Traders have grown increasingly fearful in recent weeks that the powerful surge in the three major U.S. stock indices – one of the strongest in history – may not have been justified because of an ongoing economic recovery that’s not as strong as originally believed.

“There’s no question in my mind that the economy is improving,” Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors, told The Associated Press on Friday. “But investors are betting on some sideways consolidation rather than a continuation of a sharp spike in share prices.”

All the major indexes closed the week down for the first time since the week of May 11. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 3%, theStandard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 2.6%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index 1.7%.

Stocks returned to the whipsaw trading pattern investors had grown wearily accustomed to in the months before the rally got under way.

Stocks fell early in the week as a handful of weak economic reports – including news that industrial production had fallen for the seventh straight month – contradicted other reports that seemed to depict a gradual improvement in the American economy.

But some modestly upbeat economic reports sent U.S. share prices up a bit on Thursday; one report demonstrated that the overall number of people drawing unemployment benefits fell last week for the first time since the start of January.

But it wasn’t until stocks finished the day mixed on Friday – with financial, retail and tech shares gaining, while energy and utility shares dropped – that the three major indices finished with their first weekly loss since the start of May.

Last week was a loss. And the week before the three key indices each rose less than 1%.

“It’s not going to be a one-way ride,” Keith Walter, portfolio manager of Artio Global Equity Fund, told reporters.

Since periods of powerful market overperformance are usually followed by a period of sharp underperformance, institutional players have been looking for a down week.  Usually, a 40% surge like the one seen in the S&P 500 index takes years to develop, not months.

But here’s the question: Does last week’s market pullback have more to go, or can it still move higher after two consecutive weeks of sideways trading?
The conventional wisdom is calling for a stretch of choppy trading that will last through the summer, a period during which there’s low volume, until July when Corporate America begins announcing second-quarter earnings.

Market Matters

As the Dow finished the week in the “red,” it also turns out that its push into positive territory for the year was relatively short-lived.  Just one trading session beyond the index’s surge into the “black,” traders surveyed the economic landscape, evaluated the new regulatory environment, reconsidered the ballooning deficit (not even including health care) and chose to book some profits.  While the other major indexes remain profitable year-to-date, many investors believe the markets stand at a crossroad as they attempt to determine whether the recent move has been:

• A mere blip on the radar screen, amid a much-longer bear market.
• A much-too-fast run-up for a rebounding economy that that still faces a plethora of challenges.
• The start of a new bull market that simply is taking a week off to digest all the “euphoric” news.

The analysts, TV pundits, and bloggers maintain no shortages of views about the markets’ future direction.  Only time will tell.

As expected, major financial institutions rushed to pay back $68 billion in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money and get out from under the strong arm of the government.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS), and Morgan Stanley(NYSE: MS) highlighted the list, while Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC), and Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC)are among those still seeking Uncle Sam’ approval for every action.
Meanwhile, Standard & Poor’s downgraded 18 related institutions, including a few that paid back the bailout money - BB&T Corp. (NYSE:BBT) and U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB) – and warned about the industry’s future

The Obama administration revealed plans for the most significant financial regulatory overhaul since the Great Depression.  The proposal expands the oversight role of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and includes higher capital and liquidity requirements, stricter reviews over hedge funds and certain derivative products, and the creation of a new consumer protection agency.  U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner detailed the plan before the Senate and was met with mixed (but predictable) reactions…Republicans thought it was excessive, while Dems felt it didn’t go far enough.

If both sides dislike it equally, perhaps it’s a good plan?

Volatility returns to the markets as the VIX (Chicago Board Option Exchange Volatility Index) surged past the critical 30 mark early in the week, a sign generally associated with stock-market pessimism.  Bonds continued their ongoing roller-coaster ride as some fixed-income investors remained concerned about the global demand for U.S. debt, while others turned to the asset class as a flight-to-quality from riskier securities.

The worries continued as both China and Japan reportedly cut back their treasury holdings in April, a worrisome development considering the upcoming Treasury auctions will add a record $104 billion of government securities to the Street.

Oil hovered around the $70 a barrel level and gas prices increased for 52 straight days as consumers began to feel the pinch just in time for the summer holiday travel season.  Options expiration from “quadruple-witching Friday” brought additional volatility as each major equity index gave back some ground for the week on less-than-favorable reports from the likes of Best Buy Co. (NYSE: BBY) and FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX).

Market/ Index	Year Close (2008)	Qtr Close (03/31/09)	Previous Week (06/12/09)	Current Week (06/19/09)	YTD Change
Dow Jones Industrial	8,776.39	7,608.92	8,799.26	8,539.73	-2.70%
NASDAQ	1,577.03	1,528.59	1,858.80	1,827.47	+15.88%
S&P 500	903.25	797.87	946.21	921.23	+1.99%
Russell 2000	499.45	422.75	526.84	512.72	+2.66%
Global Dow	1526.21	1347.38	1,694.76	1,633.70	+7.04%
Fed Funds	0.25%	0.25%	0.25%	0.25%	0 bps
10 yr Treasury (Yield)	2.24%	2.68%	3.79%	3.79%	+155 bps

Economically Speaking

While U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will be gaining enhanced powers under the federal financial system makeover, he must be wondering whether he will be around to experience them.  Despite the unprecedented challenges he has faced over the past few years, U.S. President Barack Obama has been tightlipped about whether he will reappoint Bernanke for another term when the central bank chairman’s current stint expires in January.

