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In The Citi

On this day, we found out that the 4th quarter of 2008 had a 6.2% contraction of GDP, far worse than originally thought, the worst performance since the Reagan Administration. For the record, that happened on Mr. Bush’s watch. Stocks ended at a 12 year low (in fairness, during the Clinton Administration, but turing an uptrend). Yesterday we learned that the number of banks the FDIC is keeping a special eye on is up to 252. Good news, there was not an announced bank failure this afternoon, so the tally for the year stands at “lucky” 13. Update: I stand corrected. It’s up to 16.

Before the opening of trading this morning, it was announced that the Feds were going to convert preferred shares to common shares of CitiGroup, and end up owning up to 36% of the company. Citi officials added, however, that they would still control day-to-day operations. Price per share promptly tanked.

Now let me make sure I understand this properly. Citi is so bad off that they need thousands of millions of dollars. They are so big they can’t be allowed to fail. They need to be rescued by the Feds. But never fear, the idiots who got them into this mess will still be in charge.

No wonder there was “dissatisfaction” with the deal.

I’m with Wired on this, we need “radical transparency now“. To the extreme.

In closing: A few choice paragraphs on higher education; America’s worst intersections — is one near you?; CSM asks “Archeological Park or Ethnic Cleansing?”; One in Four Americans put off medical care because of the cost; Homo erectus (“upright humans”) appear to have walked upright (good thing we don’t have to change the species name); I love this paragraph “I kind of love the Hoover Institution. It has all the trappings of being an academic think tank, but none of the actual academics, rigor, intelligence, relevance or inquiry that would normally follow something academic in nature.”; How ironic that a President breaking down the barriers of racism would preside over a nation with “growing hate groups” (seriously, what the heck is with these people?).

What They Said

I know, I know, it’s been a while since I posted. I just haven’t been motivated by killer chimpanzees or the State of the Union or much of anything else that everybody else has been on about for the last week or so. Luckily, other people have written things worth linking.

Let’s start with proof that when you provide seed capital to moticated entrepreneurs, good things happen! Meet Rahinatu, a young lady who made an opportunity for herself with the help of a mere $110. If this sounds like a good thing to you, then I strongly encourage you to go on over to FreeMicroLoan, sign up for the RSS feed, and make some comments.

So I have been hearing nonsense all morning about how “the markets” don’t like what the President said last night and they don’t like “uncertainty.” Well, the people don’t like uncertainty either! Part of the problem “the markets” are experiencing have to do with the fact that we are no longer pretending everything is wonderful. But, when you compare a bunch of stock market declines, you realize it really could be worse! And good news for getting done with this but bad news for corporations, shareholders are angry.

Megan’s Laws don’t work. They don’t work, they don’t prevent crime, they don’t help potential victims stay away from Bad Guys. Since nearly half of sex offenders are family members, it is clear why.

Go ahead and write a letter to the President. He actually reads some of those letters, and uses the feedback he gets from the public (that would be the people who helped him get elected, on whom he must depend to get re-elected in 2012) to inform public policy.

Harsh, Penguin! A few words for the Appleheads.

Harsh but true, Cranky! A few choice words for the young ladies we used to call “bow-heads” when I was in college.

Matt Yglesias has brief but insightful comments on the people who have been called “irresponsible” borrowers. By way of bookends on that theme, Time’s list of 25 people most responsible for the housing crisis, with the ability to rank your favorite losers! Fittingly, when I last looked, Phil Gramm was in the lead. Oh! And it looks like a major group of appraisers are going to oppose the recently announced loan modification plans. Their reasoning? They’re getting cut out of the action.

I enjoyed this chart of travel efficiency, and I hope you will too.

From the “the more things change” department, we have two corrupt judges who were sending kids to juvie detention facilities from which they were getting kickbacks. Often the charges were flimsy. Pork pretty much said what needed saying. Back in my day, it wasn’t juvie. After all, you need an actual judge to send you there. Nope, we had mental hospitals. Even without a crooked judge, you can make do with a crooked doctor, or even a concerned and/or hoodwinked and/or lazy parent, as long as there’s health insurance. And that, my dear readers, is why the seriously crazy lady down the street can’t get inpatient treatment.

And finally, it’s been a while since I gave you some Japanfilter. This is a serious dose of what the…?: Amigurumi.

