From the Wall Street Journal:

In an ominous sign for the holiday shopping season, American consumers behaved like skinflints in August, focusing on bare necessities and budget-priced deals as they made back-to-school purchases.

Shoppers spent slightly more last month than they had the year before, according to MasterCard Advisors, which crunches data from credit cards, checks and cash payments to form sales estimates. But in nearly every category, the sales numbers were far short of 2008 levels, indicating the economic recovery remains sluggish…

That last should actually say “indicating the economic recovery remains a figment of Bernanke’s imagination”. Who has money to spend right now? For those who do, who is willing to greatly extend themselves when the next couple of months might bring economic collapse and spreading unemployment?

Get ready for a grim rest-of-the-year, and then a miserable 2011 as the Bush tax cuts expire and put yet more downward pressure on the economy.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From the Wall Street Journal:

Stocks limped to their worst August since 2001, battered by a wave of discouraging data that cast doubt on the faltering economic recovery.

Investors now enter September, a month that has been historically challenging for the stock market, against a backdrop of broad uncertainty, including slow growth and deflation fears.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average battled to a stalemate on Tuesday, rising 4.99 points, or 0.05%, to finish at 10014.72. The blue-chip index’s 4.3% drop for the month was the worst since a dismal May, and the measure’s first down August in five years. The Dow had rallied 7.1% in July…

I’m not so sure that September will prove a bad month – seems to me that the markets are being either manipulated, or controlled by coked-up monkeys. It should be down thousands of points from where it is as the economy is clearly in the dumpster – but, it still hangs on around the 10,000 mark. It will eventually fall, but I suspect that the Powers That Be will try their best to keep it up until November 3rrd.

The curious thing is that I don’t see how we get out of this while Obama is in office. Supposing the GOP wins big in November, the fact remains that the only thing the GOP can do for sure is halt any further Obama initiatives…but with Obama holding the veto, we can’t roll back any of the disastrous policies (Obama-made or inherited from decades past) which are preventing us from recovering. It could be a very long two years.

From My Fox NY:

If you think you’ve been seeing more people sleep on city streets, statistics back up the perception. The homeless population living on New York City streets has gone up 50 percent in the past year, according to city statistics reported by the HellsKitchenLife.com blog.

The New York City Department of Homeless Services conducts a yearly survey of the streets of the city to count the number of homeless who are not in shelters. The HOPE survey was conducted in January 2010…

The “good” news is that the number living in the streets is not as bad as it has been in the past – but my bet is that it’ll get increasingly worse. We’re at the tail end of the support we can easily provide. States and local governments are going broke; charities are feeling the pinch; people have less to give. And, furthermore, the increase is not in the number of boozers and druggies on the streets – that remains fairly constant, but in the number of regular folks.

We’ve seen it out here in Vegas – where other places have rooms for people to warm up in winter time, we have rooms for people to cool down in during the summer heat. During our very hot July, the cooling rooms were swarming (which isn’t 100% an indicator of homelessness – some of them were probably people who couldn’t afford to turn on the air conditioning…but, you get the picture).

A bankrupt government – a dying economic and political settlement, is now leaving the most vulnerable in a lurch. The welfare state has failed – I write more about this over at Noonan for Nevada where I actually get in to an argument with a man facing eviction.

Just how is that whole hopey-changey thing working out for ya?

…Industrywide deliveries, to be released tomorrow, may have reached an annualized rate of 11.6 million vehicles this month, the average of eight analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That would be the slowest August since 1982, according to researcher Ward’s AutoInfoBank. The rate would be 18 percent below last year’s 14.2 million pace, when the U.S. government’s “cash for clunkers” incentive program boosted sales…

We’ll have to see what the real numbers are – after continually over-estimating, a lot of “experts” are now heading the other direction. Still, even if the numbers beat these expectations, we can be sure they numbers won’t be beating last years rather dismal figures.

The “cash for clunkers” scam didn’t “boost” sales – all it did was rob from future sales. A political gimmick to make things look good for a news cycle or two, and now the piper is being paid. Better to have had slow and steady sales than what we’re getting now – a little boost, then a complete collapse. How many auto dealers are going to be laying off sales and maintenance staff now? Staff which might have been able to keep working in a more steady-pace, though slow, sales environment.

Every last thing Obama has done has been a complete failure because everything done revolved around the government deciding what the money should be spent on. Until Obama wakes up from his socialist stupor and realizes that he’s not the smartest man in the world, we’re going to keep heading down the economic drain.

