A quick bit of data

Good morning. I'm playing catch-up, so this update is very heavily reliant on secondary sources (particularly Mish Shedlock), rather than primary, but I only link to items which link through to original articles, so the data is there if you go digging. Sorry about that; it's a little easier to get these things online that way.

There's been a good bit of a rally in the stock markets lately, as many people have noted, and various commentaries have made a good deal of noise about a market bottom, and the beginning of a recovery, and so on. Most of it is not based on any data beyond excitement over the stock market, though there have been a few positive earnings surprises, and that's good. Also, the TED spread and LIBOR rates are well down into non-panic territory, tho' still quite high compared to good economic times.

Still, despite lower rates, bank lending continues to fall, particularly at bailout-recipient banks. And job losses haven't been letting up. (California's up to 11.2%, a record, and that's not even the U-6; that's the conservative U-3!) Job losses will, of course, have a cascading effect on purchasing, which has generally been 65% to 70% of US GDP over the last couple of decades; indeed, March retail sales fell sharply and unexpectedly. Also, commercial property is on the decline with large bankruptcy and failure counts in retail, Japanese deflation is picking up steam; Americans are entering credit default at record rates; home foreclosure rates are soaring again as various temporary moratoriums on foreclosures are being lifted, and so on.

And things like this very bad idea - invaliding one out of 10 dollars, declaring them "non-currency" to force more and immediate spending before you lose 10% of your money - makes me think that the power that be are not at all of the opinion that the situation has stabilised for very long. It's not so much that the idea exists, it's that it came out of Harvard and was printed in the New York Times, an organ of the political and economic establishment. (Extra analysis here, courtesy Mish; story relayed to me by cow.)

Questions are being raised about the validity of the bank "stress tests" the Treasury is conducting, with former Federal bank regulator William Black calling them a "complete sham." Mish has a roundup of reactions to these tests, here; Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks the bank plans will fail as they aren't really targeted at rebuilding a coherent financial system, but are instead centred around bailouts. The IMF is raising its estimate of bank losses to around US$4 trillion. Small-business optimism - a major driver of recovery employment - is sinking to new lows as venture capital investments plunge.

Staying in the real economy, trading values of housing CDOs have plumbed new lows, after a brief and smallish apparent recovery driven mostly by the money funnel. Credit spreads on commercial property are at record highs for all tranches other than AAA. AAA is level at extremely high spreads, but not at or hugely close to the records set earlier on.

This blog post over at Economic Edge collates a whole bunch of charts from the St. Louis Fed. You'll enjoy the plumetting tax receipts, the zomgwtf corporate pretax profits, and, as I've been saying a lot lately, keep watching the M1, particularly for shit like this. Mmmm, big spikes up. I can't recommend looking over that chart set strongly enough; note that the timelines on many of these are decades long, and compare recent huge swings against the previous five decades. (Watch some of the vertical scales, though; they aren't very consistent and that can be misleading!)

Jeffrey Sachs as a long post up on why the "Geithner-Summers Plan is Even Worse Than We Thought", mostly discussing the money-funnel functionality.

This is a contingency plan only so far, but the Canadian Auto Workers are preparing their membership for a Chrysler bankruptcy. Do they know something? Maybe.

So there's a bit of a cold splash of reality for your Monday morning. Good luck.

eta: Japanese steel output fell 13.2% for FY2008 (ending March), the biggest drop since 1948, on falling demand, particularly in the automobile sector.

The political class demands complete immunity for war crimes

It's been quite the weekend for torture supporters and their apologists. Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff, states on ABC's "This Week" that Mr. Obama supports immunity for all levels of US war criminals involved in torture and other war crimes - implementers, those who established the policy, those who wrote bad-faith legal opinions to try to justify the crimes. Fox News has started a campaign to lie about the torture regime, declaring it "not torture" (law, precedent, previous US prosecutions be damned) and in general a good thing. So does Bill Krystal. George Will spent the weekend saying that the only problem with the memos is that they were released, and prominent Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan talks about her strong support for keeping everything covered up. (Just in case you need another example of everything wrong with the American press. Also, Glenn Greenwald has another good example of how the political press serves as a willing and enthusiastic propaganda arm of the political class.) Obama senior advisor David Axelrod continues boosting the "move past it, it's over" theme. Finally, Christopher Buckley is a member of the 'it's just "harsh interrogation"' club in his call for immunity as well, also asserting that torture prevented "another 9/11," calling opposition to the use of Nazi and Stalinist techniques designed to elicit false confessions "sanctimony."

And I remind everyone yet again that the point of torture is not to get the truth, but to get the victim to say whatever you want them to say so that the torture will stop. It's not about truth; it's at best orthogonal to the truth. And were this any other actor, all of the people above would be demanding heads on pikes; we know this because they do, and have, made exactly those kinds of demands for exactly these kinds of acts - when other people do them. The contemptible degeneracy of the political class could not be more plain.

Meanwhile, people who actually know about these things, such as torture-resistance trainers for the military, want prosecutions. Manfred Nowak, torture investigator for the United Nations, wants investigations, and notes (correctly, as far as I can tell) that refusal to investigate and prosecute violates US treaty law - not that anyone in the political class cares about that.

The longer Mr. Obama refuses to act, the more complicity he gains in the torture regime. The longer his supporters tolerate that, the more they do as well.

eta: The EFF has a fundraising campaign against Mr. Obama's continuation and extension of Mr. Bush's domestic spying and wiretapping regime and immunity-thorugh-secrecy claims here.

also, music

Woo! silussa is the latest sponsor for my CD project, which has been coming very slowly these last couple of weeks because mostly Norwescon. Yay! Thanks! My next step is to buy some more PVC and make another gobo, this one for the studio window, because now that it's suddenly summer, there are lots more barky dogs outside. To wit: foo.

I got the bouzouki! I have spent dollars. Some from some of you! Thanks! ^_^ His name is Kohaku (spelt 琥珀) and he's awesome. He's also a monster - almost a metre long, larger than some guitars, and with wider fret-spacing too. So that's a learning curve. (F is suddenly Difficult. So is Em.) Here's a little pocket-recorder recording of me screwing around with him yesterday just so you can get some idea what he sounds like (at least, when played one particular way); I think I'm going to experiment with different tunings just to provide contrast with Summer and maybe make some chords easier.

Also, my Craigslist vulturing finally paid off! I have a midi controller; it's a Roland A-30, an older but durable semi-weighted keyboard with aftertouch, which will be another learning curve, but that's okay. (I was surprised that the aftertouch worked with GarageBand, but that was convenient because it let me do a quick test with my laptop.) I really didn't think I'd manage to get anything with aftertouch for my $100-or-less budget, so I'm really pleased about that. Strangely, given its age, the thing is pristine - the seller wasn't the first owner but basically never played with it, and I don't think the person she bought it from ever played out with it, even though it's built for that. It's bigger than I wanted (srsly it takes up more space than I'd like) but I have software that works with it and so on.

So I've spent lots of money, no doubt more than I should've. And I'll be buying PVC tomorrow, but that's cheap. Now I go to work on lyrics. ^_^