Black Thursday?

It’s not quite noon in New York today August 4, 2011 and the Dow is down 350 points already.  Will this be Black Thursday?  Will the market close early today, suspending trading, circuit breakers?  Or will the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) step in with taxpayer money to prop up the bankster ponziconomy?  Stay tuned…..

update 2 pm new york time Dow still down 340 points, there was the usual ppt bounce after noon but it didn’t last…..still 2 hours to go but the trend at the moment is down.

update 4 pm market closes with Dow down 512 points, and clearly signs of panic in the last hour.

The Unemployed Forsee a Bleak Future

The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers are Losing Faith in their Futures

National survey documents impact of prolonged joblessness

December 16, 2010EDITOR’S NOTE:

ATTENTION BUSINESS, ASSIGNMENT EDITORS, for more information or to arrange an interview, contact Professor Carl Van Horn, vanhorn@rutgers.edu or 732-932-4100, ext. 6305; Professor Cliff Zukin, zukin@rutgers.edu or 732-932-4100, ext. 6205; or Robb C. Sewell, senior writer/editor, rcsewell@rutgers.edu or 732-932-4100, ext. 6312. Copies of The Shattered American Dream are available at http://bit.ly/hDB6q4.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – “A new survey of unemployed American workers documents dramatic erosion in the quality of life for millions of Americans. Their financial reserves are exhausted, their job prospects nil, their family relations stressed and their belief in government’s ability to help them is negligible. They feel hopeless and powerless, unable to see their way out of the Great Recession that has claimed 8.5 million jobs.

These are some of the main findings of The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in their Futures, a new report from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers,

The survey shows that only one-quarter of those first interviewed in August 2009 have found full-time jobs some 15 months later. And most of those who have become re-employed have taken jobs they did not really want for less pay. Moreover, the recession has wreaked havoc on the retirement plans of older workers.”

http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/news-releases/2010/12/the-shattered-americ-20101216

the 99ers

UPDATE: 99ers plan rally on Wall St. Thursday!

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/08/08/2010-08-08_99ers_looking_for_help_a_curse_becomes_a_cause_as_jobless_benefits_expire.html

“Ms. Jarrin, 49, wound up at a motel here, putting down $260 she had managed to scrape together from friends and from selling her living room set, enough for a weeklong stay. It was essentially all the money she had left after her unemployment benefits expired in March. Now she is facing a previously unimaginable situation for a woman who, not that long ago, had a corporate job near New York City and was enrolled in a graduate business school, whose sticker is still emblazoned on her back windshield.

“Barring a miracle, I’m going to be in my car,” she said.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03unemployed.html

and:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Who-Are-the-99ers-4317

Slot Machine Malfunction In the Big Casino – Winnings Cancelled….for some

For others, a big payday(or a big flotation device)  when a stock goes from $40 to 1 cent in less than an hour.  This is like when you hit a big jackpot these days in the casino and they tell you that the machine malfunctioned.  The stock market game is fixed.  Is there any doubt any more?  All of the workers pension retirement money invested there, just to be scammed away.  Tsk, tsk.

The big question is what happens to all the derivative bets made on the values of the underlying trades that have been cancelled?  They are worth much more (in fantasy money)  than the underlying stocks.   Oops.

from CNN Money:

“Accenture (ACN) fell from $40.13 at 2:45 p.m. all the way to just 1 cent before quickly rising back to $39.57.

Sam Adams maker Boston Beer Co. (SAM) also fell to a penny before recovering to $55.82.

Oxford Industries (OXM) tanked to $1.34 before soaring back to $19.51 a minute later.

But some other wild trades were not canceled by Nasdaq. For instance, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) traded down 22% to $199.25 before recovering, but those trades were upheld.

Most notably, Nasdaq did not cancel trades of Procter & Gamble (PG, Fortune 500) or 3M (MMM, Fortune 500), which momentarily fell 37% and 22%, respectively.”

Here is a list of the canceled stock trades, courtesy of Nasdaq:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/07/markets/explaining_wall_street_turmoil/

China: Overcapacity – Commodity Stockpiling

http://urlet.com/schedule.anything

http://www.rgemonitor.com/emergingmarkets-monitor/257856/chinas_september_data_suggest_that_the_long-term_overcapacity_problem_is_only_intensifying

Bank failures hit 106 on year

By Greg Morcroft, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Seven more banks failed Friday, pushing the 2009 total to 106 and marking the first year since 1992 that at least 100 have gone under

Experts suggest we could be no more than 10% of the way through this cycle of bank collapses, which is sure to be the worst run of closures since the Great Depression.

http://urlet.com/len.man

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-failures-hit-100-for-year-2009-10-23

Matt Taibbi on Wall Street Criminals

Like all the great merchants of the bubble economy, Bear and Lehman were leveraged to the hilt and vulnerable to collapse. Many of the methods that outsiders used to knock them over were mostly legal: Credit markers were pulled, rumors were spread through the media, and legitimate short-sellers pressured the stock price down. But when Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push — especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling.

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote “serious financial reform,” his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

http://urlet.com/go.caught

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle

AND THEN WHAT? Prolonged Aid to Unemployed Is Running Out

ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: August 1, 2009

Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.

Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid.

http://urlet.com/strategies.fair

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/02unemploy.html?hp

US and UK on brink of debt disaster

20 Jan 2009, 0419 hrs
 
 
 
LONDON: The United States and the United Kingdom stand on the brink of the largest debt crisis in history. 
While both governments experiment with quantitative easing, bad banks to absorb non-performing loans, and state guarantees to restart bank lending, the only real way out is some combination of widespread corporate default, debt write-downs and inflation to reduce the burden of debt to more manageable levels. Everything else is window-dressing.
 
The proximate trigger of the debt crisis was the deterioration in lending standards and rise in default rates on subprime mortgage loans. But the widening divergence revealed in the charts suggests a crisis had become inevitable sooner or later. If not subprime lending, there would have been some other trigger.

The charts strongly suggest the necessary condition for resolving the debt crisis is a reduction in the outstanding volume of debt, an increase in nominal GDP, or some combination of the two, to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio to a more sustainable level.

From this perspective, it is clear many of the existing policies being pursued in the United States and the United Kingdom will not resolve the crisis because they do not lower the debt ratio.

In particular, having governments buy distressed assets from the banks, or provide loan guarantees, is not an effective solution. It does not reduce the volume of debt, or force recognition of losses. It merely re-denominates private sector obligations to be met by households and firms as public ones to be met by the taxpayer.

BANKRUPTCY OR INFLATION

The solution must be some combination of policies to reduce the level of debt or raise nominal GDP. The simplest way to reduce debt is through bankruptcy, in which some or all of debts are deemed unrecoverable and are simply extinguished, ceasing to exist.

Bankruptcy would ensure the cost of resolving the debt crisis falls where it belongs. Investor portfolios and pension funds would take a severe but one-time hit. Healthy businesses would survive, minus the encumbrance of debt.

http://urlet.com/bingo.angels

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/rssarticleshow/msid-4004567,flstry-1.cms

Its Time to Dump Your Dollars – If You Still Have Cents

Crude Oil Caps Biggest Monthly Gain Since 1999 on Dollar Drop

By Mark Shenk

May 29 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil rose, capping its biggest monthly gain in a decade, as the dollar weakened against the euro, bolstering the appeal of commodities.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=af0H16dCeM_A&refer=home