“Ben Bernanke has handled his position extraordinarily well under extraordinary circumstances…but I’m not going to make news on that right now,” President Obama said.

Some Fed watchers believe that President Obama has Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and present National Economic Council chairman, in mind for the position.

On the economic front, inflation data highlighted the week’s releases as both producer price index (PPI) and the consumer price index (CPI) for May were reported as below expectations.  While certain naysayers pressed forward on the scary “deflation” argument, other naysayers point to the rapid rise in energy prices as proof that the dreaded “I” word is merely lurking on the horizon.

For now, however, inflation is not considered “Public Enemy No. 1″ and economists will focus on housing, labor, and manufacturing for more signs of economic stability.

Turning to housing, new construction climbed by its largest amount in three months and even building permits jumped in May as prospects for the future look more promising.  Bear in mind, however, homebuilding activity still remains more than 45% below last year’s levels.

Industrial production fell more than 1% in May as automakers Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors Corp. (OTC: GMGMQ) continued shutting down plants and limiting production as they initiated their restructuring plans.  While initial jobless claims actually increased slightly in its most recent weekly release, total insurance claims actually fell for the first time in five months.  Still, the labor market remains the primary concern as the economy begins to show some signs of improvement.

On that note, the leading economic indicators (LEI), an index thought to forecast economic activity for the next three to six months, experienced its best showing since March 2004.

Weekly Economic Calendar

Source:  Market Stumble Heightens Worries That Economic Rebound May Not Be That Strong

This dismantling of the so-called “New Federalism” will be readily apparent again this week as the federal government is once again at the forefront of the most-closely watched  crisis-fighting initiatives at hand: With Congress pushing forward on an $827 billion stimulus plan and the Treasury Department planning to unveil its new banking bailout blueprint on Tuesday, economists and other experts say the federal government is taking its biggest role in the economy in a generation.

States that once pushed away from the federal government as part of the New Federalism are now essentially begging it for financial support, banks and Big Business that once viewed near-total deregulation as Corporate America’s Holy Grail are now seeking federal financial aid and new regulatory protections (and in many cases are becoming actual business partners with the government), and individuals are asking for tax relief.

Alan Viard, a Bush administration economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, may well epitomize this reversal of thought: He’s one of the economists who initially rejected the need for a fiscal stimulus, stating that the right size for a government spending bill was “probably zero,” believing that federal interest rate cuts and existing unemployment benefits would be enough to do the trick. But he now sees the package as necessary.

“Things have gotten so bad so quickly,” Viard told The Washington Post. “We have now lost 3.6 million jobs, a stunning loss. But what’s more horrifying is that half that loss has occurred in the last three months. This is a severe recession.”

The exact shape and size of the package matters less than the timing, and any delay will be very damaging, economists say.

“Most of the things in the package, the big dollar amounts, are things that are pretty quick stimulus and need to be done,” Alice Rivlin, who was former president Bill Clinton’s budget director and a critic of aspects of the proposed stimulus, told The Post. “Is it a perfect package? Of course not. But we’re past that. Let’s just do it.”

Signs of the Stimulus

The U.S. Senate late Friday reached agreement on the estimated $827 billion stimulus bill, setting the stage for what’s expected to be some tough negotiations with the House of Representatives over tens of billions of dollars in aid to states and local governments, tax provisions, and programs focusing on education, health and renewable energy.

Congress is pushing hard to complete the legislation this week. But that figures to be a challenge. The House bill was passed without any Republican support, while the Senate version passed Friday night between Democrats and three moderate Republicans.

During a rare floor session on Saturday, Republican opponents continued to criticize the entire stimulus proposal – even though they clearly don’t have the votes to stop it. The bill is expected to be passed in the next few days.

The price tag for the Senate plan is only slightly more than the $820 billion measure adopted by the House late last month. Both plans seek to resuscitate the U.S. economy with similar one-two punch strategies:

• Fast-acting tax cuts designed to jump-start consumer and business spending.
• And longer-term – albeit slower-acting – spending on public works programs and other projects that are projected to create more than 3 million jobs.

Despite these seemingly similar philosophies, the two plans rely on approaches that are very different. The higher-priced House bill emphasizes help to states and municipalities that would otherwise be facing major cuts in services and layoffs of public employees, while the Senate slashed $40 billion of that kind of funding from its version of the bill.

The Senate plan focuses more on tax cuts, lowers a proposed increase in food stamps and provides health-care subsidies for the unemployed that are much less generous than the House version. The Senate plan also creates $30 billion in tax incentives to encourage Americans to buy homes and cars within the next year.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the emerging Senate cuts to the stimulus program “very damaging” and that she was “very much opposed to them.” But after the Senate reached a deal, Pelosi expressed resolve to complete the legislation in the days ahead.

