How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine – The top-loading washer continues to disappear, thanks to the usual nanny state suspects. Front-loaders meet federal standards more easily than top-loaders. Because they don’t fully immerse their laundry loads, they use less hot water and therefore less energy. But, as Americans are increasingly learning, front-loaders are expensive, often have mold problems, and don’t let you toss in a wayward sock after they’ve started. True, true....
China takes hard line on activists, many missing - The last time the prominent Chinese lawyer Jiang Tianyong was seen or heard from, he was visiting his brother in a Beijing suburb. Police grabbed him and threw him into a waiting van, pushing aside his elderly mother who had clung on to the vehicle. Don’t you worry …Jang Tianyong is on “vacation” somewhere in China’s gulags. By the way, is Obama’s administration intending to send the US army over to China to protect the innocent citizens from the communist regime there as they claim that is what they did with Libya?…
Cancer operations are denied to thousands of elderly patients ‘because of ageism’ – Thousands of older cancer patients are being denied potentially life-saving surgery because of ageism in the NHS. The chances of being operated on start falling in middle-age and plummet for those in their 70s and older, an official study shows. Experts blame age discrimination and poor access to specialist opinion in some areas. This may explain why older people in Britain are less likely to survive than elsewhere. Death panels anyone? They have them in Britain…
US Approaching Insolvency, Fix To Be ‘Painful’: Fisher - “If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when,”Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said in a question and answer session after delivering a speech at the University of Frankfurt. ”I think we are at the beginning of the process and it’s going to be very painful,” he added. Aha, I agree it is going to be very painful, but most important question you should expand on – is for WHOM it is going to be painful?… Surely not for the banksters, the politicians and the unions. The the average working american, the american middle class, will be transformed into a permanent underclass
The trigger will not be entitlement spending. Rather, the driver of the fiscal crisis will be an uncontrolled $800 billion explosion in annual interest payments on the federal debt to potentially $1 trillion per year over the next five years. Such a super-charged ramp up in spending will more than offset even the most ambitious ideas now being discussed to reduce the Federal budget deficit over the next 10 years.
“We want to help you with the technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely. And when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.” WHAT? WHAT?
Supreme Court Lets Fed Bailout Records Release Stand - The Supreme Court let stand a ruling that the U.S. Federal Reserve must disclose details about its emergency lending programs to banks during the financial crisis in 2008.
Regulator Rumble: SEC Going After Fannie and Freddie Execs - The Securities and Exchange Commission is finally taking on the biggest bailout recipients of them all: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How could things go so horribly wrong — resulting in a still-growing $150 billion bill to taxpayers — without any shenanigans? Perhaps Fannie and Freddie executives misled investors, who provided funding for mortgages of worse quality than the companies led on. But since the firms’ disclosures were approved by the Federal Housing Finance Authority, the suit sets up a clash of regulators.
Help Housing? Dump Uncle Sam - A number of politicos and pundits are warning that reforming and/or getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would hit the home-mortgage market hard. Home buyers would have to make big down payments–20% or more–and mortgage interest rates would soar.
General Motors lays off workers at NY plant – General Motors Co. on Monday is halting some production and temporarily laying off workers at a Buffalo, N.Y., engine plant, another sign that Japan’s disaster is affecting automakers around the globe.
The Audacity of Golf - America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that’s no reason not to spend more — because the world hasn’t yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back.
Unions still waiting for Obama to step up – “If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself,” then-Sen. Obama said during his 2008 campaign. “I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States. The workers deserve to know that someone’s standing with them.”
Report: Japanese mafia providing quake relief - The three largest Yakuza groups (kind of like the crime families of the American Italian mafia), have sent dozens of trucks with a few hundred tons of goods to the devastated regions thus far, reports Japan crime expert Jake Adelstein. They’ve sent everything from diapers to batteries to instant ramen.
