I don't know about the Discussion tab, JPB.
Moving right along to the "What If Stress Test." This should get some right wing talk show hosts excited. According to Market Watch, the Federal Reserve has asked 19 banks (including the really big ones) to look at their health if unemployment were to rise to (gasp) 11%.
Banks are reporting decent profits now, such that they are increasing dividends and buying back shares.
The What If involves how strongly the banks are positioned in terms of reserves in the event of an economic downturn or in the event that the banks come out on the short end in the litigation involving flaws in their bundling of questionable loans sold to Freddie/Fannie.
@realjohnboy,
rjb, With the on-going defaults on mortgage loans that is increasing in some markets, I'm not sure how these same banks that holds these mortgages can show "profit." Home values are dropping by tens of thousands of dollars for each one, while their profit is usually made up from fees and interest that doesn't come close to making up thousands lost by each property they have on their books. There's something fishy going on with these banks.
@realjohnboy,
realjohnboy wrote:
Moving right along...
No way. This is too much fun.
Quote:In a last-ditch effort to stop the passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill, Senate Democrats staged a walkout Thursday, leaving the state to avoid a forced return to the Capitol and a doomed vote against the bill.
Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, D-Monona, gave an interview on CNN, saying only that he and his colleagues were in “a secure location outside the Capitol.”
Miller said the senators, who are not all in the same location, would return to the Capitol when the governor decides to end his bid to curb collective bargaining powers for state and local employees and returns to the negotiating table with union leaders.
On Thursday, Walker called for the senators to return to Wisconsin
“Out of respect for the institution of the Legislature and the democratic process, I am calling on Senate Democrats to show up to work today, debate legislation and cast their vote,” Walker said. “Their actions by leaving the state and hiding from voting are disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands of public employees who showed up to work today and the millions of taxpayers they represent.”
His calls were echoed by Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, who said the process to find the missing legislators is under way.
“With the tremendous show of democracy we’ve seen this week, it’s a shame that the Senate Democrats decided not to show up to do their job today,” he said.
More
What? They don't like the numbers that are stacked against them so they're taking their ball and going.... out of state?
@JPB,
We had earlier reports from Pdiddie about Texas Republican's doing about the same thing a few years ago. I kind of miss that boy.
@plainoldme,
Plainoldme, I have found what you have shared with me to be very intellectual in my opinion.{Class Dismissed} You have asked if I am very young in another thread. which I will copy and paste too!
I think that I am very young to be a grandfather at the age of 45 to a grandson 3 years old and one on the way!
I have been married sense the age of 18 to a woman that tries to be the best that she can, though she does not share the same interest as you nor I but she does share all that she can! Can anyone expect any more than that and still be ethical?
I do think that for the most part that it does take women to change the world but please teach your descendants not to be absolutist in their thinking as this is where we get the division from among our people.
We are all in this struggle forward together!
@reasoning logic,
That's interesting. A few things you wrote made me wonder whether you were in your early to mid-twenties. I thought it better to ask than to wonder. Thanks.
@plainoldme,
POM, are you out shopping for some new plastic parts?
Stimulate your local economy by buying yourself some plastic parts.
@roger,
roger, Met with PDiddie and his wife a couple of years ago when we met in Houston for dinner. He's doing fine.
I found this article, and would recommend it as great reading for anyone interested in some of the reasons why governments are going broke. One of the big factors in play is the collision course of government bureaucracies and their employees versus us, the taxpayers. I believe this relates directly to what is going on in Wisconsin, and it relates directly to our economy as a big long term factor.
http://therightfieldline.blogspot.com/2010/01/jfks-unionization-of-federal-work-force.html
"JFK's unionization of federal work force made Democrat Party a public-sector dependency
The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities."
This is a partial answer to a request that I felt should not have been made. The request was for the meaning of the phrase I used, post-industrial world. It should not have been made because the meaning of the words as they are strung together should be obvious. This a phrase that intelligent and concerned people in their 20s and 30s are using in their political and economic discussions. Remember, they will have to be pioneers in the post-industrial world.
Our Warmer, Wetter, Wilder World
— By Kevin Drum| Fri Feb. 18, 2011 3:00 AM PST
My friend the geophysicist emailed the other day to tell me his house in Connecticut was still snowed in. "The main hypotheses for why we have so much snow," he explained, "involve heat coming out of the now-open Arctic ocean in early winter. Once the ice cap freezes over temporarily, the wild weather calms down."
In other words, it's caused by global warming. Not global warming next year. Not global warming 50 years from now. Global warming today. And according to a new study published in Nature, the entire continent of North America is affected:
"Human influence on the climate system has the effect of intensifying precipitation extremes," said Francis Zwiers, a climate researcher at Environment Canada in Toronto and lead researcher on the first study....The study found that observed increase in deluges "cannot be explained by natural internal fluctuations of the climate system alone," said Zwiers. In other words, only the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere explains why the United States and Canada have experienced a dramatic increase in heavy downpours.
....The explanation is simple physics: Warmer air holds more water vapor. That means when rainfall gets triggered, the air contributing to the storm is holding more water than it did in the cooler pre-industrial world.
And it's not just North America. Another new study looked at the epic floods in England and Wales in 2000 and concluded that they likely resulted from a warmer world:
In nine out of ten cases our model results indicate that twentieth-century anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increased the risk of floods occurring in England and Wales in autumn 2000 by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by more than 90%.
And the even scarier part? These studies only go through the year 2000, so they miss the entire last decade, which was the warmest on record. And needless to say, England and North America are far from being the areas worst affected by climate change. What we're seeing here is just a small taste of what's to come in the future and in other parts of the globe. Buckle up.
@plainoldme,
plainoldme wrote:Our Warmer, Wetter, Wilder World
— By Kevin Drum| Fri Feb. 18, 2011 3:00 AM PST
My friend the geophysicist emailed the other day to tell me his house in Connecticut was still snowed in. "The main hypotheses for why we have so much snow," he explained, "involve heat coming out of the now-open Arctic ocean in early winter. Once the ice cap freezes over temporarily, the wild weather calms down."
What I love about libs is their twisted logic. At least it provides comic relief.
@okie,
Twisted logic is better than no logic; you!
@cicerone imposter,
If only the ice cap would stay frozen, so the folks in Connecticutt would never need to worry about getting snowed in, right, ci? Makes sense to me. See, I can learn from libs!!
@okie,
"If?" You're talking stupid - again!
@cicerone imposter,
I'm just trying to learn from experts, ci. The expert cited by POM said:
"main hypotheses for why we have so much snow," he explained, "involve heat coming out of the now-open Arctic ocean in early winter. Once the ice cap freezes over temporarily, the wild weather calms down.""
I better look into this, because unknown to me when I was a kid, maybe all the blizzards we had in the Great Plains were due to global warming too?
@okie,
That you're trying to learn about climate is a good start for you - only if you progress beyond that topic.
@cicerone imposter,
How about if I progress to learn from you and the Obama experts on the economy? Apparently according to Obama's experts, spending all of those hundreds of billions saved our economy. It appears we need to keep spending like a drunken sailor in order to have any chance for economic success in the future too.
Hows that? Am I learning?
@okie,
I'm not here to teach you anything; neither are Obama's experts. Besides, you're no trainable; you've already fixed your brain with saw dust.
