FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Treasury Department’ Category

This guy doesn’t know when to quit:

NEW YORK (AP) — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday that if Republicans insist on passage of their budget plan as a condition for approving an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit, they will be responsible for the consequences.

Speaking to a New York audience, Geithner said that Republicans would bear responsibility for the first debt default in the nation’s history if they insist they will not vote for an increase in the $14.3 billion borrowing limit unless they win approval of a House Republican budget plan.

Your administration has known full-well what the debt limit has been for a very long time.  So has CONgress.  Both bodies were well aware that raising the limit is discretionary.

You seem to believe that playing the “Armageddon” card is something that can be done with impunity, mostly because your predecessor Hanky-Panky Paulson did so and Bernanke was a party to that.

The fact of the matter is that you seem to think that there’s no limit to the nation’s credit card.  You’re wrong.

Yes, I know, the bond market hasn’t cared (yet) about all this idiocy.  Then again it didn’t care over in Greece either, right up until it did.  Same with Iceland, Ireland and Portugal.

In fact, it seems to work the same way with most personal bankruptcies too.  People think they can push things a bit further, a bit more, they get another credit card, they play the balance-transfer rollover game, they feel the pressure and make some sort of maneuver and then breathe easier.

All this works for a little while, right up until it doesn’t in dramatic fashion.  And then, once again, we hear “nobody could have seen it coming.”

Well Timmy, lots of people saw this coming.  I did.  Hundreds of others who write on economics did.  The only people who “couldn’t see it coming” are those who are so arrogant as to think they can play Global Thermonuclear Financial Armageddon whenever their social spending and military adventure bonanza is threatened and who have their heads firmly buried up the bankster’s asses.

Let’s cut the crap: That’s exactly what this has been.

The jackbooted games are completely out of control.  The Federal Government has doubled in size since 2000.  Have we gotten twice as much service from the government?  No, we’ve gotten serviced instead.  And 2000 was a bad time in that regard as the government was dramatically overblown and overbloated at that point in time.

That was the last time I ran a mid-sized business and had to deal with that crap.  I will never do it again, so long as that “mass” is amassed against me.  And it will forever be, until the government shrinks.

The Feral Government is like a vampire that has gotten to weigh 500lbs.  It loves to suck the blood out of the nation and consume it.  Government employees like the TSA folks think that virtually rape-searching people with X-rays is “cool” and “for our safety” – including sticking their hands down a baby’s diaper.  What sort of sick bastard engages in that sort of act?  The fact is that it was never about safety – it’s entirely about shielding airlines from the risk of failing to secure their own aircraft and terminal facilities. We can’t have certain “favored” businesses risk failure when they blow it; rather, we have to make sure the boot of the government presses ever further on the people’s necks.

The vampire needs to be put on a severe diet.  Yeah, it will scream and holler, like every fat man does when told that he can’t gorge at McDonalds’ any more.  But just like the 400lb man that needs two seatbelt extensions if the government doesn’t cut this crap out the nation is going to have a heart attack and die.

I say chain the 500lb vapire to its chair and cut its rations by 50%.  When it screams, and it will, wear earmuffs and slam the door shut.  In short, Geithner, here’s my response to your threats: Pound sand.

We’re well-beyond the time where we should be neutering the government, not enabling it.  Emasculating the Federal Government with a nice, sharp knife, feeding its former pair of testes to the closest shark would do more to help this nation’s economy than anything else that could be undertaken.

Ronald Reagan used to talk about “rugged individualism.”  He was right in that regard, although he sure didn’t believe it when it came to certain personal choices.  He thought it was great if you wanted to drink a beer (boosts the economy) but smoking a doobie was good for 10 years in the slammer.  Like most statists he was a hypocrite when it came to that true “rugged individualism” and to add to his hypocrisy the “deal” he made on cutting taxes and slashing the size of government had no verification on the second half – which didn’t happen.  Instead he sat back, patted himself on the head and then watched the vampiric Feral Government pack on another 50lbs.

