http://lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts265.html

This April 15 is the 94th year that Americans have had to file an income tax. For most Americans, the day is a non-event. The federal and state governments have already collected the taxes due by withholding from each paycheck over the course of the calendar year. Most Americans never saw the money and have no real idea that they earned it.

Some Americans have their incomes over-withheld as a form of forced savings. They look forward to tax time as it means they will receive a refund check from the government that they can use for a summer vacation, a big screen TV, a new appliance, or a down payment on a new car.

Few Americans realize that over the last 94 years they have been enserfed and have no more rights to their own labor than medieval serfs or 19th-century slaves.
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http://finance.yahoo.com/…

Citigroup’s chief economist is being tapped for a job at the short-staffed Treasury Department, which is at the center of the Obama administration’s efforts to battle the financial crisis.

Lewis Alexander will become a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, according to a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement has not been made. Alexander will work on domestic finance matters, the official said.

Alexander had worked at the Federal Reserve and also served as the Commerce Department’s chief economist in the 1990s.

Geithner so far has battled the crisis with no key deputies in place. That’s made for a rocky start for the man President Barack Obama put on the front lines of the financial crisis.

Treasury’s handling of a $700 billion financial bailout fund has drawn fierce criticism from Congress and the American public. The government has put up hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to rescue troubled financial companies, including American International Group, Bank of America and Lewis Alexander’s own Citigroup Inc.

In late February, the government said it will exchange up to $25 billion in emergency bailout money it provided Citigroup for as much as a 36 percent ownership stake in the struggling bank, a move that could put taxpayers at greater risk. The deal represented the third rescue attempt for Citigroup in the past five months. It’s contingent on private investors agreeing to a similar swap.

As a Wall Street insider from a bank that has been one of the largest recipients of government rescue funds, Alexander’s appointment could raise some eyebrows. In December 2007, he was quoted as saying that while he believed the housing market would remain weak well into 2008, it was more likely that the economy would keep growing than head into recession, adding that the housing bubble was “correcting on its own.”

The same Citigroup which is now partially nationalized? The one that made lots of bad business decisions on his watch? He’s now going to work for an institution with even more economic power?

And yet people are pissed over some AIG bonuses?

http://www.reuters.com/…

Under fire for regulatory missteps, top U.S. securities regulator Christopher Cox defended his agency’s record but acknowledged some regrets over how he handled the worst financial crisis in decades.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been lambasted by lawmakers and others for not doing enough to prevent the 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, interfering with markets and failing to detect the alleged $50 billion fraud at Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff’s firm.

Cox, a Republican and former California congressman, said the SEC’s focus has been customer protection and broker dealer regulation and that the agency “performed that traditional role superbly.”

However, Cox said he had some regrets over a drastic action the agency took as markets were hurtling downward in September. For a few weeks, the SEC stopped investors from making bearish bets on financial stocks like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

The SEC’s office of economic analysis is still evaluating data from the temporary ban on short-selling. Preliminary findings point to several unintended market consequences and side effects caused by the ban, he said.

“While the actual effects of this temporary action will not be fully understood for many more months, if not years, knowing what we know now, I believe on balance the commission would not do it again,” Cox told Reuters in a telephone interview from the SEC’s Los Angeles office late on Tuesday. “The costs appear to outweigh the benefits.”

The SEC imposed the temporary ban under intense pressure from the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department which insisted it was crucial to the short-term survival of these institutions, Cox said.

A few weeks after the temporary ban was lifted, global markets were again dropping precipitously, U.S. banks were begging the SEC to reinstate its short-sale ban and there was talk of shutting the markets down.

Cox said the chief executive of one major U.S. investment bank even urged suspension of normal trading rules across the entire U.S. market, likening the situation to how Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War Two.

The chief executive said, “that is how America made it through such crises, and we couldn’t be too focused on maintaining the rule of law,” Cox said. “That was advice we rejected.”

Wonderful. Comparing his their actions to that of outright tyrants. In one respect I agree. What was done was but a difference of degrees and not kind. But the level of degrees is so great it’s a bit of an insult to those who suffered as a result of Lincoln’s and FDR’s actions.

This was completely predicted by anyone with half an economic brain. The ban was obviously pushed for by John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs along with other major bank players. No net good can occur due to government interference. Only relative to the bad they caused prior.

http://www.reuters.com/…

The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report released on Thursday says.

As a result, governments are pumping masses of public money into the economy across the world because of the difficulties of a few big, vocal banks and industries such as car manufacturing, which would be in difficulty anyway, according to the report published by Celent, a financial services consultancy.

“It’s just stabbing in the dark with trillions of dollars,” Octavio Marenzi, report author and head of Celent, told Reuters in a telephone interview where he questioned the depth of the analysis that preceded numerous fiscal stimulus packages.

The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.

“It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson’s remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead,” said the report.

Perhaps the U.S. central bank and treasury department, and authorities in other countries by extension, know something they are not telling anyone and which is far more worrying than the public data shows, the report says.

Or, more plausibly, they were generalizing erroneously from the bad experience of a limited number of big banks and companies that are in any case in difficulty.

“I don’t think they’re fabricating stuff but what I think they are doing is taking the situation of a handful of institutions and generalizing that to the market as a whole, incorrectly,” said Marenzi.

The picture appeared to be broadly similar in much of Europe and Japan, said the report, based on publicly available data on trends in bank lending to industry, households and among banks themselves in the so-called interbank markets.

ALL A MYTH?

Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says:

*Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever and has grown during the current financial crisies.

*U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007.

*Corporate bond issuance has declined but increased commercial lending has compensated for this.
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Writes Bob Higgs:

My source is Bloomberg.Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC.

“If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.”

I believe he said “the banking system is bankrupt.” That seems like an honest statement. And then he said “you try to keep it going.” Pretty cool, eh. Zombie banking system. Keep it going.

Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.

Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said.

“The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said.

The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.

Note: the Treasury changed the law. The pretense that Congress makes the laws, with the president’s assent, has apparently been abandoned as unnecessary in a crisis. Besides, under the present emergency regime, the Treasury is the government, with assistance from the Fed and the FDIC. All the rest is mere window dressing.