NBC told me I needed to really dumb it down, and I thought what I said did sound sorta dumb, but at least they are allowing critical views to be expressed. The lighting was really harsh too, but maybe they think making guests look older confers gravitas.

Settlement Swiss Cheese Release

Settlement Graphic

State Settlement Amounts

Blood-sucking flies clue to zebra’s stripes BBC

Lizard survives washing machine spin Telegraph (hat tip furzy mouse)

Should Plastic Bags Be Banned? New York Times

The science fiction effect Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A Suit Airs Debate on Organic vs Modified Crops New York Times (hat tip reader John L)

Brazilian government files lawsuit against Twitter Raw Story (hat tip furzy mouse)

Greece Talks Stall as Venizelos Heads to Brussels Bloomberg

For Greece a tear, for Brussels a blush Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Insight: The dark side of Germany’s jobs miracle Reuters (hat tip reader May S)

Chinese inflation jumps to 4.5% Financial Times. Seen as New Year related, stay tuned.

Chinese electricity consumption smacked? MacroBusiness. Ditto.

FBI “Communities Against Terrorism” Suspicious Activity Reporting Flyers Public Intelligence (hat tip furzy mouse)

Elected as a Democrat, Now Governing the City Like a Republican Governing (hat tip reader May S) Wonder where they got that idea from?

ROMNEY-GEDDON! MITT’S FOREIGN POLICY TEAM RUN BY ULTRA-NEOCON LOONS & FAILURES ITCHING FOR NUCLEAR WAR WITH IRAN Max Blumenthal, eXiled

Don’t put venture capital at risk John Gapper

Local currency in Bristol, UK can be used to pay taxes MoslerEconomics (hat tip Lambert)

Chief defends mortgage fraud task force Financial Times. Notice the spokesman is from the DoJ, not Schneiderman?

LES MISERABLES: SOCIAL SECURITY Dale Coberly, Angry Bear. This is ugly.

The world of finance needs a shame culture Jonathan Ford. It actually needs a guilt culture, but shame would still be great progress.

David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words (a review) The New Inquiry (hat tip Lambert)

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining Matt Taibbi

Antidote du jour (by Sompob Sasismit):

The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that the SEC is about to launch some securities litigation against major banks. Since the statue of limitations has already run out on securities filings more than five years old, this means they’ll clip the banks for some of the very last (and dreckiest) deals they shoved out the door before the subprime market gave up the ghost.

The various news services are touting this pact at the biggest multi-state settlement since the tobacco deal in 1998. While narrowly accurate, this deal is bush league by comparison even though the underlying abuses in both cases have had devastating consequences.

The tobacco agreement was pegged as being worth nearly $250 billion over the first 25 years. Adjust that for inflation, and the disparity is even bigger. That shows you the difference in outcomes between a case where the prosecutors have solid evidence backing their charges, versus one where everyone know a lot of bad stuff happened, but no one has come close to marshaling the evidence.

The mortgage settlement terms have not been released, but more of the details have been leaked:

1. The total for the top five servicers is now touted as $26 billion (annoyingly, the FT is calling it “nearly $40 billion”), but of that, roughly $17 billion is credits for principal modifications, which as we pointed out earlier, can and almost assuredly will come largely from mortgages owned by investors. $3 billion is for refis, and only $5 billion will be in the form of hard cash payments, including $1500 to $2000 per borrower foreclosed on between September 2008 and December 2011.

Banks will be required to modify second liens that sit behind firsts “at least” pari passu, which in practice will mean at most pari passu. So this guarantees banks will also focus on borrowers where they do not have second lien exposure, and this also makes the settlement less helpful to struggling homeowners, since borrowers with both second and first liens default at much higher rates than those without second mortgages. Per the Journal:

“It’s not new money. It’s all soft dollars to the banks,” said Paul Miller, a bank analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

The Times is also subdued:

Despite the billions earmarked in the accord, the aid will help a relatively small portion of the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing foreclosure. The success could depend in part on how effectively the program is carried out because earlier efforts by Washington aimed at troubled borrowers helped far fewer than had been expected.