Faced with a global economic collapse, China’s government has massively increased support for State-run enterprises – from the New York Times:

…whether in the coal-rich regions of Shanxi Province, the steel mills of the northern industrial heartland, or the airlines flying overhead, it is often China’s state-run companies that are on the march.

As the Chinese government has grown richer — and more worried about sustaining its high-octane growth — it has pumped public money into companies that it expects to upgrade the industrial base and employ more people. The beneficiaries are state-owned interests that many analysts had assumed would gradually wither away in the face of private-sector competition…

Later in the article the Chinese Prime Minister is quoted as saying China’s socialist economy allows it to better allocate resources – it is as if the 20th century never happened. What is really going on here is two-fold:

1. With the private economy around the world suffering, China’s government is worried that the private sector will not be able to keep China’s people sufficiently employed, thus risking a rising tide of unemployment destabilizing to China’s oligarchic dictatorship.

2. China’s corrupt oligarchy likes being in charge and thus when really faced with assigning control to outsiders or keeping themselves on the gravy train, they did what comes natural to a corrupt oligarchy.

This will be an utter disaster for China. China’s State-run enterprises routinely operate at a loss and are already burdened with debts they cannot repay…and which no one really asks them to repay because to do so means going up against powerful figures in the Chinese government. They are throwing good money after bad – and incidentally starving China’s private economy of the funding it will need now that China’s stimulus is unwinding and global demand for Chinese goods remains flat.

China, like Stalin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany can get away with this for a while – and even convince outside observers that things are going swell (this is especially true for those outside observers heavily invested in China and thus determined to paint the brightest picture possible of Chinese prospects), but the price has to be paid. You can’t keep shoveling money in to a government black hole for ever. Eventually, the books have to balance. Unless China’s government does something no government has ever been able to do – run a major industrial enterprise at a profit over a sustained period of time – it will all collapse back on itself as mounting losses and bad loans take the Chinese treasury down.

Anyone who remains invested in China is a complete fool – they are heading for a fall, and no one knows what they will do when the crash comes.

UPDATE: Rumor Mill – Governor of the People’s Bank of China flees to the United States?

From The Hill:

Democrats are undercutting their campaign message by condemning Republican economic policies while calling for the extension of Bush-era tax cuts.

“It’s hard to say the Republican economic policies were bad, [and] then continue them,” Paul Begala, Democratic strategist and former advisor to President Clinton, told The Hill. “That is a bit of a mixed message.”…

But they also don’t want to have a huge tax increase looming on November 2nd. Some of them are also smart enough to realize that if the tax cuts of 2001 expire, it will kill of what remains of the economy, thereby killing the Democrats’ 2012 chances. Problem is, they spent the last 8 years saying they were “tax cuts for the wealthy” and promising to do away with them – and the left wing base is still insistent that those evil, wicked rich people (but not people like Jay Rockefeller and George Soros) get what’s coming to them.

It is quite a problem, isn’t it? What to do?

I suspect they’ll try to punt – some sort of cosmetic move to extend some tax cuts and allow others to expire and hope to goodness its enough to defuse the issue for November. I doubt it will work – any failure to extend the entire tax cut package will be painted (correctly) as voting for a tax increase. In the end, inability to finesse the issue will likely result in inaction – and so the GOP will still be able to paint the Democrats as tax-increasers.

Now, if the Democrats had only been honest about the tax cuts from the get go, they wouldn’t have this problem. Far from being tax cuts for the rich, they were tax cuts on the productive economy. Absent Democrat hate-mongering, the Democrats would be well placed to just extend the cuts…or, better yet, they cuts would never have had a sunset provision to begin with.

Ah, what tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!

Then The Automatic Earth has an entry tailor made for you:

…However this may be, I urge you to take another look at the Consumer Metrics Institute data. Realize that their Growth Index is a leading indicator, and thus both the S&P 500 and the US GDP numbers, if we take the last five years as a measuring stick, will, over the next quarter, follow the Growth Index down. Way down.

As per this morning, the discrepancy between US GDP (official estimate still +2.45%) and CMI Growth Index (-5.25%) is a staggering 7.7%!. And then look at how closely the two are correlated in the graphs…

…If we get anywhere near what the CMI data (seem to) foresee, we’ll have drama, tragedy, mayhem and panic all wrapped in one neat package. The US economy cannot withstand anything even near that sort of fall and pretend the world is still the same…

Indeed. Do read the entire linked article – even if it doesn’t turn out quite that way, the data is still indicating some really rough sledding ahead for us.

