STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 13 August 2013

[Tansy_Gold]

[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Tuesday, 13 August 2013[font color=black][/font]

SMW for 12 August 2013

AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 12 August 2013
[center][font color=red]
Dow Jones 15,419.68 -5.83 (-0.04%)
S&P 500 1,689.47 -1.95 (-0.12%)
[font color=green]Nasdaq 3,669.95 +9.84 (0.27%)


[font color=green]10 Year 2.49% -0.03 (-1.19%)
30 Year 3.58% -0.03 (-0.83%) [font color=black]


[center][/font]

[HR width=85%]

[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
[center]


[/center]

[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]

[/center]

[center]

[/center]

[HR width=95%]

[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
[center]
Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
Bloomberg Economic News
Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Bank Tracker
Credit Union Tracker
Daily Job Cuts
[/center]

[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
[center]
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
[/center]

[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Essential Reading:[/font][/font]
[center]
Matt Taibi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout


[/center]

[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
[center]
LegitGov
Open Government
Earmark Database
USA spending.gov
[/center]

[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
[center]
Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
Charlie Rose talks with Krugman
William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
[/center]

[div]
[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.
02/14/13 Gilbert Lopez, former chief accounting officer of Stanford Financial Group, and former controller Mark Kuhrt sentenced to 20 yrs in prison for their roles in Allen Sanford's $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
03/29/13 Michael Sternberg, portfolio mgr at SAC Capital, arrested in NYC, charged with conspiracy and securities fraud. Pled not guilty and freed on $3m bail.
04/04/13 Matthew Marshall Taylor,fmr Goldman Sachs trader arrested, charged by CFTC w/defrauding his employer on $8BN futures bet "by intentionally concealing the true huge size, as well as the risk and potential profits or losses associated."
04/04/13 Matthew Taylor admits guilt, makes plea bargain. Sentencing set for 26 June; faces up to 20 years in prison but will likely only see 3-4 years. Says, "I am truly sorry."
04/11/13 Ex-KPMG LLP partner Scott London charged by federal prosecutors w/passing inside tips to a friend in exchange for cash, jewelry, and concert tickets; expected to plead guilty in May.










[HR width=95%]


[center]
[HR width=95%]
[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]

[Demeter]

1. Cute Cartoon!

Should have drawn him as a swordfish, though, slashing the damn net to shreds...

[Demeter]

2. Launch of Green Tea Coalition Drives a Wedge Through Georgia’s Tea Party By Ashton Pittman

TIME TO START THINKING OUTSIDE THE LIPTONS'S BOX

http://www.nationofchange.org/launch-green-tea-coalition-drives-wedge-through-georgia-s-tea-party-1375968980

“The Tea Party has formed an unholy alliance with the left,” Debbie Dooley recalls a panicked member of Georgia’s big energy lobby lamenting. Dooley, a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots, doesn’t deny the charges. In fact, she is set this Tuesday to celebrate the official launch of the Green Tea Coalition – the same “unholy alliance” of right and left grassroots that has big oil interests reeling.

“It’s an unholy alliance because they see it as a threat to them,” Dooley said, speaking ahead of the launch. “In the past, the elites on both the right and the left got away with it. On the right, they’d say, ‘This person’s on the left. Stay away from them,’ On the left, they’d say, ‘They’re radical, they’re the Tea Party. Stay away from them.’

"But we got through all that bull, got to know each other, and started working together,” she said.

And it’s not the first time. In 2012, the Atlanta Tea Patriot Patriots joined the NAACP and the Sierra Club to successfully defeat a $7.2 billion transit tax referendum. That same year, Tea joined forces with Occupy Atlanta and the AFL-CIO to stop an anti-union bill that would have banned protests at private residences (the bill sought to protect the “right of quiet enjoyment” of CEOs). The threat of a grassroots movement united across ideological lines manifested itself again last month when the Tea Party Patriots – allied with environmentalists of the Sierra Club – triumphed in a win for solar energy.