2. Schneiderman’s MERS suit survives, and he can add more banks as defendants. It isn’t clear what became of the Biden and Coakley MERS suits, but Biden sounded pretty adamant in past media presentations on preserving that.

3. Nevada’s and Arizona’s suits against Countrywide for violating its past consent decree on mortgage servicing has, in a new Orwellianism, been “folded into” the settlement.

4. The five big players in the settlement have already set aside reserves sufficient for this deal.

Here are the top twelve reasons why this deal stinks:

1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.

3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.

4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.

5. The enforcement is a joke. The first layer of supervision is the banks reporting on themselves. The framework is similar to that of the OCC consent decrees implemented last year, which Adam Levitin and yours truly, among others, decried as regulatory theater.

6. The past history of servicer consent decrees shows the servicers all fail to comply. Why? Servicer records and systems are terrible in the best of times, and their systems and fee structures aren’t set up to handle much in the way of delinquencies. As Tom Adams has pointed out in earlier posts, servicer behavior is predictable when their portfolios are hit with a high level of delinquencies and defaults: they cheat in all sorts of ways to reduce their losses.

7. The cave-in Nevada and Arizona on the Countrywide settlement suit is a special gift for Bank of America, who is by far the worst offender in the chain of title disaster (since, according to sworn testimony of its own employee in Kemp v. Countrywide, Countrywide failed to comply with trust delivery requirements). This move proves that failing to comply with a consent degree has no consequences but will merely be rolled into a new consent degree which will also fail to be enforced. These cases also alleged HAMP violations as consumer fraud violations and could have gotten costly and emboldened other states to file similar suits not just against Countrywide but other servicers, so it was useful to the other banks as well.

8. If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.

9. There is plenty of evidence of widespread abuses that appear not to be on the attorney generals’ or media’s radar, such as servicer driven foreclosures and looting of investors’ funds via impermissible and inflated charges. While no serious probe was undertaken, even the limited or peripheral investigations show massive failures (60% of documents had errors in AGs/Fed’s pathetically small sample). Similarly, the US Trustee’s office found widespread evidence of significant servicer errors in bankruptcy-related filings, such as inflated and bogus fees, and even substantial, completely made up charges. Yet the services and banks will suffer no real consequences for these abuses.

10. A deal on robosiginging serves to cover up the much deeper chain of title problem. And don’t get too excited about the New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware MERS suits. They put pressure on banks to clean up this monstrous mess only if the AGs go through to trial and get tough penalties. The banks will want to settle their way out of that too. And even if these cases do go to trial and produce significant victories for the AGs, they still do not address the problem of failures to transfer notes correctly.

11. Don’t bet on a deus ex machina in terms of the new Federal foreclosure task force to improve this picture much. If you think Schneiderman, as a co-chairman who already has a full time day job in New York, is going to outfox a bunch of DC insiders who are part of the problem, I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you.

12. We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.

As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos

– Will Durant

Well, it looks like the Greeks are going to get a deal on their debt. Provided they continue to destroy their economy through austerity measure, of course. But then why should it be otherwise – why on earth should logic rule when crass moralising is so much more palatable?

But there are a couple of problems with the current ‘arrangements’. As Marshall Auerback wrote yesterday:

Suppose Greece finally does get a deal? I realize everybody says it is a ‘one-off’, but do you really think the Irish, Portuguese, or even the Spanish and Italians will go along with that, particularly if (as is likely) they continue to experience double digit unemployment and minimal growth?

Marshall’s focus in that piece was Spain as the proverbial elephant in the room. And his argument should be seriously considered.

However, there’s another important angle on this. And in truth, it’s rather obvious – less the elephant in the room than the floor, ceiling and walls. Simply put: if Greece gets a deal and if other countries begin to increase the pressure to have their debt burdens alleviated, should potential investors in European government bonds not come to see that they’re just disposable playthings that can be tossed over the side of the crib the moment the ECB and the Germans find it politically convenient to throw a temper tantrum and do so?

Way back in October Mosler and I wrote:

Think about this. You’re a private sector institution that has to ensure that you don’t take losses on crappy paper. You’ve now seen that the Eurocrats are willing to burn anyone who invests in the sovereign debt of any European country that experiences significant financial difficulties – difficulties which, it should be pointed out, are imposed on these countries by the Eurocrats. And you’re expected to continue to consider, for example, Italian debt to be relatively safe? What a lark!

