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The CNN blog just ran a lengthy interview with Tricia Erickson, who makes a variety of arguments that no believing Mormon should ever be elected President. (Link here; note that in her interview she cites language from the endowment ceremony). Erickson’s arguments...repeats the old evangelical anti-Mormon reasoning that Mormons are all basically automatons, and suggests that any Mormon politician would have a secret church-promoting agenda. It’s an argument straight out of The Manchurian Candidate (and reminiscent of the anti-Catholic arguments raised against JFK)...But what are the implications of the article’s prominent publication today — what does it say about the...

The real question the media needs to ask Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman -- and even Harry Reid coincides with my new tagline: 'SHOW US YOUR SPIRITUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE FROM KOLOB' Mormons make bold claims to a pre-existence on Kolob: Having a dad-become-god father and a divine mother...giving "spirit birth" as aliens to this planet. Then being sent here to Planet Earth to inhabit bodies. Well. We wanna see the proof! Actually, I'd even settle for significantly less than "proof!" I'd just like to hear each of them utter: "Yes, I was spirit-born on Kolob to a divine goddess." That's...

Identical twins from Cambridge who sexually abused a boy more than 20 years ago have been jailed. John and Martyn Conway, 50, both Mormons, abused the child in the 1980s, Cambridge Crown Court was told. John received six years and Martyn three. John was convicted of indecent assault at a trial earlier this year while Martyn admitted abuse charges. Earlier convictionJohn Conway had entered not guilty pleas, arguing he was a victim of mistaken identity. Jurors heard that the victim, now in his 30s, had complained of being abused over a seven-year period. In 2008 Martyn was given a seven-year...

Utah death-row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner is set to be executed by a firing squad on Friday. Thirty-five states allow the death penalty, but death by firing squad remains an option only in Utah. SNIP Every detail of April 2, 1985, is burned into her memory. Gardner was in court on a murder charge when he tried to escape. An accomplice slipped him a gun, and he shot and killed an attorney and also severely wounded George "Nick" Kirk, who was a bailiff. Kirk didn't die, but VelDean Kirk says he wasn't the same active, cheerful man anymore. She says...

REXBURG — Police arrested a woman on Wednesday for embezzling more than $105,000 from a Rexburg law firm where she worked. Jennifer Handy, 31, of Rexburg, has been charged with four counts of grand theft. She is being held in the Madison County Jail with bail set at $100,000. Rexburg Police Capt. Randy Lewis said the thefts occurred on four separate occasions between January 2008 and April 2010. Police declined to name the law firm at this stage of the investigation. He said Handy had access to the law firm’s bank accounts during that time period. The potential penalty for...

Deflationary Economic Depression 2010, Ready Or Not Here It Comes! Economics / Great Depression II Dec 06, 2009 - 08:31 PM By: Darryl R Schoon Much has been written about the Great Depression and the present crisis. There is much that is similar and some that is not. The differences explain why events have unfolded differently. The similarities explain why the end will be the same. Deflationary depressions occur after the collapse of large speculative bubbles. The collapse of the 1920s US stock market bubble, then the largest bubble in history, caused the Great Depression of the 1930s. The collapse...

Below, release from Kirk.... McCain to Endorse Kirk at Veterans Gathering in Glenview McCain: "The people of Illinois deserve a Senator who will restore honest government, strengthen our national security, fight for veterans and bring fiscal discipline to Washington. Mark Kirk has my strongest endorsement." Who: Congressman Mark Kirk Senator John McCain When: 4:00 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30 Where: Glenview Park Center, Lakeview A Room 2400 Chestnut Ave. Glenview, IL What: Senator John McCain will endorse Congressman Mark Kirk for U.S. Senate at a veterans gathering in Glenview on Sunday afternoon. Kirk, an early supporter of McCain's presidential bid during...

August 23, 2009 — An alternative cosmology that doesn’t require dark energy may have the effect of putting the Milky Way near the center of the universe. That’s not the only interpretation, but it is being considered....

