Securities and Exchange Commission declined to say whether it was investigating

Of course it did, because the whole thing is rigged: Opinions split over surge in Apple bets

Ex-Swiss Banker Gives Data to WikiLeaks

In London on Monday, Mr. Assange said that financial institutions “operate outside the rule of law” because of their economic power.

And he's right. Story.

Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement

In the "wow" category:

SPIRITWOOD, N.D. — A hulking yellow machine inched along Old Highway 10 here recently in a summer scene that seemed as normal as the nearby corn swaying in the breeze. But instead of laying a blanket of steaming blacktop, the machine was grinding the asphalt road into bits.

"When [counties] had lots of money, they paved a lot of the roads and tried to make life easier for the people who lived out here," said Stutsman County Highway Superintendant Mike Zimmerman, sifting the dusty black rubble through his fingers. "Now, it's catching up to them."

It's like the country is just crumbling... more here.

It's really just insane

There just seems to be a global mind fuck going on in the world as whole countries think they can just keep punting their futures away. And yes, the fact that a global player like Goldman Sachs, which would not even exist today without the extreme measures of the Unites States and the fleecing of America's tax payers in now involved in the Greek mess just makes perfect sense in all of this:

Point:

We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November. These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets. When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.

Point:

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

So it wasn't just greedy bankers, real estate speculators, and most of America borrowing their future away - it was also whole nations, like Greece, mortgaging their futures - hiding deals off their balance sheets, etc. And for what? For what? When will everyone just come back to reality? This world economic mess won't be close to over until everyone does.

Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many

Another one of those stories that you can't actually believe as you read it. Are things really this bad in certain regions? I think the story of this crisis going forward is going to be the regionality of it - how some areas are going to be devastated while others do okay, which will in my eyes make federal help even harder to come by.

COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
"I guess we're going to find out what the tolerance level is for people," said businessman Chuck Fowler, who is helping lead a private task force brainstorming for city budget fixes. "It's a new day."
Some residents are less sanguine, arguing that cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.
"How are people supposed to live? We're not a 'Mayberry R.F.D.' anymore," said Addy Hansen, a criminal justice student who has spoken out about safety cuts. "We're the second-largest city, and growing, in Colorado. We're in trouble. We're in big trouble."
Mayor flinches at revenue
Colorado Springs' woes are more visceral versions of local and state cuts across the nation. Denver has cut salaries and human services workers, trimmed library hours and raised fees; Aurora shuttered four libraries; the state budget has seen round after round of wholesale cuts in education and personnel.
The deep recession bit into Colorado Springs sales-tax collections, while pension and health care costs for city employees continued to soar. Sales-tax updates have become a regular exercise in flinching for Mayor Lionel Rivera.
"Every month I open it up, and I look for a plus in front of the numbers instead of a minus," he said. The 2010 sales-tax forecast is almost $22 million less than 2007.
Voters in November said an emphatic no to a tripling of property tax that would have restored $27.6 million to the city's $212 million general fund budget. Fowler and many other residents say voters don't trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don't believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.
Dead grass, dark streets
But the 2010 spending choices are complete, and local residents and businesses are preparing for a slew of changes:
• The steep parks and recreation cuts mean a radical reshifting of resources from more than 100 neighborhood parks to a few popular regional parks. The city cut watering drastically in 2009 but "got lucky" with weekly summer rains, said parks maintenance manager Kurt Schroeder.
With even more watering cuts, "if we repeat the weather of 2008, we're at risk of losing every bit of turf we have in our neighborhood parks," Schroeder said. Six city greenhouses are shut down. The city spent $19.6 million on parks in 2007; this year it will spend $3.1 million.
"If a playground burns down, I can't replace it," Schroeder said. Park fans' only hope is the possibility of a new ballot tax pledged to recreation spending that might win over skeptical voters.
• Community center and pool closures have parents worried about day-care costs, idle teenagers and shut-in grandparents with nowhere to go.
Hillside Community Center, on the southeastern edge of downtown Colorado Springs in a low- to moderate-income neighborhood, is scrambling to find private partners to stay open. Moms such as Kirsten Williams doubt they can replace Hillside's dedicated staff and preschool rates of $200 for six-week sessions.
"It's affordable, the program is phenomenal, and the staff all grew up here," Williams said. "You can't re-create that kind of magic."
Shutting down youth services is shortsighted, she argues. "You're going to pay now, or you're going to pay later. There's trouble if kids don't have things to do."
• Though officials and citizens put public safety above all in the budget, police and firefighting still lost more than $5.5 million this year. Positions that will go empty range from a domestic violence specialist to a deputy chief to juvenile offender officers. Fire squad 108 loses three firefighters. Putting the helicopters up for sale and eliminating the officers and a mechanic banked $877,000.
• Tourism outlets have attacked budget choices that hit them precisely as they're struggling to draw choosy visitors to the West.
The city cut three economic-development positions, land-use planning, long-range strategic planning and zoning and neighborhood inspectors. It also repossessed a large portion of a dedicated lodgers and car rental tax rather than transfer it to the visitors' bureau.
"It's going to hurt. If they don't at least market Colorado Springs, it doesn't get the people here," said Nancy Stovall, owner of Pine Creek Art Gallery on the tourism strip of Old Colorado City. Other states, such as New Mexico and Wyoming, will continue to market, and tourism losses will further erode city sales-tax revenue, merchants say.
• Turning out the lights, literally, is one of the high-profile trims aggravating some residents. The city-run Colorado Springs Utilities will shut down 8,000 to 10,000 of more than 24,000 streetlights, to save $1.2 million in energy and bulb replacement.
Hansen, the criminal-justice student, grows especially exasperated when recalling a scary incident a few years ago as she waited for a bus. She said a carload of drunken men approached her until the police helicopter that had been trailing them turned a spotlight on the men and chased them off. Now the helicopter is gone, and the streetlight she was waiting under is threatened as well.
"I don't know a person in this city who doesn't think that's just the stupidest thing on the planet," Hansen said. "Colorado Springs leaders put patches on problems and hope that will handle it."
Employee pay criticized
Community business leaders have jumped into the budget debate, some questioning city spending on what they see as "Ferrari"-level benefits for employees and high salaries in middle management. Broadmoor luxury resort chief executive Steve Bartolin wrote an open letter asking why the city spends $89,000 per employee, when his enterprise has a similar number of workers and spends only $24,000 on each.
Businessman Fowler, saying he is now speaking for the task force Bartolin supports, said the city should study the Broadmoor's use of seasonal employees and realistic manager pay.
"I don't know if people are convinced that the water needed to be turned off in the parks, or the trash cans need to come out, or the lights need to go off," Fowler said. "I think we'll have a big turnover in City Council a year from April. Until we get a new group in there, people aren't really going to believe much of anything."
Mayor and council are part-time jobs in Colorado Springs, points out Mayor Rivera, that pay $6,250 a year ($250 extra for the mayor). "We have jobs, we pay taxes, we use services, just like they do," Rivera said, acknowledging there is a "level of distrust" of public officials at many levels.
Rivera said he welcomes help from Bartolin, the private task force and any other source volunteering to rethink government. He is slightly encouraged, for now, that his monthly sales-tax reports are just ahead of budget predictions.
Officials across the city know their phone lines will light up as parks go brown, trash gathers in the weeds, and streets and alleys go dark.
"There's a lot of anger, a lot of frustration about how governments spend their money," Rivera said. "It's not unique to Colorado Springs."

