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Where 140 characters (@michaeljung) are not enough
and a blog post (michaeljung.wordpress.com) would be a waste.

http://www.michaeljung.co.uk

Republicans said the government can’t afford further increases in the budget deficit, expected to reach $1.4 trillion this fiscal year, and said that Democrats have lost sight of the economic risks posed by the nation’s rapidly mounting total debt. In the give and take, the contours of the 2010 midterm election debate have become clear. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky. ) chided Democrats for refusing to fully pay for the legislation with offsetting savings or revenue increases. “The principle Democrats are defending is that they will not pass a bill unless it adds to the deficit,” Sen. McConnell said. Can’t do what they are supposed to do. What’s good for the country and its people. Maybe the 63% (see poll) have jobs.

Republicans said the government can’t afford further increases in the budget deficit, expected to reach $1.4 trillion this fiscal year, and said that Democrats have lost sight of the economic risks posed by the nation’s rapidly mounting total debt. In the give and take, the contours of the 2010 midterm election debate have become clear. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky. ) chided Democrats for refusing to fully pay for the legislation with offsetting savings or revenue increases. “The principle Democrats are defending is that they will not pass a bill unless it adds to the deficit,” Sen. McConnell said.

Can’t do what they are supposed to do. What’s good for the country and its people. Maybe the 63% (see poll) have jobs.

peterfeld:

This is your US Senate nominee on drugs: Alvin Greene meets Keith Olbermann.

Urlesque:

Just some simple, old fashioned down-home campaigning. All across the state. Hard work. The guy can barely put words together and is running on no discernible platform. Are we living in some kind of post-apocalyptic banana republic?

Now you know that all the movies about political conspiracy theories are movies.

This is the b-roll man! America finds a new new low. They should have asked the CIA/FBI to help cast the puppet, career politicians are not good at anything.

Interesting Analysis about recent events in Japan;

Earlier this week, Japan’s prime minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned. Today, Naoto Kan was elected as the new prime minister. (via The Economist)

Although the macroeconomic view (fiscal tightening) might be fatal (Richard Koo, 2009)

Thank god somebody said it out loud.

IT’S not quite a Lehman moment, but financial markets are more anxious today than at any time since the global recovery took hold almost a year ago. The MSCI index of global stocks has fallen by over 15% since mid-April. Treasury yields have tumbled as investors have fled to the relative safety of American government bonds. The three-month inter-bank borrowing rate is at a ten-month high. Gone is the exuberance that greeted the return to growth (see article). Investors are on edge.

What lies behind these jitters? New nervousness about geopolitical risk, with tensions rising in the Korean peninsula, has not helped. But that comes on top of two wider worries.

One is about the underlying health of the world economy. Fears are growing that the global recovery will falter as Europe’s debt crisis spreads, China’s property bubble bursts and America’s stimulus-fuelled rebound peters out. The other concerns government policy. From America’s overhaul of financial regulation to Germany’s restrictions on short-selling, politicians are changing the rules in unpredictable ways (see article). And the scale of sovereign debts has left governments with less room to counter any new downturn; indeed, many of them are being forced into austerity.

The danger is that these fears reinforce each other in a pernicious reversal of the dynamics of 2008-09. Then, co-ordinated government action on a grand scale stopped the global financial crisis from turning into a depression. Now, thanks to incompetence and impotence, governments may become the problem that will drag the world economy down.

(via @theeconomist)

*Now I am all shy and blushing*


[ECB] Trichet explains why they buy know bonds (monetization).

They observed ‘hampering of transmission of monetary policy.’ Markets currently don’t function normally.

The best is when he gets out of himself speaking about the stability and growth pact and the time around 2004/2005. The countries he didn’t want to name was Germany and France. Both countries wanted to water down the pact and go above the 3% new debt to budget line.

The downfall of Greece got much more interesting now.

Greek blog DosePasa has released several smoking gun documents  in which Boston-based Hayman Private Equity (no relation to the Kyle Bass firm, at least none that we can find), discloses it intention to offer a E20 billion loan through a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding to Greece at roughly LIBOR+125bps in February 2010. If the documents are proven legitimate, and with a plethora of executive-level signatures it appears they would be difficult to forge, Athens will likely now demand G-Pap’s head on a platter, or at least a coherent explanation why he refused to do this transaction at massively beneficial to Greece terms, which most importantly, did not involve the IMF’s austerity measures, which have been the source of so much consternation to date, not to mention a proximal cause for the biggest market drop in history.

Personal Note

The longer the windows are open [fiscal and monetary policy], the longer, harder and more painful it will be in the future. 

We should not talk about ‘the crisis’, it brings up the wrong emotions. I have to warn about the collective angst and the synthetic creation of panic. We should all ask where is the wall, the wall of possibilities.

The crisis is our own creation of perpetuum mobile.

Election Debate Rap Battle (by Dan Bull) (via douglby dgblackout) #fb

Gordon Brown talking about Conservative implementing budget cuts within 50-days after the election in case they win.

I just want to remind everyone. Budget cuts within the next 9 months will be inevitable, whether you vote Labour, Conservative or Lib Dems. The markets will force it upon this nation.

As we have learned during this brief time of financial upheaval, things usually get worse till they get better.

What Brown said is lie. He is misleading the public. He still is Prime Minister, and saying such things is pure manipulative of the public, misleading, a lie.

Bond fund managers have called for steep cuts in welfare spending by highly indebted European countries to avoid a repeat of the Greek crisis. Spain, Portugal and Ireland have already been targeted by speculators. Some economists have included Britain and Italy in the European “circle of doom” countries that ring the more financially secure nations of France and Germany.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said Britain was unlikely to come under the same pressure as Greece, Spain and Portugal because it was able to devalue its currency and trade its way out of recession. Britain remains the world’s sixth-largest exporter in the world. Sterling has fallen from $2 before the crisis to $1.70 early this year to $1.50 last week, giving exporters a boost as prices of their goods fall. (via Guardian May 3rd 2010)

And giving consumer a hard time on the till, especially petrol (oil), gas, travel tickets. As a world deeply intertwined, the weakness of the pound will push up the CPI and RPI. Inflation will remain at alleviated levels above 2 if not over 3% year over year.

Which implies with the current overall world outlook, the perspective shifts towards double-dip, all things considered.

President Obama speaks at the 2010 University of Michigan commencement ceremony in Ann Arbor, MI.