<p>When everyone is thinking the same thing, it never happens, and what everyone is thinking right now is that when August is over, and we get down to business, this market's going to be in for some hurt.</p> <p>Folks have been saying it all summer, as bulls make mincemeat of bears without mercy. And now traders are starting to place their bets on the wheels coming off soon.</p>

More than 2,000 commercial properties in Maricopa County, Arizona have received 90-day foreclosure notices since the beginning of the year. In total, that represents $6.3 billion in real-estate loans. That foreclosure number is horrific. Arizona was one of the canaries in the coal mine of the housing bubble. If it’s playing that role for commercial real estate, we’re in for a lot of pain. Over the past decade the foreclosure rate has stayed around zero. Now foreclosures have skyrocketed, and local real estate brokers say they are still building momentum. Commercial-mortgage lenders are reportedly not modifying commercial-real-estate loans. But the...

<p>The $3.5 tn commercial real estate market is eroding, defaults are doubling on loans for apartment buildings, office buildings, housing complexes, strip malls, hotels, hospitals, and a staggering amount of loans must be rolled over this year into refinancings, or else go bellyup.</p>

Goldman Sachs is once again warning the world of a coming spike in oil prices that will remind everyone of 2008. The current financial crisis is to blame. While we focus on fixing the banking sector, we've forgotten that there are fundamental problems with the commodites markets. The spike from 2008 will return because there's been "decades" of poor investment decisions by oil producers. When the economy kicks into gear around the world, supply shortages will become problematic, and the price of oil will spike. Says Goldman via Alphaville, "As the commodity markets rebound with the broader global economy we...

With all this blather about “green shoots” and economic “recovery” and new “bull market,” I thought I’d inject a little reality into the collective financial dialogue. The following are ALL true, all valid, and all horrifying… Enjoy. 1) High Frequency Trading Programs account for 70% of market volume High Frequency Trading Programs (HFTP) collect a ¼ of a penny rebate for every transaction they make. They’re not interested in making a gains from a trade, just collecting the rebate. Let’s say an institutional investor has put in an order to buy 15,000 shares of XYZ company between $10.00 and $10.07....

And with the Federal Reserve still intervening heavily to hold down borrowing costs and the government spending money hand over fist, few want to bet against this bull run. However, every post-recession period is different, and this one still looks nasty enough to cause disappointment on fundamentals. Indeed, the bulls' weakest point is their reliance on the earnings rebound predicted by Wall Street analysts. The S&P 500 is trading at 16.8 times consensus 2009 earnings, above its level at the market peak in October 2007. That is why the bull case says investors need to look even further forward, at...

Insightful commentary from Warren Pollock on how China is quietly getting the hell out of dodge. Video at site

I'm going to put this bluntly, at the risk of being called an "extreme doomer", even though the scenario I am outlining here has only, at this point, a reasonably-small (perhaps 10-20%?) chance of happening. During the S&L Crisis many people who had (up to $100,000 at the time) money below insured limits were prevented from getting all their money at once. The circumstances? The same as we have today: State-run insurance, which insured some S&L accounts, ran out of money, just as the FDIC is out of money under any rational accounting. Note that these insurance funds were "backed"...

Richard Parkus of Deutsche Bank has updated his Commercial Real Estate outlook with Q2 data. Check out how much the situation has deteriorated since the end of Q1. First, here's where things stood at the end of Q1. The lines on the chart are the percentage of loans that are delinquent, measured by length of delinquency (the black line is the average). Deutsche Bank (bearish) was looking for 3.5% average delinquency by the end of the year. . And here's where they were at June 30. Deutsche Bank is now looking for 6%-7% delinquency by the end of the year....

Wire flash: Corus Bankshares, Inc. Update: Reportedly Q2 -$9.07 v -$0.30 y/y - tier 1 capital ratio: -2.1% NEGATIVE Tier 1 Capital? The FDIC should have closed these clowns months ago. Now we're going to (again) take it in backside as a direct consequence of the FDIC's refusal to do their damn job! "Prompt Corrective Action" is not a suggestion - it is the law! Why is Sheila Bair not out of a job for refusing to follow the law? Why is not Treasury's Geithner not out of a job for refusing to follow the law? Why do we have...

