This is a post I just wrote over at Yves Smith’s site Naked Capitalism in response to a reader request. Marshall Auerback has already written a reply as well and I will post this later today.
A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does [...]

This comes via Gallup:
The latest Gallup Daily tracking results show 49% of Americans approving of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, putting him below the majority approval level for the first time in his presidency.

Although the current decline below 50% has symbolic significance, most of the recent decline in support for Obama occurred [...]

Morgan Stanley’s piece on Treasuries Priced for Perfection…for Now! is pretty bearish. The basic gist is that while the ten-year represents fair value today, because inflation expectations have become unanchored, Morgan Stanley expects the yield to rise from 3.3% to 5.5%. That’s a disaster of 1994 proportions. Obviously, given some of my recent comments, this [...]

Valero Energy has just announced it is shutting down its Delaware City Refinery.  This is a major news announcement because refiners should be seen as a canary in the coalmine for end-user demand and Valero is one company in the oil patch which has been loath to cut workers to improve the bottom line. This [...]

Nationwide Says British House Prices May Fall on Job Losses – Bloomberg.com
Investors ask Goldman to be less greedy: report | Reuters
BBC News – Tobacco firm Philip Morris to pay out $300m in damages
Susan Boyle Makes Amazon History
Execution Dignity – Robin Hanson
Is the Fed Creating New Bubbles? – BusinessWeek
Palinoia – [...]

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The Mortgage Bankers Association is reporting that nearly one in ten households with mortgages are at least one payment behind.  That is a record, my friends. And it certainly means we cannot believe house prices have permanently stabilized.
The New York Times says:
The delinquency figure, and a corresponding rise in the number of those losing their [...]

I pick up Bill Gross where I left him on Friday.  He said in his monthly newsletter that the Fed is going to keep interest rates at zero percent through 2010. But, he is not willing to stick his neck out in a liquidity seeking return kind of way even though this is what reflation [...]

I have written extensively about how I believe the bank bailouts were the worst of all possible solutions – fixes that perpetuate too big to fail, moral hazard and crony capitalism.  That ship has sailed, but the questions still linger – in large part because the fix has not trickled down to common folk to [...]

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See also Democratic Rep. DeFazio Calls for Geithner and Summers to Be Fired – Yves Smith