“U.S. stock index futures signaled a firmer opening for Wall Street on Wednesday and Treasury futures rose in anticipation that the Federal Reserve will announce more asset purchases to stimulate the economy,” Harpreet Bhal reports for Reuters.
“Market reaction to Republicans’ victory in the midterm elections was relatively muted as investors have largely priced in an outcome that is seen as a net positive for business, with the focus firmly on the Fed meeting,” Bhal reports. “Republicans seized control of the U.S. House of Representatives and strengthened their ranks in the Senate in midterm elections after voters punished Democrats over high unemployment and a sluggish economic recovery.”
“A divided Congress is seen as supportive for stocks. Critics for example of the new healthcare law, which put pressure on related stocks earlier this year, hope Republicans can spearhead attempts to repeal or not fund parts of the reform,” Bhal reports. “But the S&P 500 index has gained almost 14 percent since September, and analysts said the result was largely priced in and may raise some doubts over fiscal spending to support the recovery, leaving stocks ripe for some profit taking.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) are up slightly in pre-mart trading to $311.30 (+$1.94, +0.63%).
@Killjoy Deluxe:
You know nothing about the world.
I will take checks and balances over one party rule any day. No matter what the party is.
I forgot to mention that after every real estate bubble there is a post real estate bubble recession.
Normal post bubble recessions don’t last long, about a year as the economy adjusts, unemployment takes a hit for a short time.
But because of the hundreds of billions in sub-prime losses by Freddie and Fannie, this one will take nearly 10 years to fully recover from, because it included people who should have had no business getting a over-priced house to begin with.
These poor/working people would have been better off getting a home AFTER the real estate bubble expired and housing prices stabilized for the next 15 or 30 years as they carry the loan.
So you see, Democrats are idiots. Most of them lack human and business experience.
@ KillJoy Deluxe
You idiot!
It was the Republican deregulation that allowed thesub-prime fiasco! It was Bush himself who pushed to allow it through.
It was the REPUBLICANS who repealed the Glass-Steagle act that protected us from the banks getting to deep in risky investment banking and THIS is what really took the financial system down.
It was Republican deregulation that allowed AIG type insurance – unbacked by any sane policy.
You say “If you recall the economy was roaring…” roaring like a downhill freight train towards a broken track! People who make comments such as yours are short sighted fools who unthinkingly repeat the drivel of the right-wing propaganda machine!
I suppose you are gonna tell me that the reason we found no WMDs is because Saddam H moved them all to Syria just before our $1 -Trillion invasion? (By the way -are YOU gonna pay for that?)
I suppose you still think that there really was a “Death Panel” clause in the health care legislation. This is how right-wing propaganda machine manipulates tools like you.
Bokweb
“whose progenitors opposed the Civil rights Act”
You obviously don’t know shit about how that legislation was passed and have bought into the Hollywood version of history.
“is there a reason to capitalise White and Black, mr. TowerTone?”
Yes, when it represents a race or culture and not just a color.
“no thanks to the conservatives, by the way”
Predrag, your ignorance of true American history is only overshadowed by your brilliance in other fields. What a shame.
“It will be primarily because folks from the bible belt are subconsciously extremely uneasy with a president that doesn’t look anything like them.”
The Bible Belt has the highest concentration of Blacks in America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg
We also have a large number of Blacks in local, county, and state governments. Be careful stepping of your high-horse after causing the stampede, because sometimes they change directions…
Now, please explain how your country of origin is superior in these respects.
What the Libs do not EVER want you to read:
NY Times: March 14, 1992
“If you put too much of the actual official power in the hands of the Republicans, it makes them responsible.”
Isn’t that an interesting sentence coming from a conservative.
The whole objective of Republicans now for the next 2 years is not to get anything done constuctively, legislatively for the American people but to torpedo the Obama presidency so we can, what, in their fantasy dial back the clock to the year 2000 in 2012? Yeah, that was a great run. The only plan Republicans have (read: neo-con corperatists) is more deficit-sourced tax breaks for the wealthy (the exponential growing interest on which is a hidden tax for the rest of us) and deregulation (think BP disaster, bank scandals requiring bailouts).
“The primary reason he will NOT get re-elected will be precisely the colour of his skin.”
Ah. You are approximately as ignorant of American society as we tend to be of the rest of the world.
