President Obama’s decision to support California and other states’ application to set stricter limits on greenhouse gasses from cars and trucks is peculiar from a couple of different points of view. First, the federal government and its denizens are usually pretty protective of their prerogatives. One of those happens to be the right to set standards […]
Archive for January 26th, 2009
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Staggering Job Losses: What Do The Numbers Tell Us?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 26th, 2009
A couple of reports, one in the Guardian and the other in the New York Times, highlight the toll that the recession is taking on jobs. The NYT article notes that today U.S. companies announced job cuts totaling 45,000 employees. The Guardian article notes that today over 67,000 job cuts were announced across Britain, Europe […]
Thain Climbs Out From Under Bus And Pushes Lewis In Front Of One
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 26th, 2009
I’ll lose my blogger’s license if I don’t post something on the Thain counter attack. So here via Clusterstock is the text of the letter he sent to Merrill employees. Memo from John Thain It has been an honor to lead this company over the last very difficult year. The decisions that I made were […]
TARP Babies: Are They Lending As Much As They Should?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 26th, 2009
Thanks to the Wall Street Journal we finally have some data concerning lending levels by banks that received TARP funds. Lending at many of the nation’s largest banks fell in recent months, even after they received $148 billion in taxpayer capital that was intended to help the economy by making loans more readily available. Ten […]
Economic Reports: Not As Good As They Look
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 26th, 2009
There were a couple of rays of economic sunshine this morning in reports on existing home sales and leading indicators. Analysts immediately set about trying to dispel any hint of optimism. Existing home sales for December increased to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.74 million from a 4.45 million pace in November. For the […]
