Democrats and particularly President Obama have been taking a lot of heat over the stimulus bill. Now, a lot of people that complain about the stimulus so loudly try to attribute the TARP bailout somehow to Obama too. Despite the fact that Obama was not President when the economy crashed and the banks were bailed out suddenly it is all his doing.

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of [AIG]. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers. Throughout the financial crisis key officials have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. Finishing the job of fixing the broken economy has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts. Officials could have called on bankers to offer a better deal [to bear part of the cost of the bailout], for their own sake, and simultaneously threatened to name and shame those who balked. It was their choice not to do that. And these seemingly safe choices have now placed the economy in grave danger. For the economy is still in deep trouble and needs much more government help. So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Government officials, perhaps influenced by spending too much time with bankers, forgot that if you want to govern effectively you have retain the trust of the people. And by treating the financial industry — which got us into this mess in the first place — with kid gloves, they have squandered that trust.

Two powerful lobby groups in the food industry, The Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Organic Trade Association, recently intervened as friends of the court in a federal consumer class-action lawsuit accusing the nation's largest supplier of private-label organic milk of consumer fraud. In what has been described as "the largest scandal in the history of the organic industry" USDA investigators, in 2007, found that Aurora Dairy had willfully violated federal organic standards. However, industry lobbyists are now concerned that convicting Aurora will set a dangerous legal precedent. Aurora bottles private-label organic milk for Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway and many other grocery chains.

Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction. -- In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has given Americans a glimpse of the ugly truth about their future job prospects. Simply put, companies have found that they can shed workers and rely on technological advances and overseas factories to operate with a lot fewer U.S. employees.

"Top executives at four companies that jettisoned their employee pension plans received $49.5 million in retirement and severance benefits in the years before the companies filed for bankruptcy, while retirees saw their benefits cut by as much as two thirds, congressional investigators conclude in a report to be released today. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that pensions at the companies, United Airlines, US Airways, Polaroid and Reliance Insurance, were underfunded by more than $11 billion when the companies turned them over to a government-backed insurance fund. The report says executives at those four companies and six others that abandoned their pension plans took in a total of $350 million in pay and perks in the years leading up to the bankruptcies."

A brutal report issued Monday by a government watchdog holds Timothy Geithner -- then the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now the nation's Treasury Secretary -- responsible for overpayments that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs. - The authoritative new narrative describes how, while bailing out insurance giant AIG last fall, a team led by Geithner failed nearly every step of the way. - Instead of bargaining with AIG's numerous counterparties to resolve its billions of dollars in souring derivatives contracts, Geithner's team ended up paying top dollar for toxic assets -- "an amount far above their market value at the time," the report notes. - "There is no question that the effect of FRBNY's decisions -- indeed, the very design of the federal assistance to AIG -- was that tens of billions of dollars of Government money was funneled inexorably and directly to AIG's counterparties," the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said. - Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia got full value for their derivatives contracts with AIG, and taxpayers got the bill. In total, $27.1 billion of public money was transferred to companies that did business with AIG. -- Throughout the bailout of AIG, the report says, the New York Fed failed to develop appropriate contingency plans; failed to properly assess the impact of its decisions; and generally engaged in negotiation strategies that were doomed to fail. -- Then, after Geithner's team paid off AIG's counterparties on Wall Street, it imposed "onerous" terms on the troubled insurer, the report says. - "The decision to acquire a controlling interest in one of the world's most complex and most troubled corporations was done with almost no independent consideration of the terms of the transaction or the impact that those terms might have on the future of AIG," the report finds.

The U.S. is losing $725 Billion per year to foreign countries through trade losses. This money does not come back to buy our goods and services.

In this climate, GDP growth can turn positive but companies are reluctant to hire. Full recovery will not resume spontaneously based on household or business demand, and the only source of increased demand to break the cycle is the government. One of the most widespread and mistaken assumptions is that this bleak future is just baked into the cake. Because of the legacy of the financial collapse, and the limits of deficit spending, supposedly, we are just stuck with it. You hear that in testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, and it is repeated mindlessly by the media.

