The latest notes on the likelihood of a coming recession

First, Jim Jubak says major banks are about to lower the boom on the illogical return of the bull market:

There's not a chance the worst is over, and Wall Street knows it. Wall Street knows the big investment banks that reported in mid-September aren't out of the woods. They all took relatively tiny write-offs — $700 million on the fixed-income portfolio at Bear Stearns, for example — on the damaged goods in their portfolios, and if they can't trade their way out of this mess, they've got more big losses to write off in the quarters ahead.

Jubak notes that most banks haven’t yet posted third-quarter statements; he expects many to join the already-posting Citigroup, which listed a 60 percent drop in third-quarter earnings from a year ago. That would certainly put the squeeze back on the credit market.

Next, Bill Fleckenstein bluntly says recession is an “if” and not a “when.” In addition to the housing bubble, he notes that corporate profit margins are at record levels, and clearly doesn’t think they’re going higher.


Fleckenstein dives more into the subprime collapse here; I agree that self-feeding fear is simply the flip side of self-feeding greed.

Yes, many subprime borrowers were first-time homebuyers who didn’t understand the first thing about fine print. But many others were buying 3,000 square foot homes when they could have gotten more traditional mortgages on 1,800-2,200 square foot homes; many others were buying second or third homes as investment properties.

Folks, it’s just like playing the stock market. You gambled and you lost. Why should the government bail you out.

Environmentalism on the pavement has to be about more than car mpg and gas taxes

Salon notes that we have parking space overkill because too many Americans are too lazy to walk more than half a block, if that far, to a store or other destination.

Instead, people may literally drive 15 minutes at one site, cruising for a close-up parking spot. Even if you’re in a Corolla or Civic, you’re wasting gas. In a Prius, you’re wasting stored charge.

Salon mentions two steps that can be an important part of the answer.

The first is for cities to cut back on their planning requirements for stores to offer so many parking spaces per store or mall square footage.

The second, for on-street parking, is a market-based one: price parking spaces per their desirability

I do see one concern here: People will be more tempted to cheat on handicapped parking. Higher fines and citizen citation-writing ordinances would address this.

Bush loses yet again in court

This time, his executive order giving former presidents review over their executive records before release was ruled out of bounds. In a narrow ruling, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly told the National Archives not to withhold releasing any more records on that basis.

Remember, that executive order was way back in 2001. Standing alone, it seemed bad enough at the time, but in hindsight, it was clearly just the tip of the iceberg in BushCo’s standing privacy issues on their head, namely, by expanding government power to intrude into your privacy while at the same time bloating government determination to make private executive records, discussions and meetings that needed, and were legally entitled to, the sunshine of public disclosure.

Next came Vice President Cheney’s secret energy task force meetings.

Then, after 9/11, came BushCo’s fight against revealing just how much and what sort of advance warning the president had.

Then, over the Iraq run-up, things went further downhill.

When will Steve Jobs and Apple learn you can’t beat hackers?

Apple said that upgrades to the iPhone would shut down phones previously hacked to use cell providers besides Apple partner AT&T.

That may not last too long.

Steve, Steve, Steve. Don’t even try to up the ante in this war. You lost, you blew it, and all because you stupidly challenged hackers, and pissed off some potential. Although hackers haven’t yet restored upgraded iPhones’ ability to actually be used as phones, I’m betting that’s just a matter of time.

If we attack Iran, remember, Hillary was in at the start

With his usual depth of analysis, Seymour Hersch tells what’s up with the White House’s Iranian war gaming. Excellent article.

Sen. Clinton was the one Democratic presidential candidate out of the four Senatorial ones to vote in favor of declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, a linchpin in BushCo’s drive against Iran on the PR front. Why any Democrat would vote for a political statement they know ultimately has deep roots with Dick Cheney is just beyond me.

You “run any Dem up the flagpole” Democrats who accuse me of having “blood on my hands” for voting Green, just who has blood on their hands now after all?

2004: Democratic candidate John Kerry.

2008: Likely Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

I rest my case.

The latest BushCo environmental lies

Legal actions by lawsuit against uncooperative, and caught, polluters are down 70 percent for 2002-2006, compared to a similar period in the late 1990s.

In the face of this massive scofflaw-enabling by BushCo, specifically the Environmental Protection Agency, what do we hear? This:

“We have been on an unprecedented run of success in the enforcement arena,” said Granta Y. Nakayama, EPA assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance. "These are major cases we are pursuing.”

In retort and reply, we have this”

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell, whose panel oversees environmental enforcement, disagrees. “Where once a polluter could expect criminal prosecution, there are now civil settlements. Where once there were criminal penalties, there are now taxpayer subsidies,” Dingell (D-Mich.) said.

And this, in which Justice Department and EPA staffers both admit the problem, but blame the other side:

“Environmental crimes are simply not in the U.S. attorney top 10 priorities,” said one senior EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media.

Prosecutors counter that the EPA has fewer agents and is bringing them fewer cases. “We’re not turning away environmental crimes in order to prosecute other crimes. They are just not being presented in the first case,” said Don DeGabrielle, the U.S. attorney in Houston.

It’s easy to tell from the rest of the story that Mr. DeGabrielle is far nearer the truth than the anonymous EPA official. That’s probably why that person is staying anonymous — he or she knows this claim doesn’t stand up.

Further proof? Criminal cases are also down, off 36 percent in 2006 compared to 2001. The number of new criminal investigations opened declined 37 percent over the same period.

Oh, and Dingell’s “subsidies” charge? Well, it can be true:

The Justice Department in August also touted a plea bargain with IMC Shipping Co. that required the Singapore ship operator to pay $10 million in connection with a massive oil spill in 2004 that killed thousands of birds in Alaska's Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. …

The decision to drop negligence charges could be valuable to the company, which as a result remains eligible to seek reimbursement from a special government fund for $77 million of the more than $100 million it has spent cleaning up the spill.

The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund — administered by the U.S. Coast Guard and funded by a special oil tax — can reimburse shippers for all cleanup costs not covered by insurance, but only if the incident does not involve gross negligence or willful misconduct.

Certainly, by the seventh year of BushCo, neither the administration failure to rigorously enforce environmental laws nor its lying claims about actually doing that should surprise anybody.

Add in that Nakayama claims not to be “personally familiar” with a new EPA policy that requires agents to get pre-approval from their division heads to directly refer cases to state and federal prosecutors, and you have the third part of the BushCo trinity: incompetence. (That’s assuming that Nakayama is being truthful about his lack of personal familiarity. However, the “personally” modifier is one that I’ve found to be a common bureaucratic weasel word, so he could well be lying again.)