I want to live in AMERICA!

It's unreal:

Report: More Americans going hungry
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 16, 2009 3:14 PM

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a federal report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children -- more than one in five across the United States -- were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million youngsters the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

Taken together, the findings provide the latest glimpse into the toll that the weak economy has taken on the well-being of the nation's residents. The findings are from a snapshot of food in America that the U.S. Agriculture Department has issued every year since 1995, based on Census Bureau surveys. It documents both Americans who are scrounging for adequate food -- people living with some amount of "food insecurity" in the lexicon of experts -- and those whose food shortages are so severe that they are hungry.

"These numbers are a wake-up call . . . for us to get very serious about food security and hunger, about nutrition and food safety in this country," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a briefing of reporters.

The report released Monday is the first produced during the tenure of President Obama, who pledged during his campaign for the White House last year to eliminate hunger among children by 2015, a goal that no previous president has set. The administration has not produced a full-fledged plan to meet that objective, but White House and Agriculture officials said in recent interviews that they are developing policies. Among the first is a decision to use $85 million freed up by Congress as part of a recent appropriations bill to experiment with ways to get food to more children during the summer, when subsidized school breakfasts and lunches are unavailable.

Vilsack attributed the marked worsening in Americans' access to food primarily to the rise in unemployment, which now exceeds 10 percent, and in people who are underemployed. "It's no secret. Poverty, unemployment, these are all factors," he said. Vilsack acknowledged that "there could be additional increases" in the 2009 figures, due out a year from now, although he said it is not yet clear how much the problem might be eased by the measures the administration and Congress have taken this year to stimulate the economy.

The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not just an absence of work.

The government's next significant forum for debating how to improve access to food is likely to come next year, when Congress is scheduled to renew the country's main law covering food and nutrition for children. In the meantime, the White House has been convening frequent meetings with officials from several federal departments -- including Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, in addition to Agriculture -- that deal with youngsters' well-being.

