Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Proposed Legislation: IRS to Make Sure Americans Are Buying Health Insurance
January 4th, 2010Change. Via: USA Today: Internal Revenue Service agents already try to catch tax cheats and moonshiners. Under the proposed health care legislation, they would get another assignment: checking to see whether Americans have health insurance. The legislation would require most Americans to have health insurance and to prove it on their federal tax returns. Those […]
China Clamps Down on Rare Earth Elements Exports
January 2nd, 2010Via: Independent: Britain and other Western countries risk running out of supplies of certain highly sought-after rare metals that are vital to a host of green technologies, amid growing evidence that China, which has a monopoly on global production, is set to choke off exports of valuable compounds. Failure to secure alternative long-term sources of […]
Injecting Beef with Ammonia
January 2nd, 2010Must see image of the factory floor. It’s the Mordor of The Meatrix. Via: New York Times: Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia. The company, Beef Products Inc., had […]
U.S. to Lose $400 Billion on Fannie, Freddie
January 2nd, 2010Via: Bloomberg: Taxpayer losses from supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will top $400 billion, according to Peter Wallison, a former general counsel at the Treasury who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The situation is they are losing gobs of money, up to $400 billion in mortgages,” Wallison said in a […]
S&P 500’s First Decade Loss
January 1st, 2010In other news: Gold headed for its ninth increase in as many years. Via: Bloomberg: U.S. stocks fell this week, limiting an advance that sent the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to its biggest annual increase in six years. The 2009 rally failed to rescue investors from the worst return for any decade. Ford Motor […]
Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift From Barney Frank
December 30th, 2009Via: Bloomberg: I quickly discovered why members of Congress rarely read legislation like this. At 1,279 pages, the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” is a real slog. And yes, I plowed through all those pages. (Memo to Chairman Frank: “ystem” at line 14, page 258 is missing the first “s”.) The reading was […]
Bubbles, Bubbles and More Bubbles
December 30th, 2009Par for the course in Fiat Currency Hell. Via: AP: A string of exploding investment bubbles that started with the dot-coms and ended with mortgages and oil dominated the years from 2000 to 2009. And it looks like the next decade will be no different. It doesn’t seem to matter to many hedge fund traders […]
National Irish Bank Moves to Cashless Banking (Not The Onion)
December 29th, 2009What if you want more cash than whatever pissant amount they allow you to remove from the ATM each day? Oh, I almost forgot, only criminals need that much cash. Via: Irish Times: IT MIGHT sound like a contradiction in terms, but for the first time one of the main Irish consumer banks is moving […]
Balance of Terror: From Detroit City to Ghazi Khan
December 29th, 2009Via: Chris Floyd: A lone man on an airliner makes a badly botched attempt to ignite what appears to be some kind of hastily cobbled-together device that might or might not have caused some kind of unspecified but apparently non-crippling damage to the plane. The plane lands safely; no one is killed. Yet the reverberations […]
Small-Business Bankruptcies Rise 81% in California
December 28th, 2009Via: Los Angeles Times: With credit tight and consumers still pinching their pennies, many business owners find they can’t go on. The Obama administration’s new plan to give a boost to small businesses reflects continued trouble in that sector, which is facing new failures even as much of the nation’s economy is stabilizing. As credit […]
