Do me a favor: When you hear a wanker go on about how the market can take care of itself, just punch them in the face. Don't even think about it twice: Just fuck their shit up real good and in the name of people like you and mean who have to deal with bullshit like the two news items below.

From FT.com / Companies / Banks - Banks make $38bn from overdraft fees:

US banks stand to collect a record $38.5bn in fees for customer overdrafts this year, with the bulk of the revenue coming from the most financially stretched consumers amid the deepest recession since the 1930s, according to research. The fees are nearly double those reported in 2000.

The finding is likely to increase public hostility towards the financial sector, which has been under political pressure to ease the burden on consumers by increasing credit availability and lending more fairly after being bailed out by taxpayers.

Angry? No? Ok, how about this article from the New York Times --which will get the dubious distinction of being blogged by me in two separate posts!

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From Hempton's Law of the Conservation of Subsidy - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com:

The critics of the subsidy implicit in the Geithner plan aren't in general critics on the grounds that it constitutes excessive government spending --we're mostly supporters of the stimulus package, for instance. Rather, my problem with the implicit subsidy is more about the "implicit" part than the "subsidy" part. If you're going to subsidize the banks, let's make it very clear which banks you're subsidizing, and how much you're subsidizing them by.

This is all connected to the nationalization debate, of course. Every time the government throws a certain amount of cash at a bank, it's quite easy to calculate the ownership stake that quantity of money could buy, given the prevailing share price. And so you get pro-nationalization rhetoric along the lines of "we could have bought Citigroup X times over for the amount of money we've given them".

If you hide that money in some combination of PPIPs and the FDIC, however, then it's never possible to calculate how much any given bank has benefitted from the taxpayer plan.
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Gawker is making fun, and pointedly so, of how some big media reporters are grousing about the fact that President Obama didn't call on most major newspapers but did take questions from Univisión and Ebony Magazine. Of course, given how awesomely impartial and objective this cadre reporters is, they attribute the snub to either Obama being too scared to mess up his opening speech or to his desire to control the message, even as far as "debriefing" the White House surrogates (or talkers) who would be hitting major TV news outlets after the press conference.

There is any more objectivity in journalism, particularly political reporting, than there is blogging and yet Lynn Sweet, Michael Calderon, Ron Fournier and Ed Henry would want us to believe that they are the only ones capable of asking the right questions to get the answers the public needs to hear. Well, if by right we mean, "talking points of the GOP", then obviously they are the perfect messengers.

Let's take the above clip of Obama smacking down Ed Henry. The CNN reporter's question was actually two republican talking points :
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As in they have no money, no assets, no equity, no nada :

Tyler Cowen : U.S. banks have been known to be insolvent for some time and everyone is simply afraid to come out and admit it.

Brad Delong : Recapitalize the banks so that the risk tolerance of the private sector recovers to more normal levels--ideally through something like the Swedish model of temporary nationalization in order to avoid the creation of zombies.

Calculated RIsk : We should definitely stress test the banks. My suggestion: announce when this will be complete (within 30 days), make the results public, and preprivatize the insolvent ones.

Martin Wolf (via Matt Yglesias) : Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell [...] Under the second view, a sizeable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities.

Yves Smith : Let's start with the basics. The US banking system is insolvent. Got that? Insolvent. That does not mean every bank in the US is toast, in fact quite a few are probably just fine, and another large group is no doubt hurting and undercapitalized, but a couple of years of not shooting themselves in the foot again would enable therm (via earnings) to rebuild their equity bases sufficiently to proceed more or less as normal.

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MSNBC just announced that the US Senate has approved their $838 million stimulus bill. Their version one close enough to the bill ratified by Congress about a week ago but it had $100 billion in spending trimmed in a move to win the votes of moderate Republicans. Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania broke ranks with their party and helped pass the bill 61 to 36.

I haven't had the opportunity to look at the bills, but here's some differences highlighted in the article :

House's bill costs $819 billion. Senate, $838 billion.
Senate : Tax breaks for new cars
Senate Houses' allocation for NASA by $50 million
Senate : They sneaked in money for "network monitoring"

Now the Senate and Congress will be duking it out for a final bill to go to the President. Ugh. If only they had a system by which people could see all these changes and differences easily.

Back in 2005, this is what Stephen Slivinski, of the free-marketeering and Libertarian-ish Cato Institute, had to say about the economic policies of Bush's GOP controlled Congress :

The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders:
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush's first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton's last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush's first term.

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes Bush's new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.

Republicans could reform the budget rules that stack the deck in favor of more spending. Unfortunately, senior House Republicans are fighting the changes. The GOP establishment in Washington today has become a defender of big government.

As late as October of last year, that bastion of Che-hating journalists, The Washington Times, developed a scathing report on George Bush's "Whatever it takes" policy and politics of government spending post 9/11. And just a few days ago the Wall Street Journal reprinted Nick Gillepsie's kick in the teeth at Bush's big government disaster. An article that, by the way, kind of punctuates Jeb Bush's own repudiation of his older brother's governmental policies.

Yet somehow Republicans are calling the dubiously named 'Stimulus Bill' a crap sandwich of big government spending that Democrats are feed the US people.
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