As I have previously pointed out, the current economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression. See this and this. I have also pointed out that two economists said as recently as June that the global economic downturn was worse than the Great Depression. But if you don't believe them, here it is from the horse's mouth . . . Ben Bernanke said 3 days ago: .

Prices have fallen so far that about $1.3 trillion of properties have either lost their owners’ down payment or are close to it, Robert White, president of the New York-based research firm, said in a report.

China's Finance Ministry failed to attract enough bids to complete a bill auction Friday for the third time in two weeks, due to inflation expectations and tightness in liquidity caused by a large initial public offering, traders said. The unsuccessful bill auction comes as China's money supply and bank lending are expanding rapidly and follows the central bank's sale of three-month bills Thursday that carried a higher yield than a week earlier for a third week in a row. The ministry sold 18.51 billion yuan ($2.71 billion) of six-month bills on Friday at 1.6011%, less than the planned issuance of...

Sales down 51% in North America. Let's just get it out of the way upfront: We don't follow trading in Caterpillar (CAT) stock all that closely, so we don't know what investors were really expecting, or why shares are up 10% pre-market. We're more like a visitor, inspecting the latest report from the politician-friendly company, and dismayed at how bad things seem to be. The Peoria, IL-based maker of giant earth moving machines just reported Q2 revenue that fell 41%(!) from the year before. Earnings were down even more steeply, and they would've been down even more than they were...

How large is Morgan Stanley's exposure to commercial real estate? It's very difficult to tell, actually. As we learned during the horrors of 2008, there are so many ways for banks to hide their exposure to certain asset classes. In fact, many banks were so good at concealing their exposure that their own management had no idea what they owned. This morning's Wall Street Journal notes that Morgan Stanley has about $18 billion in exposure in just one unit--the institutional securities unit--to commercial real estate. Some of that might be hedged, although until we know how Morgan Stanley is hedging...

GE's earnings today are likely to be irrelevant because Wall Street is now worried about GE's long-term exposure to commercial real-estate, the WSJ says. And no wonder. In April, when concerns about the real estate first surfaced, Steve Eisman of FrontPoint wrote a detailed analysis concluding that the company has $40-$45 billion of embedded losses in its commercial real-estate portfolio. If these losses were taken all at once, they would wipe out the company. As it is, they'll likely weigh on GE's earnings for years. For those who didn't see the analysis the first time, here are some of Steve...

Each business day, the United States Treasury Department publishes a report on the workings of the government’s income and spending. One of the items on this report is the “Withheld Income and Employment Taxes.” (Here in the USA, workers have taxes automatically deducted from each paycheck.) This project charts this data. Current through the Daily Treasury Statement dated July 15, 2009.

This is REALLY BIG folks: NEW YORK, July 16 (Reuters) - Mortgage insurer MGIC Investment Corp reported a wider quarterly loss and said it will stop writing new business as losses mount in the battered housing sector, sending its shares down 14 percent in premarket trade. You basically cannot finance a home purchase with more than 80% LTV (loan to value) without private mortgage insurance - that is, insurance that covers the lender if you default and they take a loss. MGIC (NYSE: MTG) is the largest issuer in this area. They said they will be "trying" to capitalize a...

Although it is smaller than the residential housing market, the deepening US commercial property market bust could have a major impact on the banking system in general and on US regional banks in particular, according to Oxford Analytica. It could also substantially affect non-residential US investment. The Fed estimates that the size of the US commercial property market is 6.5 trillion dollars, or approximately one-third the size of the housing market. Commercial property loans outstanding are an estimated 3.3 trillion dollars, also roughly one-third of the 10.0 trillion dollars in residential mortgages outstanding. Of the commercial real estate loans outstanding,...

Finally, a somewhat-honest look at Merideth's actual words this morning: Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC. While Whitney raised her short-term outlook for banks, causing stocks to open in positive territory after pointing lower earlier, she said the long-term outlook for the economy remains murky. Right, so now you're right which ever way the market goes! If the market rockets higher, you called it. If it tanks, you called it. The truth is that...