Mega-Banks and the Next Financial Crisis – Hedge-fund manager Paul Singer recognized the risks of subprime mortgages and bet against them. Now he warns that monetary policy could cripple American banks again
Stuck in reverse: Split doesn’t fix Citi – Investors initially cheered Citi’s news Monday — it also reinstated its mighty penny-per-share dividend. But by Monday afternoon, the stock was down 2%. The simple fact of the matter is that the reverse split should do absolutely nothing to change Wall Street’s perceptions of the bank for the long-term.
Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated – WE all enjoy speculating about which Arab regime will be toppled next, but maybe we should be looking closer to home. High unemployment? Check. Out-of-touch elites? Check. Frustrated young people? As a 24-year-old American, I can testify that this rich democracy has plenty of those too.
About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.
A College Degree Is Still Worth It – Sure, it costs more, and technology is threatening high-paying jobs. But the Great Recession shows postsecondary education is more valuable than ever
Disaster could cost Japan $235 billion: WBank – Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami could cost its economy up to $235 billion, or 4.0 percent of output, and reconstruction may take five years, the World Bank said Monday.
Nevadans face new challenge – unforeseen tax penalties on early withdrawals – Taxpayers who withdrew 401(k) or IRA funds will be taxed from 10 percent to 35 percent on their withdrawals, depending on their tax bracket. In most cases, they also must pay a 10 percent early-withdrawal penalty. For an individual or family struggling to get by without a steady source of income, that double whammy is painful, if not impossible, to absorb. The problem is, the Internal Revenue Service wants its money.
Pray for Japan and worry for Europe – While the world has been transfixed with Japan, Europe has been struggling to avoid another financial crisis. On any Richter scale of economic threats, this may ultimately matter more than Japan’s grim tragedy. One reason is size. Europe represents about 20 percent of the world economy; Japan’s share is about 6 percent.
They say the telltale sign is a measure of co-movement, or the likelihood of stocks to move in the same direction. When a market is healthy, co-movement is low. But in the months and years before a crash, co-movement seems to grow.
A ‘Unique’ Form of ‘Terrorism’ - Here is a thought experiment concerning two men who have issued money. One issued gold and silver coins that will today bring more in dollars than he charged for them. The other issued paper notes that are today worth but a fraction the gold or silver they were worth at the time they were issued. One man is facing the possibility of years in prison after a federal jury found his issuing of money to have been a crime. The other man is walking around free and being treated by the authorities with great deference.
Dashboard camera catches tsunami as it hits the car
Tsunami of Tohoku Earthquake Before Wrecking the Coast
INEFFECTUAL, invisible, unable to honour pledges and now blamed for letting Gaddafi off the hook. Why Obama’s gone from ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Er, maybe we shouldn’t’…
Ego maniac and chief….
“The first time around it’s like lightning in a bottle. There’s something special about it, because you’re defying the odds. And as time passes, you start taking it for granted that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States,” Obama said. “But we should never take it for granted.”
General Motors Co. says it suspended production at its Shreveport, La., plant for the week of March 21 because of a parts shortage stemming from last week’s earthquake in Japan. Damage to parts suppliers and transportation networks in Japan have brought that country’s auto industry to a halt.
That is why it is important to have a manufacturing industry in US. We even do not make the parts for our cars anymore.
Output at Toyota’s China ventures is continuing normally, Liu Peng, a Beijing-based spokesman, said today without elaborating. Plants operated by Nissan have so far suffered “no impact” since last week’s temblor in Japan, spokesman Akihiro Nakanishi said. Honda’s Chinese factories have adequate parts supplies to ensure production until the end of the week, said Takayuki Fujii, a Beijing-based spokesman.
Faced with losing billions of dollars in revenue once new regulations limiting debit card and overdraft charges kick in as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, banks are looking for new ways to make money. The same scramble led Chase to consider a $50 spending limit for debit cards.
NATO leaders are gathering to discuss missions to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, after France reportedly said strikes could come “within hours” and Britain said it was deploying fighter jets.
