Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
Markets are generally higher this morning on hopes of further stimulus measures and some decent earnings reports out of Ebay and IBM. Morgan Stanley missed. Spain raised 3 billion euros but paid dearly for it. Bonds are down almost a point and MBS are down a tick or two.
Initial Jobless Claims for the week of 7/14 came in at 386k, more in line with typical readings. Last week’s low 350k print was revised upwards, but still looks like a statistical fluke. Separately, it looks like another round of job cuts is on the way in the banking sector.
In other economic data, existing home sales fell by 5.4% month-on-month to an annualized pace of 4.37MM units. The Street was expecting 4.62MM. The Leading Economic Indicators index posted a negative number in June, the second negative number in 3 months.
The Philly Fed survey reported weak business conditions. Ominously, they reported declines in employment and shorter work hours.
FHA is conducting another mass distressed loan sale. Buyers will not be permitted to initiate foreclosure proceedings for 6 months. The loans are concentrated in hard hit areas like Phoenix, Tampa, Chicago, and Newark.
The Fed is considering another measure to ease up credit – allowing banks to borrow from the Fed at even lower interest rates provided the money is used to lend, not buy Treasuries. The Fed is really scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point – I guess the next step would be to allow the banks to repo the water cooler and office furniture.
Chart: Initial Jobless Claims:
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
July 2011 estimates Census Bureau, below.
The TX cities are doing well [4, 7, 9,13,16, and 19]. We did not allow the kind of leveraging on homestead loans that other states did. We have mild winters. We have no state income tax. What else is working here? What other cities are in good shape? Why? Are there lessons that can be exported?
1,New York city,New York,”8,244,910″,,,,
2,Los Angeles city,California,”3,819,702″,,,,
3,Chicago city,Illinois,”2,707,120″,,,,
4,Houston city,Texas,”2,145,146″,,,,
5,Philadelphia city,Pennsylvania,”1,536,471″,,,,
6,Phoenix city,Arizona,”1,469,471″,,,,
7,San Antonio city,Texas,”1,359,758″,,,,
8,San Diego city,California, ,”1,326,179″,,,,
9,Dallas city,Texas,”1,223,229″,,,,
10,San Jose city,California,”967,487″,,,,
11,Jacksonville city,Florida,”827,908″,,,,
12,Indianapolis city (balance),Indiana,”827,609″,,,,
13,Austin city,Texas,”820,611″,,,,
14,San Francisco city,California,”812,826″,,,,
15,Columbus city,Ohio,”797,434″,,,,
16,Fort Worth city,Texas,”758,738″,,,,
17,Charlotte city,North Carolina,”751,087″,,,,
18,Detroit city,Michigan,”706,585″,,,,
19,El Paso city,Texas,”665,568″,,,,
20,Memphis city,Tennessee,”652,050″,,,,
21,Boston city,Massachusetts,”625,087″,,,,
22,Seattle city,Washington,”620,778″,,,,
23,Denver city,Colorado,”619,968″,,,,
24,Baltimore city,Maryland,”619,493″,,,,
25,Washington city,District of Columbia,”617,996″,,,,
Edit: I just realized that 6 of the nations 25 largest cities are in TX and 4 are in CA and no other state has more than one. Wow.
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Everything is bigger in Texas. Also, this seems to be one of the more worthwhile uses of stimulus money:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec12/smartgrid_07-13.html
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Worth a read:
“What Follows from “You Didn’t Build That”?
July 19th, 2012 ·”
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2012/07/19/what-follows-from-you-didnt-build-that/
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OT: Probably significant and good news for President Obama:
“German Parliament gives wide support to rescue package for Spanish banks
By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, July 19, 1:00 PM
BERLIN — Germany’s Parliament has approved a rescue package worth up to €100 billion ($122 billion) for Spain’s struggling banks, which the finance minister said was needed to help prevent the eurozone’s debt crisis spreading further.
Lawmakers voted Thursday 473-97 in favor, with 13 abstentions. The two main opposition parties joined in backing the Spanish rescue.
Germany’s Parliament has to endorse all decisions to use money from the eurozone’s rescue fund. The country is Europe’s biggest economy and the biggest single contributor to the bailout fund; it will guarantee loans of up to €29 billion under the Spanish package.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/german-parliament-meets-in-special-session-to-vote-on-spanish-bank-rescue-package/2012/07/19/gJQAR5M8uW_story.html?hpid=z3
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What follows from “You didn’t build that?”
All Your Business Success Are Belong To Us
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“What Follows from “You Didn’t Build That”?
A lot of nonsense. I thought Ezra did a pretty good job with the whole gaffe of the week drama.
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My question for Ezra then is why Obama felt the need to tell an audience of supporters that, in essence, no person is an island? Who is out there saying that government serves no purpose? That government does not do anything useful? I can’t think of anyone campaigning on that. So either he is reminding his supporters of something they manifestly support (nagging, in effect) or he is once again claiming that his opponent believes and actively supports anarchy.
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McWing, doesn’t it all just go to the tax fight he’s engaging in now and letting the high end tax cuts expire? He’s just reminding everyone that some of the things we do best we do together and said it rather inartfully.
I keep thinking of the “war effort”, one way to make sure we all have skin in the game is through higher taxes to pay for it rather than lowering taxes and shielding us from the cost by making future generations pay for it through the deficit.
