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STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 22 March 2013
[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Friday, 22 March 2013[font color=black][/font]
SMW for 21 March 2013
AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 21 March 2013
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Dow Jones 14,421.49 -90.24 (-0.62%)
S&P 500 1,545.80 -12.91 (-0.83%)
Nasdaq 3,222.60 -31.59 (-0.97%)
[font color=red]10 Year 1.94% +0.01 (0.52%)
30 Year 3.17% +0.02 (0.63%) [font color=black]
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[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
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[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
Bloomberg Economic News
Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Bank Tracker
Credit Union Tracker
Daily Job Cuts
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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The Big Picture
Financial Sense
Calculated Risk
Naked Capitalism
Credit Writedowns
Brad DeLong
Bonddad
Atrios
goldmansachs666
The Stand-Up Economist
The Automatic Earth
Wall Street on Parade
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Essential Reading:[/font][/font]
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Matt Taibi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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LegitGov
Open Government
Earmark Database
USA spending.gov
[/center][font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
Charlie Rose talks with Krugman
William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
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[font color=red]Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 [/font][font color=red]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
8/22/12 Doug Whitman, Whitman Capital LLC hedge fund founder, convicted of insider trading following a trial in which he spent more than two days on the stand telling jurors he was innocent
10/26/12 UPDATE: Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta sentenced to two years in federal prison. He will, of course, appeal. . .
11/20/12 Hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma charged with insider trading at SAC Capital Advisors, and prosecutors are looking at Martoma's boss, Steven Cohen, for possible involvement.
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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]
51 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I think we will see spring April 1st.
On the good news side, the counter tops went in today. The back splash gets tiled on Sunday. God bless the heathens!
The kitchen will be done. The painting continues else where. I am the world's second slowest painter. But, it's good zen.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-lingered-for-more-than-100-years-2013-3#ixzz2O4EhfSFZ
If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat. An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.
At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war's long-lasting financial toll.
Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack Obama's deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need the money they are receiving.
"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson said.
With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of disability payments are set to rise much higher. The AP identified the disability and survivor benefits during an analysis of millions of federal payment records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. To gauge the post-war costs of each conflict, AP looked at four compensation programs that identify recipients by war: disabled veterans; survivors of those who died on active duty or from a service-related disability; low-income wartime vets over age 65 or disabled; and low-income survivors of wartime veterans or their disabled children.
If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat. An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.
At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war's long-lasting financial toll.
"When we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about the cost," said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII-veteran father's disability benefits helped feed their family.
Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack Obama's deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need the money they are receiving.
"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson said.
With greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of disability payments are set to rise much higher. The AP identified the disability and survivor benefits during an analysis of millions of federal payment records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. To gauge the post-war costs of each conflict, AP looked at four compensation programs that identify recipients by war: disabled veterans; survivors of those who died on active duty or from a service-related disability; low-income wartime vets over age 65 or disabled; and low-income survivors of wartime veterans or their disabled children.
There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee— each for $876 per year.
Surviving spouses can qualify for lifetime benefits when troops from current wars have a service-linked death. Children under the age of 18 can also qualify, and those benefits are extended for a lifetime if the person is permanently incapable of self-support due to a disability before the age of 18.
Citing privacy, officials did not disclose the names of the two children getting the Civil War benefits.
Their ages suggest the one in Tennessee was born around 1920 and the North Carolina survivor was born around 1930. A veteran who was young during the Civil War would likely have been roughly 70 or 80 years old when the two people were born.
That's not unheard of. At age 86, Juanita Tudor Lowrey is the daughter of a Civil War veteran. Her father, Hugh Tudor, fought in the Union army. After his first wife died, Tudor was 73 when he remarried her 33-year-old mother in 1920. Lowrey was born in 1926.
Lowrey, who lives in Kearney, Mo., suspects the marriage might have been one of convenience, with her father looking for a housekeeper and her mother looking for some security. He died a couple years after she was born, and Lowrey received pension benefits until she was 18.
Now, Lowrey said, she usually gets skepticism from people after she tells them she's a daughter of a Civil War veteran.