U.S. President Barack Obama has made the economic recovery effort the centerpiece of his agenda since even before he officially took office. But President Obama now intends to get much more involved, and much more aggressive: He will conduct a “town-hall-style” meeting in Indiana today (Monday), followed by a formal “prime time” White House news conference – the first of his term – tonight.

The president will then pitch the plan again in Florida tomorrow (Tuesday) and again in Virginia on Wednesday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said final passage of the Senate bill is expected Thursday, after which congressional leaders say they will hurry to get the House and Senate versions into conference with the hope that a passed bill can be sent to the White House by the end of week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Banking Plan Overhaul Unveiling Tomorrow (Tuesday)

Busy new U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner last week promised that the Obama administration would unveil its new blueprint for rescuing the U.S. banking system today. Over the weekend, however, the administration said the rollout would be delayed until Tuesday, so that the focus could remain on passage of the stimulus package, Bloomberg News reported.

But that doesn’t mean the banking bailout plan isn’t key.

According to a recent analysis, the Obama administration has a multi-pronged strategy for quelling the financial crisis, including:

• A program to insure banks against extreme losses on mortgages and other loans.
• A new round of investments in banks.
• Help for homeowners facing possible foreclosure.
• The broadening of a U.S. Federal Reserve program to ramp up lending.
• The Treasury Department could also look at purchasing toxic assets from banks – possibly with the aid of private-sector financing.

This would represent an overhaul of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) initiated by the Bush administration. As the name implies, TARP was initially concerned with buying troubled assets – but it quickly evolved into a direct-government investment into the banks.

This new Obama plan reflects Geithner’s personally held view of how governments should respond to financial crises. Geithner believes all available financial tools should be used – and used aggressively. Any such effort would include direct efforts to deal with the financial sector’s massive losses, since that would help renew public confidence in the financial system.

Too small a government response during a crisis poses more risk than too much response, he said during his confirmation hearing.

Many of the details of what Geithner will announce remained in flux, although the broad outlines were becoming clear, published reports state. But one thing is certain: Even the ideas that are continuations of the initiatives started by former Treasury Secretary Henry M. “Hank” Paulson Jr. will have a unique Geithner twist.

One example: The government will almost certainly continue to invest in banks. But past investments consisted of a form of “preferred stock” that granted the federal government no say in how the bank was run, or how the money would be used.

As a Money Morning investigation revealed, that lack of control allowed banks to use taxpayer-provided TARP money as financing for buyouts. And then the banks refused to detail how they spent the money – and why not? They weren’t required to.

Under the new plan, there will still likely be new government investments in banks. But Geithner will likely call for those new investments to be convertible into common stock after some fixed period of time, perhaps seven years. If the banks are unable to raise private capital in that span, government control would escalate.

Banks receiving money also will probably have to report to the government and to the public, and the government is likely to insist that the new capital be used to expand lending.

Geithner has also been looking for a way to bring back the original TARP concept, which Congress passed on Oct. 3. Paulson pitched the plan to Congress as a program to buy troubled assets off of banks’ books, then shifted the plan and opted to invest directly into the banks instead.

Paulson’s chief worry – and the reason that he changed direction – was that asset purchases would involve too many technical complications, meaning it would take too long to enact. And that delay could be costly to a system where banks were teetering on the precipice of failure.

After struggling with those same issues, Geithner and his team appear to have settled on an approach that amounts to financial triage, meant to give investors confidence that banks will not encounter vast new losses so that they are willing to invest private money, The Post reported.

In addition to buying bad assets, the Fed and Treasury in the next few weeks are expected to expand a program that should jump-start lending outside the banking system. In November, the agencies launched a program – the “Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility” – that would devote $200 billion for credit card, auto, student and small-business loans.

That program will be extended to include residential real-estate mortgages and into the commercial real estate sector. Geithner may also announce an initiative that would inject government money into companies known as mono-line insurers. These firms are key players for states and municipalities when it comes time for those state and local government bodies to borrow money. With the implosion of the housing bubble, and the subsequent implosion of the commercial real estate business, mortgage-related losses by the insurers have made it harder for states to issue the municipal bonds that would help them ride out the recession without aggressive tax increases or budget cuts.

Geithner is likely to roll out a plan, worth $50 billion to $100 billion, to encourage the modification of mortgages for homeowners who would otherwise likely face foreclosure. It could be based loosely on a strategy for foreclosure relief engineered by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) Chairman Sheila C. Bair, when the FDIC took control of the failed bank IndyMac Bancorp Inc. (IDMCQ) last year.

Market Matters

On the corporate front, United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) posted a profit (though revenue declined) and then announced new cost-cutting measures.  Motorola Inc. (MOT), The Walt Disney Co. (DIS), Time Warner Inc. (TWX), and Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) reported disappointing results.  Visa Inc’s (V) earnings jumped by 35%, though management warned of tougher times ahead.

