Lessee … a work day for me. Ugh! Bring on the deflation, I need to relax more!
Here’s Bond Gurl over @ Self Evident eviscerating Meredith Whitney, who is one of these finance chicks who spend a lot of time on teevee yammering about this, that or the other. Meredith usually yammers on about banks and lending and has shifted into other fields of fickle finance endeavor. Generally, Ms. M is a bear, which BG does not think is accurate:
Some thoughts on the muni marketBond Girl 2010-11-19 00:06
I have been somewhat hesitant to write about the recent sharp correction in the muni market, mainly because I do not like wasting my time. There has been a lot of completely insane commentary published about the muni market of late, which began with Meredith Whitney’s latest attempt to be relevant again and has gained momentum from there. This kind of thing frustrates me to no end, and it is hardly limited to the muni market. Sensationalizing events requires very little effort because, curiously, very few people ask for hard evidence that Armageddon lurks around the corner. When some media figure (or blogger) predicts that the market is going to be overcome with defaults, no one asks them for a cash flow analysis, a timeframe for default, or expected recoveries on specific issuers. Aside from California, most people cannot even talk about specific issuers in even superficial detail. What they can do is talk passionately about how the United States is just like Europe, and one imagines they know precious little about Europe as well. (One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone talks about the muni market as if there are not many different types of credits backed by many different types of revenue. What an idiotic way to approach a discussion of credit risk.) Conversely, it takes considerable time and effort to produce a reasoned response to all of the hyperbole.
Hmmm … read the rest and I don’t see where BG has done any cash flow analysis, timeframes or recoveries, rather a generalized critique of the ‘Armageddon’ conceit. Pot, meet kettle! What needs to be said is that Armageddon has a lot going for it right now and with some days time I can give cash fuel flows, timeframes, what little recoveries will be left and whatnot. When America’s greatest growth industry of the present is food stamps it is best to prepare for the worst, even if the municipal bond market isn’t destitute right this minute.
Just give it a few more months ..
Hiding From RealityBOB HERBERT
However you want to define the American dream, there is not much of it that’s left anymore.
Wherever you choose to look — at the economy and jobs, the public schools, the budget deficits, the nonstop warfare overseas — you’ll see a country in sad shape. Standards of living are declining, and American parents increasingly believe that their children will inherit a very bad deal.
We’re in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around. It will likely take many years, perhaps a decade or more, to get employment back to a level at which one could fairly say the economy is thriving.
Consider this startling information from the Pew Hispanic Center: in the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. But even as the hiring of immigrants picked up during that period, those same workers “experienced a sharp decline in earnings.”
What this shows is not that we should discriminate against foreign-born workers, but that the U.S. needs to develop a full-employment economy that provides jobs for all who want to work at pay that enables the workers and their families to enjoy a decent standard of living. In other words, a resurrection of the American dream.
Right now, nothing close to that is happening.
The human suffering in the years required to recover from the recession will continue to be immense. And that suffering will only be made worse if the nation embarks on a misguided crash program of deficit reduction that in the short term will undermine any recovery, and in the long term will make true deficit reduction that much harder to achieve.
The wreckage from the recession and the nation’s mindlessly destructive policies in the years leading up to the recession is all around us. We still don’t have the money to pay for the wars that we insist on fighting year after year. We have neither the will nor the common sense to either raise taxes to pay for the wars, or stop fighting them.
State and local governments, faced with fiscal nightmares, are reducing services, cutting their work forces, hacking away at health and pension benefits, and raising taxes and fees. So far it hasn’t been enough, so there is more carnage to come. In many cases, the austerity measures are punishing some of the most vulnerable people, including children, the sick and the disabled.
Etc.
This is of course a moral and ethical problem as well as Econ 101. When your customers are broke what will happen to you is written in stone. Those in denial are those with the most to lose. Nobody dreams of throwing away the wonderful, lovely and clever hi- tech machines that give us lotsa faddish crap and leave our workforce idle and without any meaningful skills. We have reached a nadir: our machines are brilliant (until you crash them into something) but are people are hopelessly dumb. Can’t we make this backward?
Speaking of crash, I feel sympathy for estimable Steve Keen who battles his own computer:
My Dog of a Dell (or is it Windoze 7?)Steve Keen
You might be able to tell from the subject that this is not my usual debt-oriented post. Instead, it’s sheer frustration with malfunctioning computer technology. I don’t know whether the cause is the Dell Studio 17 itself, or Windows 7, but I have just endured over a dozen “Blue Screen of Death” crashes since about 1pm today (New York time–it’s currently 4pm), and this has taken the tally of crashes with this machine to well over a thousand since the first one occurred when I was making a live presentation to the U (short interruption here–the bugger crashed twice in the last 5 minutes and I am now editing this in safe mode!) UNEP (United Nations Environment Program), back in September of 2009.
Like most computer problems, it has been an intermittent one: long periods of stability have lulled me into hoping that the problem was over, only to have the problem recur just when I started to relax (it reminds of some relationships I’ve had in the past, but let’s not go there…). Not long before the warranty expired on this beast, I had Dell come by and try to diagnose the problem; the service technician found nothing, but replaced the hard disks, RAM and keyboard just in case (the numeric keyboard has always been dicky, both the old one and the new–I’ve given up using it because you have to type with the subtlety of Conan the Barbarian to be at all confident that a number you type will actually turn up in your document).
I know how it feels! Linux, anyone?