The report suggests that the main federal programs intended to help people struggling to get adequate food are only partly fulfilling their purpose. Just more than half of the people surveyed who reported they had food shortages said that they had, in the previous month, participated in one of the government's largest anti-hunger and nutrition programs: food stamps, subsidized school lunches or WIC, the nutrition program for women with babies or young children.

Last year, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, compared with 3.9 million in 2007, while people in about 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, nearly 90,000 more than the year before.

Food shortages, the report shows, are particularly pronounced among women raising children alone. Last year, more than one in three single mothers reported that they struggled for food and more than one in seven said someone in their home had been hungry -- far eclipsing the food problem in any other kind of household. The report also found that people who are black or Hispanic were more than twice as likely as whites to report that food in their home was scarce.

Poverty and food shortages are linked but are not the same thing, according to the report. Just half the households in which food is scarce have incomes at or below the official poverty level, the data show, while most of the rest live at less than twice the poverty level.

Around the Washington area, the extent of food shortages varies significantly. In the District, an average of 13.7 percent of households between 2006 and 2008 have had at least some problems getting enough food, although the problem in the District is not as severe as it was from a three-year period a decade earlier, according to the report. In Virginia, the prevalence of food shortages also has fallen in the past year to less than 9 percent. In Maryland, the problem has grown slightly worse, increasing to an average of 9.6 percent the past three years from 8.7 percent a decade before.

Overall, the data show that people who do not consistently have enough food experience the problem repeatedly, but not all the time. On average, households with such scarcity had the problem seven months out of the year, while about one-fourth said the problem occurred almost every month.

In the survey used to measure food shortages, people were considered to have food insecurity if they said that answered "yes" to several of a series of questions. Among the questions were whether, in the past year, their food sometimes ran out before they had money to buy more, whether they could not afford to eat nutritionally balanced meals, and whether adults in the family sometimes cut the size of their meals -- or skipped them -- because they lacked enough money for food. The report defined the degree of their food insecurity by the number of the questions to which they answered yes.

The next time I get the "America is the greatest country in the world" line from somebody I am going to smack them.

Income evaporation

This is a pretty incredible chart. I wonder if there is anything comparable? I wonder who was president over this course of time and what party controlled congress for the bulk of the time? Hmm... I wonder...

Stores Go Dark Where Buyers Once Roamed

New article in the NY Times today, "Stores Go Dark Where Buyers Once Roamed". To think when I started this blog (not that I have kept it up like I wanted to) there was still a discussion as to whether there would really be a recession or not. I have heard the word "crisis" used in other countries - but this is the first time I recall seeing it used in the U.S.

"It's a crisis,"

Yeah - you bet. We are in a recession/near depression - yet Goldman Sachs just had a blowout quarter. Funny how that can happen...

Record Credit Card Charge-offs

From the incomparable blog Calculated Risk via Reuters, this story about credit card charge offs:

The U.S. monthly credit card chargeoff rate surpassed 10 percent and hit a sixth straight record high in May, Moody's Investors Services said on Wednesday ...

The chargeoff rate index -- which measures credit card loans the banks do not expect to be repaid -- rose to 10.62 percent in May from 9.97 percent in April.

"We expect the chargeoff rate index to continue to rise in the coming months but at a slower pace, as it peaks at around 12 percent in the second quarter of 2010," Moody's senior vice president William Black said in a statement.

My question is about the psychological extension of this story - when do you start looking around a room with 10 people in it, and say to yourself "one of these people isn't paying their credit card bill, why should I?". I think if things fall too far apart, there is a tipping point where moral hazard (for the individual - the corporate moral hazard is gone) goes by the wayside. The stock market run from March to the last few days doesn't mean anything, nor does any financial news propaganda - things are terrible. And they are getting worse. The unemployment levels are horrific and growing. Their is no end in sight yet.

General Growth Properties Files for Bankruptcy

This is pretty big news, and the story is across many levels - consumer spending, commercial real estate, mortgages, etc:

General Growth Properties, one of the largest mall operators in the nation, filed for bankruptcy early Thursday morning in one of the biggest commercial real estate collapses in United States history.

Despite bargaining for months with its creditors, General Growth faced increasing pressure to handle its more than $25 billion in debt, largely in the form of short-term mortgages that will come due by next year. The company has been severely wounded by the recession, which has wreaked havoc upon the retailers who inhabit its more than 200 malls in 44 states. Many stores have shuttered, depriving mall operators like General Growth of revenue.

What fascinates me going forward is what is going to happen to all these eventually abandoned properties. There is so much over capacity in America, so many millions (!) of extra square feet of retail space, that realistically there may never be a need for it. Especially as more and more people shop on-line. The closings/bankruptcies of retailers and whole malls will drive even more people to turn to the web (when consumption picks up). There is such a mess to unwind, it may be the story for the next several generations.