Well well well. From my 2009 Prediction Ticker: Mortgages are not done. The story last year was "Subprime." This year's will be "ALT-A", "Option ARMs" and so-called "Prime". The Fed and Treasury know this, which is why they are playing games with "agency" debt in a desperate attempt to clear this market before the ticking nuclear devices go off. The amount of debt involved in these "bad deals" is vastly higher than that in the "subprime" space and if they fail to contain it (a near certainty) Round #2 of severe bank instability gets served up on us in the...

It is hard to consider a report with only 227 polled as being a total bogey for the whims and will of the nation. But Chief Executive magazine’s CEO Index that may show at least some concern even to those who would be fine with green shoots. The report shows the monthly CEO Index having pulled back by about 2% or 1.4 points to reading of 74.3 points for June. The reasons may be more interesting than the report, because this breaks 3 consecutive months of increases. This survey shows that CEOs are still wary about the current business climate....

Martin Weiss writes: Just as the authorities were touting the “end of the financial crisis,” all heck has broken loose again … We have a new surge in unemployment, and even without counting those who are excluded from the official numbers, 14.7 million are now jobless, the most since records dating back to 1948. Worse, for the first time since the Great Depression, every single job created after the prior recession has been wiped out. We have industrial production falling at the same pace as it did in the early 1930s …. and global trade falling at twice the pace...

"Cash was, is, and always will be - king. Always have cash in reserve. Cash is the ammunition in your gun. My biggest mistake was not in following this rule more often. Time is not money because there may be times when your money should be inactive... Often money that is just sitting can be later moved into the right situation and make a fortune. Patience-Patience-Patience. Patience was the key to success - Don't be in a hurry." - Jesse Livermore. How To Trade In Stocks, 1940. The Great Comparison Two years ago, we began to note similarities to the...

Commentary: Time to worry -- they're recommending themselves One sure sign that the markets may be getting ahead of themselves this summer: Wall Street banks are recommending each other's shares again. Citigroup (C 2.89, -0.08, -2.66%) got on its squawk box Wednesday with an analyst report claiming that shares of rival Bank of America (BAC 12.76, -0.29, -2.22%) may be the best bank buy out there now. The TARP-ridden banking giant said its government cash-infested competitor will return to normalized earnings in a couple of years and slapped an $18 stock target on the shares, up more than a third...

For a little bit it looked like stocks might edge higher today, but... no. Weekly new jobless claims jumped to 627,000 for the week, stubbornly remaining above 600,00, while total benefit rolls climbed to 6.7 million. The numbers weren't way out of line with what was expected, but we're kind of at that point, with unemployment, where everyone is secretly hoping that it's not that bad. Thing is, it is that bad. There are no gren shoots on that front yet. Nobody is hiring or creating new jobs, meaning all kidns of repurcussions from taxes, to the housing market to...

In this segment Dr. Nouriel Roubini shares his thoughts on why pundits proclaiming the stabilization of the housing market are wrong and why the current policy path is unsustainable and likely to have a messy exit. My favorite part? The idea of our debt ballooning from 40% GDP to 80%. Lovely. Can you say bust? Definitely worth watching:

And it'll probably go a lot higher. Everyone knows that banks are going to take a bath on their credit card portfolios. The question is: How bad will it get. Not surprisingly, we've alredy reached an all-time high charge-off level, but nobody expects it to peak anytime soon. Bankruptcy filings, meanwhile, are creeping back up, but are still well below the levels seen before the law changed.

The US is headed toward hyperinflation, and within five to 10 years it could have inflation rates of 10 to 20 percent, said Marc Faber, editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. "In every society, when you have large fiscal deficits combined with easy monetary policies … the likelihood that you will have high inflation is very, very high," Faber said. "And it happens very quickly." These numbers rise so speedily because the government "massively" understates the country's rate of inflation, Faber said. To get a true reading, he said, people need to ditch core inflation numbers...

The beatings will continue until morale improves. On Friday, the ratings agency Fitch made massive downgrades on various subprime residential mortgage backed securities, our friends at Housing Wire point out. Probably the only surprise here is that there is still room to downgrade subprime MBS from that era. Unfortunately, there is still room for downgrades, indicating that we haven't yet hit rock bottom on the pricing of these securities. Which means there could still be more writedowns in the future. From Housing Wire: The rating agency slashed hundreds of RMBS ratings further into junk territory. Handfuls of Wells Fargo Home...

