Merkel gives herself a pay raise, Hollande gives himself a pay cut

The pro-austerity Angela Merkel and her team are giving themselves a pay raise during an economic crisis while the pro-stimulus, anti-austerity government of François Hollande are forcing a pay cut. Huh. Read the rest of this post...

JPMorgan losses expand to $3 billion

Sometimes the market really does work. JPMorgan had been taking such large positions in the market that others had to know where they were. Once there's blood in the water, you can count on other sharks stepping in and joining the feeding frenzy.

How's that risk genius team doing at JPMorgan now and why is Dimon still CEO?

The trading losses suffered by JPMorgan Chase have surged in recent days, surpassing the bank’s initial $2 billion estimate by at least $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the losses.

When Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, announced the losses last Thursday, he indicated they could double within the next few quarters. But that process has been compressed into four trading days as hedge funds and other investors take advantage of JPMorgan’s distress, fueling faster deterioration in the underlying credit market positions held by the bank.

A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment, although Mr. Dimon has said the total paper trading losses will be volatile depending on day-to-day market fluctuations.

Meanwhile the Federal Reserve is investigating the JPMorgan trades to confirm that they were within the guidelines of a federally insured bank. Dimon currently sits on the board of the NY Federal Reserve, though Elizabeth Warren is calling for his resignation. Read the rest of this post...

Romney slams Obama for not fixing Bush/GOP financial problems

What part of the Great GOP Recession did Mitt Romney not see? Oh that's right, he didn't see it because nobody in his elite group has been touched by the Great Recession. Everyone would love to see the national debt reduced, including Obama. What is even more important now is improving the employment problem, which should dwarf all other discussions. Employment may not be an issue for the Romney class, but it certainly is for everyone else.

It's important to note that what Romney is suggesting when he talks about cutting the debt is strict austerity. As the world has noticed, austerity is having a disastrous impact on economies across the UK and Europe. Austerity works when there's an already growing economy but it deepens and extends a crisis when an economy is failing.

One can blame Obama for failing to appreciate how serious the banking crisis was in 2008 (thanks to his delusional economic team) but had he chopped deeper into the Republican-created debt problem, the US would be in much worse economic condition today.

To be clear, what Mitt Romney is promoting on the fund raising trail is the failed policy of austerity. Maybe someone in the Corporate Media world wants to call him out for this and ask him where such policies have ever worked in a weak economy? While they're at it, they can also ask him how removed from the real world he must be if he's managed to miss the Great Recession.

Bloomberg:

“I find it incomprehensible that a president could come to office and call his predecessor’s record irresponsible and unpatriotic, and then do almost nothing to fix it,” he said.

Bush began his first term in 2001 with a budget surplus that was wiped out by the cost of two wars and tax cuts initiated in his presidency, and the yearly government deficit reached $454.8 billion shortly before he left office in January 2009. Under Obama, the deficit rose to $1.42 trillion at the end of his first year, and is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to be $977 billion in fiscal 2013.

At a fundraiser later in the day -- the first of a four- stop, almost $10 million money tour Romney is making at lavish hotels, country clubs and private homes around Florida -- the former Massachusetts governor kept up his criticism of the president and promised his donors he’d run a more business- friendly government if elected.

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More climate change proof emerges from Australasia study

If only the climate change deniers could read and comprehend. Or care.

The last 60 years have been the hottest in Australasia for a millennium and cannot be explained by natural causes, according to a new report by scientists that supports the case for a reduction in manmade carbon emissions.

In the first major study of its kind in the region, scientists at the University of Melbourne used natural data from 27 climate indicators, including tree rings, corals and ice cores to map temperature trends over the past 1,000 years.

"Our study revealed that recent warming in a 1,000-year context is highly unusual and cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the Australasian region," said the study's lead researcher, Dr Joelle Gergis.

(Follow me on Twitter @ChrisInParis) Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: I misjudged Romney; not "smart and amoral" but "ignorant as well as uncaring"

The Professor has been pondering The Mitt, and in the past has marveled at the mendaciousness — bald-face lying — that seems to mark the man. But he's always considered Romney smart. Amoral, but still smart.

No longer:

Is it possible that I have misjudged Mitt Romney? My take has always been that he’s a smart guy who also happens to be both ambitious and completely amoral; ... [m]ore and more, however, he has been coming out with statements suggesting that he is, in fact, a dangerous fool.

