EconomicCrisis.US

Mounting losses from commercial real estate loans will continue to be a problem for the U.S. and especially smaller banks, but it can be managed, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Monday.

“Commercial real estate’s still going to be a problem for the country,” Geithner said in an interview with CNBC. “But we can manage through this process.”

Geithner also said the Treasury Department’s announcement that it will begin selling the stake it owns in Citigroup Inc., which could net about $7.5 billion to the government, shows “how far we’ve come” in exiting from the financial bailout program.
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More than two years after Wall Street’s closest brush with death since the Great Depression, taxpayers, investors and voters are still waiting for the kind of bare knuckles Congressional action like the Pecora Hearings in the 1930s that resulted in federal legislation creating basic firewalls within the banking industries.

For more on this, read Pam Martens’ terrific piece in CounterPunch, “The Most Vital Ingredient in Wall Street Reform Goes Missing”. This morning’s Miami Herald shows the cracks in the wall: on the one hand reporting the Rooms-To-Go economy as showing new signs of life, and on the other, Miami’s closest connection to the Wall Street crisis: LNR, managing nearly $22 billion in troubled commercial backed mortgages.
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Consumer spending in the U.S. rose in February for a fifth consecutive month, a rebound that will require gains in employment to be sustained.

Best Buy Co. and Nike Inc., which have reported higher- than-anticipated profits, are among companies that may keep benefitting as the emerging recovery gives Americans the confidence to buy. The pickup in purchases has caused the household savings rate to drop to the lowest level in more than a year, underscoring the need for more jobs to ensure the recovery is maintained.
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Leading up to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I was one of the more than 40 million uninsured Americans … and I didn’t mind it that way. Individuals have the right to pursue health care coverage should they desire. To legislatively mandate coverage, however, goes against the fundamental idea that Americans possess the right and responsibility to determine their own destinies. The arguments against the passage of the senate’s health care legislation have continued to reverberate throughout the media and the public. That is occurring despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that the bill would be, “making history, making progress, and restoring the American dream.” As many Americans realize, Pelosi’s words are deceiving. The passage of the bill creates a very real possibility that Congress’s dream of health care reform will serve as a transition to a socialist nightmare. Congress has just placed one-sixth of our national economy on life support. The only question is, When are they going to pull the plug?
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