Economy

Obamunism! Killing the Aircraft Industry

Mark Noonan24 Comments

From the Daily Caller:

Much has been made of President Barack Obama’s repeated demonizing of corporate jets and the people who fly on them in his June 29th press conference.

While pundits and politicians haggle over whether alterations in the depreciation schedule of corporate jets will actually have an impact on the deficit, those in the general aviation trenches are furious.

Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPO) President Craig Fuller told The Daily Caller that Obama’s comments have cast a pall over the industry, causing many who were considering buying a plane to back away from making a purchase…

Here’s the thing – those corporate jets are built by blue collar workers, a large number of whom are union members.  But, you see, Obama didn’t care about that. He doesn’t care that the airplane was invented in the United States.  He doesn’t care that while the United States is still the predominant aerial nation, there is increasingly stiff competition out there.  He doesn’t care that small and mid-sized aircraft businesses are dependent upon steady orders which could be harmed if prospective buyers are scared off by heated, Presidential rhetoric.  He didn’t care about any of that – all he cared about was a talking point.  A sound bite.  A phrase which was undoubtedly poll-tested relentlessly before he ever uttered it – something he thought would give him leverage to get the debt ceiling raised in 2011 and himself re-elected in 2012.  That was all – screw everyone:  Obama needs more spending to payoff backers and need to get re-elected next year.  Aircraft company worker with a wife and two kids to support?  Well, **** you.

This is the kind of man Obama is.  This is the way our liberals are.  This is the Ruling Class at work – doing what it needs to do in order to retain personal power and wealth.  You want this to continue?   Then just go and vote for Obama next year – or, if you’re a GOPer, go and get all purist and say you won’t vote for Candidate X because he or she isn’t true-blue enough.  As for me, I want him out – I want them out.

Obamunism! What Has Happened to the Dollar?

Mark Noonan37 Comments

Read the chart, and weep:

 

If you look back to 2009, you can see that the dollar was worth about 1.15 Swiss Francs…now it is worth about 0.84 Swiss Francs.  This is what happens to your money when your government goes massively in to debt and prints up bags of money…the value of the money goes down.

This really needs to be driven home – the Obama/Bernanke economic polices have amounted to the stealing of our money.  Those dollars you carefully saved in 2009 for a rainy day?  They are now worth less than they were in 2009…think of it like putting a dollar in the piggy bank on January 1st, 2009 and then checking piggy today and finding about 90 cents in there.  What happened to your dime?  Well it, and a dime out of all your dollars, was taken way…and given to banksters and well-connected, Democrat special interests.  And this didn’t happen just to your dollars, but to everyone’s.  This is the most massive heist in human history…and it was carried out right under our noses by men who claimed they were doing it for our own good.

This is why you’re paying more for a gallon of gas and for a loaf of bread – it isn’t that gasoline and bread have actually gone up in price, but that the value of your dollar has gone down…and gown down at a time when almost all of us are earning either just the same number of dollars as before, or even less for those who lost their jobs and/or were forced to take a pay cut.  Remember it, remember it, remember it:  in order that Bernanke’s bankster buddies and Obama’s union cash cows could be protected you had your money stolen from you.

It is, indeed, time for a change – the Ruling Class is robbing us blind, selling us out to foreigners and working not just to deprive us of our rights, but of our own country.  Fight hard and never give up – remember what sort of people we’re dealing with and use it to steel your heart to ever greater efforts in 2012.  We must get rid of these people if we want to save our nation.

 

Portugal’s Bonds Cut to Junk

Mark Noonan

From Reuters:

Moody’s became the first ratings agency to cut Portugal’s credit standing to junk, warning the country may need a second round of rescue funds before it can return to capital markets.

The downgrade on Tuesday was not entirely unexpected and served as a reminder that Europe’s debt troubles extend beyond Greece, which has dominated news headlines over its second financial bailout.

Some economists think Ireland may also need additional support, and investors worry Spain and Italy could be next in line for aid…

Which, as it turns out, is just what I’ve been saying.  But I’m no genius – all anyone has to do is total up the debt these countries owe, divide it by their (declining) population and you can easily see that they owe more than they can pay.  And I don’t mean “can pay this year” or “can pay in ten years” – I mean “can pay, ever”.  Even if these nations decided to dedicate themselves to debt payments – if they decided to live in poverty and work very hard, that is – they still couldn’t do it. Continue reading →

Obamunism! GM Failing, Again

Mark Noonan18 Comments

From Bloomberg:

General Motors Co. (GM) stocked Jim Ellis Chevrolet in Atlanta with plenty of Silverado full-size pickups in early 2011, part of a wager on a strong economic recovery. The strategy is backfiring.

