William K. Wolfrum

Remember investors: non-voluntary labor’s greatest advantage is its endless supply. We’re not going to run out of people.

–WKW

From the Big Picture, an excellent site for economic commentary. See if you can notice any trends with the chart below:

1. Alan Greenspan becomes Fed chief
2. Oct.19, 1987 crash
3. Iraq invades Kuwait
4. Yahoo! IPO
5. Dow hits 11,750.
6. Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
7. Second Gulf War.
8. Ben Bernanke succeeds Greenspan

–WKW

Seeing how many “conservatives” were quick to pick apart the finances of the Frost family as a way to somehow show that the SChip program was little more than a free handout ride for the middle class, I decided it was time to do my own “reporting” on how our tax money is spent.

Currently, the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill is making its way to Congress. Like every farm bill passed over the last several generations, the bill will hand over billions and billions of dollars in subsides to massive agribusinesses like Monsanto.

Today, Monsanto announced fiscal year 2007 sales of $8.6 billion and net income of $993 million, Monsanto easily eclipsed last year’s record-setting sales of $7.34 billion and profit of $689 million. Its CEO, Hugh Grant, was paid $16 million last year.

Here is a photo of the Monsanto Chemical site in St. Charles, La.

This is just one of many monumental structures Monsanto owns and operates.

The bottom line remains: This company made choices. Choices have consequences. Taxpayers of lesser means should not be forced to subsidize them.

–WKW

WASHINGTON — In a press conference by the nation’s business leaders and a smattering of government officials, it was announced that everything bought over the past seven years has been immediately recalled, and that all personal information held by all businesses had been lost.

“If we can just get everyone to form an orderly line outside of every store they’ve purchased things from, that would just be great,” said a government official.

The recall comprises more than 53 trillion products - everything ranging from canned beets and meat to children’s toys to electrical appliances to medicine to sports equipment.

“Basically, if you bought anything since early 2001, you’re going to need to bring it back,” said a government official. “Whatever it is, it could, and will, very likely kill you.

“We’re finding e-coli in everything from pork products to handbags,” the official added. “We didn’t even know that was possible.”

Calls to governmental regulation agencies were answered by a recording.

“Hey ya’ll, Bob and Linda aren’t in right now, but if you have a product you’d like us to regulate, you just leave a message and we’ll get back to you. Thanks and God bless.”

When returning products, customers will not receive a similar product in return, but a store credit for up to half the products value, due to devaluing of the products. Nonetheless, some government officials were optimistic about the recall.

“This truly shows the efficiency of the system, if you ask me,” said Terry Hansen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “You see, after only a few dozen or so deaths from e-coli and lead poisoning, we were able to announce this recall. This is good government in action, really, and gets people back to stores.”

In related news, it was announced that all businesses currently operating in the U.S. and overseas have lost all personal data from all customers. The information had been stored in a laptop, which apparently has been stolen out of the back of a pickup truck.

“We really dropped the ball on this one,” said Chief Executive Glenn Murphy of Clothing retailer Gap Inc.

Still, one anonymous government official said the problem was not as dire as it seemed.

“The fact is, your information is very likely available over the Internets or the Google, anyway, so this shouldn’t really affect too many people.”

–WKW

It seems Alan Greenspan was the perfect Federal Reserve Chairman for the Bush Administration. Because Greenspan could never have predicted that the subprime mortgage boom could ever have a downside.

“Greenspan: I didn’t grasp subprime threat”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledges he failed to see early on that an explosion of mortgages to people with questionable credit histories could pose a danger to the economy.

In an upcoming interview, Greenspan said he was aware of “subprime” lending practices where home buyers got very low initial rates only to see them later jacked up, causing severe payment shock. But he said he didn’t initially realize the harm they could do.

“While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late,” he said a CBS “60 Minutes” interview to be broadcast Sunday. “I really didn’t get it until very late in 2005 and 2006,” Greenspan said.

If there’s one thing the last seven years have taught us, it’s this - U.S. leaders never, ever, anticipate anything bad happening, in any field, at any time.

–WKW

Seeing that Ben Stein wrote some type of column for Forbes - I believe the nut graph of the whole thing was “If Ben Stein can get a loan, things aren’t so bad,” or something - I wondered in what other nation would a raving creationist also be getting column inches in a major financial mag?

I was thinking about seeing Stein’s flick on creationism (Intelligent design, creationism, whatever) called “Expelled” but it seems Jason at Unsought Input has done a fine job summarizing it:

The movie Expelled, in a sense, is nothing new. It follows the established tactics of the creationist / intelligent design crowd, trying to fight the “materialistic” “darwinists” in the court of public opinion rather than in the labs or peer-reviewed journals. It’s yet another attack on science.

