Why doesn’t Obama just give everyone a good paying government job by executive order and solve this problem directly?

It’s a bit unfair but at the end of the day, Bush had eight years and he shat the bed. Simple as that.

Congress controls taxes, spending, and regulation.

While republicans are to blame for many of our current ills, the democrats are on the hook for everything after January 2007. They’ve had 2 years to make changes, but they chose not to. The torch of the “culture of corruption” was simply passed from R to D.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/08/bank-failure-74-down-goes-colonial.html

Bank Failures #75 – #77: Union Bank, National Association, Gilbert, AZ, Community Bank of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, Community Bank of Arizona, Phoenix, Az.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/08/bank-failures-75-77-union-bank-national.html

Green Shoots!

You maybe right. However, the prospect of 5 to 10 years of flatlining is possible.

I have no interest in seeing the US economy battered and beaten. I want it fixed…NOW. Obama and the democratic congress & senate that has been in power during this whole fiasco and has done nothing to stop it or fix it. They’ve just made matters worse.

Obama promised to come in and clean up the mess. He and his Goldman Sachs cronies are just kicking the can down the road and raping current and future taxpayers along the way.

Another “green shoot”?

From The Market Ticker –
“Colonial, Alabama’s second-largest bank, is being closed by regulators today, the person said, becoming the largest U.S. bank failure of 2009 after an expansion into Florida saddled the lender with more than $1.7 billion in soured real-estate loans.

The FDIC usually waits until the close of business Friday; they must have had a slight problem with withdrawals……

Left unsaid is what’s going to happen to the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund on this one – my guess is that it will be ugly, as these guys were up to their necks in Florida on development projects that went bad. The “value” of that paper may be very close to zero; if the FDIC avoids doing one of their 40% loss deals I will be quite surprised.

A 40% loss on this one would, if my math is right, kill the rest of their insurance fund plus quite a bit and put the FDIC in the position of immediately needing to go hit up Treasury for more money.

That ought to be good for confidence, right?

Oh, there are two more on the “you’re dead” list that I’ve been talking about for a while: CORUS and Guaranty, both of which have said they (as of last filing) have a negative Tier Capital Ratio, meaning that they are formally underwater and IMHO should have been seized months ago.

But don’t worry, Treasury has an infinite credit card to keep funding the FDIC with, right?

“Heh Mr. Chinaman, can you spare an extra trillion – or three?”

“If there was ever going to be a month where retail sales were going to rise, this was it — due to the “successful” Cash-for-Clunkers program. The program may be a “success” but all the government is really doing is taking away from future spending. The 2010 outlook for auto sales is going to be even further muddled as a result, but the hope is that by then, the economy will be kicking into higher gear. (J.D. Power published a new forecast for U.S. vehicle sales for 2010 and while it sees 15% annual gain from the depressed 2009 level, at 11.5 million units, that would merely be stagnant from the stimulus-induced tally in July). If not for that gimmick, sales would have actually declined around 0.7%, by our reckoning.

Furniture sales slid 0.9% and are flat or down in each of the past five months. Ditto for building materials, which collapsed 2.1% in July. So, if “stabilization” is really emerging in the residential real estate market, it certainly is not showing through in the derivative housing-related segments of the sales data. Electronics sales tumbled 1.4% and now down sequentially in every month since March. General merchandise sales (mostly department stores) dropped 0.8% in July and have also lost ground in every month since the brief spurt we saw in February. Sporting goods stores sported a 1.9% plunge in July, the second outsized declines in the past three months. Web-based sales basically stagnated last month. What is called “retail control”, which is the headline excluding gasoline, building materials and autos, and goes into the consumer spending segment in the GDP data, fell 0.2% MoM and is flat or down in each of the past five months, and this was in the face of some pretty massive fiscal stimulus. So far in 3Q, retail control has declined at a 1.3% annual rate. So for the current quarter, GDP gets a boost from inventory building but 4Q could be flat or negative in the absence of a consumer pickup.”

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/08/peas-in-deflationary-pod.html

Dennis? Dennis?

Speaking specifically about Japan, it would be nice to hear some good news for their economy, since they’re into decade two of their economic slump.