Well, Timmy, it’s time to go cold turkey.  You have enough tax revenue to avoid a default.  You can pay principal and interest, easily, with the tax money that comes in.  You then get to choose – do you send Granny her check (after you blew her contributions over the last 30 years in a puerile display of idiocy) or do you continue to fund the magical oil “reserves” that we “defend” with our $750 billion a year in defense expenditures rather than having a cogent and defensible energy policy?

Choices, choices.  They’re tough.

But default, in the legal sense, is in fact a choice, as the government’s income does exceed it’s actual lawfully mandated debt service.

Remember Timmy, Social Security and Medicare are not “obligations” – they’re entitlements.  Your very agency has argued this, successfully I might add, in court.  The Federal Reserve does not count those “obligations” as actual debts as a consequence.

In short Turbo, your “Armageddon Card” is frayed around the edges and doesn’t work any more.  Multiple attempts at a balanced Federal Budget have been circumvented and fraudulently avoided.  It is time to pull the rug out from under this game and throw the board on the floor; balancing the budget by refusing to raise the debt ceiling is the right way to do it, and now is the time.

The Market-Ticker

A couple of revealing charts from the Fed’s Flow of Funds data.   Both show net flows into Treasuries by creditor type and the Federal Government’s borrowing during each quarter.   Note, the quarterly data is annualized.

The first chart illustrates how QE2 flushed domestics out of Treasuries and effectively funded 63 percent of the budget deficit in Q4.  The Treasury is prohibited from directly selling bonds to the central bank, but effectively finances the government through POMO.

Given that a large portion of the Rest of World category are central banks recycling BOP surpluses,  it’s likely that 90 percent of the U.S. budget deficit in Q4 was funded by central banks.    You think this may have anything to do with what’s happening in the commodity markets?   That is, the central banks’ printing presses providing the fuel for speculators?

Furthermore, we ask: who is going to finance the U.S. budget deficit when QE2 ends, especially at a sub 3.50 percent 10-year Treasury rate?    Bill Gross knows!

(click here if charts are not observable)

Macromon

In this video, Chairman Ted Kaufman of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel introduces the COP December report “A Review of Treasury’s Foreclosure Prevention Programs.”  The full report is available online here.

After two years of such reports, all of which have been varying levels of fail, we are no further along in the process of solving this crisis.  Let us not forget that two years after the beginning of the Savings and Loan Crisis, we have more than 1,000 convictions for fraud.  These convictions weren’t just bit players, they were the executives, presidents, vice presidents and board members.

So far, this time, we have nothing.  It certainly isn’t due to lack of evidence of the massive fraud.  On FedUpUSA alone, we have the official expert testimony of William K. Black, Elizabeth Warren, Janet Tavakoli, Chris Peterson and Adam J. Levitin, just to name a few.  Across the country there have been numerous court rulings at the Appellate level and above which confirm the enormous fraud.

So we are left to ask:  Why have we not STOPPED THE LOOTING AND STARTED THE PROSECUTING?

Discussion (registration required to post)

The TBAC (Treasury Borrowing Advisory Report) is usually quite dry and boring.

Well, it is this time too.

Except for one small piece….

The presenting member stated that the market expects the Federal Reserve to purchase $100 billion per month, as well as $30 billion per month in MBS reinvestments.  This will total $1,560 billion in Treasury purchases over the next year.  The member stated, however, that market participants believe the Fed will leave the status of QE2 open ended, with purchases ultimately dependent on economic conditions.  The presenter also noted that the program should last six months to two years. 

Compare with:

That’s direct monetization of the entire Federal deficit.

I hope you like really expensive commodities and everything made from them….. if this is actually done, you’re going to get them in spades, way beyond what’s currently baked into the cake.

Heh Ben!  How ‘ya like this?  You know, you can see it coming, but by the time you do, it’s too damn late to do anything about it…