U.S. Commercial Mortgage Defaults May Rise to 17-Year High (ht Brian) The default rate on commercial mortgages held by U.S. banks may rise to the highest in 17 years in the fourth quarter as debt for refinancing remains scarce and the recession drags down rents. The rate is likely to reach 4.1 percent by year-end, Real Estate Econometrics LLC ... said in a report today. ... Commercial defaults already are at a 15-year high after climbing to 2.3 percent in the first quarter ... from 1.6 percent at the end of 2008 ... The projection for this year would match...

<p>If you look hard enough, you can find some green shoots, but here's the truth. The decline in world industrial output is tracking very close with what we saw during the Depression. This chart was put together by economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke, as part of a broader study comparing this downturn with the Great Depression. The good news, they say: The policy response has been much better this time around.</p>

If prices stop at fair value, this will be the first time in history that a major bubble has merely returned to trend.

Don't get too excited about stabilized prices. A fresh wave of homes is set to hit the market. Read »

Freddie Mac has announced a sharp increase in the 30-year fixed-mortgage rate. Information released by the agency says that rates moved to 5.29% for the week ending today, up from 4.91% a week ago. A mortgage banking expert told Reuters, “Any additional rate increases will significantly hurt the home purchase and refinance markets, which will really hurt the economic recovery,” said Alan Rosenbaum, president of Guardhill Financial. The housing market is still bedeviled by several factors that are not going away. The first is the mortgage default rate, which continues to be near historic highs. The second is that a...

Now we see real reporting instead of the puff piece on Bloomberg yesterday: The Government, which claimed it was going to "drain the swamp" and get the market moving again, tried everything short of the barrel of an M-16 in the mouth of people like Blankfein and Pandit, but couldn't get them to sell. Baloney. If the banks were returning to health on their own they wouldn't care if the market price was recognized on their balance sheets. The FDIC is lying. No one knows exactly how many losses are buried in the troubled mortgages on banks’ books, but some...

The ADP number for jobs lost last month was 532,000. It was better than any month since November but worse than what many analysts had expected. Economists predict the unemployment figures from the government, due tomorrow, for May will show non-farm payrolls fell by 500,000 pushing unemployment to 9.2%. The market seems to sense relief because the economy is not pushing 600,000 people out of work each month as was the case earlier in the year. There are several reasons to believe that the pause is temporary. The government figure for the May job loss could be 550,000 if the...

Robert Zoellick, the head of the World Bank, recently said that the current efforts to right the world’s economy are wholly inadequate. It is a position in which he has been joined intermittently by economists, outspoken billionaires, Chinese leaders, and officials from the IMF. His position is that no effort which does not markedly increase global employment is futile and misguided. He told

Time for another bailout. The banking crisis is supposedly over, but outside of the big firms, the number of FDIC problem-institutions has continued to grow. Also, as you can see, the FDIC is now careening towards broke. At the end of March, it had just $13 billion in assets, or .27% of the total accounts it insures. With more bank failures on the way -- they're announced every Friday -- it's time for an FDIC bailout.

Flash back a month ago. If the market was up one day, the financial stocks were up huge. Go back four months, and on days when the market was down, the bank stocks got crushed. Now you hear barely a peep out of them, even during what's been a pretty volatile period. On Tuesday, when markets roared higher, they made fairly modest moves. Then yesterday, when the markets tanked on concerns that the lenders TO THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT were getting cold feet, they didn't sell off in any spectactular form. The government has went ahead and killed financial volatility...

A pickup in U.S. home sales has kindled hopes for a housing recovery, but plunging prices, rising unemployment and a new wave of foreclosures are clouding prospects for a quick end to the American real estate debacle. "We're not at the bottom and anybody that's trying to call the bottom right now is crazy," said Jack McCabe, a real estate consultant based in Deerfield Beach, Florida. "There's a huge foreclosure wave still ahead in the next 12-18 months and still a lot of excess inventory," he added. Housing is at the heart of the 17-month-old U.S. recession and is key...

Our huge demand for debt slams into a supply wall. Stocks tank. Read »