As I’ve said before, we can’t avoid the crash. This crash, when it comes, will just be the completion of the crash which started in 2007 and which should have been allowed to continue. The banksters and bureaucrats – taking in former President Bush and President Obama, in turn – didn’t want that to happen because that would risk their own power and wealth. Having lived off (and progressively wrecked) the productive economy for 80 years, they saw now reason to stop now. What they did, however, was just store up a worse problem for the rest of us.

The crash can’t be stopped – prices inflated by fake money and financial wheeling and dealing are unsustainable. They simply must get in line with reality – and that is going to hurt. Its going to hurt worse, now, because the banksters and bureaucrats did what they did (shorthand: the piled more debt on a problem caused by too much debt – gasoline, fire; that sort of thing). All we can do at this point is endure it and then implement policies which will cut the banksters and bureaucrats out of the picture and allow regular Americans to work their way back to wealth.

It can be done and it will be done – it is just a pity the fools who ran us in to the ground got one more shot at it.

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. economy grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the second quarter, less than previously calculated, as companies reined in inventories and the trade deficit widened.

The revised gain in gross domestic product was bigger than the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and compares with a 2.4 percent estimate issued last month, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. Corporate profits grew last quarter at the slowest rate in a year and employee wages in the prior three months were revised lower.

Its all been a waste of time and money – TARP, stimulus, all of it. Only hard work, savings and careful investment do the trick…not Fed Funny Money and manipulation of stocks and bonds to preserve “too big to fail” banks.

Thank goodness November is coming…

The stupid and the greedy are hoping that Federal Reserve Chairman and all around economic dimwit Ben Bernanke will screw the working poor and middle class one more time to keep asset prices over-inflated:

..Following a slew of downbeat economic indicators, market expectations are growing that there will be more quantitative easing from the Fed before the end of the year. Under the radical scheme, also used in the UK last year, central banks pour money into buying assets such as government bonds from banks and the commercial sector, pumping more cash into the financial system and at the same time cutting market rates…

I understand why the people calling for Quantative Easing 2.0 (ie, print more money) are doing so – because they live off our over-leveraged, usurious, fiat-money-based economy and they know that if asset prices don’t remain inflated, they’re cooked. I know why Ben Bernanke is at least willing to do it – he’s one of them. What I don’t understand is why no one in government – from Obama on down – is out there screaming and even legislating for Bernanke to stop. Sure, Obama believes in that Keynesian economic nonsense, bit it is clear that the last QE didn’t work – so why try it again?

We’re eyeball to eyeball with complete economic collapse while Obama and his Democrats are facing a crushing defeat this November. If the plan is that Obama and his Democrats are hoping to add a 2012 wipe out to their 2010 losses, then letting Bernanke get away with QE2 is the best way to do it. Sure, such a move would delight the sort of idiot investors who got us in to this mess and keep the S&P 500 high for a while – and it might even put another momentary bloom of health on the economy (though very much shorter lived than the previous one) – but the ultimate result of such a move is just more of the same – ie, more economic pain.

Its time we started to realize that we’re broke – no, scratch that. The people do realize we’re broke – its time for our leadership to admit it. We have to get back to work and thus all policies must be geared towards plowing fields, digging mines and opening up factories…if it doesn’t assist in one of those three things, it simply should not be done…and whatever we do, it can’t be done with borrowed or printed money.

Its time to get back to the real world and get back to work – Bernanke thinks its time to bail out his bankster buddies.

From Daily Finance:

Your next shopping trip may not be as convenient as it used to be. The second quarter earnings season brought news from several major retailers that they will be shutting down stores. Both Saks and Abercrombie & Fitch said they were closing stores in several parts of the country. Meanwhile, other stores like the struggling Blockbuster video rental chain, continue to slash stores by the dozens. American Apparel, which is close to defaulting on its loans, just may be next.

Consumers just aren’t shopping the way they used to. Even Wal-Mart Stores, which typically fares well during tough economic times, is worried. “The slow economic recovery will continue to affect our customers, and we expect they will remain cautious about spending,” said president and CEO Mike Duke in a statement that was released during the company’s second quarter earnings report….

