Jon Corzine’s appearance before the House Agriculture committee was a yawner and yet breathtaking.  By candidly not pleading the 5th Amendment the testimony was completely lacking in fireworks.  But the substance of it, pleading whatever amendment gives you the right to say “I dunno”, left everyone cold.  As much as $1.2 billion is missing from MF Global – but Corzine has no idea where it is.

As the poster child for more financial regulation, MF Global has a lot to teach.  It was nowhere near “Too big to fail”, but it was big and messy.  This will highlight the laws we have in place and what happens when failure is an option.

Continue reading →

News stories on the economy are full of many subjects that would have seemed strange to American readers just a few years ago – European banking, the developing world, clever financial instruments, and so on.  There is one word that is strangely absent, however – “Recovery”.  This once prominent term has apparently been banished from reporting, possibly because no one believes that there is such a thing anymore.

That’s not to say there won’t be a Recovery, but as is typical of a credit-meltdown fueled Depression there has to be a Restructuring first.  Money and labor and all the other resources you can name have to start going into areas that are going to be productive in the new economy that replaces the one that crashed and burned back in 2008.  Barataria has led some discussion on how jobs appear to be shifting rapidly, a sign of Restructuring, but there are some fascinating things happening that show how much our world is changing.

Some of those stories come from the world of oil, the mysterious black gunk that fuels the world.

Continue reading →

Since October, most of the financial news has been about Europe and the potential for a global meltdown.  The credit squeeze resulting from this crisis has become painful enough to demand serious action, which in global terms means our own Federal Reserve taking the lead.  Very little has changed since this crisis began upwards of two years ago, except the brick wall is approaching rapidly.

But what about the other big economic problem, unemployment?  Very little has been written about jobs in the US since it appeared in September that something like a turnaround has occurred.  Unemployment Initial Claims were 390k-400k each week, seasonally adjusted, through October and November with little change.  That’s a net loss of 1.7M jobs per month before we add in the total creation to arrive at the total employment picture.

Continue reading →