New Headaches for Spain, Rajoy and Rato
Another blow out number by Spain. Unemployment is now above the magic 25% level. Uncharted territory…From Bloomberg.
Spanish unemployment climbed to a record in the third quarter as a deepening recession left one in four workers jobless, adding pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to seek a second European bailout.
Unemployment, the second highest in the European Union after Greece, rose to 25.02 percent from 24.6 percent in the previous quarter, the National Statistics Institute said in Madrid today. That is the highest since at least 1976, the year after dictator Francisco Franco’s death ledSpain to democracy.
“The situation is serious,” Ricardo Santos, an economist at BNP Paribas SA in London, said by telephone. “There is still room for a deterioration in unemployment. Activity is weak and the government will reduce jobs as there are strict targets to adjust the number of public-sector temporary workers, especially in health and education.” (Full read here).
Meanwhile, the not so popular Mr Rato is about to get some uncomfortable questions with regards to the collapse of Bankia….
Bailed out “fraudsters”
Taibbi on Gold, Munger and civilization.
Earlier this year, Charlie Munger, who is billionaire Warren Buffet’s right hand at Berkshire Hathaway and a sort of self-proclaimed mad oracle of Wall Street, made some interesting comments. He bashed people who buy gold, delivering an all-time amazing quote:
Gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939 but civilized people don’t buy gold – they invest in productive businesses.
Munger, if you might remember, is the same gazillionaire dickhead who two years ago ripped people experiencing post-crash economic hard times, saying they should “suck it in and cope” and that anyone who wants to complain about the Wall Street bailouts should realize they were “absolutely required to save your civilization” (Munger thinks a lot about “civilization”). He added that even if you didn’t like them, “you shouldn’t be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger.”
Full article here.
US Govt Ignoring Rule of Law & Harming Economy Further
There are numerous examples of the federal government suspending or ignoring settled rules of law in order to quickly and effectively respond to particular problems created by the broader financial crisis starting in 2008. UPenn Law Professor, David Skeel, says that the federal government’s inability to revert to the long established principles associated with rule of law in the United States is beginning to have a profoundly negative impact on the national economy. He talks with Bloomberg Law’s Lee Pacchia.
Video below.
Tsipras the great?
The Greek drama has been unfolding over the past year(s). We have read of corruption, to much debt, creative accounting, riots and much more. During the past weeks, the extreme parties have gained a lot of popularity, and of the main questions Mr Alexis Tsipras is asking goes; “Is this debt legal”? You can’t really blame the guy. After all, Alexis means “defender (and warrior)”. Tsipras is probably just warming up. From Golem.
Predictably the bully-boy chorus, shouting insults and threats at the Greek people, has begun to swell. One of the UKs best known Tory Bully-boys, Ken Clark, Justice Secretary(!), recently described those Greek politicians who are opposed to the terms of the EU enforced austerity measures, as “cranky extremists”.
The object of this jibe was, of course, Alexis Tsipras, whom even The Guardian newspaper described as
…leader of the radical left Syriza party, [who] is demanding a renegotiation of Greece’s bailout package.
What is it that Syriza and Mr Tsipras have actually said they want, which qualifies them for being described as ‘radical’ and ‘cranky’?
Well Mr Tsipras is on record as saying that if given a mandate to set up a government, he would set up a Debt Commission to investigate the legality of the various debts the Greek Nation and its banking system have accumulated. Is this radical and cranky?
Fraud and the Future of Finance-Bill Black
Bill Black: On the Incidence of Fraud Leading to the Crisis, the Absence of Prosecutions, Dodd Frank, and What Must Happen Now. Full must listen to interview here while Santa is about to log out.
William Black: Well, I say the both of them were driven by fraud. The Savings & Loan crisis was a tragedy in two parts. First part was not fraud, it was interest rate risk. But the second phase, which was vastly more expensive, was to defraud and the National Commission that looked into the causes of the crisis said that the typical large failure fraud was invariably present. And there were real regulators then. Our agency filed well over 10,000 criminal referrals that resulted in over 1,000 felony convictions and cases designated as nature. And even that understates the grade in which we went after the elite. Because we worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department, to prioritize cases—creating the top 100 list of the 100 worst institutions which translated into about 600 or 700 executives—and so the bulk of those thousand felony convictions were the worst fraud, the most elite frauds.
Latest comments