Bailout plan recipients have tried to cut back excessive spending (and the associated bad PR) as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (Miami) and Well Fargo & Co. (WFC) (Las Vegas) canceled huge boondoggles. Bank of America Corp. (BAC) is selling off corporate jets, and Citigroup Inc. (C) may be attempting to get out of the $400 million marketing deal with the New York Mets.

C-SPAN must be enjoying stellar ratings as investors seem obsessed with the inner-workings of Congress and their debates on the stimulus and bailout.  The markets disregarded much of the dire earnings and economic data (terrible unemployment report…see below) and focused on the newfound optimism that politicos can work together to get the country moving in the right direction.

Economically Speaking

Just how long until a stimulus package starts creating jobs?  That answer can’t come soon enough for the almost 600,000 people who moved to the unemployment line in January, the most devastating month for job losses since 1974.  The unemployment rate climbed to 7.6%, forcing many economists to (upwardly) revise their projections for the rest of the year (and beyond).

Since the recession “officially” began in December 2007, the country has lost more than 3.6 million jobs, with most of the losses coming in the past three months.  The rest of the data released during the week did little to contradict the lousy unemployment picture.  Factory orders fell for the fifth straight month and the ISM index revealed that purchasing managers still look for contraction in the manufacturing sector. Though the services sector showed a slight rebound in its ISM survey, the index reported a fourth consecutive month of declining activity.  Residential construction spending experienced its worst annual decline ever recorded (since 1993), though optimists are hopeful that a stimulus package that focuses on infrastructure growth will prompt a renewal in non-residential building.

With the Fed stuck looking for creative ways to get involved (now that the benchmark Federal Fund rate stands at about 0%), its international counterparts took action (or inaction) of their own. The Bank of England (BOE) cuts its primary lending rate to a record low 1.0%, while the European Central Bank chose to leave its rate unchanged (for now) at 2.0%.

Weekly Economic Calendar

Source: As Stimulus-Package Debate Continues in Congress, New-Look Bank Bailout Plan is Set to Debut This Week

After five straight days of losses, Wall Street managed to steady itself yesterday. The Dow rose only 12 measly points; but that was a relief for most investors.

Oil held steady too – at $35. And gold lost a dollar, to drop to $807.

The big question is a question of faith. How much faith do you have in the feds? They aim to get inflation fired up. They’ve got the fire-starters. They’ve got the matches. They’ve doused on the gasoline. But so far, the whole world economy is still waiting…shivering…hoping for a spark.

Yesterday, Congress released another $350 billion in bailout funds. And Barack Obama and the democrats announced their own bailout/stimulus program – with an $825 billion price tag.

Christmas is over…but the Obama plan is keeping spirits bright around the capitol. Never in history have the feds had so much in money to share out…money they haven’t even stolen yet.

The program includes “huge increases in federal spending on education, aid to states for Medicaid costs, temporary increases in unemployment benefits and a vast array of public works project to create jobs,” reports the International Herald Tribune.

In Europe, the ECB cut rates. The IHT reports on that to

“Alarmed by the rapid economic downturn, the European Central Bank on Thursday lowered its benchmark interest rate by half a point to 2%, and hinted that the rate would fall further from what is already the lowest level ever.”

“The data surprised everybody about how negative it turned out…” said an economist watching the ECB.

But will all this extra kindling be enough to get a blaze going? How much faith do you have, dear reader?

“Economic conditions around the world are horrible and will get far worse in 2009 despite all the fiscal and monetary measures that are now being implemented in order to ’save’ the system,” writes old friend Marc Faber. “In fact, I believe that in the US and stimulus package and the various bailouts engineered by the Fed and the Treasury will make matters far worse than if the free markets had been left alone to make the necessary adjustments.”

The feds might manage to get a blaze going, but it won’t necessarily be the nice little, crackling fireplace treasure they’re hoping for. The system of debt-addled investors and homeowners is over. All the feds can do is to blow up a new bubble – in public debt.

What effect that will have on the economy…or on investment markets…no one knows. Never before has the world’s reserve currency been purely paper. And never before have its custodians been so eager to set it alight.

*** What’s normal?

Looking at the long sweep of the stock market, we notice that there’s nothing unusual about today’s prices. Au contraire, they are more ‘normal’ than prices were a year ago.

Colleague Simone Wapler handed us a chart of the French stock market going back to 1900. With prices adjusted for inflation, what we see looks like the Alps. There are peaks and valleys. The pattern is irregular…apparently unpredictable. But there’s no mountain with only one side. Every time prices went up…they went back down.

The CAC 40 rose during the boom years of the ’20s…and crashing during the ’30s. Curiously, it rose to a new peak during the German Occupation in the ’40s and fell in the ’50s. The next peak came in the de Gaulle years, in the early ’60s. Then, price fell for the next 20 years. As in the United States, the most recent bull market began in ‘82 and collapsed last year. But even after the recent rout in share prices, stocks in France are only back to their average levels. The numbers show that an investor who bought shares in 1900 could have held them for the next 108 years and still not have made a penny in capital gains.