And now, in the wake of what seems to be a deal on the Greek haircut, look at what’s happening elsewhere. Yesterday Reuters reported that the unions in Portugal were demanding that Potugese bondholders take a hit too. The intro to the piece ran:

Portugal must renegotiate its debts rather than impose harsh austerity measures to overcome its economic crisis, the head of the country’s largest trade union said on Wednesday, threatening to step up strikes if the government pushed on with cuts.

The union leader that called for the restructure is hopelessly confused about the politics here, of course, claiming that debt should be restructured rather than austerity measures being imposed. But we all know that debt restructures in Euroland are always going to come with a clause stating that extremely punitive and counterproductive austerity measures must be imposed.

So, yes, the Portugese unions are confused about the crazy politics behind these deals. (And why shouldn’t they be? After all the politics are deranged – what sane person could intuitively understand them?). But, no, the demands by the unions are not unreasonable. They are perfectly correct in thinking that if a haircut has proved the only viable solution in Greece, it will probably be inevitable in Portugal too. As the union leader said:

If the results in Greece were disastrous, without a doubt they will be no different here.

Obviously the union leader is 100% correct.

But here’s the thing: these haircuts are not really doing much to alleviate the real problems because the more of them that are demanded, the more investors are likely to pile out of the European sovereign debt markets. Again, if you were an investor would you throw your money into a pot if the holder of the pot offered you a very low rate of return and also told you that there was a very good chance that he might arbitrarily toss a match into said pot at any moment? I wouldn’t.

The situation in Europe has turned into a complete farce. The ECB needs to step in to guarantee the bonds, but the Germans won’t let them because, in their infinite wisdom, they are intent on drawing blood from a stone and imposing austerity measures (that don’t work) on the periphery.

But given these current ‘tactics’ the ECB will eventually have to step in because investors will be spooked so badly by all the talk of more haircuts that the only ones left to keep a lid on the bond yields with be the central bank.

Does the ECB realise this? Do the Germans? I don’t know. But my guess is: no. My guess is that they haven’t even thought this stuff through. My guess is that they’ve become so caught up in their own little morality play that they fully believe this nonsense.

Our leaders today do not try to bring order to chaos to ensure that their citizenry can live in liberty; instead they try to exacerbate and manipulate chaos itself so that they may impose their arbitrary rule. If history has taught us anything it is that such politics is a very dangerous game – and that such games are the enemy of civilisation.

Following the German-French council of ministers in Paris on Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a joint press conference about the crisis in Greece, among other topics. They agreed on everything. They urged the Greek government and all political parties to implement structural reforms and meet the Troika’s demands for deeper budget cuts. Without them, the next bailout tranche would be blocked.

Then they headed to the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French president, where they gave a joint TV interview amidst gilded splendor. Merkel berated socialist François Hollande, Sarkozy’s top challenger in the upcoming presidential election. Among her peeves: his campaign promise to renegotiate the new fiscal-union pact that 25 EU member states had already signed, and that she was pushing towards ratification. Then Sarkozy lashed out against Hollande. If a treaty signed by a head of state could simply be renegotiated by his successor, then “there would not be any treaties in the world at all,” he concluded.

Ten weeks before the election! And apparently, her next intervention in the campaign is scheduled for early March; she will stand near him on stage as he announces his official candidacy. Never before had a German chancellor campaigned so hard on French soil for a French president.

However, the most recent polls (BVA and Ipsos) gave Sarkozy little chance: he would survive the first round, but during the second round, Hollande would trounce him with 58% of the vote against 42%—and Merkel’s most cherished oeuvre would be at risk.

Merkel and her government have struggled fiercely to create a fiscally united Europe of balanced budgets and “structural reforms”—a euphemism for lowering the cost of labor, including wages and benefits. It’s her prescription for pulling the Eurozone out of the debt crisis. At the moment, her eyes are on the nightmare in Greece where even politicians are preparing for the “afterwards.” Read…. Greek Politicians Are Taking Cover.

