Seeking Alpha has a fairly interesting article on different aspects of the European debt crisis:

Some facts about Greece not everybody might be familiar with:

• Since the beginning of the crisis, ordinary Greeks have withdrawn about 50 billion euros from their accounts, or a fifth of total deposits [Spiegel online]
• The Greeks have reportedly deposited 280 billion euros in Swiss banks [Spiegel online]
• The new Greek PM is against the 50% ‘haircut’ on Greek bonds
• Eurostat’s figures for the average working hours in Europe for 2009 indicate that Greeks work an average of 42 hours a week. The EU average was 40.3 hours and in Germany it was 40.8. In fact, the Greek figure is the highest in all of the 27 EU countries [insidegreece]
• There are as many trucks on Greek roads today as in 1980 [NRC Handelsblad]
• Greek civil servants saw their wages decrease by 30-40% while taxes and prices were rising [NRC Handelsblad]

What do we learn from this?

1. Greeks are not lazy — not nearly as lazy as many make out.
2. They have suffered unprecedented austerity.
3. The economy has a long way to reform. For instance, they have world-class shipping companies and a big hinterland, so its harbors and logistics could give a large boost to the economy, but setting up businesses is just way too hard in Greece.
4. Capital flight is a serious problem, driven by insecurity about banks future and Greece’s membership of the euro

I particularly like lesson 3 above: cut the regulations to encourage business and grow your way out of debt. Good advice, no matter what the country!

The author goes on to analyze other Euro countries. Read it all:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/307403-some-counter-intuitive-questions-you-were-afraid-to-ask-about-the-euro-crisis

Fascinating:

The Orlando Sentinel asks its readers what they think of Obama’s jobs plan:

The White House announced this week that President Obama would unveil a new plan to create jobs in a speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7. While the announcement didn’t include details of the plan, Obama said in an interview this week that it would stress "putting people to work rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our schools all across America." In a letter to leaders of Congress, Obama also indicated his plan would include tax cuts for "middle class and working Americans." What, if anything, do you think the president should be proposing? Would you rather see government-fund construction projects, or tax cuts, or both? Do you think the nation can afford a big jobs plan?

Remember, this is a state that was so evenly divided in 2000 that Al Gore almost successfully litigated his way into the White House via hanging chads. Yet here are the results of the poll embedded on the page linked above:

57% of respondents have the sense to tell Obama to make it easier for business or to get out of their pockets altogether.

I like that.

Just an observation. America currently has 14 people in the “official” unemployed category. This is a greater number than the total population of several countries, including Singapore, Norway, Ireland, El Salvador, Denmark, Finland, and many more. 111 more, to be exact.

Put another way, America has more people standing in unemployment lines than over half of the countries on Earth has citizens.

In fact, if you take all 225 countries on Earth, sort them by population, and add up the population for countries 159 through 225 (i.e., the bottom 67 countries), you will come up with a number that is less than the number of unemployed in America.

How’s that hopey/changey thing working out for you? Because it’s not working out so well for America’s jobless, especially the 6 million that have been looking for work for 27 weeks or more.

Any healthy economy of a modern industrialized nation continually adds jobs as the economy chugs along, steadily growing GDP year after year.

John Lounsbury at Seeking Alpha came across a Chart of the Day that clearly shows the severity of the decline of nonfarm payrolls in the last recession. But John goes one step further:

The current number of non-farm payrolls is below those of 1999-2001. The population has grown from about 280 million in 1999 to approximately 312 million today. So, adjusted for population growth, employment is in much worse condition than the above graph indicates.

The following graph shows the non-farm payroll data normalized to total population.

Money quote:

While the U.S. stock market can be supported in this massive depression by global earnings, if global economic activity slows down where will support for current earnings come from? And more earnings growth?

Europe is definitely slowing under the austerity demands stemming from the sovereign debt crisis. Asia is slowing under the attempts of central banks to stem inflation.

Where is the growth going to come from?

Excellent question, John.

