Citigroup pulls another fast one

In a bid to maintain the title, "Masters of the Universe," Citigroup Inc. is increasing the base salaries of many of its employees - reportedly by as much as 50 percent for some workers - as it raises the stakes in the game of financial chicken with the Obama administration.

Taking a bead on the center stripe of the financial two-lane blacktop, "[t]he Obama administration reacted by pledging to aggressively implement a new law governing compensation at companies like Citigroup that have received billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailout support." according to the AP via Yahoo News.

Anybody want to dispute that those banksters aren't indeed the "best and the brightest"?


current-events

Will the government go bankrupt?

Does the black cloud of a depression hang over the nation?

Recession blues got you down? Well, there is some good news; the United States government can't (and won't) go bankrupt. It says so right here:

The NYT has a good discussion of how the United States government has been out front in criticizing other governments for not allowing financial institutions to go bankrupt, but is now rushing to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from failure.

One item the piece gets wrong is its discussion of the risk of bankruptcy by the U.S. government itself. This is essentially zero, since the U.S. debt is denominated in dollars. If the United States ever had difficulty paying off bonds held by foreign central banks, it could print as many dollars as necessary to make the payments.

The mass printing of dollars would of course be inflationary and would mean that foreign central banks would get paid off in dollars that are worth much less than the ones that they lent, but they have already been happy to take large losses on the money lent to the United States. For example, the dollar has fallen by almost 50 percent against the euro since 2002, yet foreign central banks are still willing to lend money to the U.S. government at interest rates that are well below the inflation rate in the United States.

The foreign central banks presumably are willing to absorb such large losses because they want to prop up the value of the dollar in order to maintain an export market for their goods. As long as foreign countries cannot figure out how to create domestic demand for their output (it actually is not very hard for those who have read Keynes), they may find it worthwhile to lose large amounts of money on their loans to the United States in order to maintain their export markets in the United States.
- Dean Baker at American Prospect

Of course, this doesn't mean that you won't go bankrupt.

current-events

Am I crazy, or just very, very angry?

The Shrub is going to come on the TV here in just a few and tell me how great it is to be an American. I couldn’t agree more. It’s great to come home from your second part-time job at the Wal-Mart to a house full of ignorant, doped-up kids, only to turn on the news to watch another piece of American infrastructure drop into a river, taking several fellow taxpayers with it.

It’s just swell to learn that the bastards in Congress passed another ratification of the Shrub’s demon vision of Iran as a terrorist state, declaring them “murderers, ” while American Blackwater contractors machine gun Iraqi citizens with impunity and we learn that not only are we supplying guns and ammo to the Sunnis, we’re giving weapons to the Shi’ias , too, thus ensuring that both sides have lots of armament for their upcoming full-out civil war.

Meanwhile here at home, a reporter on assignment for Britain's largest newspaper (the UK Guardian) was deported after spending 26 hours in lockup in an undisclosed location for failing to have a journalist visa, per the US Patriot (sic) Act. If this is how we treat our friends, you can just imagine how we treat people we don’t like.

By the way, New Orleans is still a mess and the Shrub just vetoed the idea of a 5 cent tax on gasoline to pay for repairing America’s bridges, and he still wants another $80 billion to continue fucking up Iraq. In breaking news we learn that the Japanese just fired up their presses and printed a trillion (with a “T”) yen to prop up the failing (and getting worse) American real estate market.

Congress – and the idiots in the White House – could take some pointers from the Chinese, where the guy in charge of inspecting Mattel toys for the American market committed suicide after it was discovered that those toys were covered with poisonous lead paint.

So how’s your day been?

current-events

The secret diaries of Ronald Reagan

Love him or detest him, Ronald Reagan was a remarkable man, and was much more than the filmoid one-dimensional character that some liberals have sketched him as being.

From the UK Telegraph:

The Prince of Wales was a "most likeable person", President Gaddafi a "mad clown" and Michael Jackson was "surprisingly shy". Reagan in the Oval Office. His wife Nancy, he wrote, gave him 'more happiness than any man deserves' The private diaries of Ronald Reagan, which are about to be published for the first time, reveal a US president who was worried about imminent Armageddon but who also fretted about how he would handle chopsticks in front of the Chinese. The man who was credited with ending the Cold War reveals that he was "lonesome" when his wife, Nancy, was away and refused to talk to their son, Ron Junior, after he hung up on him. His carefully handwritten and succinct private musings, contained in five leather-bound books embossed with the presidential seal, span his eight years at the White House from 1981 to 1989. Excerpts have been published in Vanity Fair magazine prior to a new book by Douglas Brinkley, a historian who was given exclusive access to the diaries. They will reassure both Mr Reagan's supporters and his detractors, providing supporting evidence that he was both a dangerously simplistic buffoon or - alternatively - that, beneath the folksy exterior, lay a razor-sharp and highly-principled mind. On being shot: 'I sat on the edge of the seat almost paralyzed by pain. Getting shot hurts' Tom Leonard in New York, for the UK Telegraph

Copyright (C) UK Telegraph