Obama

Embattled Euro Zone Hunts for Plan B

europestormSpain is desperate, pleading and begging for help. Literally Spain said it does not have access to markets to refinance their debt. This is after the G7 decided to do nothing.

Spain said on Tuesday it was losing access to credit markets and Europe should help revive its banks, as finance chiefs of the Group of Seven major economies conferred on the currency bloc's worsening debt crisis but took no joint action.

Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro sent out a dramatic distress signal about the impact of his country's banking crisis on government borrowing, saying that at current rates, financial markets were effectively off limits to Spain.

"The risk premium says Spain doesn't have the market door open," Montoro said on Onda Cero radio. "The risk premium says that as a state we have a problem in accessing markets, when we need to refinance our debt."

Now Spain is up against it, testing the market with a bond sale, all in hope of avoiding a bail out, with all of the austerity demands that come with one.

Spain will try to raise between one and two billion euros in bonds on Thursday, a crucial yet cautious test of Madrid's ability to tap investors after a minister said the country was being cut off from the markets.

The Games Politicans Play With Employment Statistics

Today our statistic is from Mitt Romney. Team Romney claims women have lost 92.3% of the jobs since Obama took office. U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner, acting as political pundit, calls Romney's new favorite statistic ridiculous.

First off Romney is right. Since Obama took office in January 2009, the below graph shows the total job losses by women as a percentage of the total job losses. As of March 2012, it is 92.3%.

payrolls loss women

Trade Rhetoric Just That

Obama and hu jintaoIt must be an election year. The Obama administration has joined a WTO complaint against China for limiting rare earth minerals exports.

The U.S. will file a complaint at the World Trade Organization today over Chinese limits on exports of rare earths used in high-tech products, deepening a trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies.

President Barack Obama will personally announce the action to join Japan and the European Union in requesting consultations with China at the Geneva-based trade arbiter over rare-earths shipments.

National Mortgage Settlement is a Big Fat Pig in a Poke

pigpokeThere are new revelations on the 50 state mortgage fraud settlement. From The Financial Times:

A clause in the provisional agreement – which has not been made public – allows the banks to count future loan modifications made under a 2009 foreclosure-prevention initiative towards their restructuring obligations for the new settlement, according to people familiar with the matter.

The existing $30bn initiative, the Home Affordable Modification Programme (Hamp), provides taxpayer funds as an incentive to banks, third party investors and troubled borrowers to arrange loan modifications.

The settlement is estimated to be $40 billion. The fines are only $5 billion of this, which implies U.S. taxpayers are on the hook, not the banks, for $30 billion. So instead of getting any justice that using people's homes, their shelter and main life investment as a gambling chip and paper chase game is wrong, once again we get to pay for financial folly while banks pocket the cash.

Naked Capitalism has put up a top 12 list of things wrong with the foreclosure fraud settlement. Here's reason #1:

Saturday Reads Around the Internets - Big Brother Strikes Again

shocknews Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop.

 

Target Knows You're Pregnant Before You've Told Anyone

The never ending invasion into our privacy knows no bounds. We just saw Google ignoring browser privacy settings and even when you delete cookies, flash cookies and even use proxy servers, you're being tracked. For those who have strong boundaries this is just irritating as hell. It's also stupid in terms of statistics. One percent, which is the typical dismissed exception of these profiling algorithms, equates to 3 million people in the United States.

This is What Happens When a President Outsources Job Creation to Multinational Corporate Executives

one trick ponyMultinational corporations are one trick ponies when it comes to their agenda. By hell or high water they want to offshore outsource jobs and have controlled, unlimited migration per their globalization agenda.

It should be no surprise when putting these same greedy bastards in the White House who outsource, they publish a faux job creation agenda. Such is the case of the latest report.

Instead of hire America, buy American or a manufacturing policy, we get these multinational's typical labor arbitraging agenda wish list. The corruption is so bad, literally corporate lobbyists' economic and statistical fiction is used in this report. Probably the most debunked economic fiction spinner of them all, the NFAP, is used. The NFAP is also these very multinational's personal white paper spin machine.

Guess what folks, labor arbitraging U.S. professionals does not create jobs, it loses jobs. The statistics show it and anyone with a 2nd grade education would know this to be true. You fire people, that is a job loss, not a job gain as this jobs agenda report tries to claim.

U.S. Trade Agreements Offshore Outsources Jobs so Congress Passes More of Them

We know bad trade deals have cost millions of American jobs. We have a jobs crisis with no growth in site. So, why in God's name would Congress pass more of the same? The South Korean trade deal has been analyzed to lose 159,000 jobs. The Panama trade agreement creates corporate tax havens that will be completely out of reach by the United States. Add in the Columbia trade deal and we've lost 214,000 jobs.

The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee held a hearing, aptly titled, Manufacturing in the USA: How U.S. Trade Policy Offshores Jobs. The title says it all, eh? Unfortunately the actual hearing didn't have the right economists who would show amply with statistics and facts, the overall hearing title is oh so true.

Contained within is the obligatory other side of multinational corporations, and the real agenda of this hearing is some token retraining for U.S. workers who will lose their jobs as a result of these bad trade deals.

Workers are not alone in wondering why our government sells us once again down the river on jobs. Small businesses, especially small U.S. manufacturers are asking the same question.

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