Daily Financial News CAPSULE: Green Jobs Greatest Opportunity; Fraud Is Now Our Top Export; Tim Geithner Challenged

March 9th, 2010 - by: danny

Green Jobs Are ‘Greatest Market Opportunity Of Our Generation,’ Senator Says

Comparing the call to create “green jobs” to former President John F. Kennedy’s call for landing a man on the Moon, Gillibrand said at a forum that the nation needs to act in order to inspire the next generation of scientists.

It’s the “moral, political and economic challenge of our time,” said Van Jones, former special adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Jones said that creating new jobs in green industries would combat both global warming and the recession. While the U.S. dithers, other countries are aggressively moving ahead. Gillibrand noted that China invested $440 billion last year in green technology such as solar panels.

To get the country to fully embrace the green technology movement, Obama needs to give a “shoot-for-the-moon speech,” Gillibrand said. “And he has to do it now.”[More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

The White House Blog: Live from Stanford: Secretary Chu on the Global Clean Energy Challenge

JS Kim, Fraud: The Western Banking Industry’s Fastest Growing Export

“A couple of weeks ago, the UK Financial Times reported an article titled, “Our World Balances on a Sea of Debt“. The byline of this article reads, “The banks that control the world’s supply of money are no better than counterfeiters — and their system of juggling debt has left the global economy teetering on the brink of ruin. Convicted fraudster Darius Guppy offers a provocative personal view.” In this article, a must read in my opinion, Mr. Guppy argues:

“These ‘experts’ will tell you that the present difficulties are simply the result of abuses and excesses in a system that is basically sound. All that is required is for some faults to be corrected. Do not believe them. The reality is that the problem is systemic and a little tinkering here or there will achieve nothing in the long term. What is needed is a root-and-branch re—˜evaluation of that most curious of cultural inventions, money: how it is created, how it circulates, and how it can best be used to serve the interests of the community.” [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

Daily Beast/WSJ: STAYING PUT: Fed to Keep Big-Bank Oversight

After the Federal Reserve failed us last financial crisis, it looks like we will soon learn if it learned its lesson: Senator Chris Dodd will propose this week that the Federal Reserve retain regulatory control over the 23 banks with more than $100 billion in assets, says the Financial Times. Now, hundreds of state-chartered institutions are saying “me too!”: According to the Times, they also want to remain under the Fed’s eye. Importantly the Fed will have the power to wind down companies that pose systemic risks to the system; in a concession to Republicans, a bankruptcy judge will serve as a check and balance against the Fed’s new power.

Simon Johnson on Tim Geithner (Baseline Scenario.com): They Saved the Big Banks But Kind Of Lost The Economy Doing It

It would be easy to take relatively cheap shots at the portrayal of Tim Geithner – “we saved the economy but kind of lost the public doing it” – in the New Yorker, out today.

Mr. Geithner is quoted as saying, “Some on the left have fallen into a trap set by the Republicans, allowing voters to mistakenly think that the biggest part of the bank bailout had come under Obama rather Bush.” Mr. Geithner should know — as he spearheaded the saving of banks and other financial institutions under both Bush and Obama. In fact, it’s the continuation of George Bush’s policies by other means that really has erstwhile Obama supporters upset.

“I think there are some in the Democratic Party that think Tim and Larry are too conservative for them and that the President is too receptive to our advice.” Probably this is linked to the fact that Tim Geithner is not a Democrat.

Geithner also suggests that his critics compare government spending on different kinds of programs under President Obama: “By any measure, the Main Street stuff dwarfs the Wall Street stuff.” This insults our intelligence. Wall Street created a massive crisis and we consequently lost 8 million jobs; any responsible government would have tried hard to offset this level of damage with all available means. This includes fiscal measures that will end up increasing out privately held government debt, as a percent of GDP, by around 40 percentage points. It’s not the fiscal stimulus, broadly defined, that is Mr. Geithner’s problem — it’s the lack of accountability for the bankers and politicians who got us into this mess. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

But the Geithner issues reflected here run much deeper…

Nationwide Bank Failure Looming

ALL MONEY IN THE U.S. COMES INTO EXISTENCE AS DEBT SO WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW THAT BANK LENDING IN THE U.S. IS CONTRACTING AT THE FASTEST RATE IN HISTORY?

CREDIT UNION PAYS SAVERS TO CLOSE THEIR ACCOUNTS

NEWS DISSECTOR SCHOOL OF CRISIS ECONOMICS, DAY 2

• Introduction: Make Markets Be Markets

• Richard Carnell on Regulator’s Incentives

• Lawrence White on the Credit Rating Agencies

• Joshua Rosner on Securitization

• Frank Partnoy on Off-Balance Sheet Transactions

Dean Baker: WSJ Gets Carried Away With Optimism on Jobs

I was one of the economists who thought the February jobs report was relatively good given the weather. Still, that was only compared with an expectation of a very bad report. The WSJ went a bit overboard with a headline: “Outlook Brightens for Jobless.”

The report still showed a loss of 36,000 jobs. It is certainly possible that if we remove the effect of the weather, that the number would have been a small positive, but this is nothing to write home about. The economy has to generate about 125,000 jobs a month just to keep even with the growth of the labor force. No one thinks the economy would have created that many jobs in February even if the weather had been great.

Given the severity of the downturn, we should be seeing job growth in the neighborhood of 300,000 to 400,000 a month. There is no plausible story that gets us there any time soon. And, there are many downside risks with the withdrawal of supports for the housing market, state and local government cutbacks, and the possibility of a higher dollar worsening the trade balance. So, the WSJ may want to rework that headline.

Diana Johnstone:The Fall of Greece Yes, It Really is a Capitalist Plot

China on Google

BEIJING, March 7 (Reuters) – China has pledged to punish hackers who attacked Google (GOOG.O) if there is evidence to prove it, but said it has yet to receive any complaint from the world’s top search engine.

Google sent shockwaves across business and political circles in January when it declared it would stop censoring Chinese search results, and threatened to pull out of China — the world’s largest online community with 384 million users at the end of last year — over hacking and censorship concerns. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

The News Dissector