"We're few and far between," Lowrey said.
Surviving spouses can qualify for lifetime benefits when troops from current wars have a service-linked death. Children under the age of 18 can also qualify, and those benefits are extended for a lifetime if the person is permanently incapable of self-support due to a disability before the age of 18.
Citing privacy, officials did not disclose the names of the two children getting the Civil War benefits.
Their ages suggest the one in Tennessee was born around 1920 and the North Carolina survivor was born around 1930. A veteran who was young during the Civil War would likely have been roughly 70 or 80 years old when the two people were born.
That's not unheard of. At age 86, Juanita Tudor Lowrey is the daughter of a Civil War veteran. Her father, Hugh Tudor, fought in the Union army. After his first wife died, Tudor was 73 when he remarried her 33-year-old mother in 1920. Lowrey was born in 1926.
Lowrey, who lives in Kearney, Mo., suspects the marriage might have been one of convenience, with her father looking for a housekeeper and her mother looking for some security. He died a couple years after she was born, and Lowrey received pension benefits until she was 18.
Now, Lowrey said, she usually gets skepticism from people after she tells them she's a daughter of a Civil War veteran.
"We're few and far between," Lowrey said.
http://heteconomist.com/why-neoliberals-pretend-private-debt-doesnt-matter-and-public-debt-does/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-neoliberals-pretend-private-debt-doesnt-matter-and-public-debt-does
The neoliberal policy approach in the decades leading up to the crisis basically amounted to enticing or pushing people into increasing levels of private debt. With private debt burdens mounting in relation to real GDP, we were told that consenting adults knew what they were doing. Then the crisis hit. Since then, as the private sector attempted to deleverage and get its unsustainable debt levels under control, we were told that the government's deficits, which increased as a matter of accounting, were unsustainable. The outcome, depending on which doomsayer you listened to, would supposedly be hyperinflation, escalating interest rates, sovereign default, a crippling debt burden on future generations, or some heady combination of any or all of these calamities. For governments that issue their own flexible exchange-rate nonconvertible currencies, these claims are nonsense. Even in the Eurozone the sovereign-debt crisis is a manufactured one that can be alleviated indefinitely by the ECB. So what explains the neoliberal preference for private debt and aversion to government deficits? The class-interested motivations seem crystal clear.
Private indebtedness, unlike government deficit expenditure, binds the majority of individuals more tightly to the wage labor relation. Workers with mortgages or other debt obligations will be more subservient in relation to their employers, and less likely to risk their present positions in negotiations over wages and conditions. The neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, the user pays principle, and austerity all played their parts in weakening the position of the vast majority relative to capitalists and government, and pushing general populations into indebtedness. Labor-market deregulation assisted capitalists in the defeat of organized labor. Financial deregulation opened the way for credit-fueled private consumption, the real estate bubble, and interest and service charges for the rentiers. Privatization of public utilities brought declining standards, higher prices for essential services, and monopoly rents for owners. The "user pays" principle has been instrumental in the case of education. By loading students with debt, lifestyles other than wage slavery are deliberately made less viable. Rising university fees also ensure plenty of young people are desperate enough to join the military as a way of getting an education.
In all this, austerity plays a key role. It intentionally creates joblessness and precariousness for many. At the macro level, as Keynesian and Kaleckian approaches make clear, unemployment is a government policy choice, a choice that is activated by keeping the budget deficit at a level too small to eliminate the output gap. The result, again, is a more subservient general population. The way the neoliberal policy agenda has been put into action is illuminated in an extraordinary feature-length documentary focusing on New Zealand. The documentary, which I have linked to previously, makes very clear that the neoliberal attack on workers' pay and conditions from the early 1980s onwards was highly orchestrated. The same basic experience has been mirrored in many places, but I have not seen the machinations stripped so bare as in this film. The documentary traces several clearly defined steps that were followed by both major parties in tandem with the treasury and central bank.
