Economics Update

In January, employers cut 17,000 jobs, the first cut in about 4 years.

Truth be told, the private sector has not been responsible for significant employment growth in this "tide that leaves ordinary people drowning" recovery anyway. It's pretty much all been public sector jobs.

Additionally, you have 2007 having the worst performance since 2002, with factory orders for the year being only 1.4% above 2006, though the month to month numbers for November and December were relatively healthy.


In the increasingly inevitable meltdown of the monoliner bond insurance companies, private equity firms want no part of a bailout of the insurers, so banks are trying to go it alone (here and here).

Banks trying to bail out insurers, so that the banks won't show huge losses or insolvency as a result of losses in the market.

So, you have broke insurers being bailed out by banks that are broke too?

This will all unwind, just like the 1929 crash, only the availability of computers, and computer models, means that the level of exposure of these institutions has multiplied many times.

In any case, it appears that the credit crunch is in the process of making large private equity deals more risky for investment banks, in this case, a take over of Harrah's Entertainment by Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group.

The banks are, "Having trouble selling on the leveraged buy-out debt to third parties. With the bulk of the debt remaining on their books, the banks are sitting on a sizeable loss." No one wants to buy the funny paper no more.

For the UK, there is some good news, asthere are now competing bids for the Northern Rock bank, with Richard Branson and the board of Northern Rock competing, which implies that the UK taxpayers won't take too bad a hit.

In a sign of the new world order, CitiGroup is no longer number one in the world in market capitalization, that honor now goes to the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp. and Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC).

In fact, it's number 7 on the list, after ICBC, Bank of America, HSBC Holdings, China Construction, Bank of China, and JPMorgan Chase.

And we now have indications that perhaps that trader was not so "rogue", with Societe Generale in court defending itself against money laundering. It appears that they were laundering stolen checks through Israeli banks.