Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Credit is scarce but not capital

Bloomberg carries an article noting that credit was tight but there appeared to be plenty of money for commodities. Here is another piece of the action. Credit is scarce but not capital. Mortgage-ravaged banks and Wall Street firms often have to borrow from the Federal Reserve, as lender of last resort, to meet current bills. […]

Department of Education becomes major lender to students

The Washington Post reports: With scores of lenders unable to come up with money to provide student loans, the Department of Education is preparing to exercise broad new powers in the coming weeks that could fundamentally recast how millions of students pay for college. This initiative could transform the federal government from a guarantor of […]

Another whittling the beak

By ilsm Carlyle Group just bought Booz Allen Hamilton which does $3.5 (about $5B total corporate revenues) a year “consulting” for DoD. Now Carlyle owns the consultants who will “advise” the DoD to keep to the “strategy and structure” of the think tanks and support investing in more and more potentially useless things from companies […]

Right to know bill out of committee

Healthy Rivers, my favorite blog for such matters, reports that: Congress just moved a little closer to establishing your right to know for sewage spills. Last Thursday, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted to pass the Sewage Right to Know bill (HR 2452) and send it to the full House for consideration. The bill […]

Capital gains increase will change investor behavior? Nah.

Bloomberg has a poll that takes a look at rational investor behavior, with which I am very familiar, over the panic behavior laid out by our conservative ideologues over touching capital gain taxes of any percentage. If the monied sloshers are as sensitive as they imply, maybe they aren’t so rational, and are actually in […]

Index funds and commodities 2

Further lifting (of comments like cactus) by juan: “…the term ‘speculators’ tends to imply short-term traders while it’s my understanding that most of the index funds take longer term or more ‘sticky’ positions, but this can become a matter of semantics that detracts from what Briese and some others have tried to bring out — […]

The glorious feeling of holding truth

We all feel this at times, when our ideas come together and form a wonderful pattern that would ‘work’. Writers sometimes shine as their works strike a chord in readers, and we have a grasp on reality. Then the light moves on. Often it happens in adolescence based on where we live and under particular […]

Photo IDs

Rock the Vote clues young voters in: President Bush has nominated von Spakovsky — a champion of voter suppression — to serve on the Federal Election Commission. Because of his work promoting photo ID requirements for voters, hundreds of thousands of students, low income people and seniors may be turned away from the polls in […]

Adjustment Disorder

May 2008 // Washington, DC – Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and VoteVets.org released an e-mail obtained from a Veterans Affairs (VA) employee directing VA staff to refrain from diagnosing soldiers and veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).On March 20, 2008 a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator sent an e-mail […]