Sarkozy has been her most powerful ally during the debt crisis. Without him, she couldn’t have pushed through her policies, which have been a resounding success, in Germany: in a recent poll, 64% of Germans have a favorable opinion of her, and 90% were satisfied with her crisis management.

But Hollande has declared war against her policies. He wants to push the ECB to aggressively buy sovereign bonds, and he wants Eurobonds so that risks can be spread, both of which Merkel has categorically rejected. He wrote: “The Eurozone must arm itself with a veritable financial force de frappe”—the term for France’s nuclear strike force. It would be used to combat the financial markets. He doesn’t want Merkel’s austerity, but stimulus. And he wants to renegotiate Merkel’s fiscal-union pact.

If he wins the election, he will find enough support among other EU states to push through at least some of his policies. But Germany is unlikely to fall in line. A handful of other countries might side with Germany and form a bloc. It might tear the Eurozone apart. To prevent that, Merkel has set out to beat him on French soil before it’s too late.

A desperate gamble. Rather than building bridges to the front runners so that a post-election continuum would be easier to achieve, she is actively fighting for the victory of Sarkozy, who has time after time abandoned his own proposals in favor of hers.

“A quid pro quo,” Harlem Désir, the number two at the Socialist Party, called it. He accused Sarkozy of having made “graves diplomatic concessions” on the role of the ECB, on Eurobonds, on austerity, and on the financial transaction tax in return for electoral support from Merkel.

With her intervention in the French election, Merkel has created the impression that preventing Hollande from becoming president has morphed into a government policy, and it doesn’t necessarily enhance Germany’s image abroad. Already, its reluctance to pay ever more to bail out the Eurozone has made it a global punching bag. Yet the amounts it has committed through a myriad of bailout programs are staggering. Read…. Germany Frets As Bailout Risks Balloon.

–

“It’s hard to see any state staying out of the deal if California is in,” said the source….

“Even if the final settlement number is $25 billion, it pales in comparison to the scope of the problem,” said Margery Golant, a Florida-based attorney who represents homeowners and formerly served as assistant general counsel at subprime mortgage giant Ocwen Financial. “If you do the math, that’s a few hundred million per state. That’s not enough to change anything.”

The article, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” pretends to be about Foxconn’s factories. But Johnson admits he’s a tech toy writer who apparently has no knowledge of manufacturing (I know I’ve had only limited contact with manufacturing, yet reading his piece, I’d bet serious money that I’ve seen more manufacturing operations than he has by dint of being a coated paper brat and doing due diligence on some oddball tech deals over the years, as well as visiting a motherboard maker back in the stone ages when motherboards were made in the US). Yet he’s remarkably uninhibited in using his fantasies and abject ignorance as a basis for making sweeping generalizations about the Taiwanese powerhouse. For instance:

In the part of our minds where Americans hold an image of what an Asian factory may be, there are two competing visions: fluorescent fields of chittering machines attended by clean-suited technicians, or barefoot laborers bent over long wooden tables in sweltering rooms hazed by a fog of soldering fumes.

When we buy a new electronic device, we imagine the former factory. Our little glass, metal, and plastic marvel is the height of modern technological progress; it must have been made by worker-robots (with hands like surgeon-robots)—or failing that, extremely competent human beings.

But when we think “Chinese factory,” we often imagine the latter. Some in the US—and here I should probably stop speaking in generalities and simply refer to myself—harbor a guilty suspicion that the products we buy from China, even those made for American companies, come to us at the expense of underpaid and oppressed laborers.

Huh? Is he serious about this? Anyone who has been following China even slightly would imagine Chinese factories aren’t like Japanese car-makers, heavy on robotics, but are mainly labor intensive (with the exception of some sparkling new capital intensive factories where China is trying to go up the value added chain), and if they are in the Pearl River Delta, makers of watches, clothing and toys (hence not much soldering). And if higher tech, the operations HAVE to be pretty to very clean. But no, everyone in the Wired readership is assumed to share his blinkered imagination.

