiheda...just a memeber off al-blow-ur-heed-aff.
(p.s. shouldnt they have let the mad airline bomber die in prison, after a sever beating, then let everyone p**s on his grave ?....justice for none, except the crims...new labour...new stupidity ).
Yep. Hardly got a mention on the Blatant ******** Corporation today. They found plenty of time to suck Bernanke's **** though.
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What's happened to RK - seems to have been scared off by old troll
He just posted a few above you at #1457.
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I wonder what the US GDP figure for Q3 is shaping up to be then?
I reckon they will "magically" produce a +0.1% figure just so they can shout "recession over".
Place your bets..........
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The news is hardly buried if we're ranting about it
It's buried because I had trouble finding it, it's in small type half way down the bloody homepage!
The Bernanke news is headlining all over the economic sites at the moment and there is hardly any mention of this. So far.
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That's not the impression anyone would get from the re-appointment of Ben B by Pres O - of course to chop him off now would shout "Dissatisfaction" to the keen observer, so they have kept him and have presented in a way to maintain that all is on track. But CNBC seems to interpret it all a little differently to that.
Quite worrying, really, the more bouncy we are now here and there then the more potential for downside later if things don't work out for the best. After all, the bunch of brains from 2005 in place to date didn't do very well before, why would they be the ones to promote a recovery now? Is it he who break it later learn how to make it? Hmm, not sure I agree that the best team to lead forward are those that oversaw this mess so far.
Bernanke is back in because the market wants him back in. Obama wanted Summers in.
This Bernanke announcement has been made today in order to fool the market and bury the bad news. It won't bury it for long though.
Next leg down starting very soon when this "buried" news feeds through to the markets and the message sinks in.
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Economy In Much Worse Shape Than Expected: White House
Published: Tuesday, 25 Aug 2009 | 11:22 AM ET Text Size By: CNBC.com with AP
The US economy will shrink far more than expected this year and will rebound much more slowly than forecast after that, according to a bleak new assessment by the White House Budget Office.
The federal government also faces exploding deficits and mounting debt over the next decade, far worse than what the Obama administration had estimated just a few months ago.
The revised estimates project that the economy will contract by 2.8 percent this year, more than twice what the White House predicted earlier this year.
Obama economic adviser Christina Romer projected that the economy would expand in 2010, but by 2 percent instead of the 3.2 percent growth the White House predicted in May. By 2011, Romer estimated, the economy would be humming at 3.6 percent growth.
Figures released by the White House budget office foresee a cumulative $9 trillion deficit from 2010-2019, $2 trillion more than the administration estimated in May.
Moreover, the figures show the public debt doubling by 2019 and reaching three-quarters the size of the entire national economy. Romer predicted unemployment could reach 10 percent this year and begin a slow decline next year.
Still, she said, the average unemployment will be 9.3 in 2009 and 9.8 percent in 2010.
"This recession was simply worse than the information that we and other forecasters had back in last fall and early this winter," Romer said.
The grim administration projections came on a day of competing economic news.
The Congressional Budget Office, which has predicted less economic growth than the White House in the past, was also scheduled to announce revised budget projections on Tuesday.
Obama himself may have drowned out the rising deficit news with the announcement Tuesday that he will nominate Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The Bernanke news could neutralize any disturbance in the financial markets caused by the high deficit projections.
The deeper red ink and the gloomy unemployment forecast present President Barack Obama with an enormous challenge.
The new numbers come as he prods Congress to enact a major overhaul of the health care system—one that could cost $1 trillion or more over 10 years.
Obama has said he doesn't want the measure to add to the deficit, but lawmakers have been unable to agree on revenues that cover the cost.
What's more, the high unemployment could last well into the congressional election campaign next year, turning the contests into a referendum on Obama's economic policies.
Republicans were ready to pounce.
"The alarm bells on our nation's fiscal condition have now become a siren," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. "If anyone had any doubts that this burden on future generations is unsustainable, they're gone—spending, borrowing and debt are out of control."
Both Romer and budget director Peter Orszag said this year's contraction would have been far worse without money from the $787 billion economic stimulus package that Obama pushed through Congress as one of his first major acts as president.
At the same time, the continuing stresses on the economy have, in effect, increased the size of the stimulus package because the government will have to spend more in unemployment insurance and food stamps, Orszag said.
He said the cost of the stimulus package—which spends most of its money in fiscal year 2010—will grow by tens of billions of dollars above the original $787 billion.
For now, while the country tries to come out of a recession, neither spending cuts nor broad tax increases would be prudent deficit-fighting measures.
