When you compare them head-to-head, the Obama and Romney tax plans are nearly identical:

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is offering a 20 percent tax cut for everyone. Given the mood of the conservatives in the United States today, that may not surprise you. But even President Barack Obama, who is routinely described as a socialist by his opponents, is peddling a plan under which 99 percent of Americans would pay less than they did under the last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton.

John O'Brennan cuts to the heart of the Eurozone crisis, outlining the political consequences of issuing aloof, one-size-fits-all austerity requirements from afar:

The European crisis is as much a crisis of politics as economics. The current paralysis of the Greek political system demonstrates the point very clearly. EU policy has actively contributed to this crisis by effectively sealing off discussion of the political problems thrown up by austerity.

Budgetary policy is at the core of traditional democratic politics in Europe but the management of the euro zone is increasingly being effected not through democratic institutions but via a centralised and depoliticised form of technocratic fiat. The “stability” narrative has triumphed over the need for legitimacy as the crisis in Europe has deepened.

Ivan Krastev, the eminent political scientist, argues that we have now arrived at a point where national governments have politics but are no longer in control of policy, including budgetary policy, which is moving via the fiscal treaty and other measures to the EU level.

On the other side of this divide the European Union has policies but no politics, since decisions are increasingly being made by technocratic managers rather than directly elected representatives of the European public. The euro zone crisis has thus amplified an existing problem – the absence of both a European citizenry and a transparent European level political process.

The whole thing. Read.

h/t RCW.

The results of this poll sort of reflect my own feelings and experiences with Facebook:

According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.

While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.

If you are the CEO of a major global bank and you have to announce a $2.0 billion trading loss, you will no doubt feel that the shareholders, regulators, and reporters are all against you. But if you announce that the loss occurred in a portfolio that just six weeks earlier was the subject of criticism in the press, and which you described as nothing more than “a tempest in a teapot”, you are entitled to feel that the gods are against you.

The gods definitely have it in for Jaime Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the legendary “fortress balance sheet” bank that prides itself on having avoided problems during the housing bust and credit crisis of 2007-2008. Someone inside the bank blew a large cannonball through the bank’s fortress walls, and it seems likely to have been “the Whale” of the credit derivatives market, JP Morgan’s Bruno Michel Iksil.

First, do nothing:

Obama turned his call for middle-income tax breaks into law within a month of taking office, incorporating a $400-a-person tax credit for workers into the 2009 stimulus law. In late 2010, with the economy still weak and Republicans gaining political clout, Obama agreed to an $858 billion tax cut that extended all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for two years.

"The tax policy has been substantially in the conservative direction whereas the rhetoric has gone in the exact opposite direction," said Don Susswein, a tax aide to former Republican Senator Bob Dole who said he supported Obama in 2008.

It often amuses me what rationales people come up with when a market moves in one direction or another.

To-wit: an analyst in England makes a positive comment about the banking industry, and glory be! the FTSE jumps up.

The comments specifically addressed this broker's belief...a broker, mind you, not a government official...that central banks around the world will address the lagging economy with stimulus packages.

Gee, thanks for pointing that out, Captain Obvious! A central tenet to Keynesian economics gets reitertated in the national press and markets suddenly facepalm and go "Now why didn't I think of that?"

Grace Livingstone | Apr 4

The Independent - Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world's poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food, says the United Nations' leading expert on food.

Hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital now dominate the food commodities markets, dwarfing the amount traded by actual food producers and buyers. Purely financial players, for example, account for 61 per cent of investment on the wheat futures market, according to the World Development Movement report Broken Markets.

Speculative investment in agricultural commodities in 2011 was 20 times the amount spent by all countries on agricultural aid. Goldman Sachs, the largest player in the agricultural commodities market, earned £600m from food speculation in 2009, and Barclays Capital, the world's third-largest player and largest British bank in this market, earned up to £340m in 2010, according to the report. Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital declined to comment.

Before it was deregulated in the year 2000, the agricultural commodities futures market was used mainly by farmers and food buyers seeking to insure themselves against changes in the prices of products such as wheat, maize and sugar. When George W Bush passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act 12 years ago, there was an influx, led by Goldman Sachs, of purely financial players who had no interest in ever buying food, but who sought solely to profit from changes in food prices, says Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

The US economy is on the road to recovery, right? That’s what all the economists and financial analysts say. Unemployment has dropped down to 8.3%, unemployment claims are now at a level last seen in 2008 before the economy fell off a cliff, almost all the TBTF banks have just passed the recent Fed stress tests and are now allowed to use their excess capital to pay dividends and buy back their stocks, inflation is tame if you go by official government statistics (especially core inflation that the Fed loves to look at because it removes the effects of food and oil price increases), and finally all major economic indicators are flashing green lights.