“We thought that this year would bring back the kind of economic activity that would translate into us selling more trucks,” Mark Frost, the dealership’s general manager, said in a phone interview. “It’s not happening.”…

…After GM’s truck inventory swelled to 122 days worth of average sales, the company said 100 to 110 will be normal going forward for such a large and complex line of vehicles, compared with 60 to 70 days for most models. Peter Nesvold, a Jefferies & Co. analyst, isn’t convinced. Ford Motor Co. (F), which makes similar trucks, is running at 79 days, and Nesvold says GM averaged 78 days on hand at year end from 2002 to 2010…

That first bit is nonsense – GM didn’t pile vehicles in to the dealership in anticipation of an economic rebound, but merely to have vehicles “sold” on the books.  From what I understand, GM counts a vehicle as sold when it is sent to the dealership.  If you want to fake your numbers and make it look like your taxpayer bailed out corporation is recovering, this is how you do it…”stuff” the dealerships with vehicles, call them “sold” and allow President Obama to state that we’re heading in the right direction.  Zero Hedge, though, has been on this since last December, and had an update on July 1st – here’s the chart:

Up and up and up goes the inventory – more and more cars being produced, with taxpayer subsidies, which no one has any money to buy.  A very large amount of our GDP “growth” over the past two years has been this sort of thing – inventory build up. Part of this is just corruption – as in GM’s case where they are trying to make a major Obama policy look like a success – while another part is just idiocy – a blinding faith in Keynesian economics which infects our entire economy.  Including in corporate board rooms where economists have received the same sort of Keynesian indoctrination that government and academic economists have received:  if government spends money, it will fix the economy.

This is Obamunism, good people – the final test that Keynes was wrong; that spending doesn’t make you rich.  The only thing which can make us rich is a free market economy based upon hard work, savings and careful investment.  Government’s only functions are to ensure a sound money supply, a balanced budget and that no one is using fraud to get ahead.  Once we get to that happy state of affairs, we’ll have a real economic recovery…until then, we’ll just wallow in the doldrums with a complete collapse possibly literally at any time.

Banks Two Years, Trillions of Dollars Too Late

Mark Noonan3 Comments

From the New York Times:

As millions of Americans struggle in foreclosure with little hope of relief, big banks are going to borrowers who are not even in default and cutting their debt or easing the mortgage terms, sometimes with no questions asked.

Two of the nation’s biggest lenders, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are quietly modifying loans for tens of thousands of borrowers who have not asked for help but whom the banks deem to be at special risk…

Which is just swell for you if you’re at risk…if your risk has already come crashing down and you’ve lost your house (as millions of Americans have), then it is a bit late.

I figured as early as October of 2008 that we needed to do something to bring home mortgages in to line with home prices.  This isn’t rocket science – home prices ran up way too high and the crash instantly wiped out a gigantic amount of paper wealth but left tens of millions of Americans owing not just more than their house was worth, but likely more than it would ever be worth, again.   It was in 2009 that I figured we needed a program of “cramming down” home loans – which is essentially what the banks are doing in the linked article.  Trouble is, I think it is too late; prices have fallen so far and so fast – and look to continue declining – that even taking a “cram down” makes no sense.  By 2010 I was arguing we needed some means of just keeping people in their homes, even after they default…anything to keep houses off the market.  That is where I still stand.

The trouble with our banks – the reason they have got it so wrong both in the run up and in the crash down – is that they are run by people who haven’t the foggiest notion of economics.  Bankers think that government borrowing and printing can be a good thing – it is why they backed Bernanke’s “quantiative easing” (ie, money printing) and Obama’s “stimulus”.  If they knew anything about economics their would have first allowed “too big to fail” to fail, and then would have called for balanced budgets and sound money – counting on the native energy and drive of the American people to dig us out of the mess while they stood ready to lend money to solid enterprises.  In a real sense, we don’t have bankers…we have corporate, Ruling Class bosses who rose to the top based on connections rather than knowledge or skill.

They are even less schooled in morality (they teach “ethics” these days…which really works out to learning how to stay out of trouble with the EEOC and SEC).  The mix – people who don’t know what to do and are weak at identifying what is right and what is wrong – prove a strong poison…and let to things like Mortgage Backed Securities and the whole “sub prime” trigger of the collapse.  It doesn’t surprise me at all that the banks are now picking up on cram down, years late and after it is already clear it can’t solve the problem.

My advice right now, if anyone is interested, is:  don’t buy a house.  Wait a couple years.  It might be down 20% lower than now…and if I’m wrong, it won’t be more than 1 or 2% higher.  Housing should, also, not be seen as an investment bringing a monetary return – it might again, some day, have that quality (though, honestly, I hope it never does) – but, instead, as a home.  If you think of it that way, then it doesn’t matter what the market does – provided you’ve bought a house within your budget, if its worth a million dollars or one, it is all good for you.

Report: Unions Kill Jobs

Mark Noonan29 Comments

From Investors Business Daily:

…The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%. In right-to-work states the average is 7.9% — 8.6% adjusted for population.