Normally, you do not make money from rising share prices. You make money from dividends.

*** Simone used to be an aeronautical engineer; she worked on the development of the Airbus – the plane that just went down in the Hudson River.

“It’s safer for them to do a crash landing on water,” she explained. “Less of a risk of fire. And it takes a while for them to sink…so you have time to get out.

“When you land or take off, there is always the risk of birds getting in your engines. When I was at Airbus, we conducted extensive tests…in which we threw chickens into the turbine engines to see how many they could take. They had to be free-range chickens…the others are too soft. Trouble with birds is that they tend to flock together… but I don’t remember how many chickens an Airbus turbine can handle before it stalls.”

*** “Ford chief doubts a return to old times,” says the Financial Times.

This week, the annual Detroit Auto show is underway. America’s automakers are sitting at the wheels of their new electric/hybrid cars…and driving into the future.

It used to be said, “What was good for GM (NYSE:GM)hat is bad for GM is also bad for America.

We have vowed to focus on the bright side this year, so we will look at the half of this glass that has the water in it. There, we find an explosion of invention and innovation in the auto business.

Detroit dominated the auto world after WWII with a simple idea about what a car should be – a piston engine attached to a standard drive train. For the next 50 years, the basic plan didn’t change very much. Detroit designers added tail fins…and then withdrew them. Engineers figured out automatic transmissions, power steering and air-conditioning. The French added radial tires and front wheel drive. But neither the car not the business model was substantially altered.

But all of a sudden, America’s big automakers are going broke – and neither the auto business nor the auto is the same. Now, autos are being made with new materials…new engineering and a new power plant. Now, the key to the auto of the future is no longer the internal combustion engine; according to the press, it’s the battery.

This is what happens to any business…or any society. Detroit can make big SUVS, trucks and cars – all based on the post-war model. But what does it know about composite materials and batteries? Not that it is impossible for it to compete. But it has a huge disadvantage – while newer, lower-cost competitors start fresh and fit…Detroit enters the race with a 2-ton piece of junk on its back. It has generations of mechanical engineers for whom it must provide pensions…an army of bolt tighteners and metalworkers it must rehabilitate…acres full of manufacturing equipment suitable for making 20th century cars and trucks.

Meanwhile, a company in China is producing an electric car that it says will go 250 miles without a recharge. The company is not an automaker at all – it’s a company that makes batteries for cell phones.

Yes, dear reader, that’s the way the world works. Just when you get something figured out, the facts change. Then, you find yourself no longer at the front of the race…but dragging along at the end. All that you learned and put in place is no longer an advantage, it’s a liability.

And yes, as Detroit goes…so goes the United States of America. Cock of the walk in the 20th century, it now finds its infrastructure…its financing…and its training all inadequate or inappropriate for the challenges of the 21st century.

When Ben Bernanke gave his speech to the London School of Economics on Tuesday, our reporter was on the scene. Terry Easton put a tough question to America’s central banker: aren’t your interventions just making the situation worse, he wanted to know.

Amid the blah…blah…blah…of Bernanke’s response was this:

“The tendency of financial systems to boom and bust …is a very long-standing problem… but I think it’s very important for us to try to put out the fire…then you think about the fire code.”

In his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argued that all societies – like all organisms – are doomed. Tainter studied ancient Rome as well as the Mayan civilization. He noticed that problems always blaze up. Each one – whether climatic, political or economic – rings the firehall bell. And each solution – and readers may substitute the word “bailout” for solution – brings more challenges and takes more resources. Finally, the available resources are worn out.

Tainter observes that when the costs become high enough, people seem to give up. By the end of Roman era, for example, the burdens of empire were so heavy that people sold themselves into slavery to get free of them. So many people did so at one point that the authorities had to come up with another solution; they outlawed the practice. Henceforth, Roman citizens were required by law to remain free!

Another philosopher, Giambattista Vico, writing in the 18th century, put the beginning of the decline of Rome roughly at the time of the Great Fire during Nero’s reign. Nero, partly to pay for his post-fire reforms and reconstruction, began taking the gold and silver out of the coins. All civilizations go through three stages, Vico said – divine, heroic, and human. The divine period is ruled by the gods. The heroic period is adorned with victories and statues. Then, comes the human era. (Here, we permit ourselves to add a footnote to Vico’s oeuvre: the coin of the realm in early periods is the gods’ money – gold. Later, people switch to money of their own invention – the kind of money you make from trees.) This last stage, says Vico, is when popular democracy arises, along with rational thinking and what Vico delightfully calls the “barbarie della reflessione” [the barbarism of reflection]. In earlier eras, people do what their gods and leaders ask of them. In the final era, they ask, “what’s in it for me?”

Even as late as the early ’60s, John F. Kennedy could still appeal to heroic urge without drawing a laugh. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he said in his inaugural address, “ask what you can do for your country.”

