Market-Ticker – MarketTicker Forums.

Banks Find A New RipOff – “Professional” Cards – MarketTicker Forums.

U.S. Postal Service Starts Quoting SDR to Dollar Conversion Rates, and IMF Endorses Replacing Dollars with SDRs → Washington’s Blog.

The gov’t is going tos tart converting your 401k to bonds.  Guess what happens when the US debt load(currently at over 25 trillion or more) get too big?  The gov’t defaults on the bonds and your retirement is worth bupkis.  Karl Denninger over at the market ticker called this last year that this nonsense would be starting.  I’ve been advising my wife based on Karl’s impressive record for accuracy to put as little to nothing into that 401k as possible.  It is now time to get out of 401k’s altogether.  I started a forum thread over on the ticker’s site…let’s see what goes on over there.

Axe falls on NHS services – Telegraph.

The Case For And Against College – The Market Ticker ®.

Listen to Paul opine:

What should it be doing? Conventional monetary policy, in which the Fed drives down short-term interest rates by buying short-term U.S. government debt, has reached its limit: those short-term rates are already near zero, and can’t go significantly lower. (Investors won’t buy bonds that yield negative interest, since they can always hoard cash instead.) But the message of Mr. Bernanke’s 2002 speech was that there are other things the Fed can do. It can buy longer-term government debt. It can buy private-sector debt. It can try to move expectations by announcing that it will keep short-term rates low for a long time. It can raise its long-run inflation target, to help convince the private sector that borrowing is a good idea and hoarding cash a mistake.

The Fed has done pretty much all but the last.  It bought government debt.  It bought private (Fannie and Freddie are not government “agencies” as the law defines them) debt.  It announced that it would leave short rates at 0-0.25% for “an extended period.”

But now Krugman crosses a particular line in asking that The Fed explicitly raise an inflation target – that is, intentionally seek to destroy the savings and investments of all Americans.

What Krugman refuses to understand (because he is a hard-core lefty collectivist) is that capital formation comes from savings.  That is, new businesses form from surplus capital excess of requirements.

via Krugman Tells Seniors (and Businesses) To Die – The Market Ticker ®.

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

A bit late, no?  Graduate eh?  Don’t you usually look for a job before you graduate?  Well, yes.  You’d think that someone with a degree would, after a large number of trials, change his strategy somewhat.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Oh.

Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

Waste, eh?  Waste?

How is earning a living – you know, something you’re supposed to do somewhere around your 18th birthday, “waste”?

Is it nice that one’s parents will fund your mealy-mouthed existence into what appears to be perpetuity?  Well, yes.  But do you have a right to expect such a thing?  Well, no.

And while $40,000 might seem “beneath” a college grad, it is nearly double what my first “real” (that is, W-2) job earned – as a programmer.  That offer was $18,000, and I took it.

via Bulls Get Fat, Bears Get Fat, PIGS GET SLAUGHTERED – The Market Ticker ®.

….

There’s a flip side, however. It only takes simple math to know that when interest rates are kept low, so are returns on savings and investment.

via No, Really? (Hard Knocks From Easy Money) – The Market Ticker ®.