Thanks to Wikicommons.

Two chalk boards and a microphone? Glenn Beck to leave Fox News at the end of this year.

Money please. Portugal requests a financial bailout from the European Union.

A heart to heart? Gaddafi asks President Obama if he could kindly end the air strikes.

Thanks to Wikicommons

Some of our readers may recall we recently suffered from a minor inconvenience called “the World Financial Meltdown”.

If you are still asking yourself, How the @#$%&!! did that disaster happen?…we have good news!

The US Government has the answers in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Final Report.

It is a beast of a report so rather than have you wade through hundreds of pages of financial analysis, we’ll let the Internet do the mining for you.

The wonderful financial blog Calculated Risk highlights the reports BIG conclusion that the

financial crisis was avoidable. …

Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. … Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner.

Expanding on the points produced in the report Calculated Risk describes

the keys to the crisis are 1) the willful lack of regulators to do their jobs, combined with 2) the rapid “innovation” in the mortgage market

For a deeper look at who’s to blame check out Frum Forum’s collection of posts on the report.

The system may have failed in the past but this new information should let us prevent future meltdowns right?

Don’t count on it.  As Sewell Chan, of Economix, notes:

The Wall Street overhaul enacted last year hopes to blunt the impact of such boom-and-bust cycles — by reining in the use of exotic financial instruments, better supervising big banks and limiting the damage if one of them fails.

But the first two efforts are under attack by the new Republican majority in the House, and the new process for containing the fallout from a giant bank’s collapse is untested. Meanwhile, the financial sector’s outsize role in the economy hasn’t changed; the giant banks that were considered “too big to fail” have only gotten bigger.

Not very comforting is it?

Thanks to Wikicommons.

You may not know this… but we at US Democrazy are doing pretty well for ourselves.

In a couple years we’ll have finished paying off the loan on our office/van. PLUS we have all of the potatoes we could ever want for dinner (as long as that number is one).

Apparently though there are some in America who are doing even better.  In fact, the wealthy are doing so well that Paul Krugman, after watching James Bond, remarked

(incomes) that were once viewed as impressive numbers, the kind of thing only arch-villains might demand, now look trivial. Or maybe the other way to look at it is that we have a lot more arch-villains around than we used to.

Is it true are the wealthy doing so well that they’ve become arch-villains in their own right?  Analyzing modern American income distributions in a NY Times Op-Ed Nicholas Kristof notes

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.

and angrily states that

we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant.

Some though are questioning whether inequality is actually an economic problem.  Over at Economix, Edward Glaeser comments that he doesn’t

like inequality any more than the next person, but that doesn’t mean that inequality is responsible for every bad thing that has happened to America.

Whether good or bad, income inequality is probably here to stay.  Tyler Cohen analyzing inequality and its causes notes that many “cultural critics” think Americans

should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life.

…those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality. Not only is high inequality an inevitable concomitant of human diversity, but growing income inequality may be, too, if lots of us take the kind of advice that will make us happier.

Which got us wondering, do we really want more than our blog, our van, and our potatoes?  What are your thoughts on happiness, money, and the ultra rich?  Would this blog be any better if read on a solid gold computer?

Thanks to Wikicommons.

Question: Do you remember that recent financial crisis that was going to (play scary music) DESTROY THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!?! (in case you don’t… crawl out from under your rock and check out US Democrazy’s past coverage).

Fortunately for us, politicians everywhere agreed to do everything possible to ensure that such a crisis did not happen again.

Unfortunately, these politicians cannot seem to agree on… what exactly “everything possible” means…

Like everything in Washington these days, reform of the financial and banking industry (which helped create the almighty mess we are stuck in) is in a partisan deadlock.

There was some progress made in 2009 when the House of Representatives passed a financial reform bill last December.

Since then, that bill has languished in the clutches of the US Senate (an organization about as fast as molasses up hill in January).

But HARK! (play triumphant music) all that is about to change!  A Senate version of the bill may be emerging!

The Wall Street Journal reports that a potential Senate bill, among other things, would place the Federal Reserve in charge of consumer protection in the financial markets.

(You can view the consumer protection part of the plan, spearheaded by Senator Chris Dodd, here…brought to you by Mother Jones).