But 11 years later, Richard Nixon, like Nero before him, began the process of debasing the country’s money. That was a solution too; the United States had spent too much. Nixon could worry about the fire code later. First he opened up with the fire hose; he defaulted on America’s promise to exchange dollars for gold at the statutory rate.

Barack Obama tried a Kennedyesque appeal to civic high-mindedness last week. We need to “insist that the first question each of us asks isn’t ‘what’s good for me’ but ‘what’s good for the country my children will inherit,’” said the president-elect. But now, like Doric columns in a trailer park, the words are ornamental, not structural. They are the homage that one age pays to a better one.

We are in the 21st century now. Barbarous reflections rise up like swamp gas. The whole place stinks of them. Bernanke and Obama offer solutions. But their plans to save the world from a correction are little more than a swindle. They offer to bail out the mistakes of one generation with trillions of dollars’ worth of debt laid onto the next.

“Regarding the current financial meltdown,” writes Rony Teitelbaum, “it is very clear that two main factors underlie the political reactions to the crisis, the first being pressure originating from ties between the financial and the political elect, manifested by taxpayer bailouts of large institutions that continue to deliver bonuses to the executives and donate to political campaigns. For those of us who are not blind, these are clear signs of political corruption which would have made the worst Roman emperor blush. The second factor is political pressure originating from the mass public. The kind of solutions offered so far, and I may add which were received with very warm enthusiasm, were tax rebates and gasoline tax holidays. These are actions aimed at a public who “impatiently expected quick and obvious results,” to quote Cary’s description of Roman society in AD300. (A History of Rome).”

Circa 2009, there is hardly a soul in the entire world who has not been corrupted by the barbarie della reflessione of the late imperial period. Both patricians and plebes are for bailouts. Both business and labor back stimulus programs. The taxpayers and the politicians who rule them are of one mind. Liberal, conservative, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat all speak with a single voice: ‘Screw the next generation!”

The golden age is over, in other words. In the space of 40 years it passed from gold, to silver, to paper…and is now somewhere between plastic and navel lint.

Source: The Lint Age

• AT&T Inc. (T) said it would scale back 12,000 jobs, about 4% of its workforce, between now and the end of 2009 to fight “economic pressures, a changing business mix and a more streamlined organizational structure.” It will also take a severance charge of nearly $600 million for the fourth quarter, Reuters reported.

• Credit Suisse Group AG (ADR: CS) will scale back its workforce, eliminating 5,300 workers, or about 11% of its workforce. Switzerland’s second-largest bank will also nix bonuses for its top executives, Bloomberg reported.

• Capital One Financial Corp. (COF) said it will acquire privately-held Chevy Chase Bank for $520 million in cash and stock, The Associated Press reported. Bethesda, Md.-based Chevy Chase Bank has branches primarily in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., and has about $11 billion in deposits.

• Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner said the government will offer 13.2 billion pesos ($3.9 billion) for an economic stimulus. The plan seeks to reduce loan costs to manufacturers, help finance new auto purchases and reduce export taxes on corn and wheat, Bloomberg reported.

• The number of U.S. workers on unemployment benefits rolls soared to 4.09 million last month, the highest level in 26 years, according to the Labor Department. The four-week moving average of initial claims, a less volatile measure, climbed to 524,500, also the highest since 1982.

• E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. (DD) said yesterday (Thursday) that it will not turn a profit in the fourth quarter, and consequently, will be forced to cut 2,500 jobs and release 4,000 contractors by the end of this year. “We expect 2009 to be a very challenging year,” said DuPont chief financial officer Jeff Keefer.

• Williams-Sonoma Inc. (WSM) beat analysts’ third-quarter expectations, but the company’s revenue still fell 16% from a year ago, to  $752.1 million. The company lost $11 million, or 10 cents a share, for the in the three months ended November 2, compared with a profit of $27.1 million, or 25 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts’ average forecast was a loss of 11 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

• Crude oil prices fell more than 5% yesterday (Thursday) as employment and manufacturing data indicated the U.S. recession would be severe. Light, sweet crude for January delivery fell $2.49 to settle at $44.30 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Source: Global Investing Roundups, Friday, December 5th, 2008

The nomination of Geithner to succeed current U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. was leaked over the weekend, and was reported by Money Morning yesterday.

Geithner (pronounced: GITE-ner) obtained a Master of Arts degree in International Economics and East Asian Studies from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 1985. He also has studied Japanese and Chinese and has lived in present-day Zimbabwe, India, Thailand and China.

As the nation’s top financial authority, Geithner will inherit oversight of the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout for Wall Street and a U.S. economy struggling with recession.

He will be flanked by former Treasury chief Lawrence Summers, who will head Obama’s National Economic Council. Analysts say this appointment puts Summers in line to succeed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve in 2010.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who ran against Obama in the Democratic primary, will take over the Commerce Department, and Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag will head the Office of Management and Budget.

In other key appointments, economist Christina Romer will be the director of his Council of Economic Advisors, which provides economic analysis and advice to the president, and Melody Barnes will be the director of his Domestic Policy Council (DPC). Before being tapped by Obama, Barnes was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress.