International travel by world leaders is mainly about making symbolic gestures. But let’s hope that when the cameras aren’t rolling Mr. Obama and his hosts engage in some frank talk about currency policy. For the problem of international trade imbalances is about to get substantially worse. And there’s a potentially ugly confrontation looming unless China mends its ways. Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy, Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem [of the depressed state of the world economy], in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters. This problem is about to get much worse. Because for the past year the true scale of the China problem has been masked by temporary factors. Looking forward, we can expect to see both China’s trade surplus and America’s trade deficit surge. Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits. And I’m not sure the Obama administration gets it, either. The administration’s statements on Chinese currency policy seem pro forma, lacking any sense of urgency. That needs to change. I don’t begrudge Mr. Obama the banquets and the photo ops; they’re part of his job. But behind the scenes he better be warning the Chinese that they’re playing a dangerous game.

Unemployed Americans Should Hunker Down for More Job Losses. .... Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

Private investors are not turning to agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty. They want profit, pure and simple. And the world has changed in ways that now make it possible to make big money from farmland. From the investors’ perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up and providing a solid basis for returns on investment for those who control the necessary resource base. And that resource base, particularly land and water, is under stress as never before. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, so-called alternative investments, such as infrastructure or farmland, are all the rage. Farmland itself is touted as providing a hedge against inflation. And because its value doesn't go up and down in sync with other assets like gold or currencies, it allows investors to successfully diversify their portfolios.

There are moments when a radical idea quickly goes mainstream. A cause for optimism but also caution; an opportunity for a practical challenge. -- The “Green New Deal,” a proposal for a green way out of recession, is such an idea. -- It has now been adopted in some form, in theory if not in corresponding action, by governments across the world.

Last week, the Treasury Department took a step to address those concerns: For the first time, it issued guidelines requiring mortgage servicers to give homeowners details about why they’ve been denied. But the required disclosure will only be partial, and housing advocates say that means servicers’ denials of loan modifications will still be shrouded in secrecy and protected from scrutiny.

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries: the United States, where stocks are up, G.D.P. is rising, but the terrible employment situation just keeps getting worse; and Germany, which took a hit to its G.D.P. when world trade collapsed, but has been remarkably successful at avoiding mass job losses. Here in America, we don’t really have a jobs policy: we have a G.D.P. policy -- that by stimulating overall spending we can make G.D.P. grow faster, and this will induce companies to stop firing and resume hiring. The alternative would be policies that address the job issue more directly [like] New-Deal-style employment programs -- perhaps politically impossible now. Alternatively, or in addition, we could have policies that support private-sector employment. And that’s what the Germans have done. Since [a large enough conventional stimulus] doesn’t seem to be in the cards, we need to talk about cheaper alternatives that address the job problem directly: an employment tax credit; the German-style job-sharing subsidy. The point is that we need to start doing something more than, and different from, what we’re already doing. And the experience of other countries suggests that it’s time for a policy that explicitly and directly targets job creation.

To be fair, Clarence Thomas was one of the DISSENTERS in this gross miscarriage of justice. Pfizer and the city of New London used the eminent domain case to uproot long term residents of an established and thriving waterfront neighborhood to make way for BIG BIG development plans. All the planning has now fallen through and the city is left with empty buildings and vacant lots as Pfizer deserts the city for greener pastures in Groton.

Americans are living beyond their means and Asia is currently financing it. Eventually the Asians/Europeans will stop financing the USA, China will pull the plug on the buck, the bubble will burst.

Financial institutions soon will be banned from charging many overdraft fees without first getting customers' consent, the Federal Reserve announced Thursday, the latest in sweeping reforms aimed at protecting consumers who have been hit hard by the recession. The new regulations cover overdrafts from ATM withdrawals and debit card purchases, officials said. The rules are intended to address widespread complaints that banks allowed consumers to use their cards despite having insufficient funds and then hit them with large fees afterward. Banks will be required to send customers a notice explaining their overdraft protection services and fees before they decide whether to sign up. The regulations take effect July 1, 2010. The rules represent an ongoing regulatory shift toward increasing protections for the most vulnerable consumers while limiting the reach of financial institutions.

After a few months of some better than expected housing news, home prices are likely to fall again, driven lower by a renewed surge in foreclosures. By conservative estimates, another 2.4 million homes will be lost in 2010, while prices will fall another 10 percent or so. This should be a wake-up call for the Obama administration. Foreclosures are expected to surge, in part, because lenders have been delaying the process during the long rollout of the administration’s antiforeclosure plan. But according to Moody’s Economy.com, most troubled borrowers ultimately will not qualify for help, and a backlog of bad loans will soon enter foreclosure.

Other countries like China, India, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, and France treat their export industries as national treasures, unlike the U.S.