At issue is Romney's recent thoughts about the $2 billion loss at Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan. Here's what Romney said:

This was a loss to shareholders and owners of JPMorgan and that’s the way America works Some people experienced a loss in this case because of a bad decision. By the way, there was someone who made a gain. The $2 billion JPMorgan lost someone else gained.

There's a kind of predator-sense to that — one man's thigh can feed a lion for a week.

But before you read on, ask yourself: What is Romney missing? What does he not get about JPMorgan?

Answer — all of the money-center banks are being run like public utilities, where the profits are skimmed into Big Boy pockets, and the losses come from straight from You. Krugman:

Can Romney really not understand that key financial institutions are different from any old business — that ... taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for [their] large losses[.]

That's correct. Romney really is that blind. Entitled, completely amoral ... and blind.

GP

To follow or to send links: @Gaius_Publius
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Video: Bachelor party bungee jump joke

Looking at the platform, this had to be done by a bunch of engineers. It's a pretty funny joke on the groom who thinks he's jumping from a high platform rather than a few feet above a small pond. Read the rest of this post...

Justice Dept. supports right to film police

It's one of the few good moves to come out of this Justice Department. Police forces across the US have increasingly been abusing their power during legitimate protests, including taking away video recordings that show abusive police behavior. While such tactics may be normal in some countries, we should never accept that behavior in the US.

More via Wired:

In a surprising letter (.pdf) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The letter was sent to the police department as it prepares for meetings to discuss a settlement over a civil lawsuit brought by a citizen who sued the department after his camera was seized by police.

In the lawsuit, Christopher Sharp alleged that in May 2010, Baltimore City police officers seized, searched and deleted the contents of his mobile phone after he used it to record them as they were arresting a friend of his.

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Elizabeth Warren comes out swinging on financial accountability

Last year liberals found a small handful of state Attorneys General to elevate as heroes for their efforts to investigate robosigning and hold banks accountable for committing foreclosure fraud. That cohort, which eventually acquiesced to the Obama administration and got on board a very weak settlement deal with the nation's five largest banks, included New York AG Eric Schneiderman, NV AG Catherine Cortez Masto, and DE AG Beau Biden, among others. Schneiderman's status as a liberal hero is now seriously being called to question by people who had previously put a lot of faith in him, myself included. Part of my takeaway from the last year is that while elected officials and candidates should be leading on these issues, words aren't enough. Actions are what will determine whether or not these people are worthy of inspiring hope.

With that as a preface, Elizabeth Warren is on something of a tear going after the failures of recent regulatory reform and ostensible accountability efforts to adequately rein in Wall Street recklessness and criminality. She told Politico that Jamie Dimon should be removed from the New York Federal Reserve's Board and sees the JP Morgan Fail Whale trade as a complete failure of regulatory reform:

“The argument for Glass-Steagall is that banking should be boring. Risk-taking should be separated from ordinary consumer banking. Banks are different from every other kind of company. They hold our money in trust and they get government guarantees. That fundamentally changes the game. The trade-off is they agree to engage in only low-risk activities. JPMorgan just showed that is not what they are doing.” ...

“I find it very interesting that at first the defenders [of JPM] said ‘Well, even if the Volcker Rule were in place this would not have violated it.’ First of all, I think people would be surprised [Volcker is] not in place. And it’s not in place because of this guerilla war banks have fought against it. ... But the correct response is not that [the JPM trader is] OK because it wouldn’t violate the Volcker rule. The correct response is that the Volcker Rule isn’t strong enough and we need Glass-Steagall.”

While these are good sentiments and in line with what Warren has been saying for a while, they're not that far outside what has become standard discourse by liberal Democrats since the announcement of JP Morgan's $3 billion and growing trading loss.

However in an interview with David Dayen of FDL News Warren makes incredibly strong statements on the failure of the Obama administration and the mortgage fraud task force to hold Wall Street bankers accountable for the financial crisis.

FDL News: Can all of these issues with regulation and oversight of Wall Street ever be successful without them involving handcuffs in some manner? The efforts to hold the banks and their executives accountable have all resulted in slap-on-the-wrist fines and settlements. We’re four years on from a financial crisis that wrecked the US economy, one rooted in multiple levels of fraud, and no top executive has gone to jail for it.