“I’ve sought leaders who could offer both sound judgment and fresh thinking, both a depth of experience and a wealth of bold, new ideas, and most of all who share my fundamental belief that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street without a thriving Main Street,” Obama said at a press conference in Chicago.

Obama’s economic team will be faced with the grand task of restoring confidence to Americas stricken financial sector, and may have to wrestle the U.S. economy out of its worst downturn in decades. President-elect Obama made it clear that the first priority for he and his team will be to pass an economic stimulus package.

“The main thing right now is to get this economic recovery package on the road, to get money in the pockets of the middle class, to get these projects going, to get America working again,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist, said in an interview with Fox News Sunday. “That’s where we’re going to be focused in January.”

Obama’s 2009 Stimulus

Obama and his aides remain vague on exactly what that package will look like. Over the weekend, however, the incoming president outlined a plan to create or save 2.5 million jobs by 2011.

“It will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jump-start job creation,” Obama said of the plan. “We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels.”

Tax cuts will also be a critical fixture in the stimulus. And they’d be preferable to rebates because they would have a more immediate impact on the economy. Of course, the question is who will receive those tax benefits.

Obama has repeatedly sounded calls for middle-class tax relief, but he also hinted that he might refrain from repealing tax cuts initiated by President George W. Bush that favored the wealthy – those who make more than $250,000 a year.

Other measures that Obama has proposed in the past include:

• Suspending penalties and income tax on early withdrawals from IRA and 401(k) accounts.
• Offering a temporary tax credit of $3,000 to companies for each new full-time employee hired in the United States.
• Extending unemployment benefits by a period of 13 weeks and temporarily suspending income taxes on those benefits.
• Requiring a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures for homeowners.

Clinton Stretch, a tax principal at accounting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP, told Bloomberg that two other Obama tax proposals could be good candidates for inclusion in a stimulus package.
The first is Obama’s “Make Work Pay” tax credit, which would provide a partial Social Security payroll tax holiday for most taxpayers, worth up to $500 for individuals and $1,000 for married couples.

The second would be an extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which favors low-income workers.

Of course, the pending stimulus package could include any of these measures, or none at all. The only certainty is that the stimulus will be costly. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, said the amount set aside for a new stimulus package could equal or surpass the $700 billion designated for the TARP fund, more than half of which has been used to shore up U.S. banks and insurer American International Group Inc. (AIG).

Martin Baily, who was the White House’s chief economist under President Bill Clinton, told Bloomberg that the stimulus could exceed $1.2 trillion. That would dwarf the $175 billion package Obama proposed just one month ago, and even the $168 billion tax-break stimulus package President Bush issued earlier this year.

“We’re out with the dithering, we’re in with a bang,” Austan Goolsbee, a senior Obama economic adviser, said on CBS’ Meet the Press.

Source: Obama Unveils Economic Team, Plans 2009 Stimulus Package

After growing 2.8% in the second quarter of the year, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 0.3% during the three months ended Sept. 30. Although investments by businesses dropped 1%, a consumer-spending cutback was the clear culprit: The 3.1% decline was the first such retreat in 17 years and was the biggest pullback in 28. And since consumer spending is the biggest component of GDP – accounting for as much as 70% of economic activity – there was no escape.

“We look at consumers being at 70% of growth and now they’re the engine of decline,” Jeoff Hall, chief U.S. economist for Thomson Reuters-IFR Markets, told CNNMoney.

Third-quarter spending fell 3.2% and shaved 2.25 percentage points off of GDP growth. Purchases of durable goods plummeted 14.1% in the quarter, and spending on non-durable goods dropped 6.4%. Services spending rose 0.6%.

Mounting job losses and shrinking incomes are expected to lead the country even deeper into recession in the New Year. The GDP report showed that disposable personal income dropped at a rate of 8.7% in the third quarter – the steepest decline since that component was first tracked in 1947.

At 479,000, the number of U.S. workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits stagnated last week, but remained above the average for the entire 2001 recession. The four-week average of new claims, a less volatile measure, fell for a second straight week, but a level of more than 400,000 is consistent with the country’s last two recessions.

“There can be no question that the labor market is deteriorating; the only issue is the speed of the decline and the eventual peak in unemployment,” Ian Shepherdson, economist at High Frequency Economics, wrote in a note to clients.

Shepherdson estimates that the national unemployment rate, which currently stands at 6.1%, could reach 8.5% next year.

“This is the first of a run of negative GDP numbers; the economy is in recession,” Shepherdson said.

With home prices caught in a downward spiral and foreclosure rates still near record highs, the deteriorating job market will put even more pressure on the American consumer – even if the government’s $700 billion financial bailout package and the U.S. Federal Reserve’s rate cuts restore some functionality to the battered credit markets.

“Given the scope of job losses seen thus far and still to come, sagging wage gains, restrictive credit conditions, and the ongoing housing market correction, consumer spending is on course for an even larger decline,” Richard Moody, chief economist at Mission Residential, told USA Today. Moody says the negative 0.3% GDP estimate will be subject to downward revisions in the months to come, meaning the economy won’t recover until the second half of 2009.