Saif al-Islam threatens to publish details of bank transfers to punish French PM for backing Libyan rebels
Muammar Gaddafi‘s son has claimed that Libya helped finance Nicolas Sarkozy‘s successful election campaign in 2007, and demanded that the French president return the money to “the Libyan people”.
Harvard’s great economic historian, Niall Ferguson, noted that the decline of a country can be marked when it pays its moneylenders more than its army. His classic case comes from the French monarchy of the 1780s that failed to make interest payments on their debt, causing the financial collapse that triggered the revolution. Recently, Carmen Reinhard and Kenneth Rogoff wrote a brilliant book titled “This Time is Different, Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” Their vast study revealed that most government officials always believe they are unique and different, causing them to make the same mistakes that crippled past nations and empires.
The government and central banks appeared to have created money out of thin air and then spent it. The subsequent economic improvement gave rise to the notion that government spending and devaluations work.
In the elitist Keynesian view, only the hoi-polloi make mistakes by succumbing to “animal spirits,” the random, unprovoked fluctuation between optimism and pessimism. The policymakers know better than the masses and the market. People do not rationally discount the follies of government and its central bank.
One of the chief alchemist Krugman in his column yesterday: Spend more to stimulate and create jobs. Gee, anyone noticed what happened with the first stimulus? Almost a trillion dollars wasted,without creating many jobs and the ones that were created came with mind boggling price tag
Federal Reserve officials signaled they’re unlikely to expand a $600-billion bond purchase plan as the recovery picks up steam and the threat that inflation will fall too low begins to wane.
The economy is on a “firmer footing, and overall conditions in the labor market appear to be improving gradually,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement yesterday after a one-day meeting in Washington. While commodity prices have “risen significantly,” inflation expectations have “remained stable.”
Prices paid by U.S. consumers for food, energy and other goods and services jumped again in February for the third straight month, adding to inflation fears.
The Labor Department reported that its inflation index increased 0.5% in February, driven by higher energy costs caused by the turmoil in the Middle East. Food prices also continued to move upward, with sharp increases in the costs of fresh vegetables and meats causing a 0.8% jump in the food index, the largest since July 2008.
The crash came in 2008, when unemployment passed 7 percent for the first time during the decade.
Even so, nearly 74,000 new homes were built in 2010, according to Census data. Realty companies said there are still buyers who prefer newly-built houses.
What’s a dot-com worth? Investors got it badly wrong when they pushed Internet stocks to nose-bleed levels in 2000, only to lose billions when the companies mostly went bust.
It’s 2011, and here we go again. There may not be sock puppets and Super Bowl commercials, as in the last Internet boom, but signs throughout Silicon Valley are starting to show eerie similarities to the dot-com bust. Now, some are wondering if a bubble is forming around a new breed of Internet companies even before they reach the stock market.
What happens if this new center of global finance is wiped out?
I got lucky. It turned out that people inside Japanese government and finance had just begun to ask themselves the same preposterous question. An imaginative young geologist with Japan’s National Land Agency named Hideaki Oda had just finished a study in which he simulated a quake similar to the one that had destroyed Tokyo back in 1923 (and also in 1853, and in 1782, and in 1703 and in. . .).
Running from Tsunami: Dramatic rescue video of moments when water hit Japan
There was a horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on Feb. 22, and an even more violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile almost exactly a year before. All three phenomena involved more or less the same family of circum-Pacific fault lines and plate boundaries—and though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side of a major tectonic plate is often—not invariably, but often enough to be noticeable—followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate’s far side. It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate—one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year.
That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault, underpinning the city of San Francisco.
Despite the looming possibility of a government shutdown, federal layoffs and furloughs, there’s at least one thing members of Congress from both political parties can readily agree on these days: partying.