Like many other states, Georgia law, through the 1973 Territorial Act, grants a single electric utility supplier the exclusive right to generate electrical power services. The beneficiary in Georgia is Georgia Power, which is owned by the Southern Company. Southern Company is the fourth largest utility in the country, with operations also in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. Even electric co-operatives in the state aren’t allowed to generate their own energy under present law. Instead, they must buy it through Georgia Power, relying on a power grid that operates mainly off coal, gas, and nuclear power. Such a centralized power grid presents practical dangers, claimed Dooley. For example, a terrorist could theoretically plunge an entire region into darkness with a few well-coordinated attacks.

Southern Company isn’t rushing to jeopardize its lucrative business model by embracing alternative energy. But thanks to Green Tea efforts and a Public Service Commission vote of 4 to 1 in July, the company will be required to obtain 525 megawatts of additional solar power by 2016. That win didn’t come without fierce opposition from deeply entrenched interests, including the Koch Brothers-funded organization Americans for Prosperity. AFP Georgia sent out a misleading email to some 50,000 members urging them to oppose the solar changes, erroneously claiming that solar would raise prices by as much as 40 percent. In reality, falling solar prices promise a future of cheaper energy – and perhaps even the opportunity for individuals to someday generate their own energy, independent of companies like Southern Company. For rate payers held captive by a government-imposed utility monopoly, what could be more conservative than achieving self-sufficiency?

Through all this, the clash between Atlanta’s Tea Party and AFP has been raising eyebrows. The Koch Brothers, through organizations like AFP and Freedom Works, have spent millions of dollars to influence Tea Party groups across the country since 2009.

“We agree with AFP on a lot of issues, but when it comes to energy, they’re not exactly unbiased,” said Dooley. And that's putting it mildly. Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the United States, makes over $100 billion a year on oil, coal, and logging, among other industries.

Critics of the Tea Party have pointed out the substantial role that AFP and Freedom Works played in the initial Tea Party protests of 2009 — not to mention the years of planning and attempts by the Koch Brothers to launch the party as far back as 2002, and even previously. However, the Kochs may have foreseen not only the benefits of jumping on the Tea Party train, but also the dangers of allowing such a movement to grow without a little corporate “direction.” The danger was that conservatives – whose politics have traditionally aligned with the interests of corporate America – would take some of the ideas brewing in the teapot too far. Conservative Americans had begun to wholly embrace the idea that there was such a thing as "crony capitalism," that certain powerful industries didn’t need to be subsidized for under-performing, or bailed out for failing, and that local and individual autonomy was more important than maintaining the profit structures of big industries. Those ideas, taken to their logical conclusions, might have led to a conservative revolution that would have severely crippled the power of industries like Koch and Southern Company. The Koch plan, then, was to jump into the fray: a corporate entity hidden among the throngs of one of the largest political movements in decades. On the fertile ground of an emergent movement, Koch would sow their genetically modified seeds of ideology. The idea was to tweak the message of the Tea Party just enough to reroute the movement’s trajectory in such a way that, far from being the bad guys, industrialists could cast themselves as the victims and even allies of average Americans.

“We don’t need taxpayer funded government subsidies and renewable energy mandates,” AFP Georgia wrote in a statement on the Georgia solar plan. “The government has spent $14 billion since 2009 propping up renewable energy projects. They wouldn’t have to do that if the technology was more market ready.”

See? AFP is on the side of the people, standing up against big government subsidies for technology that may not even be ready for prime time. The fact that solar even requires government subsidies proves it isn’t ready, so they claim. But just don’t expect AFP to apply the same standard to Koch-style industries. Between 1994 and 2009, U.S. oil and gas industries amassed nearly $450 billion in subsidies, compared to a relatively paltry $6 billion for renewable energy over the same period. And don’t expect AFP to rail against Southern Company’s $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee for its new nuclear projects, either – despite its being the same type of loan granted to solar power company Solyndra, which AFP spent over $8 million to defame between 2011 to 2012.