Solar-cell maker Solyndra received over half a billion dollars in federally guaranteed loans in 2009 as part of Obama’s "stimulus" program. When they opened their second plant (which they could afford to do, having received this taxpayer funded windfall), Obama and Gov. Arnold visited the plant and made lots of flowery, very pretty speeches. Liberals swooned in ecstasy.

Today, 1,100 workers are being laid off and Solyndra is filing for Chapter 11. Which proves, yet again, that Big Government cannot create lasting, viable jobs in the free market, no matter how much money it prints.

Meanwhile, Obama is planning his big "jobs speech" to Congress next week. Which, according to this well-researched and often sadly funny article from WSJ, will be an almost exact duplicate of last year’s jobs speech.

So really, the biggest news about this year’s speech is Obama challenging, and then kowtowing to Republican leadership as to the date of the speech, as evidenced by this post from the left-wing Washington Post (emphasis in original):

By trying to big-foot the Republicans and then retreating, the president put an exclamation point on the complaints of his base. Weak. Incompetent. Unorganized. And those descriptors are from liberals. As for conservatives, they can hardly believe their good fortune. Obama has, more effectively than they could have hoped, demonstrated that the speech is largely a political stunt designed to put Republicans on the defensive rather than address our economic meltdown and fiscal woes.

Yeah, the WaPo actually wrote that.

The unfortunate thing is that the prez will no doubt be able to pull together a coalition of liberals, moderates, and turncoats that will once again spend massive amounts of money during the final campaign year that will do nothing except further bankrupt America.

A couple of days ago Bloomberg broke one of the biggest stories of the year, yet it is getting almost no attention:

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Fed’s Secret Loans

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

We knew about TARP, in which Congress authorized $700 billion but, according to CNN, only $411 billion was loaned out. And to date only $309 billion has been returned.

But what we didn’t know about is another $1.2 trillion dollars in secret loans made to a variety of institutions. Further, the only way we did find out about it was the tenacious efforts of Bloomberg reporters that included going to court and an act of Congress.

This, from “the most transparent administration in history.”

The Huffington Post is one of the few places I saw an appropriate sense of outrage:

If you’ve not yet read the recent piece by Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz of Bloomberg News, "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Fed’s Secret Loans," please go read the whole thing. The report hits many of my favorite sweet-spots. By far the most important is the fact that, for all the reporting on the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the way every picayune repayment is worthy of an excited press release from the Department of the Treasury, the underreported story of the bailout remains the trillions of taxpayer dollars that the Federal Reserve has disbursed to major financial institutions in an attempt to make them whole, making the TARP just an overhyped sliver of the entire bailout.

Of secondary interest is that Bloomberg takes home this story thanks to the efforts of the late, great Mark Pittman. This week’s disclosures are the fruits of a lengthy legal battle that Bloomberg has waged with the Federal Reserve, which began with Pittman’s 2008 FOIA requests. Pittman, who passed away in November of 2009, produced some of the bailout era’s most important pieces of reporting — including this one, in which he described in detail the terrible deal that American taxpayers got in the whole process.

Again, “the most transparent administration in history.” What a laugh.

Now be prepared to be even more outraged: foreign banks were bailed out as well. Barry Ritholtz rightfully rants:

… Imagine if the government and the Federal Reserve were run not by knaves and fools and Wall Street sycophants, but instead, were run honestly for the benefit of the taxpaying voter. Imagine the goal was saving the banking system (not the banks), and the financial rescue was for the benefit of the taxpayers, not the bondholders. Naive thoughts, I totally understand, but hear me out.

Hat tip to Krut Brouwer at Seeking Alpha, who capably expands on Ritholtz’s post:

The first problem I see is simply the absolutely massive size of the loans that were made. $1.2 trillion! I don’t remember hearing the Fed discuss its trillion dollar line of credit for banks. In fairness to the Fed, the loans appear to have been paid back, but I am not confident that the curtain of secrecy has fully arisen. If the Fed tried to hide this program initially, is there any reason to think it is being forthright now?

Even more critical to me is that this program does not seem to have been an actual solution, but rather a stopgap measure to preserve and protect the banks and their shareholders. The Fed’s chosen solution did not solve the problem and, at best, it postponed the reckoning we face because big banks screwed up.