I suspect that's Greg Smith's new nickname in some circles.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) saw $2.15 billion of its market value wiped out after an employee assailed Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s management and the firm’s treatment of clients, sparking debate across Wall Street.

The shares dropped 3.4 percent in New York trading yesterday, the third-biggest decline in the 81-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index, after London-based Greg Smith made the accusations in a New York Times op-ed piece.

Truth-Teller Found Dead In Puddle Of Own Vomit

A departing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) employee mounted an unprecedented public attack on its “toxic and destructive” culture in a New York Times opinion piece, becoming the first serving insider to openly criticize the firm.

Greg Smith, identified by the newspaper as an executive director and head of the firm’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, will leave the firm after 12 years, blaming Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and President Gary Cohn for losing hold over the firm’s culture. Executive directors are junior to managing directors and partners, the most senior rank.

From the Globe and Mail by Neil Reynolds

Call it the final taming – the final domestication – of capitalism.

In February, a French commercial court ruled that Google Inc. broke the law when it allowed people in France to use Google Maps for free. Declaring the practice “unfair,” the court ordered the company to pay Bottin Cartographes, a French competitor, €500,000 in damages and a €15,000 fine. The court ignored the fact that Google Maps are a strategic service that enables the company to make money by giving things away. It also ignored the fact that OpenStreetMap, a wiki-based free service, has already mapped the world. (Google says it will appeal.)

..... It has taken a century to turn capitalism from an awesome force of nature, rude, raw and rambunctious, to the subservient thing it is today. Writing more recently, Mr. Epstein described contemporary capitalism as a spent force – trending, at least, to stagnation (from Latin: swamp). In the advanced economies, growth turned sluggish (in real-dollar terms) a generation ago. Now these exhausted economies, deep in debt, struggle to crank out a single percentage point of real-dollar growth a year. More at the link

The time-honored advice brokers have always given their investment clients is to “diversify, diversify, diversify!” It’s the basic law of investment – Investment 101 you might say – never put all your eggs in one basket. Which is why it is so odd to see the CEO of one of the largest investment funds in the world –BlackRock – insist that his customers ignore this basic rule and invest everything they have in equities.

CEO Laurence D. Fink says that we are living in a “New World” where it is impossible to earn a decent return on traditional bonds or other conservative investments. He’s right about that; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has made it clear he intends to keep interest rates at zero percent through at least the end of 2014. Maybe this New World is a welcome relief for borrowers, many of whom are desperate to reduce their debts, or at least the interest cost on their debts if they can refinance at lower rates.

I came across this highly informative interview with Dr. Lacy Hunt of Hoisington Investment Management on Mish's blog: Global Economic Trend Analysis. He found it on another blog: johnmauldin.com, and the interviewer is financial journalist Kate Welling. A sample quote:

Kate Welling: I suppose all this means you expect a recession this year?

Dr. Lacy Hunt Well, consumer spending will slow this year very dramatically from a very weak
base. We had a decline in real disposable income in 2011. GDP rose, but GDP
measures spending, not prosperity. In 2011, as is often the case, when inflation rises,
households initially try to maintain their standard of living. So in the face of rising
inflation and trailing wages, which was the story in 2011, families resorted to
increased credit card usage or to drawing down their saving. But in addition to a
decline in real disposable income in 2011, we also saw a net decline in net worth
[lower chart below]. And a year-over-year decline in net worth has been associated
with the start of all the recessions since 1969.

We touch on many of the topics discussed in this interview, including in our recent conversations about Greece. It is well worth the time to go through all 29 pages of the interview.

http://www.johnmauldin.com/images/uploads/pdf/mwo021312.pdf

Traders in New York this morning were greeted with this happy headline from The Wall Street Journal:

US stock futures higher; buoyed by Greece

Yes indeed, the Dow Jones index is set to open at least 70 points higher because the Greek parliament approved the additional austerity measures demanded by the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. In exchange for €130 billion in a second bailout by the “Troika”, as the three lending institutions are called, Greece will have to cut its minimum wage by 22% and the government will have to lay off an additional 150,000 workers. This is in a country that is in its fifth year of recession, with an official unemployment rate of 21%. Business has virtually collapsed, with many private sector companies on the verge of bankruptcy. The health system is so starved for funds that a bacteria resistant to all medicines is raging through hospitals, forcing the chronically ill to decide whether to even risk seeking professional care. Poverty is reaching extreme levels and is well-entrenched among what used to be the middle class. Children are sent to school so hungry that they are fainting in the classrooms. As of last night, the crowds that were storming through Athens and other large cities no longer were content to throw rocks at the police; Molotov cocktails were used to set at least forty buildings in Athens on fire. The police in Athens, facing crowds estimated from 80,000 to 100,000 people, were forced off Syntagma Square, and appeared to have run out of tear gas. Journalists described the business center of Athens as a war zone. The country is slipping into social disorder, if not anarchy. But stock markets in Europe were up today on the happy news that the Greek parliament approved the additional austerity measures.