But Obama is likely to face those choices once the economy shows signs of a steady recovery, and it could test his vow to only raise taxes on individuals making more than $200,000.
Still, 10-year budget projections can be "wildly inaccurate," said Stan Collender, a partner at Qorvis Communications and a former congressional budget official.
Collender notes that there will be five congressional elections over the next 10 years and any number of foreign and domestic challenges that will make actual deficit figures very different from the estimates.
The Obama administration did tout one number in its budget review: The 2009 deficit was expected to be $1.58 trillion, $263 billion less than projected in May.
That's largely because the White House removed a $250 billion item that it had inserted as a "place holder" in case banks needed another bailout.
Orszag, anticipating backlash over the deficit numbers, conceded that the long-term deficits are "higher than desirable." The annual negative balances amount to about 4 percent of the gross domestic product, a number that many economists say is unsustainable.
But Orszag also argued that overhauling the health system would reduce health care costs and address the biggest contributor to higher deficits.
"I know there are going to be some who say that this report proves that we can't afford health reform," he said. "I think that has it backwards."
http://www.cnbc.com/id/32551478
OOPS!
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..or not.
Expand please........
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Bernanke's Reappointment = Weaker Dollar: Analysts
Published: Tuesday, 25 Aug 2009 | 7:00 AM ET Text Size By: Antonia Oprita
Associate Web Producer
A weaker dollar at least until next year and government intervention in the markets are to be expected as President Barack Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman, analysts and investment strategists told CNBC Tuesday.
Obama will interrupt his vacation to make the announcement at 9 am New York time, with Bernanke at his side, a White House spokesman said Monday. Market reaction was muted in Asia and Europe early Tuesday.
"I think we're probably going to see a move away from the US dollar, ultimately Ben Bernanke has pumped $1 trillion into the economy which certainly has inflationary expectations attached to it; it's a great increase to money supply," Timothy Connors, corporate FX manager at Custom House, said.
"Ultimately we are going to see a devaluation of the US dollar on the back of that, Connors added. "Really what we'll see probably is a move away from the US dollar and into more risky currencies like the Australian dollar for example."
Not that a weaker dollar would be necessarily bad news for the US, where Bernanke is hailed by many, including former General Electric [GE 14.20 -0.01 (-0.07%) ] CEO Jack Welch, as a "national hero" for saving the financial system from collapse and averting an economic depression. (GE is CNBC's parent company)
The famed US consumer, who has supported the world economy until before the crisis and makes up 70 percent of the US economy, is scared by the high unemployment, plummeting house prices and mountains of debt and has stopped spending.
What we need to see is that area of the consumer pick up," James Knightley, ING Bank analyst, told CNBC.com. "There's so much stimulus out there, there's hoping it will work."
An extra fiscal package is needed and that is not Bernanke's area, but, if economic activity continues to be weak, there will be pressure on the Fed to provide even more support via its quantitative easing program.
But if the consumer still fails to pick up, the government "would expect to want to see a weaker dollar, to boost trade," Knightley said.
However, the greenback will likely strengthen in the latter part of next year, when the Fed is expected to start raising interest rates, he added.
Interventionist Fed?
Bernanke's reappointment is consistent with Obama's legislative agenda and his views on the role of government in financial markets, Michael Yoshikami, president and chief investment strategist at YCMNET Advisors, told CNBC.com.
"The President's reappointment of Ben Bernanke confirms his perspective that he supports an interventionist Fed," Yoshikami said.
"It's fairly clear the Fed supports more stringent regulation of markets. This action will give some momentum to financial oversight efforts. And we will continue to have in place a chairman that believes in strong policy action," he added.
Slideshow: The World's Safest Banks
But markets are looking beyond Tuesday's appointment for longer-term solutions to the crisis and for a sustainable recovery – and the view is not necessarily pretty.
"We are seeing a statistical recovery, but we have to look at next year, 2010, whether this recovery can actually pull through and there, we have our doubts," said Hans Goetti, chief investment officer at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein.
The real test of Bernanke's policies will come when quantitative easing will end and the economy will have to function without its liquidity IV drip.
"The bad news is that I don't see any change in the way the Fed operates," Alan Capper, managing partner at Pinner Park Investments, said. "I can see the way Trichet is thinking; I can't see the long-term thinking of the Fed."
Check Dollar Rates Here
Bernanke's job is very difficult because the problem with quantitative easing is the supply side, and the exit strategy should take that into account, said Anthony Gibbs, senior gilts broker, at Vantage Capital Markets. Stagflation and a double-dip recession are still high on the list of possible risks, according to Gibbs.