Not exactly the sort of news one wants to hear 3 months in front of the big shopping season – anyone want to take bets on whether this Christmas will be a financial bust? Might be we’ll have to get back to treating Christmas as, well, Christmas…all that God and hope for the world stuff we’ve put in the backseat in favor of new toys.

If you go to the linked article, you’ll see that this is not juts a few stores – Blockbuster is on path to close about 500 stores, while Abercrombie and Fitch will close about 100. How many people work in each store? 20? I don’t know – never really worked retail so I don’t know staffing levels…but its going to be a lot of people, and it is a sign of the continued contraction of the economy. And less retail outfits means lower levels of stock – less orders for factories; this is both a sign of how bad things are and a signal of how bad they might become.

As I’ve said, only a complete re-working of our economy towards wealth creation will get us out of this – people aren’t going to be able to fuel growth by putting it on the credit card, national or personal.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

So says Morgan Stanley over at Bloomberg:

Investors will face defaults on government bonds given the burden of aging populations and the difficulty of securing more tax revenue, according to Morgan Stanley.

“Governments will impose a loss on some of their stakeholders,” Arnaud Mares, an executive director at Morgan Stanley in London, wrote in a research report today. “The question is not whether they will renege on their promises, but rather upon which of their promises they will renege, and what form this default will take.” The sovereign-debt crisis is global “and it is not over,” the report said…

Mr. Mares is correct – this, though, is just Establishment types playing catch up with the real world. That noted financial expert, Mark Noonan, talked up this very issue here, here, here and here.

The only thing we have control over is whether or not we’ll prevent this from happening here. We still have a (rapidly shrinking) window of opportunity to get our own fiscal house in order. If we balance the budget and institute policies which will encourage wealth creation, we can weather the storm. It will still be hard – don’t get me wrong; there is no easy fix…no easy way out of this. But we can prevent, I believe, the worst-case scenario of an American default. But only if we act swiftly – and that, my fellow Americans, will require a lot of new people in DC.

Biden says a lot of stupid things, but sometimes I can’t tell if he’s lying, or if he is just too dumb to understand what he is saying.

Biden conceded that the economic recovery was not proceeding as fast as the administration had hoped, but claimed there was “no doubt we’re moving in the right direction.”

The right direction?

Positive gross domestic product readings and other mildly hopeful signs are masking an ugly truth: The US economy is in a 1930s-style Depression, Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg said Tuesday.

Writing in his daily briefing to investors, Rosenberg said the Great Depression also had its high points, with a series of positive GDP reports and sharp stock market gains.

But then as now, those signs of recovery were unsustainable and only provided a false sense of stability, said Rosenberg.

Rosenberg calls current economic conditions “a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” and notes that any good news both during the initial 1929-33 recession and the one that began in 2008 triggered “euphoric response.”

You know, for most of the Bush years, we saw unemployment go down toward 4%… that was what I call the right direction.

Yeah, I miss Dubya.

Inquiring minds want to know – and Mish links to an answer:

…Our suspicions have been confirmed — the recession never ended. Macroeconomic Advisers produces a monthly U.S. real GDP series and it shows that the peak was in April, as we expected, with both May and June down 0.4% in the worst back-to-back performance since the economy was crying Uncle! back in the depths of despair in September-October 2008.

The quarterly data show that Q2 stands at a +1.1% annual rate (so look for a steep downward revision for last quarter) and the “build in” for Q3 is -1.5% at an annual rate. Depending on the data flow through the July-September period, it looks like we could see a -0.5% to -1% annualized pace for the current quarter…

I’m also one of those convinced the recession never ended – that when all the data is added up, it will be shown that the private economy continued to contract all through 2009 and 2010. The stimulus didn’t work – not even for a minute. It is always good to keep in mind that the data you get on economics, when it first comes out, amounts to no better than an educated guess…with the “educated” believing that Keynesian economic theory is valid, thus their presumption that there simply must have been growth because we spent all that (borrowed and printed) money. This is why we see, month after month, downward revisions of previously positive economic data – and, very often, upward revisions of the bad news.

There is too much debt, boys and girls – federal debt, State debt, local debt, personal debt. This debt is piled on an economy which has shipped its factories to China, its farms to Mexico and its mines to Chile. We simply don’t have the base of wealth necessary to provide the rapid consumption necessary to keep GDP genuinely positive – only a resumption of American domestic production of actual goods (not services and not silly froth like “green jobs”) will allow us to climb out of this…and even then, it will additionally require a balanced budget. No more debt!

