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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/10/2006 11:47:51 AM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360961

Jim.. re 'that fool Greenspasm he didnt understand technology one bit he doesnt even use email' not exactly true.. Mr G went techno years ago.. eom adameve.com ..........................666..................................

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/10/2006 5:01:19 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360961

Bill Cara: Why the gold price is falling, Thurs., June 8, 2006, 11:40 AM... Gold is a commodity both like and unlike any other. There is a supply-demand factor as well as an emotional factor. That much we know. But there is another factor called speculation, which is based on market guesswork. Today comes word from the Prudential Equity Group metals research analysts that metal prices have died and gone to heaven. Download Prudential Metals Report dated June 7. billcara.com By that I mean to say that Pru is interpreting markets that speculation has been zapped. Bankers would like to think that way. I’m not so harsh on speculators because I think they have a more open mind. Presently the gold traders of the world are hung up on their questioning whether the U.S. is going to fight inflation or not. They see a 10-year U.S. Treasury Note that yields about 5.0 pct and a Fed overnight bank lending rate at about 5.0 pct. And they know that through this dance between key rates, the ultimate outcome – economic growth/inflation or recession/deflation – will happen. So their figurework goes like this: if Fed rates go higher than bond yields, then score one for the recession/deflation side; but if bond yields go higher than Fed rates, score one for growth/inflation. So – try to follow the logic – if bond yields fall, then the Fed can actually drop its rate or keep it from rising higher. That way we can avoid recession/deflation AND have growth without inflation, i.e., without an inflation problem. So what the Fed and the bankers are trying to do here is to drop the bond yields and drop the price of gold in order to give the appearance that the economy is still a “goldilocks” one that they can manage. Of course this is not what the gold traders expect will be how the game will be resolved in the end. They think that inflation is an issue, brought on by the waste of war, and that interest rates and bond yields will rise, but rise only to the point that the housing market comes to the point of a breakdown, whereupon the Administration will step in and print its own money (through its fiscal actions) in the belief that the Fed will not remove it (through monetary policy). So, what I am really saying is that Henry Paulson was brought in to do a job that Ben Bernanke can’t seem to accomplish with the tools he has, or that Paulson’s predecessor at Treasury could not do, which is to get his Wall Street banker friends to direct their capital and their client’s capital more to bonds in order to hold those yields down. So I do expect to see, from this point forward, more heavy asset weightings in bonds and less for equities in the Wall Street bankers recommended portfolios. Moreover, I expect to hear more talk from Wall Street that inflation is not a problem (such as Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley) and that a “soft landing” to this economic cycle will resolve the problems. In fact, I think we are all going to be hearing the words “soft landing” to replace the old and stale rhetoric of “goldilocks”. These people have a vested interest to have the gold price fall and the $USD rise. The world, however, is bigger than the Fed and Administration and a wiser place today. So ultimately the world will decide where the price of gold will go. Yes, today the price of gold is falling. It is being pushed down. The further it is pushed, the bigger will be the reaction. Ultimately the people will decide. The people, here and abroad, will decide if they want to buy certain goods at higher prices, and they will decide if they will spend from their savings or demand more return for their labor in order to maintain their habits. Elected representatives too, here and abroad, will decide if they will continue their penchant for deficit spending – always borrowing from the future. As I see it, the people in power – the Presidents and Prime Ministers, the Finance Ministers and Central Bankers -- are there for a short time. Some things, however, never change. And that is why gold might fall in the short run, but very long term it must continue to rise, and that’s because costs (including inflationary costs) are always rising. Btw, I see from the Prudential report available here, that Dr. John Tumazos has metal cost estimates in future pegged to somewhere near his estimates of the cost of production. He feels the cost to produce (the majority of) gold bullion is not higher than US$450, so his estimate falls in line. So (without knowing for certain, and without having the time to read his lengthy report) I gather that Tumazos is negative on the metals because he believes that economic demand is weakening, the interest cost of inventorying the metals is rising, and that speculative demand will soon die. All of that is possible, but I’ll take the other bet. Posted by Posted by Bill Cara on June 8, 2006 11:40:50 AM \| Category: Bullion billcara.com

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/10/2006 6:03:34 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 360961

