The Cynical Economist

Rich Nations That Went Broke By Spending Too Much - Government spending drives taxes, deficits, debt and inflation, so it’s at the core of our economic problems.  What to do about runaway spending?  

S&P Downgrades Dozens of Global Banks - The new criteria for rating banks comes in the wake of criticism leveled at all three major rating firms – Moody’s and Fitch’s are the other two — that they rubber stamped their highest ratings on investment products loaded with subprime mortgages in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

Recession hits families hard as half of Americans fear they won’t be able to do their holiday shopping - One in five Americans lost a sizeable amount of their disposable income during the recession, leaving them financially vulnerable and without many options.

Interpreting 2011 “Black Friday” Spending Numbers - Could the situation possibly be 30% better than last year?

Humbug! 5 reasons holiday sales won’t bring cheer - Let’s not fool ourselves. Unemployment remains above 9%, serious debt woes continue to plague America and Europe, and the broader economic troubles lurk like an unrepentant Scrooge.

Businesses plan for possible end of euro - International companies are preparing contingency plans for a possible break-up of the eurozone, according to interviews with dozens of multinational executives.

Europe ramps up rescue fund, may turn to IMF - Euro zone ministers agreed on Tuesday to ramp up the firepower of their rescue fund but couldn’t say by how much and raised the possibility of asking the IMF for more help after Italy’s borrowing costs hit a euro lifetime high of nearly 8 percent. LOL too bad the IMF  do not have left a lot of  money to give them

The Fed to Europe’s Rescue? - Will the Federal Reserve step in once again, as it has done in the past, to help? Will it do so, along with a coalition of the willing — meaning other central banks — as has been suggested?

Blame It on Berlin - The euro bailout caucus wants the Germans to write a blank check

Europe is Not the United States - Europe is now struggling with the inevitable adverse consequences of imposing a single currency on a very heterogeneous collection of countries.

Watching The Wheels Come Off The Green Machine - You can’t make this stuff up. Unless you are a central planner; then you can make up anything you want and get away with it as long as taxpayers keep writing checks, politicians keep spinning tales, and pundits keep giving them intellectual cover.

Krugman Reveals Krugmonomics Fails Even in Small Elite Liberal NYC Neighborhood

The Tale of the $100 Bill - This is a must read…By now we’ve probably all been forwarded a version of the tale of the $100 bill that single handedly wiped out lots of debt. In case some readers haven’t seen it yet, it goes something like this…

Is Facebook Worth More Than Cisco? - Facebook may be more attractive than Cisco because of its growth, but the chances it can reach Cisco’s revenue and profits are only modest.

Chuck Woolery discusses crazy budget cuts

California demographic shift: More people leaving than moving in - More people are moving out of the state than are moving in. It’s the economy, of course, especially housing costs.

Slice of missing MF Global customer cash may be in Britain - About $200 million in customer funds missing at MF Global may have surfaced at JP Morgan Chase in Britain, the New York Times said, citing people briefed on the matter.

How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word - “What is this but crony capitalism?”

It’s Time To Occupy Capitol Hill And Fight Political Greed -  Look at how the U.S. political and economic systems operate.  The issue is not how much the top one percent own.  The issue is whether they have acquired their wealth legitimately.

10 reasons the crisis isn’t over - Commentary: There may be a lot more bad news to come

Ten Brands That Will Disappear In 2012 - Each year, 24/7 Wall St. regularly compiles a list of brands that are going to disappear in the near-term.

Poland Appeals to Germany to Save Europe -  ”I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.”

Can China Rescue Its Economy? - The drop in the HSBC Index, which normally moves only tenths of a point at a time, is just another sign that the world’s second-largest economy is contracting from one month to the next.

Tower Defense and Aerospace Factory Workers Party at Lunch: MyFoxDETROIT.com

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B - The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

Europe liquidity crisis has a number: $30 trillion according to Sarkozy - On November 23rd. Olivier Sarkozy, brother of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and head of the Carlyle Financial Group, spoke on CNBC and laid out the cost of the liquidity crisis that is overtaking Europe.  The total numbers are staggering, with $30 Trillion being the overall debt holding the Euro Zone hostage.

Britain draws up emergency plans for collapse of Euro after warnings Italy needs £500bn bailout - Britain is drawing up emergency plans for the collapse of the ‘creaking’ Eurozone amid warnings debt-stricken Italy will need a £500 billion bailout involving billions of pounds of UK taxpayers’ money.  