The Cabin in the Shorties

All You Can Eat Stimulus Bar. Yes America, apparently We Can Has Stimulus Package. Here’s an outline of the provisions. Note that the home buyer tax credit isn’t there. But the bill might give you indigestion. There might be a provision in there to require an electronically verified “white list” of people who can legally be employed. Anybody want to guess if that’s more accurate than the No Fly List? Business Week says that provision is now gone. Oh, and it turns out that 20% of government contract workers earn poverty wages.

Some Alternative Stimulus Ideas. Tim says why not just pay off everybody’s mortgage (which is what I was thinking when the unfortunately accurately named TARP came out). E.B. Misfit suggests tough love for certain Congressmen who thinks no good ever comes out of government spending. Update: The President is thinking small, but it sure sounds like “let’s pay some of these defaulting mortgages ourselves.” Let’s hope it helps people like this, who played by the rules and are now underwater through no fault of their own.

Food Fight. On one hand, the nice people at This Is Why You’re Fat give us turbaconucken. Vegetarians? You might not want to click on that. On the other hand, we have a guy eating himself skinny on “16 hard-boiled egg whites, one and a quarter pound of meat and four cups of vegetables, sprinkled with an occasional carbohydrate.”

Can you tell me how to get… How to get that upcoming new book about behind the scenes at Sesame Street?

All this and no merit badge. Junior Archeology buff builds ancient Japanese style hut, intends to live in it. More on the Jomon period at Wikipedia.

Happy Birthday Mister President and Mister Scientist. You knew it was Lincoln’s 200th birthday, right? Did you also know it’s the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin?

Oh, and one last thing. I finally joined Twitter. You’ll find me as bmagnus.

Same Old, Same Old

I arrived to Geithner’s speech a little late. Just a minute or two before he began to talk about “initiatives to strentghen funding for small businesses.” Here:

We have agreed to expand this program to target the markets for small business lending, student loans, consumer and auto finance, and commercial mortgages.

And because small businesses are so important to our economy, we’re going to take additional steps to make it easier for them to get credit from community banks and large banks. By increasing the federally guaranteed portion of SBA loans, and giving more power to the SBA to expedite loan approvals, we believe we can turn around the dramatic decline in SBA lending we have seen in recent months.

Now let me tear this down for you with the voice of experience. Every time I have ever tried to deal with the SBA — every time anybody I have ever known has tried to deal with the SBA — it has ended up being all about home equity loans. I realize I have somewhat less than a statistically significant sampling, but it’s large enough to include white men, women, and minorities. All these people had detailed business plans that involved tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment purchases and buildouts.

Every time, the end conversation has become “Why exactly am I considering filling out a bunch of government paperwork about my business instead of just talking to Ditech?”

So then, let me explain to the esteemed Secretary why SBA loan applications have plummeted: nobody’s got any home equity anymore. I’m not a fan of Zillow’s research, but they’re only observing the same reality most homeowners face. You can’t get a home equity loan when you have no equity.

So Mr. Secretary, if you would like to actually help small businesses instead of giving the usual lip service, here’s my wish list:

* Direct SBA to guaranty loans secured by equipment purchases, to include reasonable start-up costs when the company agrees to allow SBA review and approval of the business plan. Yes, approval. Some business ideas are stupid. Others have clear but avoidable flaws.

* Make it an SBA priority to provide low-cost consulting and other services to start-ups and businesses in their first year. They already offer some services, but not enough.

* Most importantly, make SBA able to help people buy low-cost, quality health insurance policies for entrepreneurs and their families of the sort that these job-creators would have had if they were content to take a paycheck instead. In fact, make SBA the de facto place for businesses with 12 or fewer employees (“small businesses”) to get group coverage. Don’t tell me they aren’t set up to be an insurance company, because the government already runs several of those. If Blue Cross wants to compete (ha!), let them come up with a cost-competitive plan.

Do us all a favor and do things that will actually help small businesses. And stop trying to pretend we can solve all our financial problems with home equity.

In Closing: I hope everybody has seen this chart of job losses and gains already? How about this one of the S&P 500 adjusted for inflation? Good; Children get it worst in this economy and this stimulus bill (so far); try to live on the minimum wage in any town; getting a job is no longer as simple as moving to where the jobs are; Ezra calls for an end to the filibuster; great pictures of the salvage of flight 1549; and last, even if we have to agree to disagree about whether waterboarding is torture, can we at least agree that slicing someone’s genitals with a scalpel is torture? Please? Sheesh.