But Dooley and the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots saw through the distortions. They didn’t buy AFP’s attempts to cast its campaign against solar energy in Georgia as a “grassroots driven initiative.”

“There are lots of Tea Party activists who care deeply about the environment,” Dooley said. “We have grandchildren. Some of us hope to have great grandchildren. I have a four-and-a-half year old grandson that I adore. I want him to have plenty of air and water. I want him to live in a world where green forest parks and mountain streams are not poisoned.

"I want him to live in a world where, maybe, by the time he’s grown, he can just come off the grid and generate his own power that he needs using solar or wind.”

The Green Tea Coalition, set to launch in Georgia on Tuesday, includes activists from the Sierra Club, Georgia Watch, Occupy Atlanta, Tea Party Patriots and the NAACP. Georgia's former Democratic Governor Roy Barnes has also indicated interest in taking part in the Coalition, said Dooley. To Koch, Southern Company and other energy titans who thought they had the Tea Party in their pockets, it's an unholy alliance indeed. Beyond that, it's a wedge that could grow bigger -- and not only in Georgia.

“The elites like to keep us divided because we have to look to them for power,” Dooley added. “But now grassroots activists are coming together from across the aisle and saying, ‘We’re going to do this and we don’t need to look to elites from either party – we just need each other.’”

[Demeter]

3. Justice Dept. Seeks to Curtail Stiff Drug Sentences (COSTS GOVT. TOO MUCH)

WELL, BETTER THAN THE PRESENT PRACTICE...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/us/justice-dept-seeks-to-curtail-stiff-drug-sentences.html

In a major shift in criminal justice policy, the Obama administration moved on Monday to ease overcrowding in federal prisons by ordering prosecutors to omit listing quantities of illegal substances in indictments for low-level drug cases, sidestepping federal laws that impose strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., in a speech at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco on Monday, announced the new policy as one of several steps intended to curb soaring taxpayer spending on prisons and help correct what he regards as unfairness in the justice system, according to his prepared remarks.

Saying that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason,” Mr. Holder justified his policy push in both moral and economic terms.

“Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable,” Mr. Holder’s speech said. “It imposes a significant economic burden — totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone — and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.”

MORE

[Demeter]

4. Your mortgage documents are fake! WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/1014563255#post1

[DemReadingDU]

5. Refinancing also could have fake documents

Anything in the MERS system is highly suspect.

MERS was officially launched in April 1997
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Electronic_Registration_Systems

[xchrom]

6. STUDY: There's A Huge, $1 Trillion Hole In Chinese GDP

http://www.businessinsider.com/1-trillion-dollar-hole-in-chinese-gdp-2013-8

Associate Professor Christopher Balding of the HSBC School of Business at Peking University in Shenzhen has just published a paper arguing there are huge flaws in Chinese inflation data, with major ramifications for the official GDP figures. The full paper is here, and the post that follows originally appeared on his personal site, and summarises some of the problems with the official data from China which, as Australia’s biggest trading partner, may have implications for forecasting domestic economic conditions.

Why Does Anyone Still Believe Chinese Data?
It baffles me with everything that we know about Chinese economic and financial data that people, and even smart people who should know better, continue to believe the Communist Party Propaganda press releases put out by Beijing. The Reuters team writes:

“The slowdown in the rate of deflation was taken as further evidence of a possible stabilisation of the economy, with analysts looking to data later in the day on investment and industrial output for more signs of a bottoming out in activity.”