First, austerity was consciously imposed to create mass unemployment. It is very noticeable in the early stages of the policy assault that protesting workers were most focused on the right to work. The government's implicit employer-of-last-resort role was being withdrawn, and this fact was obvious to protesters at the time.
Second, with unemployment much higher (deliberately so) than before, this was then used as "evidence" that wages were too high, legitimizing real cuts in pay, particularly in the minimum wage. Not surprisingly, the cuts in pay did not boost employment, since it is a fallacy of composition to expect otherwise, but this was never the intention of policymakers, as the documentary evidence makes clear.
Third, with unemployment still high and real wages reduced, it was argued that unemployment benefits must be too generous relative to the minimum wage, and this was the cause (via "disincentives to work"
of the high unemployment. This is despite much of the protesting having initially been over the right to work.
The end result was mass unemployment alongside lower wages and a weaker safety net, precisely as intended. This led, predictably, to further wage and benefit cuts being demanded, in a supposed effort to reduce unemployment. Current parallels in Europe are obvious. Austerity is demanded on the pretext of bringing public debt under control. This weakens demand, depresses income, and hits tax revenues. The result – intended all along – is that there is no improvement in the public debt position, which can then be used to legitimize further austerity to bring public debt under control. Stir and repeat. The process can recycle for as long as enough Europeans are prepared to go along with it.
The neoliberal policy agenda of deregulation, privatization, user pays, and austerity appears to be delivering beyond the wildest dreams of its adherents. In most parts of the world, there is mass unemployment, private indebtedness, and an ongoing massive upward redistribution of wealth that shows no signs of abating.
The neoliberals must think they're in heaven.
The neoliberal policy approach in the decades leading up to the crisis basically amounted to enticing or pushing people into increasing levels of private debt. With private debt burdens mounting in relation to real GDP, we were told that consenting adults knew what they were doing. Then the crisis hit. Since then, as the private sector attempted to deleverage and get its unsustainable debt levels under control, we were told that the government's deficits, which increased as a matter of accounting, were unsustainable. The outcome, depending on which doomsayer you listened to, would supposedly be hyperinflation, escalating interest rates, sovereign default, a crippling debt burden on future generations, or some heady combination of any or all of these calamities. For governments that issue their own flexible exchange-rate nonconvertible currencies, these claims are nonsense. Even in the Eurozone the sovereign-debt crisis is a manufactured one that can be alleviated indefinitely by the ECB. So what explains the neoliberal preference for private debt and aversion to government deficits? The class-interested motivations seem crystal clear.
Private indebtedness, unlike government deficit expenditure, binds the majority of individuals more tightly to the wage labor relation. Workers with mortgages or other debt obligations will be more subservient in relation to their employers, and less likely to risk their present positions in negotiations over wages and conditions. The neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, the user pays principle, and austerity all played their parts in weakening the position of the vast majority relative to capitalists and government, and pushing general populations into indebtedness. Labor-market deregulation assisted capitalists in the defeat of organized labor. Financial deregulation opened the way for credit-fueled private consumption, the real estate bubble, and interest and service charges for the rentiers. Privatization of public utilities brought declining standards, higher prices for essential services, and monopoly rents for owners. The "user pays" principle has been instrumental in the case of education. By loading students with debt, lifestyles other than wage slavery are deliberately made less viable. Rising university fees also ensure plenty of young people are desperate enough to join the military as a way of getting an education.
In all this, austerity plays a key role. It intentionally creates joblessness and precariousness for many. At the macro level, as Keynesian and Kaleckian approaches make clear, unemployment is a government policy choice, a choice that is activated by keeping the budget deficit at a level too small to eliminate the output gap. The result, again, is a more subservient general population. The way the neoliberal policy agenda has been put into action is illuminated in an extraordinary feature-length documentary focusing on New Zealand. The documentary, which I have linked to previously, makes very clear that the neoliberal attack on workers' pay and conditions from the early 1980s onwards was highly orchestrated. The same basic experience has been mirrored in many places, but I have not seen the machinations stripped so bare as in this film. The documentary traces several clearly defined steps that were followed by both major parties in tandem with the treasury and central bank.
of the high unemployment. This is despite much of the protesting having initially been over the right to work.