This extract really does serve as a window onto the entire piece, because it is unduly involved in his inner process, and is remarkably ungrounded in reality-vetting. Yes, he did visit a Foxconn factory, on a guided tour organized and led by executives and PR giant Burson Marsteller. That fails the objectivity smell test. Did he try to talk to Foxconn workers outside the factory? Ex Foxconn workers? Apparently not. The only perspective he has outside his guided tour and his noisy imagination is from one Paul, a “steward for Western electronics companies seeking to procure components or goods from one of the city’s thousands of suppliers.” Do you think someone who makes his living connecting Western tech executives to Chinese manufacturers is going to say ANYTHING bad about the biggest fish in the electronics pond?

The piece goes to obvious lengths to soften the perception of the situation. He frames his account in terms of the suicides, when the recent New York Times series on Apple and Foxconn did not focus on those deaths, but the extreme hours and sometimes grinding physical toll (such as workers getting swollen feet from standing and working more than 24 hours straight). So the article skips almost completely over that issue, juxtaposing the seeming niceness of the clean factory he visited versus the deaths, and only very much later gets to the conditions that produced the suicides.

Johnson is quick to claim that the Foxconn suicides are one-fourth the level of that of college students. So even the most attention getting factoid is not so bad, right? Not so fast. The right comparison is not the number of suicides to Foxconn’s total workforce, since only the employees who killed themselves on site are probably the ones that are included in that total. If a worker killed themselves off site, you can be sure it would be attributed to something else (and it would be hard to parse out the causes). Moreover, it is the workers who live on site, who are about 1/4 of all employees, who are subject to the most extreme work hours (the New York Times recounts how they were roused at midnight to meet an Apple production demand). So this means the suicide rate at least as high as that of college students.

And to be apples to apples (pun intended), you’d need to compare suicides at Foxconn to suicides by college students on campus, which would presumably be more closely correlated with the stress of campus life, than of students who were simply enrolled in college. So it is very likely that a more accurate measurement would have Foxconn showing a markedly higher suicide rate than those of college students.

Finally, and I hate to be morbid, but a highly regimented, low privacy environment like Foxconn probably reduces the number of suicides below what you might otherwise observe. You have many fewer options for offing yourself available to you if you are living on site at Foxconn compared to a US college student (I am not making this up: gunshot is out, pills are probably too costly to procure, slitting your wrists actually takes proper technique). And Foxconn now has netting up to prevent jumping off most buildings and presumably also has its guard force on closer watch. That means the suicide rate probably understates the level of stress experienced by the workers who live on site.

He also bizarrely tries to bifurcate the work content, which he makes sound OK but boring, from what critics charge are more than occasional extreme hours, and completely ignores safety problems that add to the Foxconn death count, highlighted in a New York Times article at the end of January:

But the work itself isn’t inhumane—unless you consider a repetitive, exhausting, and alienating workplace over which you have no influence or authority to be inhumane. And that would pretty much describe every single manufacturing or burger-flipping job ever.

Huh? “Every single manufacturing job ever”? Some manufacturing jobs ARE inhumane. Start with the meatpacking industry in the US. But there is a lot of light manufacturing where the work is not highly repetitive, and that is also true in highly capital intensive factories like the paper industry. This “all manufacturing jobs are bad, therefore Foxconn is not so bad” is simply a baldfaced assertion.

Now I am not saying that there is not a case to be made in defense of Foxconn. But this article is an embarrassment. It’s an intellectually lazy way to assuage the guilt of Wired-reading gadget-owners. For instance, he resorts to “everyone in an advanced economy is guilty” as a way of diminishing the issues specific to Foxconn:

Every last trifle we touch and consume, right down to the paper on which this magazine is printed or the screen on which it’s displayed, is not only ephemeral but in a real sense irreplaceable. Every consumer good has a cost not borne out by its price but instead falsely bolstered by a vanishing resource economy. We squander millions of years’ worth of stored energy, stored life, from our planet to make not only things that are critical to our survival and comfort but also things that simply satisfy our innate primate desire to possess. It’s this guilt that we attempt to assuage with the hope that our consumerist culture is making life better—for ourselves, of course, but also in some lesser way for those who cannot afford to buy everything we purchase, consume, or own.