Warren: And that is disgraceful. No one has been held accountable. Americans know that all the way down to their gut. The financial crisis has been treated as if it were a tsunami or a snowstorm, or a natural act for which no human being had any direct participation. The people who broke the economy should be held accountable. It’s as simple as that. And that means criminal investigations, civil investigations. Without that, it’s not possible to clean the system and rebuild it.

FDL News: Are you confident that the current set of investigations, including this task force co-chaired by Eric Schneiderman looking into mortgage abuses – there’s been a lot of controversy about it, about staffing and resources – are you confident that the investigations in place today will actually lead to the necessary accountability for Wall Street for their role in the crisis?

Warren: I am not confident. No. And that’s the answer to your question. The American people are pushing for more accountability. They need to keep on pushing until it happens.

It is significant for a top targeted Democratic Senate candidate to be saying she has no confidence in what was hyped as a major investigation by the President in the State of the Union and by AG Schneiderman when he assumed a role within it. Dayen notes that it "is extremely damaging to the attempt to pass off the RMBS working group as something legitimate" for Warren to say this.

As I wrote yesterday, President Obama is unlikely to convince independent swing voters in key swing states who think he hasn't done enough to hold Wall Street accountable unless and until the handcuffs come out. Warren is saying that this is unlikely as things currently stand.

Hopefully the pressure from the polls and key Democratic candidates like Warren serves to light a fire under the administration and the mortgage task force. There is clearly no ingrained desire within the Obama administration to uphold the rule of law when it comes to bank criminality; one can only hope public political embarrassment will be a motivating factor. Handcuffs for banksters as part of a cynical election year ploy is far preferable to continued inaction. Read the rest of this post...

How did James Hansen's 1981 global warming predictions work out?

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
________

One of the chief climate scientists from the early days of this science is James Hanson (though the history of climate study goes back farther than that).

Hansen is the NASA Goddard Institute chief who penned the recent New York Times piece "Game Over for the Climate" — a reference to what happens if we succeed at throwing all the tar sands sludge into the air.

Our report on that piece is here.

A final note about Hansen. In 1981 he did some preliminary work, part of which produced this graph:

Click to big. 1950 is the zero mark. The vertical axis shows change in temperature and the horizontal shows time. Not pretty.

Some scientists over at RealClimate.org (where Michael Mann publishes) recently marked up that graph with observed change, bringing it current to 2012. Here's the markup:

In every case, the observed change meets or exceeds the worst-case prediction. (The larger red line is the smoothed average of all the small observed changes.) Both charts are discussed at RealClimate here.

On the other hand, Charles and David Koch are sitting very pretty, so there's that.

Posted for your consideration. (I discussed this chart and the charts posted here on last night's Virtually Speaking; click and listen if you're so inclined.)

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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Merkel now open to stimulus to save Greek economy

At this point it's probably too late for any option other than default. Angela Merkel has repeatedly missed critical timing moments for little more than political posturing at home, so her latest compromise position is frustrating to say the least. During the previous rescue attempts she forced Greece to accept lousy terms and harsh austerity, policies which most knew would destroy the Greek economy.

Merkel got what she wanted and Greece went the way that most economists predicted. Once again, it's too little, too late and mismanagement of the eurozone by Angela Merkel. Heaven forbid this mindset is voted in this November during the US elections.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said Wednesday that she was ready to discuss stimulus programs to get the Greek economy growing again and that she was committed to keeping Greece in the eurozone, signaling a softer approach toward the struggling country.

The fierce rhetorical salvos out of Germany in the past week gave way to conciliatory gestures by Merkel, who throughout the crisis has shown a propensity for managing through brinkmanship. "I have the will, the determination to keep Greece in the eurozone," she said in an interview on CNBC on Wednesday, in what appeared to be an attempt to relax an increasingly tense situation.

If Greek officials are looking for "stimulus to be pursued for growth in the eurozone, which we could pursue in the interest of Greece, we're open for this," Merkel said. "Germany is open for this."

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US doctors "rewire" paralyzed hand

This is an exciting medical development:

In a pioneering operation, US doctors took healthy nerves from the man and used them to bridge the damaged wiring that stopped signals getting from the man's brain to his hands.

Surgeons at Washington University's school of medicine said the operation may prove to be a breakthrough for some patients paralysed by spinal cord injuries.

The 71-year-old broke his neck in a car crash in 2008 that left him unable to walk. Though he could still move his arms, he had lost the ability to grasp or hold things in either hand.

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