More like Master of their Own Domain, now.

Enclosed within this article is a hint that the Times of New York could get their hands on the real story, if they wanted to:

When Fred Wilson, a prominent New York venture capitalist who has backed Twitter and Zynga, wanted to watch the Knicks game last month, he got an unpleasant surprise. Time Warner Cable was not showing the game because of a contract dispute.

Frustrated, he turned to the Internet for help. Within minutes he was streaming the game illegally on his big-screen TV. [...]

The headline number from the Unemployment Report this morning showed 243,000 jobs were created, more than the highest estimated increase by any of the economists surveyed before the report was released (the average expected increase from the economist survey was 120,00 jobs). The unemployment rate fell to 8.3%, again lower than predicted, and certainly good news for President Obama. Job growth was nearly across the board – in retail, construction, manufacturing, business services, and the hotel and restaurant industry. You can believe all this if you want, or you can go into the details in the report for some interesting context.

This graf from a Taibbi blog post reminds me of something. First the graf:

The potential liability each of the banks faces from foreclosure litigation is vastly greater than $25 billion, and uncertainty surrounding that litigation is holding the stock prices of all of the major companies (in particular struggling ones like Bank of America) down.

A settlement would release those firms from that potential liability and likely bring massive surges in stock-market investment. It would therefore have a profound strengthening effect on the Too-Big-To-Fail banks.

Now, if you see a big multi-day run up in bank stocks you know what's going on: the fix is in and a settlement has been made in principle. That's how we'll know: word will leak out to the main players and insiders before the news is announced.

So, buy the rumor and sell the news.

re-upping this, originally posted January 13. ~eds

I was telling someone earlier this week about my good friend Newt Gingrich. You didn’t know he was one of my friends? Neither did I, until I saw his television commercial attacking Mitt Romney for being a vulture capitalist. For at least five years, a lot of us in Leftist Blogoland have been decrying the equity extraction and asset stripping practices of people like Mitt Romney, the former CEO of Bain Capital. We’ve been joined in this crusade by writers with libertarian beliefs, and some of them, like Karl Denninger, are far more direct than we have ever been in calling a crime a crime, and demanding prison terms for the people who helped destroy America’s productive manufacturing base.

Shorter Bill Gross of PIMCO: "I have no idea what's going to happen in 2012." He concludes with: "The financial markets and global economies are at great risk."

You've been warned.

~by Phil Sloan, the Artful Watcher

Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th century German Philosopher, said: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed, Third it is accepted as being self evident”

In 1965 the ultimate protest “The Eve of Destruction” was written by PF Sloan (no relation). The song was made famous by Barry McGuire and is still remembered when citizens rise up to voice opposition to the status quo. Many of the lines hold true today even though fifty plus years have passed.

“The eastern world is exploding
Violence flarin’ bullets loadin’

The world is running out of money. If money is credit, and credit relies on confidence, there is not enough confidence in the financial system to supply the world with the money it needs. Since the initial credit crisis struck in 2008, credit and money have been withdrawn from the system in such staggering amounts that international trade can no longer grow. The world’s central banks are playing a rear guard action by acting as lender of last resort to banks that no longer trust each other and have stopped lending in the interbank market. As liquidity flows out from the system, the rottenness that has corrupted the foundations of global finance is now exposed for all to see.

Stocks closed at under $5.00 per share yesterday. This was all over the electronics trade ezines that I received today. I don't really follow the stock market...it's one of those gray areas for me. Can someone tell me in layman's terms what the impact of this news is?

Don't be fooled by this story.

The markets didn't tank because of Kim's death. Markets never tank because of bad or even good news like the death of a tyrant. They tank on uncertainty as investors pull their money out of riskier investments and into more stable ones.

Kim's death created next to zero uncertainty. Yes, his son, the Great Successor, is an unknown quantity, but ask yourself this: could he be any worse for the world than his father? Could he be any worse for his own people than Kim Jong-Il?

The UK gives the bird to the European Union:

WE JOURNALISTS are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way . . .

For Britain the benefit of the bargain in Brussels is far from clear. It took a good half-hour after the end of Mr Sarkozy's appearance for Mr Cameron to emerge and explain his action. The prime minister claimed he had taken a “tough decision but the right one” for British interests—particularly for its financial-services industry. In return for his agreement to change the EU treaties, Mr Cameron had wanted a number of safeguards for Britain. When he did not get them, he used his veto.

After much studied vagueness on his part about Britain's objectives, Mr Cameron's demand came down to a protocol that would ensure Britain would be given a veto on financial-services regulation.

Cameron has chosen the bankers over the common good in Europe. Doesn't surprise me.