Specter of a Backbone ___________________________________________________________ By Dan Froomkin Special to washingtonpost.com Thursday, June 8, 2006 Infuriated by Vice President Cheney's stealth campaign to subvert his embryonic attempts at oversight into the administration's domestic spying program, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter yesterday did something very rare inside Republican circles: He went public. In a blistering, three-page letter, Specter shed light on a modus operandi that is normally obscured in secrecy: The way Cheney bends Congress to his will -- and ignores those who dare defy him. Greg Miller writes in the Los Angeles Times: "The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee lashed out at Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday, accusing the vice president of secretly lobbying other GOP members of the committee to block hearings on the administration's domestic surveillance program. "In an unusually sharp attack, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said Cheney had gone behind his back in an effort to persuade other committee members to derail his plans to require telecommunications companies to testify on whether they secretly gave U.S. spy agencies vast quantities of data on customer phone calls. . . . "His decision to confront Cheney represents an unusually public rupture between a senior GOP lawmaker and the White House. It also provides a rare public glimpse of the tactics employed by a vice president who prefers to operate behind the scenes." James Kuhnhenn writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "In a delicious bit of detail that underscores the intimacy of this high-powered relationship, Specter complained in his letter that Cheney did not even raise the subject during Tuesday's closed-door Senate Republican policy lunch, which Specter and the vice president both attended. " 'I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions en route from the buffet to my table,' Specter wrote." Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg write in the New York Times: "One Republican with close ties to the administration, who was granted anonymity to discuss the thinking at the White House, said Mr. Specter had been increasingly nettlesome to the administration with his persistent criticism, especially of the surveillance programs. "Noting that the White House was ultimately pleased with Mr. Specter's help in securing the confirmations of Mr. Bush's Supreme Court nominees, this Republican said, 'All of that good will he's built up has really been dissipated because he keeps smacking them around.' "A senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the president's chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, had reached out to Mr. Specter on Friday to press the administration's case for how to handle the phone companies. "The official described the conversation as 'cordial but not productive.' " 'That's when we started reaching out to other members,' the official said. 'It was not out of disrespect.' . . . "In an interview, Mr. Specter described his relationship with Mr. Cheney as generally friendly and cordial. But he was clearly put out by the vice president's handling of the issue and his failure to pull Mr. Specter aside as he made several trips to the buffet for tuna salad and hard-boiled egg, salad dressing and fruit." Katherine Shrader writes for the Associated Press: "Cheney's spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride said the vice president had not yet studied Specter's letter. In an e-mail, she also reiterated the administration's position that no new legislation is needed to carry out the terrorist surveillance program. " 'We will continue to work with Congress in good faith and listen to ideas of legislators,' including Specter and Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, McBride said. 'We will ultimately have to make a decision as an administration on whether any particular legislation would enhance our ability to protect Americans against terrorists.' " The Letter CNN Web-published the Specter letter . "It is neither pleasant nor easy to raise these issues with the administration of my own party, but I do so because of their importance," Specter wrote. "On March 16, 2006, I introduced legislation to authorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rule on the constitutionality of the Administration's electronic surveillance program. . . . Notwithstanding my repeated efforts to get the Administration's position on this legislation, I have been unable to get any response, including a 'no.' . . . "I was advised yesterday that you had called Republican members of the Judiciary Committee lobbying them to oppose any Judiciary Committee hearing, even a closed one, with the telephone companies. I was further advised that you told those Republican members that the telephone companies had been instructed not to provide any information to the Committee as they were prohibited from disclosing classified information. "I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the Committee without calling me first, or at least calling me at some point. This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican Senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions enroute from the buffet to my table. . . . "There is no doubt that the NSA program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which sets forth the exclusive procedure for domestic wiretaps which requires the approval of the FISA Court. It may be that the President has inherent authority under Article II to trump that statute but the President does not have a blank check and the determination on whether the President has such Article II power calls for a balancing test which requires knowing what the surveillance program constitutes." And Specter noted that this is not exactly the only example of the Bush administration's expansion of executive power. "We press this issue in the context of repeated stances by the Administration on expansion of Article II power, frequently at the expense of Congress's Article I authority. There are the Presidential signing statements where the President seeks to cherry-pick which parts of the statute he will follow. There has been the refusal of the Department of Justice to provide the necessary clearances to permit its Office of Professional Responsibility to determine the propriety of the legal advice given by the Department of Justice on the electronic surveillance program. There is the recent Executive Branch search and seizure of Congressman Jefferson's office. There are recent and repeated assertions by the Department of Justice that it has the authority to criminally prosecute newspapers and reporters under highly questionable criminal statutes." On CNN Wolf Blitzer interviewed Specter on CNN, and in person, the senator was unemotional. "I'm not accusing anybody of anything. And I'm not saying the vice president acted in bad faith," he said. "This is nothing personal between Arlen Specter or Vice President Cheney. This is a matter of civil liberties. It's a matter of separation of power. And it's a matter of important congressional oversight. And, so far, we're not getting there. And that's why I prepared a fairly strong letter. . . . "I don't think the president has acted in bad faith here. I think he is functioning on something which he thinks needs to be done to protect the country. But he doesn't have a blank check. He's not the final word. We have a Constitution. The Constitution says that the Congress has oversight. And, on a constitutional issue, that's the Judiciary Committee."