There is a huge, unexamined leap between “things critical to our survival” and those critical to what we have come to define as our comfort. It’s the unwillingness to examine the difference between the two, or any serious question raised by the role of Foxconn, that makes this piece so dubious. (And this is not an idle observation in my case. Your humble blogger fights planned obsolescence tooth and nail: I used a NeXT computer for 10 1/2 years, a TiBook for over 8, and am still using a Nokia that is probably from 2005. I am writing this post using an Apple monitor from 2002).

I find this little chart (hat tip Richard Smith) from ninety9 via Alea (who is the antithesis of a socialist) to be more though-provoking than the entire Wired piece:

There have been numerous articles complaining about how the Chinese don’t consume enough, and the blame is laid on the high savings rate, which is in turn attributed to the lack of social safety nets (and a second, related issue is the lack of retail infrastructure). Yet it was a sonofabitch capitalist, Henry Ford, that helped create the American middle class in 1914 by paying his workers double the prevailing rate, which partly paid for itself by reducing costly turnover and increasing productivity (well paid workers are grateful workers and want to help their company what a thought!). But the big benefit for Ford was the higher wages were in large measure met by manufacturers in other cities, and created a consumer base for Ford’s own big ticket product. It was not safety nets that created higher consumption and greater American prosperity; it was higher wages.

Ford didn’t see his pay raise as a wage increases but as profit sharing. The chart Alea highlighted shows Apple could kick start a revolution in China that would help American companies, including Apple, at comparatively little cost to itself. What stood in the way when Jobs was alive was his monumental ego and his desire to leave a legacy though his products rather than his conduct as an industrialist. And now that he is dead, Apple’s practices are likely to be guided by American short-sightedness and bad incentives for executives of public companies.

Tiny primate ‘talks’ in ultrasound AFP

How America made its children crazy Asia Times. Boy, does this ring true.

Outlook bleak on Olympic cheats Aljazeera

Mediterranean seagrass could be hundreds of thousands of years old Guardian (hat tip Lambert)

The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy Aljazeera (hat tip Lambert)

Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet Bill McKibben, TomDispatch

Privacy Death Stars Approved By Congress Gawker

Dramatic drop in budget revenues Kathimerini (hat tip Marshall Auerback). Quelle surprise!

Greece misses bail-out deadline Financial Times

Capturing the ECB Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

Has the Euro Broken Out? Credit Writedowns

Temporary Employment: A New Ugly Rearing its Head in Europe? Angry Bear (hat tip Lambert)

China Central Bank Vows Homebuyer Support Bloomberg

Brazil privatises operations at three airports BBC (hat tip Lambert)

Ronald Reagan: Welfare Queen of Montana (or: Tax Tips for Mitt Romney) Rolling Stone

Some U.S. banks awash in ID theft tax-fraud proceeds as IRS cracks down Reuters (hat tip Lambert). I had doubts about the security of electronic filing. Wow, has the IRS botched it.

Another Campaign for Sale New York Times

Now the American right has even hijacked breast cancer’s pink ribbon Guardian (hat tip reader John L)

CONTINETTI: COMBAT JOURNALISM Washington Free Beacon. Per Tom Ferguson: Swamp creatures appear.

The 2012 Version of a Very Old Joke Angry Bear (hat tip reader Aquifer)

Admit It: Countrywide Is Bankrupt Big Think (hat tip reader Scott via Barry Ritholtz). From last week but still germane. The problem is that Ken Lewis looks not to have taken the steps to insulate BofA from Countrywide risk.

How Romney would tax us David Cay Johnson, Reuters

Bernanke: 8.3% Unemployment Understates Weakness in U.S. Labor Market Bloomberg. Mr. Market celebrates since that means Uncle Ben will give him cheap money longer.

Auto and Student Loans Drive Borrowing Surge Wall Street Journal

Short sellers target social network stocks Financial Times (hat tip reader Lambert)

The mantra of some financiers Carolyn Sissoko (hat tip Richard Smith)

Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures Bloomberg (hat tip Richard Smith). Sounds like PR. I just had someone say in Baltimore banks are not responding to any calls re short sales. Notice that the first para indicates that the short sales are being done only on bank-held mortgages, and then I’d bet only on ones where there was no second lien.

Dichotomy Alert (hat tip Lambert)

Money, like hat-wearing, depends on convention, not laws John Kay, Financial Times

Antidote du jour (hat tip furzy mouse):