“And what’s so wrong with that,” you might ask, “this is a democracy after all.”

We don’t do science by popular vote for the same reason that we don’t design bridges and perform heart surgery using a jury of our peers. The value of a scientific theory can only be judged by it’s correspondence to reality and it’s predictive power.

And PZ Myers adds:

Oh, and putting Ben Stein in short pants and playing “Bad to the Bone” does not make him a rebel. He’s a Republican apologist, and he’s not “cool” at all.

So Stein is simultaneously pimping creationism while giving people feel-good economics’ help. And it seems as though he has the same faith-based opinion on both. Only in the U.S.

–WKW

When Osama bin Laden - in his long-awaited for new video which apparently contains a mixture of hip-hop, jazz, death threats and social commentary - took shots at capitalism, the world awaited for the Bush Administration to take a stand and fight back for their nation’s beloved economic system.

Their reply showed the world that they would stand by capitalism come hell or high water:

“Bush plots strategy to sell Iraq policy”

The administration sees Bush’s trip to Iraq and the events of next week as a package to put the best face on the troop buildup he announced in January. Even as opposition to the war grew at home, the U.S. military presence swelled by 30,000 to roughly 160,000.

“If you had asked two months ago, ‘Is the surge succeeding?’ people would have said, ‘Ah, we’re getting killed.’ I mean literally,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said in an interview. “But now it’s very obvious that on the military side there has been some profound progress.

Take that Osama. We’ll sell anything we can get our hands on.

–WKW

The U.S. debt is currently $8,92,456,033,508. Give or take. It appears one of the great advantages of having that type of debt is that it means you don’t have to worry as much about your own markets. Because other countries - who’ve spent their hard-earned money gobbling up that debt - start asking questions when things aren’t going the way they should.

It’s sort of like the mafia, I believe. Mom and pop borrow money from the mafia; mom and pop are failures as business owners; the mafia decides that mom and pop need some direct oversight.

Give or take.

“Foreigners seek oversight on U.S. markets - report”

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Investors outside the United States are calling for greater foreign oversight of American markets, banks and credit agencies, according to a report Wednesday.

They argue that the U.S. exports its financial products to international investors, but isn’t adequately monitoring and regulating the securities, as evidenced by the substantial losses related to the subprime mortgage scare, said the New York Times.

“We need an international approach, and the United States needs to be part of it,” Peter Bofinger, a member of the German government’s economics advisory board, told the Times.

Major international banks suffered losses after buying mortgage-backed bonds based in the United States, the report said.

In the past, Washington has emphasized that it does not want foreign oversight. But analysts say Europe and Asia have more leverage now, because they own so much U.S. debt, the Times said.

–WKW

San Bernardino County in Southern California is the largest county in the United States, by area. It has more land mass than nine individual states, and is bigger than New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island - combined.

And people there are losing their homes at an astonishing rate.

County defaults up 180% in Q2
Homes lost to foreclosure rocket 987% in same period

VICTORVILLE — Mortgage default notices in San Bernardino County surged 180 percent in the second quarter compared to the same time last year, while the number of homes lost to foreclosure rocketed 987 percent over the same period, a real estate information service reported.

From April to June, lenders sent homeowners statewide the highest number of notices of default in over a decade, according to DataQuick Information Services in La Jolla.

San Bernardino County registered 5,141 notices of mortgage default in the second quarter, up from 1,839 a year earlier. Homes lost to foreclosure in the county totaled 1,489 in the second quarter, compared to 137 over the same period last year.

The trend toward rising foreclosures will continue to accelerate in the Victor Valley, said Carolyn McNamara, a broker with the McNamara Group in Phelan specializing in foreclosures and repossessions.

“We have not seen the peak of foreclosure activity in the Victor Valley,” McNamara said.

“My office alone has received 18 foreclosures in the last two weeks, and I am just one of many agents that specializes in repossessions and foreclosures in the High Desert,” she said.

Analysts attributed the rise in foreclosures to stagnating home prices and sales resulting from a readjustment in the residential market following the home-buying frenzy of 2004 and 2005.

I’m no economist, but I know how to read writing when it’s on a wall.

–WKW

Shorter Peggy Noonan:

“All these rude people are spoiling our Gilded Age.”

–WKW

I checked Sadly, No! after I posted this by the way. And my shorter is shorter. HTML Mencken is just being opulent. So there.