Morning, noon and night, more than 150 fundraising parties are scheduled all over Washington this week for Democratic and Republican politicians in bars, restaurants and private town houses and at sporting events — even to watch the woeful Washington Wizards play. Other lawmakers are gearing up for March Madness, the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament, with luxury suites for fundraising at the Verizon Center.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills. All that destruction, mayhem, death… Libya, Bahrain, Japan and they are partying? What about what is going on in our country? …. Oh, yeah fuck it! Après nous, le déluge…
If Congress were to cut $6 billion every three weeks for the next 36 weeks, it would manage to save between now and late November as much money as the Treasury added to the nation’s net debt during just the business hours of Tuesday, March 15.
We have now gotten to the point — as I noted yesterday— where if national defense, interstate highways, national parks, homeland security, and all other discretionary programs somehow became absolutely free, we’d still have a budget deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today estimates that the TARP will cost taxpayers $25 billion – an enormous sum, but vastly less than the $356 billion that CBO initially estimated. Although this much-reduced cost estimate is encouraging, it does not necessarily validate Treasury‘s administration of the TARP….
Banks received a total of $245 billion under the program. The Treasury Department has collected about $244 billion in repayments, fees and other income from banks.
The department expects the bank program will finish with a profit of about $20 billion.
Who the hell do we believe? May be propublica’s numbers….
Add that to the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which our site also tracks and is separate from the TARP — and taxpayers are $257 billion in the hole.
President Obama’s only event at the White House that isn’t closed to the press on Wednesday is a ceremony in which he’ll accept an award for being open to the press.
LOL…(UPDATE : The event has been postponed because of “changes” in Obama’s schedule, the White House says.)
This news comes 25 months after President Barack Obama signed a stimulus law designed to keep the U.S. unemployment rate under 8 percent.
According to Gallup, the employment picture in the United States is virtually unchanged from a year ago.
In mid-March 2010, 10.3 percent of American workers were unemployed and 9.7 percent were working part-time but wanted a full-time job–yielding an underemployment rate of 20.0 percent. That compares to today’s 19.9 percent underemployment rate.
Citizens! Let your hearts not worry! Our chief and commander, Mr Baraket Obama is focused as a laser on creating jobs… the process may be slow, but we all by now know, it takes him some time to process things he doesn’t understand, is incapable or incompetent to do or simply does not like.
After weeks of attention to pro-democracy movements in the Middle East and devastation in Japan, Obama will highlight more positive foreign news — the booming economy in Brazil and the diminution of anti-American sentiment in much of Latin America — and ways the United States can capitalize on it.
Seeking to shut off federal aid going to foreign countries that “don’t like us,” a Texas Republican congressman said Wednesday that lawmakers should vote separately on funding for every foreign nation receiving taxpayer money.
After the November election, the push to reduce spending on foreign aid has gained steam on Capitol Hill. Many of the same tea party-backed lawmakers who helped Republicans seize control of the House are pressuring leaders to cut spending more than they’ve offered, and are skeptical of foreign aid and programs, which they suggest are often riddled with waste and fraud.
Democrats have fought back, saying foreign-aid spending saves money over the long haul.
I am telling you we are in Wonder-world and the Dem’s are the mad hatters
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged Thursday to help Tunisia create jobs and undertake reforms to keep the momentum behind the revolution that overthrew its president two months ago.
If this woman and this administration know how to create jobs, why they don’t create them for their fellow Americans?
The cost of living for Americans is now above where it was when housing prices were in a bubble, stock prices at a record, unemployment low and consumer confidence was soaring. Something has gotta give.
Russia’s EMERCOM has organised 400 special stations to monitor radiation level in the Far East, the ministry’ s regional branch in the Far East said on Thursday.
“The round-the-clock monitoring is organised jointly by specialists of the Far East meteorology service, Rosportebnadzor’s laboratories, EMERCOM’ s stations for the radiation and chemical monitoring and by the military,” the source said.
California already has 12 monitoring stations scattered throughout the state that test the air for radiation levels. EPA also has 40 so-called “deployable” monitors that can be moved around in cases of emergency.
Russia deploys 400 radiation monitoring stations and America has about 52 that are ready, if needed? I just cannot understand why the whole World is so worried about the posibble fallout from Japan’s reactors, but the American government doesn’t give a shit?
