EppsNet

• Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics – MarketWatch – http://bit.ly/ARd8m #

LONDON (MarketWatch) — In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.

While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics . . .

— Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics – MarketWatch

The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

The new projections add approximately $2 trillion to budget deficits through 2019. Earlier this year, the administration had predicted that Obama’s policies would require the government to spend $7.108 trillion more than it collects in tax revenue over the next decade.

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report will not be formally released until Tuesday, said the change is due primarily to updated projections of economic growth that are far less rosy than data used when the White House released its first long-term budget outlook in February.

— washingtonpost.com

I think I’d be way more upset about this if the numbers weren’t beyond human comprehension . . .

There are some things that one just didn’t do. That’s the way I was brought up. It’s not gray; it was black and white.

Now the ethical standard seems to be if everybody else is doing it, I can do it too. Carry that over into the banking. Everybody else is doing these funny loans and having earnings grow faster, building up their margins, leveraging those margins.

The more leverage A gets, the more leverage B feels inclined to get. So the system fed on itself and drove bankers to making decisions that they, presumably, should have known better than to make.

I don’t blame government for this. I was at a meeting of CEOs, even though I haven’t been to one for quite a while, and someone asked me to sum up the morning. This was a bunch of bankers and other CEOs. They said, what do you think about all this?

I said, you know, what I’m hearing here is you’re blaming the government for allowing you to do what you should have had enough brains not to do in the first place.

— John Bogle

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region’s dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area’s unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average.

Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate — which was below California’s average and largely tracked the national average last year — has soared, surpassing the state average in May. By June, the area’s unadjusted unemployment rate was 11.8%, worse than California’s 11.6% and the national rate of 9.7%, according to the latest figures from California’s Employment Development Department.

Many of the jobless techies are targeting new gigs in the clean-energy or health-care industries . . . Some are shifting even further afield, looking for jobs in teaching or financial consulting. People are leaving tech as “more tech companies are offshoring and some are shrinking, plus people are burned out and tired from having been there and done that.”

— Silicon Valley’s Jobless Unplug From Tech – WSJ.com

California’s fiscal crisis has left the US state without courts and some administration offices were ordered to close on Friday.

A predicted 24 billion dollar budget deficit over the next two years has forced Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to order massive cost-cutting measures.

— California closes state offices to save cash

There is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here

— The Eagles, “The Last Resort”

All the economic news from here in California is bad and unfortunately the cry heeded by our forbears — “Go West!” — is no longer an option . . .

• As the President intervenes in more and more industries, a key question is how he does it and what he is trying to achieve http://is.gd/vLUl #

The house two doors down from us is for sale. The house across the street is empty and for sale.

The woman behind us and the woman next door, who was recently laid off, have asked my wife if she knows anything about loan modification . . .

1. Fewer kids in day care
2. More women in porno

• Offering and accepting only rational, results-oriented behavior and communication: http://tinyurl.com/5z2rg6 #
• Financial collapse shows failure of free markets? http://tinyurl.com/cmoqqw #
• Diners can ‘have a ball’ at testicle festival: http://www.modbee.com/weird/story/645349.html #
• Obama to Back GM Warranties, OnStar Operator Service: http://tinyurl.com/c8k4xz #
• In Fargo, goodwill runs as deep as the river: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29962032 http://tinyurl.com/cw9o89 #

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — If anyone could emerge from the AIG bonus debacle looking good, it could be New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

— “NY’s Cuomo wins praise for pursuing AIG on bailout”

Cuomo. KWOH-moh. Italian, I suppose.

I have no personal animosity toward Mr. Cuomo, but despite his favorable write-ups in the press, he is certainly no hero in these matters.

Americans have short memories. Even members of the press — or “the media,” as you now call them — who should provide context and perspective, have short memories.

Set the Wayback Machine to 1995. Bill Clinton is president and Henry Cisneros, the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, institutes a requirement that 42 percent of the mortgages financed by government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac serve low- and moderate-income families.