Land of the Lost (Jobs)

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All I can say is this: wow.

We knew that almost a quarter million layoffs were announced in January.

And we knew that first time unemployment filings topped 600,000 last week, a level not seen since the Reagan Administration.

But now we also know that the economy lost 598,000 jobs in January and that the unemployment rate jumped to 7.6%. The economy hasn’t lost that many jobs in one month since the Nixon Administration, and the unemployment rate hasn’t been this high since the very beginning of the Clinton Administration. Oh, and they revised the December job losses upwards. Adding things up, that’s 2,500,000 jobs lost in the last 5 months.

Wow.

And things don’t look better when you compare employment to population. Furthermore, the losses were in pretty much every sector.

The job losses obviously have fallout in other parts of the economy, and forming a feedback loop: people aren’t going to the mall or eating out or even getting expensive coffee; people are cancelling cable and getting their news on the internet; people are going without health insurance, because even the researchers have had to admit that the unemployed can’t afford COBRA; enrollment at community colleges is up; CNN is running articles with titles like 10 meals for $10 each. People don’t have money so they don’t spend money so business dries up so more people lose their jobs so more people don’t have money….

And yet the stimulus package is delayed, and some guys like Grover “drown the government in the bathtub” Norquist have the nerve to blame this mess on the new administration. Yeah, cause Obama totally wrecked the economy in less than 3 weeks. Way to go.

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In Closing: the House passed a bill that would make it easier for innocent Americans to get off the no-fly list; I could add more, but Johnny asked the right questions; Hollywood is officially out of ideas, and is clearly toked up; Economic Illiteracy; Chuck Butcher’s quote of the day, “I can state that nothing is gained by panic, which is simple enough to say, another thing in practice”; Wired notes a Playmate trend; can’t decide if the tea shark is clever or “ew”; best anti-drug ad since “this is your brain on drugs”; didn’t I say Dean should be HHS Secretary ages ago, perhaps even before the inauguration?; and yet one more actor who wants to be Governor.

How Stimulus Works

I’ve been chewing on this Forbes piece for a while. Briefly and slightly oversimplified, it says that “deficit spending is bad and doesn’t stimulate the economy ever, unless it’s for defense.” Let’s run that theory to ground.

Suppose we spend some round but arbitrary number on, say, sending a soldier to Iraq. While some money goes to the rent on his stateside place, he’s not spending money here in the United States for the most part. Sure, we also have to spend money outfitting him, making sure he has adequate supplies. Nevertheless, he is not spending his whole paycheck here.

On the other hand, let’s say we spend the same amount of money building a road. Perhaps we spend it merely widening an existing road and renovating an existing bridge. That seems kind of important, doesn’t it? The guys building that bridge are going to spend their paycheck here. They are going to buy lunch near the jobsite. They are going to pay rent and buy steel-toed shoes right here in the United States.

But wait, there’s more.

When that road project is done, it will continue to benefit the community. People will use that road to shorten their commutes and improve their quality of life — perhaps making a house a little further out economically viable. People will use that road to get to businesses, and spend money there. Businesses will move in to locations near the new road and take advantage of the improved traffic flow. Delivery vehicles will take advantage of the more efficient road to boost productivity. Someday in the future, that road will require maintenance, and then we will be able to put people to work all over again.

So no, tax cuts and military spending are not the cure-all for this or any other economy.

In closing: scientists recently dug up — separately of course — a prehistoric snake 43 feet long, a 635 million year old sponge, and an 18th century warship; it’s not a cliche, it’s a trope; look who slithered out of his undisclosed location to warn about pestilence and terrorist attacks; and the doctor whose Lexus blew up this morning? Earlier the cops swore no, it wasn’t a bomb, the hybrid motor must have malfunctioned. Mere hours later (and one must assume a few phone calls with Lexus later), they’ve decided it was a bomb after all. No idea who planted it or why. How old school.