"Down the line I think you're going to see a situation where, if liquidity is taken away, the government's demand for liquidity is going to crowd out everyone else and this is where I see the risk of a double-dip," Gibbs said.
But for Bernanke himself, worries about the medium and long-term should be miles away. He must be "smiling" given the current state of the labor market and how difficult it is to get a job in the US now, Andrew Freris, senior investment strategist for Asia at BNP Paribas Wealth Management, told CNBC.
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Bernanke to Be Nominated for Second Fed Term by Obama
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who led the biggest expansion of the central bank’s power in its 95-year history to battle the worst economic slump since the 1930s, will be nominated to a second term by President Barack Obama, said David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser.
Obama will make the announcement tomorrow on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he is vacationing with his family, and Bernanke is expected to join him, Axelrod said. The nomination requires Senate approval. Bernanke’s four-year term as chairman expires Jan. 31.
“The president believes that Bernanke has provided extraordinary leadership during the most difficult financial crisis we’ve faced since the Great Depression,†Axelrod said. “As we build our economy that leadership is still needed.â€
Bernanke, 55, slashed the main interest rate almost to zero, pumped $1 trillion into the banking system and led rescues of Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc. He now must guide the world’s largest economy back to growth and reduce unemployment approaching 10 percent while shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet to prevent a surge in inflation.
“Wall Street can rest a little easier,†said Christopher Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York. “Having a new chairman come in at this late date would put the Fed-engineered solution to both the recovery and the exit strategy at risk. â€
Tradition of Bipartisanship
Obama, a Democrat, continues a recent tradition of bipartisanship in his decision to nominate Bernanke, a Republican, to a second term.
Bernanke’s predecessor and fellow Republican, Alan Greenspan, served as Fed chief for 18 years while gaining renomination by three presidents, including Bill Clinton, a Democrat. President Ronald Reagan kept Paul Volcker, first selected by Jimmy Carter, for a second term.
The Fed chief faces threats to the central bank’s independence from members of Congress who say he overstepped his authority as he battled a crisis that froze credit markets and led to $1.6 trillion of writedowns and losses at financial firms. Bernanke was criticized as too slow to respond to the housing slump and for calling the crisis “contained†before reversing course in August 2007 and cutting interest rates.
House Legislation
Legislation in the House would subject the Fed’s monetary policy to audits by the Government Accountability Office, a change Bernanke opposes. Under a regulatory overhaul proposed by the Obama administration, the Fed would need the Treasury Department’s approval before invoking emergency powers used in bailouts and loans to non-bank financial institutions.
“It’s easy with hindsight to say he wasn’t perfect, he should have moved faster,†Laurence Meyer, vice chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC and a former Fed governor, said in an interview in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Bernanke and other central bankers gathered Aug. 20-22 for an annual retreat.
“Once he did recognize the crisis, he moved extremely aggressively, very creatively and I think you have to take a step back and say that the efforts and the leadership he gave brought the economy back from the edge of the abyss,†Meyer said.
Almost 75 percent of investors surveyed in the first Quarterly Bloomberg Global Poll had a favorable view of the chairman in July. By almost a three-to-one margin, they said Bernanke had earned another four-year term.
“Bernanke is a source of certainty,†said Guy Lebas, chief-fixed income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia.
Market Rebound
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen 52 percent since a recession low on March 9. The S&P lost 38.5 percent last year. Credit markets have also recovered: The London Interbank Offered Rate for three months loans in dollars fell to 0.39 percent on Aug. 24. The rate surged as high as 4.81 percent in October.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...id=aEFhwGa0bs3M
Looks like Bernanke is in for the long haul. Good luck Ben, you're gonna need it!
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My thoughts exactly. Just what we need to restore faith in the banking system. I'm sure Bernanke will sleep well tonight.
Time to wheel out the Bernanke facepalm again.
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Thanks for you infomations.
The original post was on Sep 30 2007 btw.
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Dunno. Have only seen that (currently) very short Bloomberg article.
I hope it applies to past and future. This could be fun.
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What, like the Fed having to reveal where the money went ?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...id=afi7TJiJFys0
If this were to actually happen, I guess things could get quite interesting....
Edit: Oops! Already posted.
Does this apply to past loans as well as future loans?
Baltic Dry Index Has Fallen 43% Since June Signaling A Warning On The Global Economy
in House prices and the economy
Posted · Edited by MOP
http://www.cnbc.com/id/32567374
A leading indicator? Looks like trouble could be ahead for the markets.