What ticker are you watching, MDN???
as of 11:30 am wednesday:
Dow: -15.59
NASDAQ: -10.31
S&P500;: -1.06
Treas: -0.31
DOWN ACROSS THE BOARD.
If you think Republicans are fiscally responsible, then you are in for a rude awakening. They are just beholden to a different set of corporate puppeteers. Welcome back, coal lobbyists.
TowerTone,
It seems I had mistook Bible Belt to mean places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Dacotas, Wyoming, Idaho, plus those just below… I didn’t realise it meant the South. I obviously misspoke. Naturally, the Blacks (capital ‘B’ here) will obviously be inclined to do exactly the same as the Whites (vote for the guy that looks more like them). WIth respect to the civil rights legislation, it seems (from what I could quickly gather) that the opposition came mainly from the South, and support mainly from the North, regardless of the party. Since the south was at the time mainly in the hands of Democrats, they voted conservatively, apparently in accordance with their electorate. Perhaps in those times, American lawmakers were more inclined to vote according to what those who elected them wish, rather than according to what those who paid for their election want. The point was, it was still a very conservative vote; at the time, it was done by the Democrats. This is pretty much in line with what I said: throughout the history, conservatives have consistently held back social progress. Back then, the conservatives were the Democrats of the South. Today, it looks like they are almost exclusively Republicans.
As for the last remark, I don’t see where in my comment did you get the impression that I claimed how my country of origin is superior to any other country (including the USA).
@jmmx
No your the idiot.
Clinton ushered in a government takeover of the banking system using the threat of the Federal money supply by making changes to the Community Reinvestment Act forcing banks to accept ill qualified loan applicants.
A year later the first Mortgage Backed Security was issued by Bear Sterns as a way for investors to invest in risky sub-prime loans for higher returns so the banks could get rid of these toxic mortgages ruining their balance sheets. However that only goes so far as you run of investors eventually.
During this time government controlled Freddie and Fannie were only accepting prime mortgages and not taking sub-prime loans.
So the combination of the government carrying more and more prime loans and forcing banks to take more and more bad loans, trying to drive them out of the housing mortgage market forced the banks to change business tactics to stay in business.
This is the cause why banks went into speculative banking, the repeal of Glass-Stegal and so on. Because the Democrats in government drove them out of their business of home mortgages.
The FHA now controls over 95% of the housing mortgage market.
One of the prime reasons given for this economic failure was the separation of the borrower from the lender. Banks had a lending rule of Credit, Collateral and Character. A person used to get to know their bank and they you so they could gauge your risk for a loan as it’s a 15 or 30 year commitment.
Now a bank just gives you a loan and the government takes it, in the case of the last bubble, it was taking everyone’s loans, if they qualified or not. Again, Democrats doing as they are socialists, the government owns everything mentality.
And by the way, Saddam killed hundred of thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons of mass destruction, invaded Kuwait, went to war with Iran and was on the border with Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil producing country and our friends for decades.
After 9/11 almost all Democrats and Republicans voted to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a lot of other nations, to bring stability to the region.
So it seems you have not been observing the FACTS and rather listening to left wing misinformation and disinformation. common on brain washing news sites like MSNBC and even Fox.
Look those two words up in a dictionary and enlighten yourself. Research the voting records, read the more detailed news of Washington instead of the propaganda.
Barney Frank is a homosexual. Look it up!
…”You are approximately as ignorant of American society as we tend to be of the rest of the world”
Mac Daddy:
Before I got a chance to spend some time in America (New York, mind you) and meet Americans, I was convinced that what I had stated above (and you quoted) wasn’t true. After living in NYC for some time, and traveling around the US extensively, I had come to realise that, while the country has made enormous progress on the racial issue (greater than almost ANY other country in the world), the problem is still acute and quite pronounced. In some places, is it almost non-existent; in others, it seems almost as bad as it was in the 50’s. And from what I learned during the years in the US, I’m absolutely convinced that no matter what Obama may accomplish in the next two years, he will be voted out by uneasy White voters.
@iWill “A house divided…”
Cute. Did you learn that in high school this week? We stand just fine when there is gridlock in the federal government. President Lincoln, a famous Republican, was referring to the Civil War when he used the phrase, but if we continue with it, consider that the divided house cannot continue to grow the federal government at an unprecedented pace, just because. A divided house cannot pass an abomination of a health care bill that most Americans did not want, just because.
