Not Flush

If these charts are any guide, it looks like Americans relied on what little cash they had left -- or didn't really have -- to buy what they wanted (needed?) in the run-up to the holidays.

Not exactly flush, are they?

Comments

[Follow the institutional chargers]

If borrowing brings riches why not?

On Mitt Romney's Defense Of Bain Capital And The Private Equity Industry - Here Are Some Facts

Lately, Bain founder and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has found himself in a spirited defense of the private equity industry, doing all he can to spin decades of data which confirm, without failure, that PE Leveraged Buy Outs are nothing but "efficiency maximizing" transactions whose only goal is the "maximization" of EBITDA in the pursuit of dividend recap deals, IPOs or outright sales, while loading up the company with untenable amounts of leverage. All this with a 3-5 year investment horizon, which ignores the long-term viability of a company and seeks to streamline (read fire as many as possible) operations as quickly as possible in the goal of maximizing short-term returns. We wish him luck in his endeavor. As for the other side of the equation, we recreate a post we penned back in November 2009 which analyzes just how effective the mega-LBOs have been for the economy, and the workers involved. In other words - the facts. In a nutshell, here they are: "The Disastrous Performance Of Private Equity: Of The Top 10 LBOs, 6 Are In Distress, 4 Have Defaulted." Read on for the full details.

For those who are interested in more information, Moody's has compiled a useful report, entitled "$640 billion & 640 days later: how companies sponsored by big private equity have performed during the U.S. recession." The track record is simply abysmal: Of the top 10 deals, only Hertz, HCA and First Data are considered "stable" which is actually saying a lot ("stable" by Moody's means these firms are likely about to have an alien burst out of their ribcage)

Between 2011 and 2014, there is roughly half a trillion in LBO debt maturing. Add that to the $1.5 trillion in bank debt due for rolling, and the roughly $3 trillion in CRE debt that is also supposed to be refinanced, and one can see how the next president will have his arms full as he/she will need to find a way to roll about $5 trillion in debt without the benefit of securitizations. Furthermore, since the economy will be on stimulus #10 by then courtesy of a drunk with power Obama, America will be on fast track to sovereign and corporate Armageddon.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/mitt-romneys-defense-bain-capital-and-private-equity-industry-here-are-some-facts?

[Not exactly America]

NDAA Protests End In Ironic Swarm Of Arrests

When a protest group is willing to stick their necks out to expose the horror of the National Defense Authorization Act and its open door strategy for unconstitutional arrest and indefinite detainment of American citizens, I have to stand up and applaud. This is the kind of protest we need to see all over the country. Of course, any establishment system which is willing to dissolve the inherent liberties of its citizens certainly isn't going to stand by quietly while they blatantly point out the injustice. The Grand Central Terminal action featured in the video below is a perfect example of the swift and immediate stifling of peaceful dissent by an increasingly totalitarian government:

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/494-ndaa-protests-end-in-ironic-swarm-of-arrests

[Rocky]

If you want to see what happened to non-violent protestors during the Third Reich, watch the German movie "Sophie Scholl - The Final Days". Sophie Scholl and some of her classmates (the White Rose group) at the University of Munich actually had the guts to leaflet against the Nazi regime. They were caught, imprisoned and after a brief trial before a Kangaroo court, were executed. I sometimes wonder how long we have before the US gets its own version of the Third Reich.

In 2004, when President Bush announced his support for a Federal Marriage Amendment, I had a nightmare in which I had been interred in a prison camp on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The camp looked just like the one (Thereseinstadt) in the Nazi documentary, "Hitler Gives a City to the Jews" directed by Kurt Gerron, an inmate at the camp. Mr. Gerron was sent to die at Auschwitz on the last deportation train to leave the camp in October 1944. Both his documentary on the camp and one on his life ("Prisoner of Paradise") are available on DVD or online.

During WWII, Treasure Island was a US military base and is now slowly being redeveloped for civilian use. Let's hope the Department of Homeland Security does not try to take over the island and use it for more more nefarious purposes and that my nightmare never comes to pass. But one never knows, do one (with apologies to Fats Waller).

[What's yours is theirs?]

Credit Card Firms: They Don't Just Steal From Cardholders

Nobody minds banks and creditors being greedy. But we can't live with big firms simply taking money out of bank accounts for no reason, and daring people to sue to get the money back. That's theft by bureaucratic force, not mere greed.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/credit-card-firms-they-dont-just-steal-from-cardholders-20120109#ixzz1j5TTS15G

[If we blow the balloon big enough we might not get caught....when it goes bust!]

Bill Black: More Proof of Obama Policy of Covering Up for Elite Financial Criminals

These charges are exceptionally severe. Senior former regulators are willing to be quoted by name asserting that Obama’s (not Bush’s) financial regulatory leaders are blocking lawsuits against fraudulent financial elites and their anti-regulatory co-conspirators because they fear embarrassment. That would be a disgraceful policy. Indeed, it is hard to think of a worse reason for granting the elite white-collar criminals that caused the crisis and the Great Recession immunity from prosecution. The fact that Obama has no response rebutting this grave charge against his administration’s integrity sounds loud, but not proud.
Some longtime lawyers go further and say the overall scarcity of cases related to the financial crisis might be in part because regulators want to avoid scrutiny of their own kind.

“It’s not just one 30-year-old wunderkind who was responsible for the financial crisis,” said Dennis C. Vacco, who was the New York State attorney general in the 1990s and now is a lawyer at Lippes Mathias Wexler & Friedman. “Once you start pulling the string through in these complex cases, you might be surprised what you find at the other end.”

Mr. Vacco continued: “What’s at the end of the string? The defense may be that ‘at the highest echelons of the financial institutions, we were in regular contact with the government.’”

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/bill-black-more-proof-of-obama-policy-of-covering-up-for-elite-financial-criminals.html