Things only got worse under Cisneros’ successor, Andrew Cuomo:

Cuomo raised that number to 50 percent and dramatically hiked GSE mandates to buy mortgages in underserved neighborhoods and for the “very-low-income.” Part of the pitch was racial, with Cuomo contending that Fannie and Freddie weren’t granting mortgages to minorities at the same rate as the private market. William Apgar, Cuomo’s top aide, told The Washington Post: “We believe that there are a lot of loans to black Americans that could be safely purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if these companies were more flexible.”

— “Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie,” The Village Voice

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s put half of the GSE money into mortgages for very low income black people! And let’s not trouble them for a down payment either:

Fannie also developed a “flexible” product line, providing up to 100 percent financing and requiring borrowers to make as little as a $500 contribution, and bought $13.7 billion of those loans in 2003.

And yet I often hear the ensuing financial meltdown being blamed on “greed” and “the evils of capitalism.”

That was not capitalism; that was government manipulation of the housing market.

Americans have very short memories . . .

A friend works at a wind energy company. I asked him if he was getting his share of the money from our new planned economy. His response: “We are stimulated! There is some good stuff in there for renewable. We may need to open a DC office just to chase the $$.”

As long as we think that we can grow GDP by having an ever-larger proportion of our best citizens working as full-time lobbyists, it would seem that the stimulus bill is working as advertised.

— Philip Greenspun

OLYMPIA, Wash. — The state is sending out hundreds of thousands of $1 checks to the state’s neediest residents. It’s a plan that’s supposed to bring millions of dollars worth of food stamps to the state by March.

When you add printing and postage, it seems like a waste, but the state says the economy has them pulling out all the stops to find money wherever they can.

— The Olympian

Yeah, it seems like a waste now — but wait till the Keynesian multiplier kicks in!

The role of the economist in discussions of public policy seems to me to be to prescribe what should be done in light of what can be done, politics aside, and not to predict what is “politically feasible” and then to recommend it.

— Milton Friedman

Take out the references to economics and public policy and you can probably apply the “what should be done in light of what can be done” approach in your own work. It’s the art of the possible . . .

The situation could not be more serious. It is inexcusable and irresponsible for any of us to get bogged down in distraction, delay or politics as usual while millions of Americans are being put out of work. Now is the time for Congress to act.

— Barack Obama

Bah-loney. The American economy will bounce back as it always has, as surely as day follows night, no matter what anyone does or doesn’t do.

The only urgency in passing a stimulus bill (which doesn’t work, as I’ve explained previously) is so President Obama can take the credit for the recovery when it occurs . . .

For centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There’s no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.

— Daniel Gross, “Why the world’s economic leaders blame the catastrophe on the system instead of themselves”

Congress doesn’t have its own stash [of money]. Every dollar it injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It’s merely redistributed from one group of people to another.

— Brian Reidl, The Wall Street Journal

As you probably learned in school, we founded this country as a free-market economy and viewed government intervention in the market with the greatest skepticism.

The above article is the clearest explanation I’ve seen for why bailouts and “stimulus plans” involving government spending never work.

The latest failed companies hoping for a bailout are General Motors and Ford. I hope Henry Ford — a great American like myself, who is currently whirling like a lathe in his Detroit grave — will pardon me for saying so, but these companies are nothing but engines of mass financial destruction.

According to the WSJ, GM and Ford invested a combined $465 billion between 1998 and 2007.

As of last Friday’s market close, they had market caps of $4 billion (Ford) and $1.7 billion (GM).

They’ve wiped out almost $460 billion of American capital in the last 10 years and now they want more money.

Look — my friend Paul Epps has a sister who spent every dollar she ever had on booze, drugs and abortions. For a while, friends and family members tried to help her by giving her money when she didn’t have any.

Do I have to tell you how that turned out?

I’m not suggesting that executives at Ford and GM spent the $460 billion on booze, drugs and abortions — not all of it anyway — but I am saying that sometimes people who don’t have any money can’t be helped by giving them more money.