Gridlock made Clinton a better President. Let’s hope it does the same for Barry O.
@TowerTone
You’re an embarrassment to the musical community, probably producing prog Christian Fundamental Rock.
@Predrag
I have to agree. You are completely ignorant of American society. Only the lunatic fringe is concerned with Obama’s race. The left in this country hated Bush. The right was profoundly disappointed in him.
Barrack Obama slipped into office riding that train of hate and disappointment in the incumbent, with tracks greased by more then SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS spent on his campaign.
Speaking as a black conservative, I think you should read these words by a noted black scholar.
——–
———
A Referendum on the Redeemer
Barack Obama put the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leading a great one.
By Shelby Steele
http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=SHELBY+STEELE&bylinesearch=true
————–
Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the “transformative” aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to “change” us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the “no” in the “party of no” even more formidable, if not definitive.
But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.
How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?
The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don’t know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.
All this would be enough to explain the disillusionment with this president—and with the Democratic Party that he leads. But there is also a deeper disjunction. There is an “otherness” about Mr. Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American. “Birthers” doubt that he was born on American soil. Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim, or in quiet simpatico with his old friends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism.
But Barack Obama is not an “other” so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new “counterculture” American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying “otherness” but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.
Bad faith in America became virtuous in the ’60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the “imperialism” of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the ’60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America’s natural default position.
Among today’s liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.
———
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. The article continues on the WSJ website.
Back to your C18 Constitution, guns, corporate greed, world’s worst health and red-neck status. The rest of the world shake our heads in disbelief. We all get the governments we deserve…
With so many smart people in America, why are so few in politics?!
The Republicans had everything fixed just fine when they had the House, the Senate and the Presidency. If you recall the economy was roaring, people were spending money like crazy and having a good old time.
It’s when the House and Senate fell to the Democrats and they decided to screw up the works and involve the government in sub-prime mortgages with our tax dollars.
Wow, that’s as delusional a revision of history as I’ve ever read.
Firstly, the 110th Congress didn’t take its seats until January 4th 2007.
Secondly, the recession that the US is now exiting started in December 2007, whilst the first budget that was approved by the 110th Congress didn’t take effect until October 2007. Even accounting for being in league with supernatural forces, even the Democrats can’t do something with that much efficiency.
Thirdly, Bear Stearns (first of the investors in CDOs and the like to go down) was already underwater by June 22, 2007 with losses commencing back in 2006. In fact, it was when Merrill Lynch seized underlying collateral allegedly worth $850 million, but was only able to recover $100 million that the entire CDO sub-prime “house of cards” started to collapse.
This had next to nothing to with Freddie or Fannie and everything to do with so-called “investment professionals” fraudulently misrepresenting the value of their assets and their exposure to a over-heated bubble. And the reason for that is that many “investment professionals” believed that they had totally eliminate risk from the market place by furiously slicing, dicing and repackaging “assets” that were barely worth the name.
When you have salmonella in sausage meat, breaking open the affected sausages and then sharing out the infection doesn’t lead to less infections, it leads to more tainted meat.
CDOs were first developed as early as 1987 (back when Reagan was in power), but they really took off in 2001 when the ability to rapidly price CDOs became available and attractive after the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 became law under the sponsorship of a trio of Republican law makers (Gramm, Leach, Billey).
In effect, the FSMA helped to create an unregulated hyper-casino where everyone thought they knew the odds.
In the period leading up to the crisis, bankers were increasingly paid through short-term cash bonuses based on volume and on marked-to-market profits, rather than on the long-term profitability of their “bets”.
In the summer of 2005, UBS (which now counts Gramm as a director) became a major player in subprime mortgage CDOs. It would purchase pools of subprime mortgages from mortgage originators and “slice and dice” them, so that the “super senior” tranches would receive the highest designation from the rating agencies.
The supposedly-AAA securities would then be sold off to investors. UBS was paid handsomely for structuring these deals. This business usually worked as intended: The credit risk that would normally be held by UBS or other banks or mortgage lenders was transferred to the better-capitalized investment community.
