Jim Cramer on February 3rd:
Jim Cramer on March 3rd:
Jim Cramer yesterday (April 2nd):
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
I've had mixed feelings about the whole AIG bonus controversy that's been dominating the news this week. Of course it's pretty insulting that everyone at the Financial Products division is getting big bonuses after basically bringing down the whole economy by themselves. And I'm pretty sure some of those cats should be going to prison for fraud.
But the media feeding frenzy seems awfully contrived and the Congressional reaction has been transparently contrived. It all seems like they all watched the Jon Stewart drubbing of Jim Cramer and felt like they just had to find something to get really angry about. This AIG stuff is outrageous but no more outrageous than any of the other nasty stuff we've been hearing for months and months about the larger Wall Street environment or some of the more specific things about private planes and refurbished offices, etc.
However, the Congressional Democrats felt the rage and proposed a plan to do something about it - to recoup the bonus money back for the taxpayers by taxing the hell out of the assholes that got paid to destroy the economy. And it passed the House of Representatives just now by an overwhelming margin.
Here's how YOUR Louisiana Representatives voted:
01 Steve Scalise: NAY
02 Joe Cao: YEA
03 Melancon: YEA
04 Fleming: YEA
05 Alexander: YEA
06 Cassidy: YEA
07 Boustany: NO VOTE
Sorry readers, posts might be less frequent and insightful over the next couple few. I've been frolicking about without the luxury of a full time paycheck for a little while. It's been very therapeutic but my bank account just called to put a stop to the festivities.
It's time to be a full time job-seeker. Funny how I've timed everything out so perfectly, as everyone knows it's a GREAT time to be looking for employment. I explained to my dad over the phone this weekend that this was all a good thing, as I am now a part of history.
What I really want more than anything is a good get rich quick scheme. I need my readers to help me brainstorm. If only I hadn't ratted out NOAH, I could've broken into the bamboo fiber underwear business.
In that vein...
For your convenience, I've already priced out some of my organs and affiliated bodily resources:
Left kidney: $15,000
Liver: $25,000
Corneas (2): $75,000
Blood (O+): $15 per pint or $25 per quart
Bone marrow: $4500 per session
Oyster highlights an old quote from a few weeks ago by one of New Orleans' benevolent business overlords.
From the NYT:
At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.
“Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”
--For Mr. Hope, the Whitney National Bank chairman, “the main motivation for TARP” was not more loans, but rather to safeguard against the “possibility things could get a lot worse.” He said Whitney would continue making loans “that we would have made with or without TARP.”
“We see TARP as an insurance policy,” he said. “That when all this stuff is finally over, no matter how bad it gets, we’re going to be one of the remaining banks.”
I don't have much of in terms of formal economics education, so I often struggle to machete my way through the thicket of the issues we're facing during this ongoing financial crisis.
I often bookmark blogs or articles to read but too often, I chicken out or get distracted by items that conform to the things that I generally write about.
But on Friday afternoon, I forced myself to read this long New York Times chronology of Bernard Madoff's $50 billion (with a B) international Ponzi scheme.
And I'm really glad I did.
It was absolutely riveting and I can't get it out of my mind. I'd say that if you've been struggling to understand the Madoff scheme, this is a good place to start because the narrative is so compelling and interesting to read. The media really has no idea how to explain this to the lay reader so I don't think they've quite imparted to people the scope of the fraud. It's historic.
I spent all weekend regurgitating the story to friends, which also helped me wrap my mind around some of the concepts and inspired me to conjure up a much clearer visualization of the larger financial system.
I don't normally glow about an article like this, it is definitely worth 45 minutes of your time. This guy was a total Bond villain and you get to imagine the plot of that movie in your mind. He even has the last name of a Bond villain.
--
If you decide to take the plunge and invest some time into the Madoff article, come back here and tell me what kind of weird physical abnormality your Madoff/Bond villain caricature has for which he needs to dominate the world in order to compensate.
My Bernard Madoff sustained an inoperable facial injury as a child that has caused him to experience a perpetual nose bleed. Doctors resolved this by diverting the blood into a series of cysts in the back of his throat that need to be drained by a busty fembot assassin in between hands of Texas Hold'em on a Mediterranean yacht.
Those arguing against the auto industry loan are losing me. The rationale for inaction seems far flimsier than that for intervention.
I don't see how Hooverite do-nothingness stops the job loss.
I mean, even NPR just cut 7% of it's workforce. If someone as brilliant as Farai Chideya is losing her job, what hope do I have of finding one myself?
And given that we dropped $700 billion without really blinking, why all the sudden hangups on this $15 billion?
Don't tell me Cao's election signals a national mandate for laissez-faire crisis management.
I'd venture to say that New Orleans isn't really such a big fan of that.
David Vitter's impassioned resurrection of Herbert Hoover's economic recovery policy makes no sense.
And if he thinks this will win him brownie points with voters for his reelection campaign, perhaps he might first want to readjust his vocabulary.
Just to make us feel worse about things:
According to the Labor Department, the number of unemployed workers rose by 251,000 in November. But the number of people who were outside of the labor force — that is, neither working nor looking for work — rose by much more: 637,000. These people aren’t counted as unemployed in the government’s statistics, because they are not looking for work. Many of them, presumably, have stopped looking for work because they didn’t think they could find a good job.
If you take a broader measure — one that tries to account for them — you see a darker picture of the labor market. The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000; at no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women has fallen so much from its peak.
Even among those who still have jobs — who, of course, make up a huge majority of the population — the news wasn’t good. The number of people working a part-time job because they couldn’t find a full-time job rose by 621,000 last month. These people count as employed, but obviously many of them are struggling.
Best video I've seen illuminating the willful ignorance of the bullish punditocracy.
via Sullivan
Kudos to Clay for finding this hard-to-watch video about the realities of the foreclosure crisis.
"They must be in great despair."
This is a very strong speech and I've got to recommend it.
He hits some good grooves within this speech.
Good politics, I think we'll win on November 4th.
Senator Obama really puts the screws on McCain in this speech, abso-lutely ridiculing his proposal for a 9/11-style commission to study the economic crisis and describing John McCain's policies that contributed to our current conundrum and his commitment to delaying concrete action. He really lays down the gauntlet in a way that breaks down the starkly divergent economic policy histories of the two candidates in a very media-friendly package.
"This isn't 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I'll provide it. John McCain won't."
The American Zombie has been FEASTING!
The corpse is on an absolute roll.
First, let's post this uncomfortably responsible clip from Jim Cramer, otherwise known, as the most annoying man on television.
When I used to own a television and when I used to have roommates, sometimes the person with the remote would flip over the CNBC, which for whatever reason was always playing Cramer's Mad Money program. It would be a showdown between roommates on the couch. How long could we listen to this guy's shrill voice and see him bouncing up and down on the television screen like a jackass before somebody freaked out and begged for a channel change? I swear to you nobody ever got past 3 minutes.
Second, and much more important, you've got to go get with the Zombie on this Entergy nonsense. What a disgusting and vile corporation. Energy policy will be a huge challenge for our next Mayor.
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