When you simply make economic data up, of course the numbers are always going to look good. For about ten years, Chinese unemployment has bounced between 4.1-4.3%. Now even accepting that Chinese unemployment has remained quite low throughout this entire time period, which in itself a dubious proposition, we expect more random variation than that.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/question-the-dragon-economist-finds-a-trillion-dollar-flaw-in-official-data-from-china-australias-biggest-trading-partner-2013-8#ixzz2bqoKRDvE

[Demeter]

25. For the same reasons they believe US Data

(they are paid to believe)

[xchrom]

7. Big German Economic Sentiment Survey Soars Past Expectations, As Eurozone Recession Comes To A Close

http://www.businessinsider.com/zew-economic-sentiment-for-august-2013-8

The highly respected ZEW Economic Sentiment index soared past expectations, with the August reading coming in at 42.0, which is well above the 39.9 that had been expected.
Here's the announcement:

The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany has increased by 5.7 points in August 2013. The indicator now stands at the 42.0 points-mark (historical average: 23.7 points). This is the highest mark since March 2013.

First signs of an end to the recession in important Eurozone-countries may have contributed to the
indicator’s rise. This is also reflected by the strong increase of economic expectations for the Eurozone. Furthermore, the economic optimism is supported by the robust domestic demand in Germany.

The assessment of the current economic situation for Germany has also improved in August. The respective indicator has increased by 7.7 points to the 18.3 pointsmark.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/zew-economic-sentiment-for-august-2013-8#ixzz2bqpDHNn8

[xchrom]

8. NOMURA: Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Might Win A Seat In Next Month's Australian Election

http://www.businessinsider.com/nomura-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-might-win-a-seat-in-next-months-australian-election-2013-8

Australia is going to the polls on September 7 for Parliamentary elections, and the expectation is that the current Labour government lead by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will go down for defeat.
A coalition lead by conservative Tony Abbott is the narrow favorite, according to polls, as well as Nomura geopolitical guru Alistair Newton, who handicaps the race in a new note for clients put out today.

It's not a slam dunk for Abbott, says Newton, but a general sense of Labour fatigue, plus some smart moves by Abbott will likely cause the party switch.

One interesting nugget is observed by Newton:

One further point of interest in the senate election is the new Wikileaks party founded by Julian Assange, which will field six candidates across three states in addition to Mr Assange himself (standing in Victoria). Under the prevailing voting system and especially following all the publicity around Edward Snowden, we would not be surprised if Mr Assange were to secure a seat, in which case he/his party may also end up having a hand in the balance of power in the senate.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/nomura-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-might-win-a-seat-in-next-months-australian-election-2013-8#ixzz2bqqF76Am

[xchrom]

9. FED STUDY: QE Hardly Does Anything

http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-study-qe-hardly-does-anything-2013-8

You won’t believe this, but apparently QE doesn’t do much for the economy. At least according to the San Francisco Fed:

“Asset purchase programs like QE2 appear to have, at best, moderate effects on economic growth and inflation. Research suggests that the key reason these effects are limited is that bond market segmentation is small. Moreover, the magnitude of LSAP effects depends greatly on expectations for interest rate policy, but those effects are weaker and more uncertain than conventional interest rate policy. This suggests that communication about the beginning of federal funds rate increases will have stronger effects than guidance about the end of asset purchases.”

Some of us wrote pieces like this years ago. At least some Fed researchers are coming around to this view. Better late than never, right? Sadly, I doubt this paper will change much with regards to the thinking on QE.



Read more: http://pragcap.com/sf-fed-qe-doesnt-do-much-to-help-economic-growth#ixzz2bqr8vnLK

[DemReadingDU]

10. IMO. QE was designed for the wealthy

Never meant to trickle down to the economy.

[Tansy_Gold]

18. Was there ever anything. . . .

. . . .that wasn't designed for the wealthy?

[Demeter]

26. Bubonic Plague

[Warpy]

24. It ended up in too few pockets

although it did end up pumping up the stock market nicely. Now we have a hyperinflated market and such things are prone to going bust very quickly.

[xchrom]

11. U.S. Regulator Subpoenas Banks Over Long Warehouse Queues

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-12/u-s-regulator-subpoenas-banks-over-long-queues-at-warehouses.html

The top U.S. derivatives regulator subpoenaed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) for documents relating to their warehouses for aluminum and other metals, according to two people with knowledge of the probe.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has requested documents dating to the start of 2010 about the banks’ commodity warehouses, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the subpoenas are private. Glencore Xstrata Plc, which owns warehousing business Pacorini, also received a subpoena, another person said.