The end result was mass unemployment alongside lower wages and a weaker safety net, precisely as intended. This led, predictably, to further wage and benefit cuts being demanded, in a supposed effort to reduce unemployment. Current parallels in Europe are obvious. Austerity is demanded on the pretext of bringing public debt under control. This weakens demand, depresses income, and hits tax revenues. The result – intended all along – is that there is no improvement in the public debt position, which can then be used to legitimize further austerity to bring public debt under control. Stir and repeat. The process can recycle for as long as enough Europeans are prepared to go along with it.
The neoliberal policy agenda of deregulation, privatization, user pays, and austerity appears to be delivering beyond the wildest dreams of its adherents. In most parts of the world, there is mass unemployment, private indebtedness, and an ongoing massive upward redistribution of wealth that shows no signs of abating.
The neoliberals must think they're in heaven.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/21/eurozone-crisis-cyprus-bailout-plan-b
A protester shouts slogans during a rally by employees of Cyprus Popular Bank outside the parliament in Nicosia March 21, 2013. Photograph: YANNIS BEHRAKIS/REUTERS
8:05 am Cyprus works on Plan B
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the unfolding crisis in Cyprus.
The Cypriot government is racing to pull together a new plan today to secure its bailout package and prevent the collapse of its banking sector.
This "Plan B" has just been presented to party leaders this morning, and could possibly be voted on later today.
State TV have reported that the plan could include a levy on bank deposits over €100,000, after MPs dramatically rejected the original plan to tax smaller deposits on Tuesday night.
It could also potentially include a new loan from Russia, nationalising pension funds, or restructuring and selling off - or even closing down - parts of the banking sector.
A protester shouts slogans during a rally by employees of Cyprus Popular Bank outside the parliament in Nicosia March 21, 2013. Photograph: YANNIS BEHRAKIS/REUTERS
8:05 am Cyprus works on Plan B
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the unfolding crisis in Cyprus.
The Cypriot government is racing to pull together a new plan today to secure its bailout package and prevent the collapse of its banking sector.
This "Plan B" has just been presented to party leaders this morning, and could possibly be voted on later today.
State TV have reported that the plan could include a levy on bank deposits over €100,000, after MPs dramatically rejected the original plan to tax smaller deposits on Tuesday night.
It could also potentially include a new loan from Russia, nationalising pension funds, or restructuring and selling off - or even closing down - parts of the banking sector.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/21/standard-chartered-us-regulators-iran-sanctions
'I made certain statements that I very much regret and that were at best inaccurate,' said Sir John Peace. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Standard Chartered has been forced by US regulators to retract comments by its chairman in which he dismissed the bank's breaches of US sanctions to Iran as "clerical errors" and insisted the breaking of the rules was not a "wilful act".
Sir John Peace also apologised for the remarks, made earlier this month at its full-year results press conference. The bank was forced to issue a formal stock market announcement on Thursday by US regulators, which in total fined Standard Chartered £415m and reached deferred prosecution agreements with the bank to avoid further sanctions.
Written in the form of a signed letter by Peace, the chairman said that during the press conference: "I made certain statements that I very much regret and that were at best inaccurate."
He said questions were asked "concerning individual employee conduct and compensation" following the deferred prosecution agreements made with the US department of justice and the New York district attorney
'I made certain statements that I very much regret and that were at best inaccurate,' said Sir John Peace. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Standard Chartered has been forced by US regulators to retract comments by its chairman in which he dismissed the bank's breaches of US sanctions to Iran as "clerical errors" and insisted the breaking of the rules was not a "wilful act".
Sir John Peace also apologised for the remarks, made earlier this month at its full-year results press conference. The bank was forced to issue a formal stock market announcement on Thursday by US regulators, which in total fined Standard Chartered £415m and reached deferred prosecution agreements with the bank to avoid further sanctions.
Written in the form of a signed letter by Peace, the chairman said that during the press conference: "I made certain statements that I very much regret and that were at best inaccurate."
