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[Catloaf]

A nice little explanation of how fucked we are in Sharkey-style whiteboard form!
RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism

[Mongrel]

Goldman Sachs fine rings in at $550 Million

I guess that'll buy a few of those marine tank-tractor things.

EDIT: Haha, whoops, sorry! Wrong *-illion.

[Mongrel]

Oh dear. So apparently the Republicans supported the vote to extend unemployment insurance, but are dropping the small business lending legislation?

Oh GOP, you so wacky.

[SCD]

Let this be a lesson on why you don't gerrymander.  Things just keep getting wackier and wackier...

[Mongrel]

Okay.

Well, there's a recent kerfuffle about a rather shameless conspiracy novel that's all the rage in China. The basic premise is that Goldman-Sachs is the antichrist and source of all the world's ills and is trying to kill China (this is what big American corporations try to do, y'see).

Turns out it's mostly plagiarized from an excellent investigative article in Rolling Stone*, and while the original article contains nothing about them targeting China specifically, it is largely accurate.

Anyway, I don't believe in single-party scapegoats, but there's more than enough to spread around that everything ascribed to G-S in the article is still credible. The actual article is well worth the read - and then some. Just don't read it if you have a weak stomach or are easily prone to Catloaf-esque rages.

*_{Who seem to have somehow stolen the mantle of 'most credible paper in town when it really counts' from the major players - which is really just depressing when you think about it. Of course we should thank our lucky stars that SOMEBODY is doing something.}

[Mongrel]

Economist argues that the actual US debt is not $13 Trillion (which is bad enough) but $200 Trillion.

[Mongrel]

Oh hey, Quantitative Easing 2 (aka WE PRINT MUNNIES!) is a go, announced by Bernanke this afternoon (600 Billion, with 75 Billion being spent a month to buy US debt, until the sum's played out).

Any comment on the timing of the announcement?

[Royal☭]

Just a friendly reminder that while several people I know on these forums and in real life are struggling to find jobs, corporate profits are skyrocketing.

Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.

Meanwhile, it's time for us to make Tough Choices and start with some huge austerity cuts, Make the Hard Sacrifice, harvest the poor, etc, etc.

[Mongrel]

Dead Kennedys - Kill the poor

[Classic]

Plutocracy vs. Kleptocracy, discuss.

[Royal☭]

The audit of the Fed during the early days of the financial crisis hit today

Zach Carter of Campaign for America's Future breaks down some interesting bits pretty well

BofA and its predecessors Countrywide and Merrill Lynch accessed the Fed's Primary Dealer Credit Facility 416 times, for a total of $2.783 trillion. A full $476 billion in junk bonds were pledged as collateral for the loans, or roughly 17 percent. The PDCF is an overnight facility, so a lot of these loans are simply being rolled over day-to-day. Nevertheless, it's a staggering amount of money, with an enormous degree of totally worthless collateral being pledged to justify it.

The Fed and Treasury had to do something in 2008 to keep the financial system from falling off a cliff. But by treating the problem as a liquidity issue with no strings attached, they didn't solve the underlying problem: lots of very big banks were simply insolvent.

Now, over two years after TARP, it's clear that many of our largest banks are only "solvent" due to accounting irregularities being approved by regulators that are terrified of letting big banks go under. As a result of this fear, we aren't really regulating our banks.

So Paul Krugman's prediction of zombie banks creating a drag on the economy has not come true. The reality is, in fact, much worse. Krugman foresaw zombie banks that didn't lend due to capital concerns, preventing the recovery from getting off the ground. We're seeing plenty of that, but we're also seeing zombie banks actively prey on the economy through the foreclosure process in an effort to repair their balance sheets. The zombie banks aren't just failing to boost the economy, they're actively sabotaging it

[Shinra]

So you could say that the zombie banks are eating the American consumer's brains, basically?

[Saturn]

Plutocracy vs. Kleptocracy, discuss.

What's the difference?

[Büge]

Hypothetically, a Kleptocracy is fixable.

[Pacobird]

The difference is dependent on just how full of shit you think Plato really was.

[Royal☭]

Plenty!

[Brentai]

So I guess the compromise in the works is to not take in any more money and spend more on unemployment.

Not that I can argue much against unemployment when one in ten people are out on their asses, but man... having a bipartisan government is like having a trophy wife.

[A²]

Despite the name, you can't beat people to death with it?

[Thad]

August spends three great posts pretty much saying that Obama's being a punk and needs to tell the Congressional Democrats they're assholes.

And force them to come to work on Christmas, because the goddamn President can do that.

Of course, August knows just as well as the rest of us do that that's not going to happen and they're going to extend all the tax cuts, because Obama is a punk.

[Royal☭]

It seems ridiculous that Dems would be losing on this, until you realize that losing is what they're going for

Why is this? No, it’s not that Democrats are wimps. They’re dive artists. Obama promised health care reform, but do he and his DLC inner circle actually want to weaken the stranglehold medical profiteers have on the public? Or do they just want to make a good show of losing the struggle?

*That piece is about the Health Care reform fight, but really it applies to just about any Democratic party position.