MillerCoors LLC, Encore Wire Corp. (WIRE) and other metal users have complained about long queues and artificially high prices at the warehouses, particularly for copper and aluminum.

“We’re a market regulator overseeing the commodity futures, swaps markets and have clear authority to police markets for fraud, manipulation and other abuses,” CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said in response to questions about warehousing at a Senate Banking Committee hearing last month.

[xchrom]

12. Blackstone Said to Acquire GE Apartments for $2.7 Billion

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/blackstone-said-to-acquire-ge-apartments-for-2-7-billion.html

Blackstone Group LP agreed to buy 80 apartment properties for about $2.7 billion in one of its largest forays into the U.S. multifamily market, a person with knowledge of the deal said.

The biggest manager of private-equity real estate funds is acquiring the properties from General Electric Co.’s GE Capital unit, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the transaction isn’t public. GE has been paring its property holdings as part of a strategy to shrink its finance division.

Surging rental demand has sent U.S. apartment vacancies to the lowest level in a decade, according to Reis Inc. In residential real estate, New York-based Blackstone has focused on buying single-family homes to rent, spending more than $5 billion to acquire more than 30,000 U.S. houses in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis.

The firm’s latest purchase comes as apartment stocks, one of the best performers among commercial-property types since the credit crisis, have fallen from their highs. The Bloomberg Apartment Real Estate Investment Trust Index has declined 1.4 percent in the 12 months through yesterday, compared with a gain of 9.6 percent for the broader Bloomberg REIT Index and a 23 percent return for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, after the reinvestment of dividends.

[xchrom]

13. London Whale Resurfaces in Potential U.S. JPMorgan Case

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-13/london-whale-resurfaces-in-potential-u-s-jpmorgan-case.html

Bruno Iksil, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) trader whose bets caused more than $6.2 billion in losses last year, is now central to any U.S. charges against his former colleagues.

Iksil, the Frenchman who became known as the London Whale because of his trading book’s size, has been cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office for months in their probe of the New York-based bank’s biggest trading debacle ever, said three people with direct knowledge with the matter. Iksil won’t face charges as long as he cooperates and testifies, the people said.

Prosecutors may announce charges as early as this week against former London-based JPMorgan employees, accusing them of trying to mask losses on a complex derivatives portfolio, said another person who asked not to be named because the investigation isn’t public. The episode has already sparked a Senate subcommittee hearing and prompted JPMorgan’s board to cut Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s pay in half.

“Jamie Dimon really wants to put this issue behind the bank,” said Christopher Wheeler, an analyst at Mediobanca SpA in London who has an outperform rating on JPMorgan’s stock. Charges against former employees would mean “JPMorgan will have to put up with having its dirty linen washed in public.”

[xchrom]

14. Cyprus could have sought aid earlier to avoid pain - central bank

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/13/uk-cyprus-cbank-inquiry-idUKBRE97C0DA20130813

(Reuters) - The head of Cyprus's central bank said on Tuesday the upheaval of an international bailout in March could have been avoided if the island nation had petitioned for aid earlier.

Panicos Demetriades also chided bankers for accumulating large amounts of Greek government bonds, whose EU-approved restructuring in late 2011 proved to be deeply harmful for Cyprus.

Cyprus took the unprecedented step of winding down a major bank and forcing losses on large depositors at a second bank to qualify for 10 billion euros in aid earlier this year.

The banks had been heavily exposed to Greek sovereign debt and suffered huge losses on holdings when that country's debt was restructured in another rescue package by the EU and IMF.

[Demeter]

27. A little nutty, banker's humor there

He's got to be kidding!