I doubt he’s accusing Romney of anarchy but Romney does seem interested in lowering the tax rate on the wealthiest among us so Obama’s just arguing against that point and may even be suggesting the self-interest inherent in Romney’s position. I don’t know what’s in either of their minds though…………………………don’t want to either. I hate Presidential elections.
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It sounds suspiciously like “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is ours”
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I think Ezra’s point though was that the campaigns and media are more interested in the gaffes during a long campaign than the substance of the arguments. I don’t pay much attention until the debates quite honestly.
Did you guys see the stuff yesterday, I think it was, about energy rates here in CA and JP Morgan? I’ll try to dig up the piece in the LATimes when I get a chance. Right now I’m on a wellness curfew and need to get away from my desk and relax……………. that means either watch my husband channel surf or read and fall asleep after about 3 pages…………… 😉
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“Under Romney, Massachusetts outsourced jobs in child support enforcement, food stamps, and unemployment insurance overseas. [GAO report, “Offshoring In Six Human Services Programs,” 3/2006]”
As outrageous lies go this one is at least Romney-esque maybe more so. The only time the whole report mentions Massachusetts is in a table of the 50 states.
The report actually notes that 43 of the 50 states and DC outsource at least some of those services. It also says that none of them do so directly however. The states contract with US companies who then sub out the work either in software development or in the operation of call centers in support of the food stamp program when people either want to report a lost or stolen card and or need to speak to someone in Spanish.
Click to access d06342.pdf
We have some very smart posters out there who nevertheless will believe and repeat anything they read without checking the source like a 16 year old on a used car lot.
That was a reprint from PL tonight by me. How easy it is to cross the line and become the person you despise for good cause of course.
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Here’s that LA Times piece from earlier this week on the CA energy market manipulation, if anyone’s interested. Probably another case of using a loophole to a financial advantage but not necessarily illegal………………..we’ll see I guess. It seems as though the smartest people work in private industry as opposed to regulation of said industry.
What the JPMorgan accusations really underscore is that a free market in California electricity, the basis of FERC’s regulatory policies, doesn’t exist. It’s a market vulnerable to anyone who can uncover a loophole in the rules — and it’s so complex that there are almost certain to be more loopholes than electrons in the power grid.
FERC says it has the legal authority to return the state’s wholesale market to a utility model, in which generators would get paid only for their true cost of generation, plus a reasonable financial return. It also has the authority to place trading restrictions on JPMorgan or any other market participant it finds guilty of manipulation, as it did against Enron (though only after that company was already bankrupt). The agency hasn’t indicated whether it might take either step in this case.
What should scare the regulators — and ratepayers — is that there may be many more scams out there, all driving up costs to California consumers. According to ISO documents, JPMorgan’s scheme got discovered only because the firm was collecting so much in excessive payments that it became hard to miss.
“JPMorgan got greedy,” Slocum says. If their take was “25 cents on the dollar, instead of 200%, they never would have been caught.”
And here’s a Bloomberg piece from last week.
Wood said the Constellation market-manipulation case shows that “there is something fundamentally broken about the system.”
He says the way the power markets work now doesn’t link power prices with the cost of power generation.
“In some respect, almost every market participant on the seller side, on the supply side is involved in what from a consumer point of view is really manipulation — they are looking for opportunities to get prices that are out of line with their production costs,” he said. “So every market participant is potentially a market manipulator from that point of view.”
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“lmsinca, on July 19, 2012 at 7:38 pm said:
“What Follows from “You Didn’t Build That”?
A lot of nonsense. I thought Ezra did a pretty good job with the whole gaffe of the week drama.”
This is the key point, which I entirely agree with about using the “roads and schools” argument for justifying specific levels of taxation:
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And here’s the part I was responding to jnc, which is also the reason I hate Presidential elections.
So, in Romney’s ad, “that” refers to “building a business.” In Obama’s remarks, “that” refers to the roads and bridges.
My point on “Morning Joe” was that the media has gotten into a pattern where we listen to presidential candidates say the same thing a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times, and then the one time they stumble over their words or phrase their point inartfully, we jump all over them. It has happened to both Romney and Obama during this cycle. Repeatedly.
What I didn’t say, but perhaps should have, is that once we in the media deem something to be a “gaffe,” the normal rules of journalism cease to apply, and we begin running and rerunning the attack ads that relate to the gaffe, and playing clips of surrogates mocking the gaffe, and so on.
All this is done, in part, to retroactively justify the coverage of the initial comment: “See, we told you this would be a big deal, and now it is a big deal.” But that is, of course, self-fulfilling, as we have made it a big deal — and have handed the opposing campaign a reason to make it a big deal — by giving it wall-to-wall coverage. In doing, we create an incentive for both campaigns to engage in more of this kind of behavior, to make more of these kinds of ads. We are, in effect, encouraging a race to the bottom.
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At the game level, see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/new-anti-romney-ad-show-us-your-papers/2012/07/20/gJQAr6VtxW_blog.html#comments
That the ad is not running in Texas, the single state with the most Hispanic voters, tells us two things.
1] BHO is writing off TX* [not surprising, but hard to swallow for down ticket Ds]; and
2] BHO is marshaling funds and selecting swing states, only.
That the ad is not running in AZ, where BHO has a [small but measurable] chance of winning and [thus] a chance to make WMR spend big shows that BHO is short of cash, period, full stop.
* But he comes to TX to collect money, nevertheless.
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