Between 1977-08, employment grew 100% in right-to-work states vs. the national average of 71% and 56.5% in non-right-to-work states. That’s according to a January study that Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder did for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

In this period, real per capita income in the right-to-work states grew 62.3% vs. the national average of 54.7% and 52.8% for non-right-to-work states…

If unions would concentrate on actually helping workers, the story would be different.  I would be a backer and member of a union if they were in favor of workers – I’m not because unions are not for me:  they are for, first, the union bosses; second, for the Democrat party; third, for corrupt deals; fourth, for various anti-American, socialist/communist political groups.  There is no place in there for an average, working man who just wants a strong business climate and good wages and benefits.

It is wise and logical for working people to band together to look after their own interests.  But the primary interest of a employee union is in strong economic growth – it is only by such means that the workers gain real leverage over the employers.  When the economy is thundering ahead and labor is in high demand, that is when the workers can hold back and demand higher wages and benefits.  Our unions, however, have decided that economic growth is pointless:  the only thing which matters is keeping the union bosses rich, the Democrats in power and the economy so controlled that non-union companies are essentially forbidden to compete with union companies.  A huge amount of our current economic misery can be directly traced to the unions corruption, political hackery and restraint of trade.

A real union actually for the workers would be calling for less government spending (government spending takes money out of the private economy which could be used to employ workers); for lower taxes (higher taxes on a business means it can employ fewer people); for less government regulation (when you tie up new businesses in regulatory knots it means fewer get started and employ fewer people).  It is to be hoped that the current unions – especially the private-sector unions (the government sector unions are probably beyond redemption) – will wake up to this, or that the membership will wake up and, if necessary, form new unions.  The working man does need his own organization…but the current groups which claim that role are actually harming the working man every day.

 

S&P: Greek Bailout is a Default

Mark Noonan3 Comments

Nice of them to mention this after the S&P 500 went on a tear based on the assumption that the Greek bail out avoided a default – at any rate, the Financial Times is reporting that S&P is considering the bail out to be a “selective default”. In other words, it is just a bit of financial chicanery to keep people thinking that all is well as Greeks drops in to complete bankruptcy.

The one thing the Ruling Class doesn’t want is a gigantic financial melt down – not now, not with so many members of the Ruling Class up for re-election in 2012 (it isn’t just about Obama). Something needed to be done last week because if Greece went, it looked as though the whole, global financial system would go with it. That was and remains a correct assumption – if Greece goes, it all goes. But, also, if Spain goes, it all goes; if Portugal goes, it all goes; if Italy goes, it all goes. The problem is, as I’ve said, too much debt – governments owe far more than they can ever repay…and that is even if their people agree to be poor and work very hard for a generation to repay. It still wouldn’t work.

So, a melt down is inevitable – and anyone out there thinking that China can rescue the Euro or that China is an engine of real growth, think again: they, too, teeter on the brink of insolvency and only European and American bonds stand between them and the abyss. Its all good, if those bonds retain their value – if the Eurozone doesn’t have a default and if the United States doesn’t get a bout of inflation making our paper worth less. Not only is the melt down coming, but it is the most healthy, long term thing which can happen. We have to clear out the morass of bad debt, find out what things are really worth and then start to rebuild. The longer we keep up this extend and pretend fiction, the worse it will get.

Save money, get out of debt – and then just watch the show.

Obamunism! Consumer Confidence Dips to 2011 Low

Mark Noonan

From Rasmussen:

The Rasmussen Consumer Index, which measures the economic confidence of consumers on a daily basis, fell another point on Sunday to its lowest of 2011. At 69.8, consumer confidence is down three points from a week ago, down 16 points from a month ago and down nine points from three months ago.

The Consumer Index is now just one-tenth of a point above its lowest level for all of 2010 and 2011….

No surprise – who can feel confident right now? After all, our Democrats are now on the talking point that the renewed recession was deliberately created by the GOP…showing that they haven’t got a clue what to do.

It will get worse before it gets better – but it will get better. Mostly likely after January 20th, 2013.

Marco Rubio: A Wake Up Call From Greece

Mark Noonan

Our Senate candidate in Florida nails it:

The meltdown in Greece should be a wake-up call for those who wish to turn America into a high-spending, high-tax welfare state. The fact is, the global boom masked what was in fact an unsustainable situation, not only in Greece but in countries like Italy and Spain…Entire countries have become profligate, unproductive, and uncompetitive. Unfortunately, the road ahead in these countries is going to be extremely difficult.

The question Americans should be asking is, Why do President Obama and the Democrats in Congress want to take America down this path?

Why, indeed?

Because they simply don’t know what else to do. Locked in to rigid ideology, our liberal and socialist leaders simply can’t conceive of any solution which doesn’t entail more government spending and more government control. Even their response to the supposed rapacity of Wall Street is to bail out the very people they claim are causing the problem – spending is all they know.

But the spending must stop. We are now so far in debt that just a bit more will tip us over in to complete national bankruptcy. We have a small window of opportunity to avoid Greece’s fate – but while Democrats are in charge, nothing will be done to change course.

And so we simply must win in November – only by putting in an opposition Congress can we prevent Obama and his Democrats from taking us down the path of destruction.