However, in 2006 (again prior to any Democratic majority in the House or Senate), UBS’ CDO unit realised that the pseudo-AAA assets were treated as essentially risk-free by their own risk-management protocols, but yielded as if they were high-risk: at this point, UBS went into overdrive increasing their internal holdings of CDOs from $5 billion (Feb. 06) to $50 billion (Sept. 07), despite the fact that the US housing market was already having issues and the fact that sub-prime lenders had started to go out of business in December 2006 (again prior to any Democratic control). It should also be noted that the CDO gamblers at UBS were – by virtue of their bonus compensation culture – loading up on sub-prime backed CDOs in spite of UBS having already closed its own hedge fund (Dillon Read) precisely because of sub-prime related losses.
I could go on and on.
But the simple truth is you’re wrong.
And by repeating a lie told to you with no knowledge of the reality, you increase the chances of history repeating itself.
With so many smart people in America, why are so few in politics?!
Because smart people only make up 10% of the population and it takes a smart person to vote for a smart person.
That leaves 90% of the population voting for idiots or being brain washed into voting a particular way, even if it’s wrong.
In the US we have a wide range of IQ levels, from below average to above average due to our mixed population.
Some places like Japan where everyone is nearly the same race, nearly everyone’s IQ level is about 110, makes it a bit easier to discuss the issues rationally amongst everyone.
I long ago proposed that anyone running for election pass a IQ test with at least a 120 or above.
Of course Hitler and his gang all had IQ’s 130 and over, look how that turned out.
Until people get over their fear that the majority of smart people are all not Nazi’s we will likely continue to elect total and absolute morons like Nancy Pelosi, Barny Frank, Harry Reid and so on. And yes, George Bush too and Bill Clinton…
…and our economy will continue to suffer as a result…
heck look at what Hugo Chavez is doing to his country, screwing it up royally as he doesn’t know what hell he is doing.
Wow…certainly a lot of anger here on both sides. America really is divided and that is a shame. No matter the origin, Obama inherited an extremely difficult situation that would take anyone a long time to fix…from either camp. I think people wanted more instant gratification which was just impossible.
The stat I heard yesterday morning was that 70% of Americans had no expectation that swinging over to the republican side will change anything….but they were going to do it anyway.
To me that speaks volumes….people are simply…lost.
@iPhoneEnvy…
“I will take checks and balances over one party rule any day. No matter what the party is.”
Agreed
@Killjoy
I’d bet every penny I have that you watch Fox News. Have you really done any research on your own or do you just listen to people who tell you what you want to hear?
So… this is what you call The Refudiation, huh? The GOP picks up majority House seats, but is unable to dislodge Harry Reid or control of the Senate, and the pendulum swings much as one might expect it to in the average, mid-term, anti-encumbent election cycle.
Wow. The Mandate is clear!!!
MacMaster
I have no idea what your point is. I don’t go to church, let alone listen to Christian music (it bores me), not that there’s anything wrong with it….
But, by your toking, are you implying that the only good musicians are abortion loving high tax rate liberals?
I’m sure that would come as a shock to George Harrison, Bob Dylan and that Cat Islam.
A year later (the first Mortgage Backed Security was issued by Bear Sterns as a way for investors to invest in risky sub-prime loans for higher returns so the banks could get rid of these toxic mortgages ruining their balance sheets. However that only goes so far as you run of investors eventually.
Actually, more rubbish.
The first CDO was developed by Drexel Burnham Lambert for Imperial Savings Association, which went underwater in February 1990. The ISA collapse was part of the whole S&L crisis. I think you’ll find that difficult to blame on Clinton.
TowerTone
He’s Afro-American, not Black.
He is one-half White and raised as a White.
He married a Black, and has Black children.
Can we now dispense with the race crap?
TT, that you wrote this…extensive, capitalized dissection of Barack Obama’s racial heritage, childhood and marriage suggests you may want to consider that old adage, “Physician, heal thyself.”
Seriously, if his race doesn’t matter, why would someone write such a detailed description about it?
This reminds me of my 81-year-old father who chopped down a small tree in his back yard, put it out by the curb and was incensed when two city workers gave him some information on the size of branches that the city could pick up.
In an angry voice, he told me, “Two blacks from the city gave me some papers about that.”
Their race was what stood out to him, just as Obama’s race is the thrust of your comment. Do you see that?