Month-End Miscellany

On this day when a huge economic stimulus bill has been passed, it is only appropriate to reference what I said in 2004 about the National Debt. Let me add Brad DeLong on how the government spending on infrastructure can actually benefit the economy 3-fold over just passing out money. And John Cole asks a great question: “If Republicans plan to deliver exactly zero votes for Obama’s stimulus bill, then why does the bill still have compromises in it? Screw them. Put the family planning stuff back in, take the tax cuts out. If we know for sure that passing a crappy bill won’t win any more votes then just pass a better bill. They won’t scream any louder. The political cost won’t be any greater. Also, and pay attention because this is the important part, a better bill is more likely to succeed.”

I also talked about education “reform” back in 2004. Interesting, the bill passed today has a lot of money for making sure that physical school buildings are safe and in good condition. Elsewhere, other people are talking about teaching “green” at school. And on a local note, one Nevada school district wants to expand random drug testing at exactly the same time that the state wants school districts and everybody else to cut their budgets. Somehow, that doesn’t seem right to me.

In 2005 I laid out some of the lies told about Social Security to manipulate us into thinking running our own private retirement accounts was a good idea. Anybody look at their IRA or 401k statement lately? Anybody still think this is a good idea? Anybody?

In 2006 I argued that I was a centrist because, in fact, my ideals were in line with “most Americans.” Today, one of Ezra Klein’s guest bloggers calls out the media on not being very centrist in their choice of interviews. Liberal Media? Where??

It’s a shame the comic is no longer available online, because in 2007 I wrote yet more about universal health care (as opposed to mandatory health care). Just today, we have “COBRA expansion won’t benefit most low income workers” (hello, recently somebody actually did a study that proved what many of us already knew, COBRA is a sick, expensive joke on the newly unemployed). Oh, and Mahablog has a great BBC documentary on the American health care system. Rather damning that Auntie Beeb had to do that for us.

In 2008 I rounded up some of the ways that the government has manipulated economic “data”. Now, the phenomenon has a technical name: Pollyanna Creep. Kinda sounds like the sort of guy who hangs out just outside the Junior High School, doesn’t it.

I also asked why we ask if America is ready for a woman President. Sure, we are. We just aren’t ready for President Hillary Clinton, or worse yet, Vice President Sarah Palin. Gee Sarah, thanks to you and that Ferraro woman for setting women back politically a couple decades each!

In Closing: Google wants to help you figure out if your ISP is throttling your bandwidth; the Abramoff scandal continues to spawn indictments (and public trial records that may yet be used against members of the Bush Administration); and Carrie asks all the hard questions about being the parents of octuplets. How easily we forget that a) the Bradys were fictional and b) Carol didn’t have to potty train them all at the same time.

On the Roe v. Wade Anniversary

It’s Blog for Choice Day.

Last week I was listening to NPR, and they had some leaders from the So-Called Pro-Life community discussing how they were going to have to change their tactics during the Obama presidency. I will continue to call them the So-Called Pro-Life community until such time as they denouce and expel the internal faction that thinks it is acceptable to enforce their opinion through intimidation, violence, vandalism, and murder. The first fellow they interviewed was mostly reasonable. But then the conversation turned to the idea of “If abortion can’t be prevented altogether, then how can it be reduced.”

This gentleman began to talk about policies such as childhood health care initiatives that could “encourage women to keep their babies.” What? Never heard of giving a child up for adoption? I’ll give this guy credit for at least caring about babies that are actually born. He might actually be “Pro-Life” for real.

Let’s get one thing perfectly straight: The best way, the only way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Sure, I support universal healthcare for children (grown-ups too, but that’s another issue). I support policies that make life easier for families to exist. What do such policies do to prevent unwanted pregnancies?

The policies we need to prevent abortions are age appropriate comprehensive sex education, wide availability of contraceptives, birth defect prevention, rape prevention, and moving the high school schedule so that teenagers don’t have as many unsupervised hours after school. These things will prevent unwanted pregnancies, the leading cause of abortions.

The next fellow was not so agreeable. He spoke graphically of things like forcing women to see ultrasound images of their “unborn babies” before “killing” them. Well, if guys like this get their way and abortion is outlawed, does he propose charging women who get illegal abortions with “murder”?And if not, why? Why do we never hear the So-Called Pro-Life movement go that far when they discuss the consequences of outlawing abortion?

