This post is a guest  contribution by Asha G. Bangalore * of The Northern Trust  Company

The main theme of the opinion piece by Representatives Hensarling and Ryan from Texas and Wisconsin, respectively, in today’s Wall Street Journal (Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan: Why No One Expects a Strong Recovery - WSJ.com) is poor economic policy choices of the current administration. To make their case they focus on the Reagan administration’s successful economic policies. The success/failure of economic policy choices can be measured by various metrics. It is well known that the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP during the Reagan years has been the largest in the entire post-war period ending 2008 (see chart 1). Therefore, from a fiscal perspective, the perceived success of economic policies of the 1981-1988 period is not a resounding success.

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Sunday November 8, 2009

DrStockPick.com Article!

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Let’s call it what it is; It’s Reagan’s Fault!

The government, both state and federal, is on a feeding frenzy to save the banks, the real reason is that the banks are the feeding ground for our politicians, in fact any office seeker is beholden to the banks for their financial support. As such there will never be any meaningful control over these institutions.

There are now 140 fewer banks then there was last year, and the too big to fail have gotten even larger, and now

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Dan Holland has just interviewed Wall Street chronicler Charlie Gasparino’s. The first few paragraphs of the interview that appeared on RealClearMarkets are published below.

There’s good reason to believe that Gasparino’s latest book, The Sellout, will become the definitive book on the current financial crisis and the events that led up to “The Great Recession.” Spanning three decades, The Sellout pulls no punches in chronicling the rise and fall of excessive Wall Street leverage and risk taking, as well as the cast of colorful characters that ultimately brought the US financial system to its knees. It will hit bookshelves tomorrow [Tuesday].

RealClearMarkets: You sat down recently with Wall Street legend Teddy Forstmann to discuss your new book and the genesis of the mess we now find ourselves in. Forstmann said it all began as a “cold” back in the 1970s and 1980s, and that since

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Defense Solutions Holding Incorporated is a company that is on the rise. Founded in 2001 in Exton, Pennsylvania, Defense Solutions is known as being one of the few American companies that does business in the U.S. and Iraq. Today, the company announced that one American refinery and two Asian refinery groups have asked them to secure oil contracts in Iraq.

One of the most unique aspects of Defense Solutions is how far their business has branched out. In 2005, when the company was merely four years in their history, Defense Solutions supplied 77 T-72 tanks to the Iraqi Army whom were under contracts with NATO at the time and the U.S. Army. Since then, Defense Solutions has entered into joint development agreements to produce the NATO-compatible armored personnel carrier, the BTR-4.

Leading the way at Defense Solutions is Colonel Timothy D. Ringgold, PhD who formed Defense Solutions upon

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Billionaire investor George Soros said yesterday (Monday) that the U.S. recovery would be a slow one because of all the “basically bankrupt” financial companies impeding it.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Congress agreed Friday that the financial system – not the American taxpayer – should bear the costs of bank bailouts. Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), wants the banks to ante up $45 billion – three years’ worth of deposit-insurance premiums – to bail out the fund that insures bank deposits.

When it comes to bank stocks, we all know that there were a number of Money Morning readers shrewd enough to buy Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) shares when the foundering giant’s stock price was below $1 a share.

If you’re one of those investors, good for you: With Citi’s shares now trading at nearly $4.70 a share,

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Is the government creating another subprime-mortgage bubble?

The first time around, the three-headed federal serpent – the Bush administration, the Treasury Department and the U.S. Federal Reserve – used Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) to “legitimize” trillions of dollars worth of toxic financial waste known as subprime mortgages.

The result was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression – a mess that was global in nature.

And we’re now headed for a repeat performance.

Some of the players may have changed since the first subprime-mortgage crisis, but the game apparently remains the same. With banks currently unwilling to lend, the new federal triumvirate of the Obama administration, the Treasury and the Fed are trying to inflate the moribund U.S. housing market. This time around, however, the FHA is the weapon of choice.

Obama & Co. are making an all-or-nothing bet that the

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With the release of the Automatic Data Processing (ADP) numbers this morning and the BLS jobs report due out on Friday (and initial claims tomorrow), jobs -- or the lack of them -- is clearly front and center. Normally when people talk about job losses or gains, they are talking about net job creation. After all, even in the biggest booms, there are still some people who are losing their jobs, and even in the deepest darkest recessions, there are some folks who find new jobs. There is an interesting article today by Andy Harless of Atlantic Asset Management posted on Economist View that disaggregates it into the rate of job destruction and the rate of job creation. It is a long and interesting article and is worth reading. The key trends are shown in the graph below. If the blue line is above ...

From Arnold Kling's entry yesterday:

Kwak goes on to endorse Chinn's ideological rant that the Bush tax cuts caused the financial crisis. Yes, I know that Chinn is speaking in the tone of economic analysis rather than a rant, but only a left-wing ideologue would take the thesis seriously. I bet Kwak cannot find a blog post of Chinn's where he made a policy point against Democrats/liberals or for Republicans/conservatives.

Where Kling is responding to James Kwak's assertion: "[Menzie] Chinn is not given to ideological ranting." (Thanks, James).

I don't find it very profitable to characterize anybody's posts as "rants", but I thought it useful to see what the definition is:

A rant or harangue is a speech or text that does not present a well-researched and calm argument; rather, it is typically an attack on an idea, a person or an institution, and very often lacks proven claims. Such attacks

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also find enjoyable.

• Doug Kass (TheStreet.com): Sooner or later, the piper must be paid, August 28, 2009. My view is that investors will shortly see through the current sugar high and the better-than-expected earnings cycle and will begin to look over the valley at the chronic and secular issues that have emerged from the past cycle and from policy decisions aimed at returning the domestic economy toward self-sustaining growth.

• Michael Kahn (Barron’s): Dollar and frothy sentiment are new worries, August 26, 2009. There’s a fine line between risk taking and risk ignoring. Bulls may be doing both.

• Economist.com: Has the tide turned for corporate profits?, August 27, 2009. The recent rally in shares has

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Monsanto Corp. (NYSE: MON), the world’s largest seed maker, says it’s on track to more than double its 2007 profit by the year 2012 and is expecting a “technology explosion” to provide even stronger products going forward. But while Monsanto continues to build on its reputation as a cutting edge agricultural business, it is also under siege by competitors and advocacy groups who claim the company is a monopoly.

The St. Louis-based Monsanto said in June that its fiscal third-quarter earnings fell to $694 million, or $1.25 a share, from $811 million, or $1.45 a share, in the same period a year ago. Sales slipped to $3.16 billion from $3.54 billion last year. The company also said its annual earnings would likely be at the low end of its $4.40 to $4.50 a share forecast range.

That’s not very impressive for a company that last year posted record net sales

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