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/10/2006 9:31:21 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 360961

BofA: Train your replacement, or no severance pay for you sfgate.com San Francisco Chronicle \| 6/9/06 \| David Lazarus Bank of America has been steadily moving thousands of tech jobs to India. The latest to go are about 100 positions that handle BofA's internal tech support. While many of the bank's Bay Area techies accept the inevitability of their jobs heading abroad, what rankles them is the fact that, in many cases, they're being told they have to first train the Indians who are getting their gigs. "If people want their severance packages, they have to train their replacements," a senior engineer at one of BofA's Bay Area facilities told me. "There's nothing in writing that says this -- the bank's been careful about that. But it's made clear at meetings what we're supposed to do." Shirley Norton, a BofA spokeswoman, confirmed that while workers aren't being explicitly told they have to train their replacements or risk losing severance pay, they are being instructed that severance pay is contingent on satisfactorily completing their jobs. Completing their jobs, in turn, can include training replacements from India, she said. "I know that's parsing things a bit," Norton acknowledged. "What we ask associates to do as part of getting severance is that they stay on the job until the job is transitioned.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/11/2006 5:36:50 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 360961

Greetings, These discussions are important though are difficult to partake in with this blog system. I thought it was important enough to bring it up again in today's open thread. There was a discussion brewing on a Drum Beat thread of a few days ago that discussed the ability of the US to: Build its way out of a depression... My contention was and is that it would not be possible. I brought up the "New Deal" of old and explained that in those days energy was on the upswing. Given the falling dollar and rising energy costs of today how can we build our way out? The concept being that to implement a "New Deal" type plan today to stimulate the labor sector by adding lots of jobs related to public works projects would be difficult to impossible given the costs of energy, labor and materials. When you stroll down the isles at the Home Depot or Lowes glance at the price of a 1/2" x 4 x 8' sheet of sheetrock and see the reality. This time last year a board was in the $4-6 range. Yesterday I saw $13.75 +tax. You can do the same thing for all the materials and you will be shocked. Most of the material supplies have doubled in cost, while others have even quadrupled. Items with copper or brass are off the charts. Plumbing and electrical components make up a majority of the copper and brass materials. Home Depot is not a place to obtain wet concrete however their bagged concrete as doubled. If you were to contact a concrete supplier you will note that 10 yards of delivered concrete has doubled and a fuel surcharge is added to the order. Here I'm talking about actual costs of any given construction project related to both materials and labor. Today when estimating a project the materials are broken out from labor. While labor costs do raise this difference is small and can often be absorbed by the contractor. Material costs on the other foot have across the boards have at least doubled. In the past builders could offer new construction for $60.00 per foot and now we see numbers like $140.00 per foot less hardwoods, bathrooms, kitchens, etc. Energy costs related to construction in the past helped to keep the costs of construction down. When these costs rise so does the bottom line of any given project. I met a plumber who charges $600.00 to change a toilet excluding the cost of said toilet and the disposal of the old one if he can not take it to the curb. Myself, I would not pay that fee yet it is clear that those that are not equipped to do plumbing work will seek a licensed pro and pay the going rate. Regardless of the business you are in the general costs of doing your business today have most likely doubled. The greatest feature of this cost is energy. Trucking companies are forced to raise freight charges and delay shipments so that trucks are as full as possible, these transportation costs as you would imagine inflate the costs of all goods both durable and consumer. If I were to build a house last year at $60.00 per foot this year I could not do the same project for less then $150.00 per foot. In the past labor costs in construction started at $10.00 per hr and now the lowest paid earn $15.00 per hour. My contractor to contractor labor charge last year was $210.00 per day and now I'm forced to charge $265.00 per day. My living expenses have gone up at a disproportionate rate compared to my hourly labor rate to contractors or as a contractor. Clearly builders use a wide variety of equipment and tools to build and tool prices have jumped up as well. Energy efficient homes would be desired today but are not affordable to most home buyers. Energy efficient homes require more insulation and larger framing members. Standard construction practices for a home typically start with a 2 x 4 stick frame. This will allow R13 insulation. Bothe the 2 x 4's and the insulation have inflated in price. To move to energy efficient building requires the use of thicker framing members to allow for R19 insulation in the walls. Houses and buildings need to have a durable exterior that can withstand the elements at a low cost. In the old days the standard cedar shake or clapboard were used and offered a decent lifespan. Today the most common siding is vinyl and has many issues with the first being rising costs. This material requires large amounts of fossil input and appears to be a dangerous to the dwellers and the environment. The costs of all of the above will rise along with the costs of energy. This will compound if the national unemployment rate were to go up (as it is doing). Suppliers will cut staff to control costs and this will lead to material shortages since the ability to maintain material output depends on staff and low input costs. I wish someone would explain how the US will be able to build low cost homes again for the expanding middle and poor classes? If we don't wire homes, heat homes or put plumbing in homes the cost may come down a fraction yet going to the bathroom will be hard. Please help me to understand how we can build our way out of this mess? [new] AlphaOmega on Saturday June 10, 2006 at 2:07 PM EST theoildrum.com

