Stocks enter the final hour about even on little real news. The March Treasury Budget deficit was 65.4 Billion, matching expectations.
A report by Treasury’s Inspector General and the FDIC found that regulators, primarily the Office of Thrift Supervision, failed to do their jobs with respect to Washington Mutual over a period of years. This essentially confirms what I’ve been saying for a while. It’s not so much a lack of regulation but the failure to enforce existing regulations that was instrumental in allowing this fiasco to build to crisis proportions.
As a pattern of failure exists going back to at least 2003 regarding a failure to enforce existing regulations, all the more galling now we are all paying for it, greed on the part of the financial sector and laziness on the part of the regulators.
After I think 15 announcements regarding a Greek bailout package it seems #16 might actually stick. As Germany agreed to below market rates on the bailout once the Euro was sufficiently devalued to promote its export driven economy.
Given the data over the last 9-months or so it’s a little surprising that the NBER, there the folks that declare when recessions officially begin and end, declined to declare the recession officially over following an announcement on the subject Thursday after their latest review of the data. Declaring that despite improvement in many indicators it would be premature to announce the recession’s end.
Andy Xie, former economic star with Morgan Stanley and now independent in Asia had some interesting comments in a recent article regarding the Chinese real estate bubble, and I quote; “The stability of a modern society depends on its middle class being in the majority and content with its situation. The high land-price policy is a form of tax on the middle class, which will slow its growth. China may become a country with a small group of the super-rich, a vast lower class with no property, and a small middle class. Such a social structure would not be good for long-term stability”. Substitute high home price policy for high land price policy compliments of our government’s endless attempts to prevent true asset price discovery and the statement is equally applicable here. As the largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector in this countries history continues. Bank #42 went to the receivers Friday Beach First national Bank in South Carolina.
Hi and welcome to The Profit Motive, I’m your host Caleb Lawrence. Once upon a time in America the media acted as the watchdog of the corporations and the state. In the modern era it’s all about ratings and profits, opinion has been substituted for news and frequently is presented as fact. 