He said questions were asked "concerning individual employee conduct and compensation" following the deferred prosecution agreements made with the US department of justice and the New York district attorney
http://www.businessinsider.com/arkadiy-abramovich-first-investment-2013-3
Billionaires probably don't have too many cares in the world. But raising well-grounded children is one of them, it seems. In 2011, Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One magnate, spoke to the Guardian about his socialite daughter, Tamara: "Yes, for sure, she goes and buys loads of shoes and bloody clothes. Unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. I suppose it's because … one wonders ... and this is not in her defence – how many other girls her age would do the same if they could?"
Nowhere is the density of super-wealthy offspring greater than in Russia. Many oligarchs keep a tight lid on the lives of their children, but, occasionally, the public gain an insight. This week, for example, it was reported that Arkadiy Abramovich, the 19-year-old son of Roman Abramovich, had bought a stake in an oilfield in Siberia for $46m. Arkadiy, who is currently working as an intern at the London office of a Russian investment bank, acquired the oilfield in a complex deal via a shell company of which he owns 45%. That a 19-year-old even knows what a shell company is, let alone controls one, tells you something about the life of a billionaire's child
In true "like father, like son" style, not only has Arkadiy developed a taste for his father's investments in Russian oil fields, but in 2010 he was linked to an unsuccessful attempt to take over the Danish football club FC Copenhagen. It doesn't seem to be wildly speculative to suggest that Arkadiy might one day pick up the reins at his father's beloved Chelsea FC.
Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the 23-year-old daughter of fertiliser billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, has a similar taste for multi-million-dollar purchases. Last year, she bought New York's most expensive apartment for $88m – to live in while she completes her university studies in the US. Ekaterina's representative – yes, she has a spokesperson – confirmed to the press that she had acquired an apartment at 15 Central Park West. Press reports said the property boasted "10 rooms including four bedrooms, a wraparound terrace of more than 2,000 square feet, four bedrooms and two wood burning fireplaces". But it later emerged that the apartment had become the subject of a legal tussle as part of a bitter divorce between her father and his estranged wife.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/arkadiy-abramovich-first-investment-2013-3#ixzz2OGoV7kzK
Billionaires probably don't have too many cares in the world. But raising well-grounded children is one of them, it seems. In 2011, Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One magnate, spoke to the Guardian about his socialite daughter, Tamara: "Yes, for sure, she goes and buys loads of shoes and bloody clothes. Unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. I suppose it's because … one wonders ... and this is not in her defence – how many other girls her age would do the same if they could?"
Nowhere is the density of super-wealthy offspring greater than in Russia. Many oligarchs keep a tight lid on the lives of their children, but, occasionally, the public gain an insight. This week, for example, it was reported that Arkadiy Abramovich, the 19-year-old son of Roman Abramovich, had bought a stake in an oilfield in Siberia for $46m. Arkadiy, who is currently working as an intern at the London office of a Russian investment bank, acquired the oilfield in a complex deal via a shell company of which he owns 45%. That a 19-year-old even knows what a shell company is, let alone controls one, tells you something about the life of a billionaire's child
In true "like father, like son" style, not only has Arkadiy developed a taste for his father's investments in Russian oil fields, but in 2010 he was linked to an unsuccessful attempt to take over the Danish football club FC Copenhagen. It doesn't seem to be wildly speculative to suggest that Arkadiy might one day pick up the reins at his father's beloved Chelsea FC.
Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the 23-year-old daughter of fertiliser billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, has a similar taste for multi-million-dollar purchases. Last year, she bought New York's most expensive apartment for $88m – to live in while she completes her university studies in the US. Ekaterina's representative – yes, she has a spokesperson – confirmed to the press that she had acquired an apartment at 15 Central Park West. Press reports said the property boasted "10 rooms including four bedrooms, a wraparound terrace of more than 2,000 square feet, four bedrooms and two wood burning fireplaces". But it later emerged that the apartment had become the subject of a legal tussle as part of a bitter divorce between her father and his estranged wife.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/arkadiy-abramovich-first-investment-2013-3#ixzz2OGoV7kzK
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/03/the-contradictions-of-george-osborne.html
George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been called many things since 2010, when he turned the United Kingdom into a petri dish for his experiment in austerity economics: arrogant, incompetent, supercilious, right-wing, cruel, antediluvian, deluded. Until now, though, nobody has described him as a socialist.