Debt is our enemy – it is the enemy of prosperity, it is the enemy of American national security, it is the enemy of freedom. We should, honestly, amend the Constitution to forbid any government entity from contracting any debt whatsoever. We won’t do that, but that is how serious the problem is – and if we don’t face up to what we need to do, we’ll just bury ourselves deeper.

I’m not a doomsayer about the United States – the TEA Party has shown that the true American spirit lives…we will overcome this. But we need a complete change of government policy – a night and day sort of paradigm shift – in order to make it happen.

UPDATE: Seems that the Federal Reserve governors are divided on what do to. Bottom line – some want to insanely do what they’ve already done, others want to change course.

From the Associated Press:

The rate at which U.S. homeowners fell behind on their mortgage payments remained stubbornly elevated in the second quarter.

In the three months ended June 30, the number of mortgage holders 60 days or more behind on their payments was 6.67 percent, credit reporting agency TransUnion said Tuesday. That’s a big jump from 5.81 percent in the second quarter of last year, and well above the historical norm of 1.5 percent to 2 percent…

Later in the report the MSM earns its Slavish Devotion to Obama Award by spinning that late payments are rising slower than they did last year. Woohoo! We’re not going bankrupt quite as fast as we were last year! Give Obama a second term!

The fact of the matter is that unemployment is increasing and people are exhausting all resources to maintain mortgages with eliminated or reduced income – adding to the mix is the increasing willingness of people to just walk away from their “underwater” mortgage in “strategic default” (meaning you can pay for the house, but choose not to). This situation will only get worse until new ideas start to be implemented aggressively in what will amount to a bankruptcy reorganization of America’s housing market. Long time readers know my preferences, but just about anything which doesn’t involve either bailing out the banks nor attempting to maintain artificially high home prices should be on the table – we need to think and we need to act. The Keynesian dogmas of a dead, liberal economic system simply won’t do the trick.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

This is a good thing to have – it shows, in graphic terms, the increasing economic disaster…a disaster made worse, not better, by Obama’s foolish, tax-and-spend liberalism policies:

From the Associated Press:

Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.

The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday’s report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say…

We’re on track, according to the linked article, for 1,000,000 foreclosures in 2010 – far outstripping the 900,000 we had in 2009. But the really bad news is that we might have 1,500,000 in 2011. This will put massive downward pressure on home prices, thus putting ever more people “underwater” and that, in turn, will increase the phenomena of “strategic default” (people bailing out on homes they can afford, but which are underwater) – and so yet more downward pressure.

This is a crisis of massive proportions. Even if nothing else goes wrong with the economy, this will be enough to push us in to full-blown Depression. We need to get creative here – just modifying the payment so people are still stuck owing banks the massively over-inflated home prices of 2005 simply won’t do the trick. We have two tasks in front of us:

1. Keep as many people in their homes as possible via “cramming down” the mortgage to match current market value.

2. Get as much of the inventory off the market as possible by working out incentives for foreclosed homes to be leased for 2-5 years rather than sold.

I’ve discussed this issue here, as well as many other times over the past two years. I realize it is unfair to the people who aren’t “underwater” that some people will have their mortgages crammed down. I realize that it is, often, best to just let things take their course – but we’re facing the complete collapse of home values in the United States. The loss of that stored wealth would cripple our economy for a decade. Think of all the follow-on things which go with homes: televisions, washer/dryer units, landscaping, etc, etc, etc. Houses drop to 10% of their 2005 value, my friends, and we’re well and truly in a bad spot – and they can drop that low, and take the remainder of the economy down with them. 25% unemployment might seem like a good thing at that point.

We need to figure a way out of this – we need to both spread the pain and the benefits around. Bailing out banks has failed. Letting the market completely collapse will be ruinous (including to those of you out there who aren’t underwater or who have paid off your home…think about it: if you’ve got a paid off house worth 200,000 right now, how will you feel when its worth 100k? 50k? 20k?). We’ve got to put a floor under housing prices – we’ve got to get the massive inventory to go away, at least for a while.

Or we can just let things drift – and have a world of economic hurt. Our choice.

Naturally:

ShoreBank, a Chicago-area community lender praised by Democrats, was taken over by the government Friday and its assets sold.