Reform should be bringing out cheers, right? Well, some don’t seem to think this bill contains much reform at all.

The blog Calculated Risk snidely remarks on the proposal that

wasn’t the Fed already responsible for consumer financial protection?

Don’t think Calculated Risk are the only one who picked up on this.

Heather Booth, Executive Director of the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), an alliance of organizations promoting changes in the way Wall Street us regulated, issued this statement on the Senate proposal:

The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect American families or the financial system as a whole: a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency

Yesterday, Paul Krugman, Noble winning economist, wrote in a similar vein that this bill

eliminates a key plank of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent agency protecting consumers.

Not only that but Mr. Krugman goes so far as to say that

it’s time to draw a line in the sand

and that no reform bill is better than

such a watered-down reform.

Now the question may be forming in your head (at least it did in ours), how could a reform bill, such as that passed by the House of Representatives, with support from the White House and many Americans become watered down?

Arianna Huffington, namesake of the Huffington Post, conjectures that the weakening of the bill was due to the banking lobby .

A couple of hundred million dollars later, and we’re left with this punch-to-the-gut of reform, from the top-line summary of Dodd’s plan: “the independent agency proposal would be dropped.”

Representative Barney Frank, a key player in the House of Representative’s reform, states the weak Senate bill is because

Procedurally, the Senate Republicans are killing this or watering it down,

We’ve taken a look at what the experts have said on this issue… perhaps it’s best we hear from those who will be most affected by this so-called reform. That would be YOU.

That’s right, we want you to go to the top right of this article, where it says “leave a comment”, click that spot and write your thoughts.  Otherwise we may just have to write them for you.

We at USDemocrazy do not have money problems. We have no money…no money, no problems.

Still, we have enormous respect for those who can manage huge sums of money on an awesome scale. So for this week’s Awesome Sites we are sharing links to World-wide wonders that manage mega-money.

The World Bank is an international organization based in the United States that grants loans to countries in order to reduce poverty. But these loans (often in the millions of dollars) come with strings attached.

The World Bank often requires these countries make to significant changes before they agree to lend them money. These requirements might include restructuring governments and changing economic policies.

Another important global financial institution is the International Monetary Fund.  The IMF is charged with overseeing exchange rates among countries as well as monitoring the debt of various countries. Like the World Bank, The IMF also offers conditional loans to poor countries.

These two organizations, though different, are related.

They both were created near the end of the Second World War to stabilize the war-torn global economy.

To help us keep up with today’s news on global finance, we turn to the web. Here are some of our favorite sites to keep us informed (a challenging task). Check them out:

Bloomberg News is a US-based news group founded by the current mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.

The Financial Times is a British-based publication dealing with monetary matters.

CNN Money is the financial news arm of the famous Atlanta-based Cable News Network.

The Economist is a global magazine dedicated to news, politics, finance and culture.

Okay folks… it’s QUIZ TIME!

Which American state has:

The eigth largest economy in the Universe…

Has a former Mr. Universe as its Governor…

and is Universally regarded as a financial basket-case?

If you guessed California, YOU ARE A WINNER*!  (Except, of course, if you happen to live in California.) The West coast bureau of USDemocrazy is sending news to our HQ in Baltimore of gargantuan debt and political gridlock on a scale that would make Hollywood blush.

California politicians led by Governor Arnold “the Terminator” Schwarzenegger have been trying to pass a blockbuster budget to stave off economic collapse. Without this combination of spending cuts, tax hikes and additional borrowing … the state will go belly up (and this is one heckuva belly!). But nothing is going according to script and everyone fears a disaster movie is in the making! 

California is a huge and diverse state that is inflicted with political divides worthy of the Grand Canyon. For the past five years our favorite action hero,  The Governator, has presided from his throne as a moderate stuck between two warring political factions (you’ve seen this movie before…). He seems to be stuck again.

Our hero may not win this battle… and all Californians may be the losers. Time is running out and there are no calvalry on the horizon. There is only one thing in this mess that is certain… when the film version is made we all know who will play Arnold (very badly) in the movie.

*Quiz winners get 2 weeks free access to www.USDemocrazy.net

photo: courtesy of Girondatalks.com