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NEW YORK -- Investors clamored for Treasurys in 2011, giving the market its best return since 2008, even after the US government lost its sterling AAA credit rating. The turmoil in global markets only seemed to increase demand for Treasurys, which are still seen as the lowest-risk investments anywhere.
Compared to the U.S. stock market, which is ending the year flat, Treasurys soared 9.6 percent for the year, according to a broad market index from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. That's the best return since 2008.
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HONOLULU — President Barack Obama is delaying his request for another $1.2 trillion increase in the nation's debt limit at the request of congressional leaders.
It's basically because of a technicality.
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In previous posts, I've mentioned serious fiscal problems that need to be addressed at state and local levels. This varies by region and some issues are potentially solvable.
I live in lllinois ground zero for fraud, corruption, underfunded pension funds and general fiscal mismanagement. It's an example of one of the first fiscal messes in the United States. This year Illinois hiked personal income taxes from 3% to 5%, and increased corporate taxes. We'll be slammed with hidden tax increases in utilities, purchases, and more. When now Mayor Rahm Emanuel left his post as White House Chief of Staff to run his election, the Chicago mayoral race centered partly around steps, including budget cuts, needed to solve Chicago's serious fiscal issues: See "Third World America: Drowning in Debt and Chocking on Lies," Huffington Post, June 24, 2011, and 'Fast-Tracking to Anarchy;" August 25, 2010.
On December 19, 2010, I was (at first) happy to see 60 Minutes highlight fiscal problems of states and municipalities. It explained how Illinois was late on payments to service suppliers, and it's a huge problem for people doing business with the state. The state's pension fund is underfunded and although 60 Minutes didn't mention it, state pension funds are the prey of Wall Street cronies that stuff them with losses and then propose fee-loaded leveraged financial products that are bets to make up the shortfall. Then 60 Minutes went completely off the rails by suggesting that these problems would lead to widespread defaults on municipal bonds in 2012. You can still view the segment, "State Budgets: Day of Reckoning," on the CBS web site.
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It might not be the right method for everyone seeking a home loan -- it requires both a good credit score (798) and some singing and guitar-playing skills -- but it worked for one Georgia couple.
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Yesterday, the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery, as is her wont, summed up the past year with a lengthy lamentation about how Congress didn't do enough to tame Federal deficits, leaving her debt-obsessed editors sad and unfulfilled, I suspect. She tells the story through the eyes of Rep, Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), who we are told "helped change the way Washington talks about the national debt" but has "done much about the debt itself."
How Ribble "helped to change the way Washington talks" about this debt is never explained, but that's who Montgomery got "access to," and the rest of the piece follows from there into a thicket of fuzzy speculation over what went wrong, eventually settling on the lack of "leadership" and the bad messaging. Here's a reminder about how to decode political journalism, by the way: when a piece spends the bulk of its time talking about "messaging" and "language," go ahead and click to close the tab, because you're reading a report from a reporter who would rather take a short cut into Beltway ephemera rather than contend with the actual experiences of actual people.
For example, this doesn't sound like a real problem that real Americans are experiencing in America, to me:
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