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/12/2006 4:41:17 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360961

Housing Prices Drooping, Buyers Waiting ______________________________________________________________ Monday June 12, 3:02 pm ET By Ellen Simon, AP Business Writer Farewell to the Flippers: Housing Prices Are Drooping and Buyers Are Waiting NEW YORK (AP) -- Low-ball bidders, persnickety buyers and cancellations are now the rule in once-hot housing markets. Rising interest rates and sky-high home prices have cooled real-estate investment, "particularly in high-end markets in some juiced-up parts of the country where speculation was most rampant," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. The record low interest rates and speculators that once drove prices higher are gone. Observers expect housing prices to stagnate or decline slightly, though a steep crash for housing prices is unlikely. As the market slows, both builders and buyers are getting used to the changes. On a recent conference call, Ara K. Hovnanian, the president and chief executive officer of homebuilder Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. said that real estate investors "have largely pulled out." "Investors were a bigger part of the market than many thought, including ourselves," said Hovnanian, whose company builds primarily in the Northeast. Would-be flippers are not only not buying new properties, they're selling what they already own, adding to the record number of homes already on the market. Stocks in the sector have fallen dramatically. Hovnanian, for instance, is trading near $30 a share, down from its 52-week high of $73.40. Rival Toll Brothers Inc. trades around $27 a share, down from a 52-week high of $58.67. Wachovia last week cut its rating on builders including Pulte Homes Inc., KB Home and DR Horton Inc., citing a sharper more rapid downturn in the market than expected. Developers have started canceling projects. Plans were scrapped last week for a 4,400-unit Las Vegas condo resort complex that had been backed by actor George Clooney and nightclub owner Rande Gerber. The development company for the project said rising construction costs and slow sales forced it to rethink the plan. With land prices falling in some areas, Hovnanian has walked away from about $5.6 million of deposits on land parcels it had options to buy, lopping 5 cents a share off the company's second-quarter earnings. Buyers in some cooling markets know they're in the driver's seat. Rachel Moehl, a real estate agent with Weichert Realtors in Jersey City, N.J., said she almost saw a deal for a three-bedroom condo fall apart over what proved to be a $400 problem -- moisture between window panes. The buyers "were saying the week before the closing, 'We don't really love the apartment. We're ready to cancel the deal over the windows,'" she said. The seller gave them a $400 credit. Other agents say clients are putting in bids well below the sellers' asking prices, or simply waiting. "Home prices have risen to where buyers can't afford to buy," said Keith Gumbinger vice president at HSH Associates, which publishes consumer loan information. The national median existing home price was $223,000 in April, according to the National Association of Realtors. While that was a 4.2 percent increase from April 2005, the organization predicts that prices this year will rise only 0.8 percent. Others aren't so sure they'll rise at all. There was a 4-month supply of unsold homes on the market in April 2004; it rose to 5.8 months in April 2006, according to the Department of Commerce. In suburban Philadelphia, where the inventory of unsold homes has soared, Zandi asked an agent months ago how anyone could get a mortgage for a home listed at $3.2 million. "They were almost snooty," he said. "The girl said, 'People who buy these homes buy with cash.'" The house is still on the market, now listed at $2.8 million. Part of the backlog is 128,000 unsold new homes, the highest level in history, said Mario Ricchio, housing analyst at Zacks Investment Research Inc. "(H)omebuilders may not be able to push all this supply through the market," he said. Contract signings for new homes are down sharply and cancellations are up. "It's a more difficult market and our salespeople are no longer just taking orders; they have to sell," Hovnanian said on the call. Most observers say housing prices will only slide dramatically if the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates. The Fed's target short-term rate is currently 5 percent. If it passes 7 percent, "then things get very tricky," Zandi said. "Many home owners will have trouble making payments. We'll see significant mortgage credit problems develop." By the end of 2004, 35 percent of buyers had adjustable-rate loans, up from 18 percent the previous year, according to the Federal Housing Finance Board's interest rate survey. Those buyers could see a steep increase in their monthly payments if interest rates spike. That, in turn, could cause increased defaults and foreclosure sales at low prices. "The higher mortgage payment may lead some overstretched owners to default on payments, adding supply to an already glutted market," said Ricchio at Zacks Investment Research.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/13/2006 12:09:21 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360961

