Tony Wikrent's blog

Cross-posted from Real Economics.

WalMart executives are freaking out over lousy sales, according to this article in Business Insider. After a disastrous January, one WalMart exec wrote in an email that February sales so far are a "total disaster," according to a Bloomberg news story.

“In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February MTD sales are a total disaster,” Jerry Murray, WalMart’s vice president of finance and logistics, said in a Feb. 12 e-mail to other executives, referring to month-to-date sales. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company.”

Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics. Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics.

A week ago, Matt Stoller provoked a lot of discussion with his The Progressive Case Against Obama, a masterful accounting of this administration’s dismal policy record “on the grounds of economic and social equity.” Income and wealth inequalities, Stoller points out, have not just continued under Obama, but have actually become some fifty percent worse than during the Bush regime. Read below the fold...

Every week there are a number of articles and blogs I would like to comment on, but never do. Here are a few of the most noteworthy from the past two or three weeks.



A tip-o-the-hat to Jesse's Café Américain for posting Financial Fukushima: US Big Bank Derivative Bets Double in Six Years To $236 Trillion, based on a summary of the Sept 2012 report from the Bank for International Settlements, As Stirling Newberry commened about two years ago, all that the Obama administration has really accomplished is to get Wall Street willing to play with itself again.
Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics. Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics.

The Mars rover Curiosity landed safely on Mars early this morning. The rover weighs over one ton and is larger than a full-size American automobile (notice the two people standing at the left side of the photo, below). Congratulations are due to the people at NASA, JPL, and elsewhere who conceived, designed and executed this impressive mission. Read below the fold...

Cross posted from Real Economics.

In response to President Obama’s rather inept explanation that nobody can build a successful business outside the supportive legal and physical environment created and funded by all the rest of us citizens of the republic, Mitt Romney declared that, “I’m convinced [the President] wants Americans to be ashamed of success.” Read below the fold...

Cross posted from Real Economics. Read below the fold...

[Was US Manufacturing: "Worse Than the Great Depression" --lambert] Read below the fold...

Kinda surprised Lambert's not the first here with the story. JP Morgan Chase called a special after-hours press conference to reveal a few billion bucks in losses on some derivatives trades going against them. The guys at Zero-Hedge seem intent on pushing into full panic mode, with their usual hyperbole, but - who knows? Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics

Lambert points to an important post at Naked Capitalism focusing on the disastrous results of two Congressional primaries in which progressive candidates were defeated by large margins, Why is the left slice of Democrats getting crushed? Reinforcing Jon Larson's link, that most Americans do not feel there is an economic recovery, the latest study by Emmanuel Saez shows that income inequality is now far worse than it was under George Bush. Read below the fold...

#OccupyWallStreet has issued an emergency appeal for support tonight, after New York City mayor (and billionaire) Michael Bloomberg directed NYPD to force the #OWS protesters out of the public space they have been camping in for over three weeks. Ostensibly, Mayor Billionberg wants the park area to be "cleaned," and so the protesters need to leave "temporarily."

The situation at the site of the #OWS camp is reportedly tense as police gather to begin their assault. Read below the fold...

Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry, by Michael Hudson: Obama is selling out his constituency to his campaign contributors: that's what politicians do. But even worse, the President is a fully committed acolyte of neo-liberal economics and "has bought into the idea that the only way to get recovery is to cut wages by about 30 percent." Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics. Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics.

At the beginning of the American experiment in self-government, concentrations of wealth and large inequalities in income and wealth were viewed suspiciously as dangerously subversive vestiges of the royalty and oligarchies of Europe. But today, conservatives would have us believe, concentrations of wealth and inequalities in income and wealth should be viewed as the natural result of a social Darwinian struggle between those who work hard, and those who do not. Thus are Americans slowly but steadily being led to acceptance of the rise of a new oligarchy, Read below the fold...