Oh, I guess we cannot explain the following madness either….
As a thank-you to its most famous customer, Amtrak is renaming the train station in Wilmington, Del., after stimulus “sheriff” Vice President Joseph R. Biden – after the project received $20 million in stimulus money and came in $5.7 million over the initial announced budget.
Officially renamed early in 2010 after the president, the building was known as the Bangs Avenue School since it was built a century ago. The state School Development Authority had planned to build a new school to replace the historic building, but has pulled back and Lowe said recently the state would not build a new school…
Fresh from defeat in Wisconsin, union leaders are planning a new campaign not just to head off future challenges to their collective bargaining powers but also to make the case that organized labor’s benefits and prerogatives — wages, health care, and pensions that are more generous than those of comparable workers in the private sector — are the moral equivalent of rights won by black Americans during the civil rights movement.
What? What? Now I am called a racists , because I do not want to give more from what I earn, to people, that MAKE MORE THAN ME through extortion?
Obama’s budget foresees the government taxing 20 % of GDP and spending 23 percent of GDP. That means if we spend as much as Obama wants, we would be increasing our debt every year, unless Washington could somehow get 23 percent of GDP through tax receipts. This might not be impossible, but history shows that no matter how much you tax the rich, 20 percent is a stretch and 23 percent is impossible without some major change to our tax system — like adding a value-added tax (VAT).
“The first time around it’s like lightning in a bottle. There’s something special about it, because you’re defying the odds. And as time passes, you start taking it for granted that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States,” Obama said. “But we should never take it for granted.”
Another proof that we are in Wonder land….
Shut up you Weiner! I want to know how much the oversizes poster of Click and Clack costs and who paid for it…
The Horror: Stephen King Says He and All Rich People Need to Pay 50% in Taxes
Obama Urged to Seize Reins as Crises Pile Up - Amid chaos around the world and on Capitol Hill, Obama’s Saturday radio address was devoted to Women’s History Month and a call to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a proposal meant to address the income gap between men and women. Then, the president went golfing at Andrews Air Force Base.
John Williams – The Great US Collapse Nears - “The U.S. economic and systemic-solvency crises of the last four years only have been precursors to the coming Great Collapse: a hyperinflationary great depression. Such will encompass a complete collapse in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar; a collapse in the normal stream of U.S. commercial and economic activity; a collapse in the U.S. financial system as we know it; and a likely realignment of the U.S. political environment.”
Kass: A Contagion of Black Swans – Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words, it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall
Twin threats of Japan and Gulf stalk global recovery – As catastrophe at home prompts Japan to repatriate chunks of its vast wealth, it is pulling the rug from under stock and bond markets thousands of miles away.
Obama’s ‘Stimulus’ Precluded A Robust Recovery - The U.S. economy has recovered since June 2009 not because of the Keynesian “stimulus” spending but in spite of it. Growth today would be far more robust and the jobless rate much lower had it never been adopted.
The End of Sound Money and the Triumph of Crony Capitalism - The triumph of crony capitalism occurred on October 3rd, 2008. The event was the enactment of TARP — the single greatest economic-policy abomination since the 1930s, or perhaps ever.
Kerry proposes infrastructure bank bill – Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas proposed legislation today that would create a new infrastructure bank to help finance roads, bridges and other projects, an idea that has percolated for years but has never gained widespread support.
Union teachers in Wisconsin taking their pupils to the Capitol so that they can line up in the rotunda and chant “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Scott Walker’s got to go!” Adults getting children to chant about things they don’t understand? Despicable!
Another fire broke out on Wednesday at an earthquake-crippled Japanese nuclear plant that has sent low levels of radiation wafting into Tokyo and triggered international alarm, suggesting that the crisis may be slipping out of control.
Japan suspended operations to prevent a stricken nuclear plant from melting down Wednesday after a surge in radiation made it too dangerous for workers to remain at the facility.
