If you search your favorite news aggregate for “US housing market”,  you’ll find a whole mess of headlines guaranteed to make you feel good about that crappy McTractHome you might have bought at the height of the real estate orgy. Turns out that you’ll start making money on your investment sometime very soon. Just look at the stuff I skimmed off the top of Yahoo and Google News (more…)

I was channel surfing last night when I stumbled upon a couple of Citi commercials—or PSAs, since taxpayers own more than 30% of Citi—that offered viewers a number of depression-era, cost-cutting lifestyle suggestions. With the billions in bonuses Citi has paid out to their workers, the ads so brazenly mock Wall Street’s massive plundering of taxpayer wealth that it’s almost hard to believe that Citigroup had the guts to have them made—and bill us 30 cents of every dollar paid for production and air time costs. But they did.

(more…)

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is in China today, doing whatever it takes–no matter how shameless and sordid– to make sure that the Chinese don’t pull out of American bonds, which are tanking in value thanks to Geithner’s multi-trillion-dollar gift to Wall Street. The Chinese are not happy, and since the Chinese loaned America all the money it’s now blowing, they call the shots.

The Tim Geithner lifting ass today in China sounds a lot different from the Tim Geithner who recently played the role of alpha Chinaman Dominator when he was trying to impress the wannabe macho men in Congress. The Treasury Secretary’s old self was captured perfectly in a NY Times article headlined “Geithner Hints At Harder Line on China Trade.” (more…)

If you’re wondering why disgraced pseudo-rebel Rick Santelli and his pals at CNBC kept strangely quiet about the hundreds of billions in bailouts right up until a couple weeks ago, when the government finally extended its bailout program beyond the corporate world and to regular American citizens, there’s a simple explanation. Rick and his coworkers at CNBC have been living high on the government bailout hog. Yup, “Slick Rick” Santelli and his fair-weather free-market comrades are nuthin’ but old-fashioned welfare queens pimping a newfangled libertarian hustle to cover it all up.

Since last October, CNBC’s parent company General Electric has taken at least $139 billion in government-backed loan guarantees to keep GE Capital Corp from going belly-up and taking the whole company, including Rick Santelli, with it. (more…)

We all know in the backs of our minds that Barack Obama’s incredible victory will eventually be followed by disappointment. But does it have to come so soon, and hit so hard? The answer will be yes, if Lawrence Summers is named treasury secretary in the president-elect’s cabinet, as many observers believe will be the case. Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis–hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal. And when you look at the trail of economic destruction Summers left behind in other crisis-stricken countries who sought his advice in the past, then “terror” might be a more appropriate word than “disappointment.” (more…)