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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (86169)	12/1/2010 2:07:03 AM
From: Neil H	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 149317

Yep - It would be great if our elected officials actually quit the partisan crap and worked for the best interests of the people and the country rather than themselves and their special interest groups. What part of Asia? Neil

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (86169)	12/1/2010 12:22:13 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 149317

U.S. private-sector employment posts largest monthly gain in three years: ADP

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (86169)	12/1/2010 2:49:09 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

From WikiChina nytimes.com By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times 12/01/10 While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? I suspect the cable would read like this: Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today. Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things. There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests. Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent. The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s. But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that adjective upon you. In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals. Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America. Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America. Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables. Embassy Washington.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (86169)	12/3/2010 4:36:08 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

Who Needs Jobs When Wall Street Has the Fed? finance.yahoo.com On Friday December 3, 2010, 3:42 pm Pay no attention to those 15.1 million unemployed people-Wall Street instead is more focused on the man behind the Fed curtain and what he'll be doing to fire up the equity markets. Friday's significantly disappointing jobs report, which under normal circumstances would have sparked a significant selloff in the stock market, instead was greeted only with more expectations that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will continue aggressive monetary easing policies. Stocks were down mildly through the day, but the 9.8 percent unemployment rate seemed to take a back seat to other issues. In other words, it was business as usual for a market that has come to rely on the dual hopes of gradual improvements in economic data along with accommodative policy from the central bank-like the Great Oz orchestrating a recovery. "Markets will interpret this negatively at first. They will focus on the chronic unemployment that is growing more pervasive in the US," David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors, wrote in an analysis for clients. But "financial analysts will realize that this will extend the already 'extended period' of Fed QE for many more months," he added, referring to the central bank's quantitative easing plans. Finally, he noted that "expectations were jerked back to reality today" but that "we remain fully invested in the US stock market." Investors, indeed, looked to put a bright side on numbers that Paul Dales, US economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, said showed that "economic recovery is going nowhere at a time when companies are unwilling to boost hiring significantly." Familiar refrains about unemployment being a lagging indicator permeated many analyses, and there were few market pros willing to budge from the notion that while the recovery indeed will be slow, one month's jobless numbers don't equate to the dreaded double-dip back into recession. "The November reading was as disappointing on the downside as the October number was a surprise to the upside," said Kathy Bostjancic, director for macroeconomic analysis at the Conference Board. "This underscores the Fed's latest decision to engage in more quantitative easing. It supports the notion that further monetary easing was appropriate." The Fed has just kicked off what many in the market call QE2-a second round of asset purchases, this time worth $600 billion, aimed at injecting money into the system, pushing down interest rates and driving investors into risk assets like stocks. For investors who feared that the Fed might succumb to political pressure and curtail its aggressive easing programs, a weak jobs number helps squelch that kind of talk and gives rise to the notion that stocks could head higher or at least hold steady. "There is huge and growing liquidity with no place to go," Kotok wrote. The liquidity issue also is likely to be an important one as fund managers head into the end of the year and have to shore up their portfolios to reflect a strong year. "A lot of the major hedge fund guys and mutual fund guys were positioned in November and came into December with the expectation of getting long the market for the final leg of the year," said Gary Hager, president of Integrated Wealth Management in Edison, N.J. "They did so in robust fashion on Dec. 1. They added a tremendous amount of buying pressure that they didn't fully exercise yet." That pressure, even independent of hopes for more Fed asset purchases and help from Washington in the form of tax breaks and extended aid to the unemployed, could keep pushing the market higher. "There's an enormous amount of liquidity and buying pressure that is on top. It's almost like the consumer demand for durable and non-durable items that's been waiting and waiting," Hager said. "As soon as the dam starts to crack a little bit, all of this back pressure is going to flood out with a continual surge of bidding prices higher." Another school of thought is that the economic data, though not standout, continues to show improving conditions, even if the long-term is less promising. "The key here is that (the jobs report) does not damage what is otherwise a cluster of improving information and stabilizing financial markets," Kevin Ferry, president of Cronus Futures Management, told CNBC. "We feel that unemployment and this report in particular are to be looked at in terms of volatility and not real economic impact. By the time unemployment is going to become really important it's going to be 2012 and 2013 and we'll be talking about a number that will be far too great for the market to handle." Finally, technical factors appear to be supportive. The Standard & Poor's 500 (INDEX: .SPX) and the Dow Jones industrials (INDEX: .DJIA) have survived repeated challenges to their 50-day moving averages, a trend technicians see as significant. "The bears kept trying to knock the market down but the market wouldn't do it," said Matthew Tuttle, president of Tuttle Wealth Management in White Plains, N.Y. "At the end of the day everybody expects the jobless numbers are bad and are going to be bad for a while. It's a huge issue, but it's almost become old news at this point."