US outflanked in Eurasia energy politics atimes.com

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (70438)	6/14/2006 1:34:16 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 360961

The Mark of the Bust _____________________________________________________________ By MARTIN MAYER Op-Ed Contributor The New York Times June 14, 2006 What may be the most important number in the American panoply of economic statistics appears every Thursday night as an appendix to the weekly statement of the condition of the Federal Reserve System. This generally ignored number — few, if any, newspapers cover its release — has the unusual virtue of accuracy, for it is a simple financial statement derived from an adding machine, not from a computer or a formula. What the number announces is the quantity of government and agency securities held "for foreign official and international accounts" — that is, for foreign central banks and finance ministries — by the federal reserve banks. It is important because over time it measures the demand for American assets by private enterprise in the world's creditor nations. It is important also because it is very large — last week, about $1.63 trillion. Three years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq, it was about $900 billion. The week George W. Bush took office, it was $693 billion. Our appetite for imported goods throws some $600 billion to $700 billion a year into the hands of foreign suppliers. The businesses that receive these dollars have two fundamental choices about what to do with them: spend or invest them in the United States, or convert them into their own local currency. Exporters to America who keep the dollars and use them for American purchases and investments create what economists call an autonomous flow of funds back to the United States, financing the American trade deficit with an American investment surplus. This produces the argument most closely associated with the new Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke (though Alan Greenspan believed it, too), that our trade deficit is caused by a surplus of savings that can't be profitably invested in the home countries of our trading partners. Financing for our trade deficit comes before — and actually causes — the deficit itself. If instead of investing their dollars in the United States, foreign exporters want to take the proceeds of their sales in their own currency, their central banks will in effect sell them that currency for their dollars. Back in the late 1960's, when Great Society deficits and the Vietnam War prompted the first serious sell-off of dollars (and forced the United States to abandon the gold standard because too many holders of dollars, led by President Charles de Gaulle of France, wanted gold), those central banks lent those dollars into the new Eurodollar market, where they traded somewhat separately from domestic dollars. This created a nightmarish prospect of the United States losing control of its own currency, and in 1971 the Fed chairman, Arthur Burns, negotiated a deal with the European and Japanese central banks. The deal was that they would return to America the dollars they acquired in their own economies, and the Fed would invest the money on their behalf, in absolutely safe government securities, without charge and at the best rates. Today, the Fed continues as custodian of the "foreign official holdings" of such government obligations. During the Clinton administration, the Fed agreed to invest in federally guaranteed housing securities for those foreign central banks that wanted a better yield on their dollar reserves than they would get from government bonds, and now more than half a trillion dollars of the total official holdings are invested in agency paper. Foreign official holdings of government paper is a miner's canary number. It tells you if there is big trouble ahead. The most common worry is that the number will shrink suddenly, with foreign governments dumping their dollar holdings, driving down the dollar's value and driving up American interest rates, but that's not a real danger. If the price of our government securities dived, the foreign central banks would have to bear the loss. This would be a budget item for their governments, whose leaders would not like it at all. What we have to watch out for is a sudden and drastic increase in foreign official holdings. Rapid growth in this number in the late 1960's and 1970's forecast the recessions of the early 1970's and 1980's, and it could happen again. Recent large increases in foreign official holdings indicate that foreign private investors see fewer attractive places to put their money in the American economy. They could presage a significant fall in the price of American assets, stocks (witness the recent drops in American stock markets) and bonds and real estate and all, and a hard landing for a world economy still floating on the crest of cheap credit. *Martin Mayer, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, is the author of "The Fate of the Dollar."