Exactly. These bailouts had the same effect as rewarding unruly children with hugs and toys. What’s the 2-year stock price chart for the top 3 beneficiaries of our government’s largesse at tax payer expense?

Morgan Stanley:

Citibank:

Bank of America:

How bad is the financial market? According to one of my favorite (and usually spot on) analysts, Bank of America will enter bankruptcy this fall, perhaps as early as September.

While Wall Street is rewarded for being really bad at their jobs, the real unemployment in the rest of the nation nears 23%. TWENTY THREE PERCENT!

Anybody else feeling a little cheated?

Haver Analytics took a look at the numbers that came out of the Philly Fed reading on Thursday and the news is not good:

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s index of regional factory sector plunged this month. Today’s Philadelphia Fed General Activity index dropped to -30.7 from an unrevised 3.2 in July. The figure was well short of Consensus expectations for 4.2. …

Month-to-month deterioration occurred in each of the Fed’s component series with new orders and shipments falling the most. The employment series turned negative for the first time in twelve months. … The prices paid index fell to its lowest level since September. …

The separate index of expected business conditions in six months plunged to its lowest since November, 2008. Expectations for inventories, the workweek and capital expenditures fell precipitously.

Economist Daven Rosenberg took a look at the Philly Fed numbers, and is almost certain that another recession is inevitable (via Cullen Roche):

The Philly Fed index was the real shocker…. As the chart below illustrates, never before has the Philly Fed been at this level without there being a recession – will it really be “different this time around”? Well, Bill Dudley at the Fed seems to think so. Without going into the gory details, almost every component was negative – not just down, but below zero. This is a one in 10 event, and this breadth is itself consistent with a 90% chance of outright recession.

But Rosenberg, who has a pretty good track record on market predictions (including the 2007 recession and this year’s Treasury Bond rally),  goes further in an interview with Forbes:

Rosenberg, a longtime bear on the economy and the stock market, now says he is 99% sure we will have another recession by the end of next year.

He reasons that consumers have just begun clearing debt from their ledgers (see chart, right) and that as that deflationary process plays out, spending will slow, weighing on job growth. Adding to the pressure, government and the Federal Reserve are trying to wriggle out of the stimulus game.

"So we still have this credit contraction shock as it pertains to the broad consumer sector, and, going forward, no fiscal cushion," Rosenberg writes in a note to clients Tuesday.

Rosenberg adds that as the extent of the economic slowdown becomes apparent, the stock market may finally sag. The S&P 500, recently about 6% below its 52-week high at 1285, could test last summer’s lows near 1000, he says.

For the sake of every person out of work, for the sake of the increasing number of children caught up in the homelessness, for the sake of our abandoned veterans, I hope that Obama’s yet-another job creation plan is more successful than whatever he has done to date, but even the liberal Huffington Post doesn’t believe it.

Non-blogging Advised by Wolves found this graph posted last year at Reason, which they pulled from American Thinker.

Advised by Wolves writes:

I am pretty sure that the models used by the Congressional Budget Office are about as accurate as the models used to predict global warming.

Federal Revenue as a percentage of GDP has held stable at about 19%. This is a historic fact of the last 80 years (since 1930), despite the tax rate of the wealthiest Americans.

Yet, the CBO consistently scores the end of the Bush Tax Cuts as a revenue enhancer to the Federal Government. Just as consistently, this has not occurred while the economy is in recession. Revenues continue to fall and only turn around when the economy recovers. Based upon historical evidence, CBO scores are wrong, therefore, the mathematical models that produce these scores are wrong.

To which The Big Kahuna responds with:

This is the classic example of garbage in, garbage out.  The CBO works with assumptions given them by Congress.

I am waiting for a president to run on the platform of limiting Congress’ influence in the areas of science and economic theory. Geez, the damage they did with just the food pyramid is staggering.

Lew Rockwell posts the following matrix:

Anybody want to bet how many of those are left today? Liberals want to tax the rich, yet their policies will eventually drive them out of existence.