Read it about the early filers here

bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.
Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:
They created fake demand.”

The best thing we could do is to rid ourselves of all regulations, knowing that when left to their own  self governance, corporate managers will always do the right thing. Sure they will!
This story, while not the least bit surprising, should blow another hole in any (libertarian) theory that the players in a “free market” will choose to be honest and will be preeminently concerned about maintaining their reputations in order to attract more (voluntary) business.

Now we read in this report that homelessness among seniors is projected to increase by 33%!

As such, homelessness is projected to increase by 33 percent from 44,172 in 2010 to 58,772 in 2020 and will more than double between 2010 and 2050, when over 95,000 elderly persons are projected to be homeless.

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

J – O – B – S  That’s it in a nutshell.

Read it here:

The National Association of Realtors said Tuesday that its seasonally adjusted index of sales agreements for previously occupied homes dipped 2.6 percent to a reading of 75.7.

That was the lowest on records dating back to 2001 and down nearly 19 percent from the same month a year earlier. The index has fallen more than 40 percent from its peak in April 2005. May’s reading was revised slightly downward to 77.7.

That being said, unfortunately, I believe the bill suffers from two major problems.  First, the bill delegates too much authority to the regulators.  I’ve been around the Senate for 37 years.  As I said on the Senate floor on February 4^th of this year and in several speeches since then, I know that many times laws are not written with hard and clear lines. Laws are a product of legislative compromise, which often means they are vague and ambiguous.  We often justify our vagueness by saying the regulators to whom we grant statutory authority are in a better position than we are to write the rules – and then to apply those regulatory rules on a case-by-case basis.  But, as I have said, this was not one of those times. This was a time for Congress to draw hard lines that get directly at the structural problems that afflict Wall Street and our largest banks.

Second, the legislation does not go far enough in addressing the fundamental problem of “too big to fail.” Instead of erecting enduring statutory walls as we did in the 1930s, the bill invests the same regulators who failed to prevent the financial crisis with additional discretion and relies upon a resolution regime to successfully unwind complex and interconnected mega-banks engaged across the globe. I am also disappointed that key reform provisions like the Volcker Rule and the Lincoln swaps dealers spin-off provision were scaled back in conference.

The bill mainly places its faith and trust in regulatory discretion and on international agreements on bank capital requirements and supervision.

I actually read The Economist and, while mostly not agreeing with their editorial stance, I had the impression they were above this kind of nonsense. Apparently not!

“More than half (55%) of all adults in the labor force say that since the Great Recession began 30 months ago, they have suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center‘s Social & Demographic Trends Project.

The survey also finds that the recession has led to a new frugality in Americans‘ spending and borrowing habits; a diminished set of expectations about their retirements and their children‘s future; and a concern that it will take several years, at a minimum, for their family finances and house values to recover”

More than half (55%) of all adults in the labor force say that since the Great Recession began 30 months ago, they have suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center‘s Social & Demographic Trends Project.The survey also finds that the recession has led to a new frugality in Americans‘ spending and borrowing habits; a diminished set of expectations about their retirements and their children‘s future; and a concern that it will take several years, at a minimum, for their family finances and house values to recover