[xchrom]

15. France mulls pension changes to give labourers more say over when they retire

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/13/uk-france-pensions-idUKBRE97C0D520130813


(Reuters) - France's government is mulling a points-based retirement credit system rather than a years-of-work tally for people in tough physical jobs, to give them more say over when they retire, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Tuesday.

Any special credits for labourers are likely to be financed by rises in social welfare contributions, details yet to be worked out by a Socialist government which plans to reform the retirement system to help fix a ballooning pension deficit.

It aims to submit the plan to parliament in the weeks ahead.

Some Scandinavian countries use points-based pension systems praised for their transparency and simplicity and for allowing more flexibility for people who, for example, switch careers often or take time out to care for children or the elderly.

[DemReadingDU]

16. Detroit bankruptcy consultant fees draw outrage from unions

8/13/13 Detroit bankruptcy consultant fees draw outrage from unions

Detroit— City Hall’s estimated $1.4 million-a-month restructuring tab includes a consulting company billing $275 an hour for a 22-year-old financial analyst who graduated from college last year, according to records obtained by The Detroit News.

Wade P. Johnston got his bachelor’s degree in finance in 2012 from Michigan State University and is part of the team the consultants, Conway MacKenzie, have working to turn around city operations. The Birmingham firm billed the city $288,671 for the work of 11 staffers over two weeks in July, including more than $26,000 for Johnston alone.

The records give a rare look at the costs being picked up by the city and state, a breakdown city council members and other critics have argued has been hidden amid Detroit’s historic bankruptcy. Conway MacKenzie’s hourly rates range from $495 for the group’s senior managing director to $275 for Johnston, who started with the company in June as a senior associate, according to records.

Critics questioned the wisdom of spending $275 an hour for a 22-year-old.

more...
http://www.detroitnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013308130021

[Demeter]

28. Or anyone

[xchrom]

17. Eurozone manufacturing output rises ahead of GDP data

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23678493


Factories in the eurozone saw output rise in June, reinforcing hopes the bloc may have exited recession in the second quarter.

Industrial production grew by 0.7% from the previous month, according to official data from Eurostat.

The rise was driven by a 4.9% surge in the production of durable consumer goods, such as cars and computers.

Eurozone growth figures for the April-to-June period will be published on Wednesday.

[bread_and_roses]

19. Another Obamacare delay: Out-of-pocket caps waived for a year

http://blog.al.com/wire/2013/08/another_obamacare_delay_out-of.html

See Demeter's first post in yesterday's SMW if you missed it.


And here's the thread in LBN with the usual excuses and defenses abounding - also some sanity here and there, always quickly attacked. I thought of wading in but it's too wearisome ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014564052

[Fuddnik]

21. FUBAR

[Demeter]

29. It started out as FUBAR

Now, it's beginning to resemble the Death Star in a black hole...

[xchrom]

20. Tomb Raider: Badger Digs Up Medieval Treasure in Germany

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/badger-discovers-medieval-tomb-in-germany-a-916305.html


A badger in Germany deserves a reward for making a significant archaeological discovery: the medieval tombs of two Slavic lords buried with an array of intriguing artefacts.

The striped animal, perfectly equipped for digging with its short legs, had made its underground home on a farm in the town of Stolpe in Brandenburg, some 75 kilometers northeast of Berlin.

Two sculptors who happened to be hobby archaeologists, Lars Wilhelm and Hendrikje Ring, live on the farm and had planned to exhibit some of their work near the badger's sett.

"We spotted a pelvic bone that had been dug up, it was clearly human," Ring told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It wasn't exactly surprising to us because a whole field of ancient graves had been found on the other side of the road in the 1960s. So we pushed a camera into the badger's sett and took photos by remote control. We found pieces of jewellery, retrieved them and contacted the authorities."


***honey badger don't care.

[AnneD]

23. Can you believe....

the Daucshund was breed to hunt badgers. I think that explains a lot about their personalities.

[antigop]

22. In case you missed "60 Minutes" on China's real estate bubble

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50152767n