For his presidential campaign in which Wall Street regulation was a mantra, Obama's top source of funds was investment bank giant Goldman Sachs, whose employees, partners, and executives gave him $995,000 -- that's the most any politician has raised from any one company in a single election since the age of "soft money" ended.
What we need now is clarity. What will future capital requirements look like? What is the plan to return the banks to reasonable rates of profitability? Until that architecture is put in place, banks will have little incentive to sell the problem assets currently clogging their balance sheets—let alone to lend more aggressively.
Protracted congressional hearings on the bank crisis, piecemeal new regulations, sporadic attacks on bank compensation, and an ad hoc approach to taxing banks will only compound the crisis in the American financial service industry.
Probably the lowest moment was getting care from Canada."
"They couldn't do nothing for me," he noted in a later media conference call Wednesday. "It was like I was in a Third World country."
"One of two piers at the port serving the Haitian capital has reopened, and a gravel road was laid off of it, clearing a major route for aid to come into the city, officials said. A Dutch Navy ship, the Pelikaan, unloaded 90 tons of humanitarian aid Thursday morning. Two other ships previously offloaded containers for trucks to carry supplies into Port-au-Prince" (CNN article)
"In a country whose government has all but stopped functioning, in a city whose crowded shanties remain largely unreached by aid cargoes, it has fallen to communities on the ground to fill the gap as best they can. Religious missions, with their deep community connections, are proving to be particularly critical conduits of help, both spiritual and material." (WSJ article)
This Daniel Indiviglio article at The Atlantic discusses "Glaxo-SmithKline's recent decision to put thousands of chemical compounds which may cure malaria into the public domain." An interesting discussion of the balance between responsibility to shareholders and responsibility "for the greater good"
This NY Times article from Sunday talks about "Baumol’s cost disease," which refers to businesses that don't benefit from increased efficiency and therefore labor costs continually rise - such as "the performing arts...education, police work and garbage collection." "Cost disease helps explain why low-income Americans can now afford flat-screen televisions that were out of reach a decade ago, but health insurance that was unaffordable in January 2000 remains unaffordable in January 2010."
"A divided Supreme Court on Thursday swept away decades of legislative efforts to restrict the role of corporations in election campaigns, ruling that severe restrictions on corporate spending are inconsistent with the First Amendment's protection of political speech." (Washington Post) Wonderful - more power for businesses to "vote themselves largesse from the publc treasury"
In this Washington Post article, President Obama said "We were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values." Nice spin. 2009 was spent not reforming the financial system, not creating jobs, not reforming health care, not inproving education, and not changing the energy sector. 2009 was not about "getting stuff done" -- it was about sticking to an agenda and finding out that even a supermajority of Democrats in Congress couldn't pass it. Rahm Emanuel didn't want the crisis to "go to waste". To date, not only have they failed in exploiting the crisis for their agenda, but they have also increased the overall uncertainty that is preventing businesses from investing and growing the economy. Obama plans to rectify all of this by telling everyone how angry he is at Wall Street.
Evan Newmark's "Mean Street" blog in the WSJ says "Apparently, this is now how we treat success in America. We damn it — and then we punish it by enacting loopy, politically — expedient measures such as caps on Wall Street trading and principal investments...We need people to come together, but we engage in populist divisiveness. We need millions of jobs, but we kill the incentives and destroy the capital that will create them."
From George Will's column in today's Washington Post:
"We are on the precipice of an achievement that's eluded Congresses and presidents for generations."
-- President Barack Obama, Dec. 15, on health-care legislation
Precipice, 1. a headlong fall or descent, esp. to a great depth.
-- Oxford English Dictionary
"Some are More Equal Than Others" Read responses to the WSJ's article on union member's special exemption from the proposed 40% tax on "Cadillac" health care plans.
Say it isn't so - "President Barack Obama's top goal as he enters a second year in office is to lift U.S. job creation and revitalize the economy, the White House said on Tuesday" (Reuters, here). Can't you just stay out of the way?"Crediting themselves with mending the crisis, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ruled that banks were on a solid footing because private investors would provide fresh capital and banks would be free to book profits and earn their way out of trouble.
That was then. Today it's politically convenient to bash banks for the very same profits, and to punish the very same investors with a new Obama bank tax. First, the government coaxes banks into buying back the government's TARP stake (and therefore government's share of future earnings). Then it turns around and helps itself to a chunk of those earnings anyway.
The prospect of increased federal and state regulation and taxes has been particularly disruptive to the hiring plans of small- and medium-sized businesses, which have historically generated about two-thirds of the nation’s jobs...Businesses don't like to hire in an uncertain environment, and while Congress has spent much of 2009 and early 2010 debating health care "reform", employers have little guidance on taxes, energy policy, financial sector reform, and other areas Obama promises to address. Meanwhile, the administration claims they're doing everything they can to create jobs.
In a recent interview with CNBC.com, the [American Chamber of Commerce]’s chief economist, Martin Regalia, described a paralyzing uncertainty over policy issues, saying that many members “had adopted an attitude of survival” and "few talked about net new hiring.”
At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door.Similar clothes were also found at a nearby Wal-Mart, but a spokesman says "the company normally donates all its unworn goods to charities."
It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result, Washington, rejecting "business as usual," finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it, and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it.
Congress passes, without reading it and without actually finishing writing it, a stimulus package totaling $787 billion...This will stimulate the economy by creating millions of jobs, according to estimates provided by the Congressional Estimating Office's Magical Estimating 8-Ball.
The annual observance of Earth Hour is observed with one hour of symbolic energy conservation as hundreds of millions of nonessential lights and appliances are turned off. And that's just in Al Gore's house.
In other international bad news, North Korea launches a test missile that experts say is capable of hitting Hawaii, based on the fact that it actually hits Hawaii. The United States swiftly pledges to issue a strongly worded condemnation containing "even stronger words than last time."
New York is temporarily thrown into a panic when Air Force One flies low over Manhattan for a publicity photo shoot. Responding to widespread criticism, Gibbs notes that Obama inherited Air Force One from the Bush administration.
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