The U.S. Navy said Tuesday that very low levels of airborne radiation were detected at Yokosuka and Atsugi bases, about 200 miles to the north of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
The wind near a quake-damaged nuclear complex in northeast Japan, which has released radiation into the atmosphere, will blow from the northwest and out into the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, a weather official said.
In summary, what we have now is a crisis that is slipping out of control, everyone is leaving the plant, evacuations are underway and radioactive materials are blown towards USA….
Can a radioactive cloud reach US?
Theoretically YES! How do I know that?
During WW2 Japan was sending balloons with bombs into the jet-stream. Some of those bombs landed as far as MICHIGAN! In just 3 days!
I lived trough the Chernobyl disaster and even though I was only a teenager back then I remember the scared and panicked people. We lived some 800 miles from the site. So we did not know what has happened for a few days. The government imposed an information blackout. The only way we learned that there is something serious that has happened and what was going on at Chernobyl was from the radio news coming beyond the iron curtain…
And then when the rumors spread and everyone was talking about the accident, the government officials stated, that there is no imminent danger to the public, we should not panic, everything is under control, everyone must carry on with their daily activities as usual….
Now we have the same situation… Uncontrollable atomic reaction and governments who say we should not panic.
At the same time Japan is desperate, cannot control the situation and is seeking DIRECT U.S. MILITARY HELP
One thing I learned years ago, is to take everything, that the government say with grain of salt (I always use Iodised salt)
click X to disable the adds so you can read the subtitles
I hope and pray that this situation is not going to turn into bigger disaster than Chernobyl
BTW the same government officials that are saying that everything is OK, have on their disposal government bunkers, protective wear, food, water, energy generators, filters and many other things to insure THEIR SURVIVAL for few months.
I am not telling you to start chewing those iodine potassium tablets.
That would be dangerous.
Just get prepared you know…food, water, basic things
Do you realize that we are in the current situation, because the reactor was designed in a way that something like the events that happened(devastating earthquake, tsunami, 3 safe devices failing, unable to control water and reactor core) were considered to be so unlikely, GE never considered the possibility of them happening…
As Aristotle put it “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.”
Medicare paid $3.1M for Viagra, other erectile-dysfunction drugs – Despite a ban on funding for sexual or erectile-dysfunction treatments, Medicare improperly paid $3.1 million for the treatments over a two-year period, according to a new internal report. Oops…
It’s Time to Get Out of the Markets – The countertrend rally may have topped. And even if it hasn’t, the potential upside is so small that it’s not worth the risk to catch a few more percentage points.
How Japan’s Quake Will Rattle the World Economy – Japan’s economy will clearly suffer, since the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in northern Japan hit a region that’s home to a variety of factories and important ports. And the ongoing battle to prevent catastrophic damage at three nuclear facilities is a high-stakes international cliffhanger. But barring any further disasters, Japan seems poised to withstand the damage, rebuild, and recover. Though it’s still early and much could change, here’s some handicapping on the likely impact of the earthquake worldwide
Japanese earthquake could be most expensive ever - According to AIR, the number of Japanese businesses and homeowners with earthquake insurance is relatively low, ranging between 14% to 17%. As a result, the total financial toll for the catastrophe could be considerably higher than the estimate of insured losses.
Why Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme – Some people say, “There’s no problem here – just raise taxes further until we get the money that we need.” But what started at 2% has now become 12.4% when both the employee’s and the employer’s portions are considered. And keep in mind that the half paid by the employer represents monies that by definition can’t be paid to the employees or investors in the form of additional wages and/or returns. As the saying goes, corporations don’t pay taxes. People pay taxes.
Derivatives, as Accused by Buffett – Mr. Buffett once described derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Yet some of his most ardent fans have quietly raised eyebrows at his pontifications, given that he plays in the opaque market. In the fourth quarter alone, Berkshire made $222 million on derivatives. TheStreet.com published a column last spring with the headline: “Warren Buffett Is a Hypocrite.”