It becomes more and more clear to me that the Pro-Choice and So-Called Pro-Life movements are speaking across one another. Nobody really wants abortion to be widespread. The Pro-Choice movement wants to stop abortion before there even is a pregnancy, but understands that sometimes abortion needs to be considered.

Somehow, the So-Called Pro-Life movement doesn’t want to deal with preventing the problem. They think they can just make women magically want to be mommies, that they can wish away the reasons a woman might say “I can’t have this baby”. It makes you wonder if maybe the real goal isn’t to punish women for having sex. Come to think of it, mighty curious that neither of the people interviewed by NPR are at risk of becoming pregnant.

In closing: H-t to Poligazette for this First Amendment Quiz; why the bailout will create inflation (giving the FOMC a good excuse to raise interest rates to a more normal level); somehow China can implement universal health care while becoming capitalists in the midst of a “retail consolidation“; and Myths and Truths about Japan and Fiscal Stimulus.

A Non-Political Post About the Automotive Industry

Sure, it’s a huge day. But there are things that are happening outside of Washington DC. There are a lot of really good sites covering what’s going on there, including The Moderate Voice (where you will find a small and rather fluffy item I wrote on the incredible job the White House residential staff does moving one First Family out and the next in).

Nope, there’s stuff going on elsewhere.

There are two huge automotive news items that deserve attention. The first is that Fiat is planning on purchasing a rather large stake in Chrysler as part of a “strategic alliance“. More:

Under terms of a pact that is being hammered out, Fiat is likely to take a 35% stake in Chrysler by the middle of this year. It would have the option of increasing that to as much as 55%, these people said.

Fiat, the stronger of the two, wouldn’t immediately put cash into Chrysler. Instead it would obtain its stake mainly in exchange for covering the cost of retooling a Chrysler plant to produce one or more Fiat models to be sold in the U.S., these people said. Fiat would also provide engine and transmission technology to help Chrysler introduce new, fuel-efficient small cars, they said.

Critics of this plan say it is nothing more than trying to make two small, struggling car companies into one large, struggling car company. You remember Fiat, right? They stopped importing cars to the United States over 20 years ago. However, they have been public about their deliberations to build a US factory for just over a year now.

And that’s not the only big automotive story of the day.

Back in Japan, Akio Toyoda is preparing to become the CEO of the compnay his grandfather founded, Toyota. This is in the wake of falling sales, particularly in the United States. Toyota may even annouce it’s first yearly loss ever. Toyoda-san is fluent in English, having been a VP of American operations and a MBA from an American college. (Note: Crown Princess Masako is Harvard educated; Crown Prince Naruhito has a graduate degree from Oxford.) He has also been an executive in the company’s Chinese interests. It will be interesting to see how his international experience influences the company going forward.

In closing: checklists save lives; so does Tom Colicchio; the Great College Hoax; and finally, seriously, I wish the very best for our new President, his family, his administration, and our country.

On the Strip Searching of Children and the ACLU

I must not be very imaginative.

I say that because I can’t think of a single thing that is so important that it’s worth strip searching a child in a public school, but so unimportant that it’s not worth calling that child’s parents first, and not worth calling the police first.

And the thing is that an appeals court pretty much agreed that if the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our persons didn’t apply to the actual body of a child in a school, who the heck did it apply to? The majority opinion said, in part “It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude.”

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case. CNN points out, emphasis mine, that “They will decide whether a campus setting gives school administrators greater discretion to control students suspected of illegal activity than police are allowed in cases involving adults in public spaces.”

Do we want school administrators to have more authority over kids than cops have over citizens? If you think that your kids should be able to go to school without the risk of strip searching on the say-so of a thick-headed administrator, based on the confession of another student who was already in trouble and probably trying to save her own skin, then you should be a supporter of the ACLU.

Cross-posted at The Moderate Voice.

In closing: Seven states sue to block the Bush Administration “My conscience is more important than your health care” rules; a donut is not a baby, but try telling that to the so-called pro-life movement; a CNBC columnist proposes helping us out of the recession by… legalizing pot?; if you thought landing a plane in the Hudson in January and getting everybody out alive was a good thing, thank Unions; cars, cars, everywhere, plenty of deals to be had; on class discrimination in Japan; and sure, it’s just got to be a strange coincidence that 4 out of every 5 people stopped by the NYPD are black or hispanic, never mind the demographics saying they make up just over half the population. Just a coincidence.