Let me be the first. Yesterday, in his annual budget presentation to the House of Commons, a desperate (there’s another frequently applied adjective) Osborne launched a scheme to socialize a significant portion of the U.K. mortgage market. Taking his cue from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those two great American bastions of state socialism, he said that the U.K. government would enter the mortgage business, lending British homebuyers up to a fifth of the cost of newly-constructed houses and guaranteeing the mortgages of people who are struggling to raise enough cash for a down payment. Hitherto, mortgage finance in the U.K., unlike in the United States, has been exclusively a private-sector business. Now, Osborne, a self-described apostle of Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, has decided to change all that.
As you might have already guessed, the reason for this ideological U-turn has nothing to do with Osborne jettisoning his copy of “Wealth of Nations” in favor of Keynes’s “General Theory” or Anthony Crosland’s “The Future of Socialism.” Osborne really is a Thatcherite, albeit one with virtually no personal experience in the private sector. (A year after graduating from Oxford, he joined Conservative Campaign Headquarters. He’s been in politics ever since.) Unlike Saul on the road to Damascus, he didn’t see a blinding light. It’s not as if he’s suddenly recognized that many markets, the housing market among them, fail to work as the free-market textbooks say they should. Instead, it’s almost all about politics and the abject failure of his experiment.
In a new forecast published alongside the budget, the Office of Budget Responsiblity, an independent watchdog that Osborne set up, said that the British economy would hardly expand at all this year, meaning that the Conservative-Liberal coalition will have presided over three successive years of recession or near-recession. With growth stalled, his targets for the public debt comprehensively blown, and an election due in a couple of years, the Chancellor had to do something—anything—to try and revive spending and investment, and the voters’ spirits.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/03/the-contradictions-of-george-osborne.html#ixzz2OH0ErE4a
George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been called many things since 2010, when he turned the United Kingdom into a petri dish for his experiment in austerity economics: arrogant, incompetent, supercilious, right-wing, cruel, antediluvian, deluded. Until now, though, nobody has described him as a socialist.
Let me be the first. Yesterday, in his annual budget presentation to the House of Commons, a desperate (there’s another frequently applied adjective) Osborne launched a scheme to socialize a significant portion of the U.K. mortgage market. Taking his cue from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those two great American bastions of state socialism, he said that the U.K. government would enter the mortgage business, lending British homebuyers up to a fifth of the cost of newly-constructed houses and guaranteeing the mortgages of people who are struggling to raise enough cash for a down payment. Hitherto, mortgage finance in the U.K., unlike in the United States, has been exclusively a private-sector business. Now, Osborne, a self-described apostle of Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, has decided to change all that.
As you might have already guessed, the reason for this ideological U-turn has nothing to do with Osborne jettisoning his copy of “Wealth of Nations” in favor of Keynes’s “General Theory” or Anthony Crosland’s “The Future of Socialism.” Osborne really is a Thatcherite, albeit one with virtually no personal experience in the private sector. (A year after graduating from Oxford, he joined Conservative Campaign Headquarters. He’s been in politics ever since.) Unlike Saul on the road to Damascus, he didn’t see a blinding light. It’s not as if he’s suddenly recognized that many markets, the housing market among them, fail to work as the free-market textbooks say they should. Instead, it’s almost all about politics and the abject failure of his experiment.
In a new forecast published alongside the budget, the Office of Budget Responsiblity, an independent watchdog that Osborne set up, said that the British economy would hardly expand at all this year, meaning that the Conservative-Liberal coalition will have presided over three successive years of recession or near-recession. With growth stalled, his targets for the public debt comprehensively blown, and an election due in a couple of years, the Chancellor had to do something—anything—to try and revive spending and investment, and the voters’ spirits.
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