Of course it will be approved. As if there is any doubt. The only thing which will kill production from the tar sands is a low price. That will only come from another financial panic.

If as citizens our banks winning global competition isn’t a priority it is priority one of our political elites. Banking and financial power are political power internationally. Thus the banks are not simply beneficiaries of partnership with power but actors used to advance US power in absolute and relative terms. Getting back to my reform statement, this makes it impossible for citizens to enter the picture.

Today self identified liberals and progressives all seem to be fans of Modern Monetary Theory. My take on this is that the central principal is that the Feds assets should no longer be considered as assets. In other words the money is truely ‘backed’ by nothing. Isn’t this a huge error?

Statement. Agree or disagree. The banking/financial/monetary system is so corrupt it is beyond reform. Or rather reform cannot be done without massive asset deflation.

What was the exact law change in early 09 which allowed the banks to forgo Mark To Market accounting? Could you or someone suggest to Senator Warren or someone to introduce a law to roll back that and establish real accounting.

We know it won’t pass but seeing the banks twist in knots explaining why 400 years of accounting shouldn’t apply to them might be fun

Bachmann is a complete fruitcake. The total package. It would be a shame if she loses her seat at the head of the Tea Party table.

It’s hard to begin with what is wrong here.

The Fed buying Treasuries is printing money, just the opposite of “We do this because we don’t want the government to print money. Creating money is left to the private sector” The Fed ‘prints’ the money to buy the Treasuries. The Treasury securities are then held and shown on the books as an asset which are understood to ‘back’ the money printed. Which is why the green stuff in your wallet says Federal Reserve Note. QE is no different than any other Open Market Operation except in degree, now huge, and in the not too distant past the Fed only purchased short term bills, never never ever longer term bonds and notes.

The private sector does not print money. It creates bank deposits by lending money. This is money creation sure but it isn’t ‘printing’ money.
Then there is “If the Fed is losing money on its portfolio, it may not be in a position to pay a dividend to the Treasury” The Fed sends a ‘dividend’ to the Treasury out of the interest the Treasury pays to the Fed on the Feds Treasury bonds. I know this is circular but that is how it works. The Fed almost never and will not now sell its bonds and thus lose money on its portfolio. They pretended they were going to do that in 10 but it was a ruse. If rates rise and they don’t sell they lose nothing, and they won’t sell. They will still then return the interest the Treasury pays them back to Treasury.

I am out of time here.

Pardon me but I don’t take much stock in Obama’s stated opinions of the Constitution anymore. To say the least I am no Constitutional scholar so Obama is far more qualified than I am but his opinions and or actions speak to simple expediency or convenience in constitutional matters now.
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So it’s OK with you if truckers hauling various dangerous chemicals are smoking dope before they hop in the truck? I know this is an extreme case but where do you draw the line. Being high on pot reduces the performance of most tasks in probably hard to quantify ways.

Listen I am playing devils advocate here. No opponent ever mentions this sort of worker performance and safety thing so it’s probably not a factor in their opposition. I think the main opposition comes from some deep suspicion that somehow pot is subversive to the existing social order and I think that is true. In a minor way maybe but true.

Until proven otherwise I believe that Federal legalization or decriminalization of Pot will never happen. That being because it is an hallucinogen or its effects are widely understood to fall under that definition, and so it is subversive to the normal social order. Well I can’t think of another way to put it. The word hallucinogen is fraught with complications I know and pot has other effects with other definitions.

I have always thought too that the difficulty in determining a users intoxication makes it extremely worrying to employers on many levels from safety to liability to of course productivity. It’s easy to say don’t be drunk at work and easy enough to detect someone who is. With pot it is I think impossible to determine if someone is stoned except in the extreme and only possible after the fact to determine if it is in their system, but that has nothing to do with their level of highness at some previous time, measured in an hour or two. This all plays into the final decision of the Feds to say no.

Currently most workplaces will test for pot in the system of anyone hurt on the job and this can limit their liability. What happens if it is legalized or quasi legalized like the states are doing. Can employers still limit their liability if a worker has a legal drug in their system?

Firstly all bubbles are driven by credit. Every single one ever has been the result of credit supplying the money, liquidity, into the favored asset.

Savings,bank savings that is, were the traditional source of money for banks to extend credit. However that is all so old fashioned. One, traditional bank lending went from being the main source of systematic credit to a secondary one, because of securitization. Now banks did the securitization but this is not traditional bank lending. Savings, traditional bank savings you should realize have been punished and discouraged by low rates for 20+ years. So first stocks became the new ‘savings’ then residential real estate. Bank deposits have shrunk over time as a percent of GDP and at any rate there are still too much of them as the $1.6 trillion of bank ‘excess reserves’ deposited with the Fed attest.

The ‘savings’ glut story was first fashioned with China as the source. This was stupid however. China wasn’t ‘saving’. Instead their central bank was returning the dollars we sent them. Which they first had gotten to a large extent by printing Yen and trading them for the dollars their domestic companies had been paid in. How the savings glut became associated with the US system is beyond me as we know traditional ‘savings’ had fallen for years. Besides which as I said, they being a source of domestic bank credit had an ever diminishing effect on overall system credit supply.

Holder is holding for the duration. The perfect intermediary between the permanent government establishment and the administration. He served his apprenticeship in the white shoes Beltway firms doing exactly the same thing and there is no better place to do it than where he is now.