IMF drawing up £500bn package to save Italy, Spain and the euro - The International Monetary Fund is being lined up potentially to help Italy and Spain amid growing fears that a European rescue scheme will not be able to prop up the countries.

Germany, France plan quick new Stability Pact -  France and Germany are planning a quick new pact on budget discipline that might persuade the European Central Bank to ramp up its government bond purchases, Welt am Sonntag reported on Sunday.

The eurozone really has only days to avoid collapse - Italy’s disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.

The euro zone:Is this really the end? - Unless Germany and the ECB move quickly, the single currency’s collapse is looming

Should the Fed save Europe from disaster? - The dam is breaking in Europe. Interbank lending has seized up. Much of the financial system is paralysed, setting off a credit crunch just as Euroland slides back into slump.

Death of a currency as eurogeddon approaches - It’s time to think what hitherto markets have regarded as unthinkable – that the euro really is on its last legs.

Moody’s Says All Euro-Region Sovereign Ratings Threatened by Debt Crisis - Moody’s Investors Service said the “rapid escalation” of Europe’s debt and banking crisis is threatening all of the region’s sovereign ratings.

Number of N.J. residents receiving food stamps doubled in last four years - As of September, the most recent data released by the state Department of Human Services, more than 400,000 households and nearly 822,000 people were enrolled in the food stamp program, meaning nearly one out of every 10 residents in New Jersey receives assistance.

Memo to the Occupy protesters: here are ten things we evil capitalists really think - A list…

Federal review of $433-million contract for smallpox drug requested - A Senate subcommittee chairwoman is calling for a federal review of the Obama administration’s award of a $433-million sole-source contract for an experimental smallpox drug.

Whose Fuse is Shorter? - With fiscal time bombs ticking in both Europe and the United States, the pertinent question for now seems to be which will explode first.

EU demands right to dictate national budgets - The European Union demanded Wednesday sweeping powers to override national budgets and proposed issuing joint eurozone bonds to help resolve and prevent a repeat of the debt crisis.

U.S. Rating by Moody’s Imperiled Without $1.2 Trillion in Cuts - Reducing the $1.2 trillion of discretionary spending cuts set to begin in 2013 may have “negative rating implications” for the U.S.’s top credit ranking, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

‘Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone’ - “Can’t afford it,” explained the employer, Bill Looman, Tuesday evening. “I’ve got people that I want to hire now, but I just can’t afford it. And I don’t foresee that I’ll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C.”

The government paid $200,000 for a useless OSHA Android app? – The application cost $106,467 for the Android version, and an additional $96,000 for the iPhone and (non-existent) BlackBerry version. That’s more than $200,000 for less than $2,000 worth of non-functional temperature converters.

Alternative Energy’s Alternate Reality – Creating a “green energy” economy may be the most daunting central planning task ever attempted. It entails nothing less than the reengineering of our entire energy infrastructure. And, like all central planning schemes, it is based on a roadmap that eschews real-world experience and sound economics in favor of utopian ideology driven by political connections.

14000 Abandoned Wind Turbines In The USA - The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or  the wind speed is too high.

Climate Minister buys a castle with 16 bathrooms… and a massive carbon footprint – He is the climate change  minister who pledged to ‘lead by  example’ in the fight against global warming.

Commodity Index up 252% in last 10Y. Hence… Deflation? - So when an influential idiot like Christina Romer says, “the spectre of inflation is quickly fading”, as she did on Bloomberg TV recently, it makes one wonder. What is the time period these people are looking at? A week? A month? Only ones when commodities are down?

The entire Occupy movement summarized in one sign - Photojournalist El Marco has returned from a trip to New York during which he documented the final days of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. His newly published collection of Zuccotti Park portraits contains many unforgettable images (one of which we already featured here), but one particular image summarizes the entire Occupy movement — and the entire entitlement mentality as well.

Should the Rich Be Condemned? - Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there’s a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they “give back.” Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.

THE RETURN OF DEBTORS PRISONS: Collection Agencies Now Want Deadbeats Arrested – As if life wasn’t already tense enough for Americans who can’t pay their debts, collection agencies are now taking advantage of archaic state laws to have some debtors arrested and sent to jail.