Reuters Jamie Dimon's Ahab moment

Analysis & Opinion | Reuters:

'via Blog this'

Jaimie Dimon tells his crew they're to look for the white whale. Who on American Pequod doesn't want to follow and grab that gold coin Ahab/Dimon hammered onto the mask.

JPMorgan’s Ahab has met his Moby Dick. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has toiled at length to build a bank strong enough to withstand the greatest of storms. The $2 billion hedging hit the bank disclosed late on Thursday will put JPMorgan to the test. Its capital buffers may be safe for now, but the ramifications are apt to be broader.

The losses come from the bank’s chief investment office. That’s part of the core treasury function at JPMorgan, responsible for managing the entire firm’s balance sheet. That it was being “poorly monitored,” as Dimon conceded, is even more worrying than the discovery of a random rogue trader.

The CIO has made news of late because of reports that one of its overseas traders, Bruno Iksil, was taking such large positions in a credit index to hedge JPMorgan’s risk that he was distorting the market. Rivals labeled him the London whale. Dimon declined to discuss specifics.

Social Security Is Not Going Broke | Common Dreams. Also called another raid on the treasury

Social Security Is Not Going Broke | Common Dreams:

'via Blog this'

Which federal program took in more than it spent last year, added $95 billion to its surplus and lifted 20 million Americans of all ages out of poverty?

Why, Social Security, of course, which ended 2011 with a $2.7 trillion surplus.

That surplus is almost twice the $1.4 trillion collected in personal and corporate income taxes last year. And it is projected to go on growing until 2021, the year the youngest Baby Boomers turn 67 and qualify for full old-age benefits.

So why all the talk about Social Security “going broke?” That theme filled the news after release of the latest annual report of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds, as Social Security is formally called.

The reason is that the people who want to kill Social Security have for years worked hard to persuade the young that the Social Security taxes they pay to support today’s gray hairs will do nothing for them when their own hair turns gray.

That narrative has become the conventional wisdom because it is easily reduced to a headline or sound bite. The facts, which require more nuance and detail, show that, with a few fixes, Social Security can be safe for as long as we want.

From Al Jazeera the indenture servitude of the American college students

John Nichols: Fighting Back Against Austerity

Massachusetts explaining budget cuts and debt. What will be left? Just to make sure Bill Gates doesn't have a tax cut

From The Auburn Journal (California)

The Republicans continue to bet heavily that the Americans don't have the memory that retains information longer than an amoeba does, as they pivot and repeat the same arguments back to already failed policy. The height of insanity is trying the same thing and expecting different results,

GOP Created Debt, Blames Obama

By ThosPayne

This from the uber-liberal nazimarxist propaganda rag, Businessweek (Tues., 26 July 2011), pointing out Republican hypocrisy on the debt the GOP voted to create.
*****
July 26 (Bloomberg) -- House Speaker John Boehner often attacks the spendthrift ways of Washington.

“In Washington, more spending and more debt is business as usual,” the Republican leader from Ohio said in a televised address amid debate over the U.S. debt. “I’ve got news for Washington - those days are over.”

Yet the speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt soaring the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that bailed out financial institutions and the auto industry.

A Bloomberg News analysis shows that together these initiatives added $3.4 trillion to the nation’s accumulated debt and to its current annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.

Republicans, of course, have an answer; "'Blaming Bush for the structural deficits we've known would come since the early 1990s is beyond irresponsible,' according to Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Cantor."

Right - except that the mid to late 90s saw unprecedented growth and a budget surplus. That's another one of those liberally-biased facts you can't expect a Republican to acknowledge.

Unfortunately, what you can't sum up in an easy-to-understand chart is the fact that Republicans really don't care about the deficit. It's purely a political issue for them, a cudgel to keep that "tax and spend" mantra against Democrats going.