Chicago-area Democrats pushed hard for regulators to extend bailout money to the bank from the government’s $700 billion aid program. The bank was praised by President Clinton and numerous other lawmakers and industry players. The bank was started in the 1970s…

Now I’d like there to be a minute examination of the banks books – if Democrats wanted to save this bank, there must be something screwy going on in there. They just don’t do that for any, old bank – always, always Democrats direct their bail out efforts towards those people and institutions which help Democrats. And I am doubly interested because it is a Chicago-area bank…not an area of the country noted for business and political ethics.

From CNBC:

U.S. bankruptcy filings have reached the highest level since 2005, government data released on Tuesday show, as the economy slows and the unemployment rate hovers just below double digits.

There were 422,061 bankruptcy filings between April and June, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, up 9 percent from 388,148 in the prior three-month period, and up 11 percent from 381,073 a year earlier.

For the year ended June 30, there were 1.57 million bankruptcies, up 20 percent from 1.31 million a year earlier.

But the economy is all better now – Obama and Co say so. The stimulus worked! Trust us!

I don’t know about anyone else, but it seems to me that rising bankruptcies indicate a worsening economic situation. It really is the last resort for people who simply cannot carry the debt load anymore – anyone filing bankruptcy now probably went through savings, 401ks, life style reductions…everything they could think of before taking this step. And here’s the really bad news – business bankruptcies have risen 9% over a year ago.

Much worse times are coming, fellow Americans – we can tough it out as poverty really isn’t the worst thing which can happen. But we do need to get rid of the Ruling Class clowns so that we can start rebuilding.

A former bank regulator – William Black – makes the accusation; from Mish’s:

AAron Task: Should we be surprise there are not more bank failures?
William Black: Not Surprised,we should be upset there are not more bank failures. The industry has used its political muscle to get Congress to extort the financial accounting standards board to gimmick the accounting rules so that banks do not have to recognize their losses.

Aarron Task: In practical terms, what does the gutting of that rule mean for the banks?
William Black: Capital is defined as assets minus liabilities. If I get to keep my assets at inflated bubble values that have nothing to do with their real value, then my reported capital will be greatly inflated. When I am insolvent I still report that I have lots of capital.

Aaron Task: You are saying the FDIC is intentionally keeping foreclosures down because it knows it does not have enough money to pay off depositors who are insured by the FDIC?
William Black: That is correct and that is going to make ultimate losses grow. It also means we are following a Japanese type strategy of hiding the losses and we know what that produces – a lost decade, which is now two lost decades. Your listeners and viewers if they are stock types, look at the Nikkei. It lost 75% in nominal terms and has stayed that way for 20 years. I real terms it lost 85% of its value. This is a really stupid strategy. And it’s ours…

This is what I’ve suspected all along – but even so, there is no actual proof of it. But 109 banks have failed in 2010 and we’re on track for many more failures than we had in 2009. Furthermore, it is known that FDIC is out of money.

This “extend and pretend” tactic allows FDIC to not go running to Congress for a bail out, which would be politically horrific just in front of the mid-terms. It also lulls less informed investors in to thinking that our financial system is sound, thus helping to keep stock prices up. Finally, it allows Barack Obama and his Democrats to pretend we’re not in a Depression.

But it can’t be sustained – eventually, the books do have to balance. Tomorrow; next week, next month; next year…one of these days, the complete collapse will arrive and it will be far worse than it had to be because we allowed banksters, bureaucrats and grafting politicians to pull this nonsense.

From the AP:

The $700 billion U.S. bailout program launched in response to the global economic meltdown had a far greater impact overseas than other countries’ financial rescue plans did on the U.S., according to a new report from a congressional watchdog.

Billions of dollars in U.S. rescue funds wound up in big banks in France, Germany and other nations. That was probably inevitable because of the structure of the Treasury Department’s program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says in a new report issued Thursday…

Bail outs are never a good idea – and this is just a strong bit of proof of that. They never work as intended and will always benefit groups and institutions no one in their right mind would intend to benefit.

It was bad enough that we even did the bail outs, but if we had a government run by people with any sense at all – even if not enough sense to understand that bail outs are stupid – then we would have at least ensured that every penny went to Americans, alone. But that wasn’t the point – what was intended was a vast sum of money to be expended by Democrats to secure power and wealth for themselves – and that is precisely what we got – all that we got, and all we ever would get, while they are in charge.

November is coming!