“The crisis really kicked up in late September,” Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. (ADR: BCS) in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We’re going to be looking at a very unfriendly GDP number in the fourth quarter, with a drop of 2% to 4%.”

Swimming Against the Tide of Recession

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut its benchmark Federal Funds rate to 1% Wednesday, hoping the move would further unfreeze lending and also lessen the financial fallout wrought by the credit crisis. It marked the ninth time the central bank has lowered rates since September 2007.

The Fed has also loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to banks through a new lending program and earlier this week began loaning money directly to major businesses by purchasing commercial paper.

The People’s Bank of China also cut its key interest rate Wednesday, sending that lending benchmark from 6.93% down to 6.66%.  That was the third time China cut rates in the past two months.

China’s economy registered a solid GDP expansion of 9% in the third quarter – a noticeable step down from the torrid 11.9% pace set in 2007.

Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso yesterday (Thursday) unveiled a $50 billion economic stimulus package, the nation’s second in as many months.

Roughly $20 billion will go to handouts, distributed evenly, with the average payout of $608 per family of four, The Financial Times reported. Tax breaks on mortgages will also be increased and highway tolls reduced. The package also includes more than $200 billion in government loan guarantees for small and medium-sized businesses.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is expected to reduce interest rates today (Friday), as well. And the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of England are expected to follow suit next week.

“A harsh storm seen only once in 100 years is raging,” Aso, the Japanese prime minister, said at a news conference detailing the moves.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts the world economy will expand just 3% next year – the slowest pace since 2002, and an average that the world body says borders on a global recession. Other forecasters, such as economists working for Morgan Stanley (MS), say that a worldwide recession is already under way.

Source: Third Quarter GDP Suggests U.S. Has Entered Into Recession

But the effects may not last, as unemployment continues to rise and crude oil supplies tighten.

Record high gasoline prices padded the report, but purchases still increased in every other sector. Gasoline sales jumped 2.6% last month and have gained 13.8% in the past year. Excluding gasoline, sales still climbed 0.8%.

“Yes, we bought a lot more gasoline as prices skyrocketed,” said Joel Naroff, president and chief economist at Naroff Economics Inc. “But the sales gains may not have kept up with the cost increases. More importantly, you name the good, electronics, appliances, clothing, health care, food or general merchandise and sales rose. We even ate out more.  That is impressive, to say the least.”

Many economists were impressed by the figures as retail sales rang up $385.4 billion for the month. However, most attributed the growth to the $50 million in economic stimulus payments the U.S. government sent out in May, and analysts are divided on whether their positive effect will continue.

“The full impacts of the rebate checks are still to come as people are still receiving them,” Naroff said. “That holds out hope that consumption will continue to expand through the summer.”

Then again, unemployment is on the rise having reached 5.5% in May, a 0.5% increase from April – the largest monthly increase in 23 years. Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose to 384,000 last week from 359,000 for the week ended June 6.

“This good [retail] report suggests the tax rebates are having an impact,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told Bloomberg in a radio interview. “As these effects fade, the weaker job market will take over.”

Also, after nine months cutting interest rates and lending freely to financial firms hoping to ease the pain of the credit crunch, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is has been phrasing a reversed course to battle inflation.

“The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so,” Bernanke said earlier this week. “The Federal Open Market Committee will strongly resist an erosion of longer-term inflation expectations.”

Coupled with tough talk from the European Central Bank, the message is clear: The U.S. Federal Reserve can no longer afford to stand by and watch the value of the dollar plummet. And if that means the economy and investors limp through the remainder of 2008, so be it.

“The immediate effect from this dramatic shift in policy priorities has been to ‘drain’ visibility, confidence and liquidity from financial markets,” Tullett Prebon economist Lena Komileva wrote this week, according to Fortune. “With monetary policy adopting the role of a risk-driver rather than a source of relief for financial markets, current conditions are actually worse than they were last August when the credit crunch erupted.”

Source: Stimulus Checks Push Retail Sales Rally, Economy Still Facing Uphill Battle

The economic news of the day was mostly negative.

The New York Fed’s Empire State Manufacturing index fell to a reading of negative 3.2 in May from a positive 0.6 in April. In Philadelphia, factory activity rose to negative 15.6 in May from 24.9 in April. New York’s data was worse than projected, but Philly’s was better.

The Fed also reported that industrial output of the nation’s factories, mines and utilities dropped 0.7% in April in a broad-based decline led by falling production of motor vehicles. That was worse than a predicted 0.6% decline.

And the Labor Department reported that the number of people filing for the first time for unemployment benefits rose 6,000 to a total of 371,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis in the week ended May 10.

“The recent downward tilt in industrial production and ongoing moderate job losses suggest the U.S. economy is in a mild recession,” wrote Sal Guatieri, economist at BMO Capital Markets.

It’s mild, of course, unless you’re directly affected.

Source: Dollar Makes Small Gains