So this headline crossed the Tape a few minutes ago:
Sara Lee Likely To Break Up Co Into 2 Businesses – Sources
So, what’re they going to call them? Sara and Lee?
That’d be better than the names Motorola gave to the two businesses created from its split: Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions. Sure, they both get a share of the Motorola name, which is iconic. But Mobility and Solutions? Awful.
Can you imagine Sara Lee Solutions?
This ought to get your attention:
The new US congressional session is barely a day old and already House Republicans are moving to repeal the landmark Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation passed last summer. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) said in a release Thursday said she had introduced a bill that will “offer a full repeal of the job-killing Dodd-Frank” legislation. The legislation contains measures intended to bring some types of spot forex trading under regulation.
That’s a snippet Robert Flint wrote for the Newswires version of Market Talk. It certainly caught my eye. Now, you could raise about 2,000 objections to the Dodd-Frank bill. Its focus on counsels and oversight committees, rather than hard and fast rules, makes it ripe for lobbying and evasion, for one thing.
But Rep. Bachmann focuses in on the “job-killing” aspect. That’s corporate code for “squeezing profits.” Any time you hear any company argue that so-and-so is a “jobs killer,” what they’re really saying is, so-and-so will crimp our profits, thus meaning we won’t hire as many people as otherwise. Meaning you better get rid of it.
If she’d said, look, this bill stinks, it won’t solve the problems for which it is intended, let’s scrap it, start over and get a better law in the books, because what happened in 2008 was a disaster we never want to relive, I’d applaud her. But she doesn’t, at least as far as I see.
The legal construct known as the national debt ceiling is one of the biggest fictions in Washington, a place that surrounds itself in more stories than City Lights. The debt ceiling is a set limit to the national debt, beyond which Congress cannot borrow.
Sounds pretty scary, right?
It’s not. Every time the national debt starts creeping up toward the “limit,” Congress passes some resolution that increases the limit. That increased limit is inevitably and eventually reached, of course, forcing Congress to “act” again (if by the word “act,” you actually mean taking no action, but instead giving yourself another free pass to profligate away.)
So once again, the national debt is approaching the debt ceiling, currently standing at $14.3 trillion, and the game is starting up again. What makes it different this time, though, is the new GOP-led House in Congress, which at least talks a big game on deficits. They will get a chance, very soon, to prove they’re more than talk. Will they just do like past Congresses, and raise the limit? Or will they use this as a “teaching moment,” an opportunity to put their rhetoric into practice?
The Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, wrote a letter to Congress, imploring it to raise the limit. The irony of the what is essentially the nation’s chief financial officer begging the board of directors to be less fiscally responsible, there’s a slightly more anxious tone to this year’s letter than there was to last August’s letter.
What’s got the Treasury Secretary so worried is that if the ceiling isn’t raised, Congress legally won’t be able to borrow any more money. That would raise the prospects that the U.S. government would default.
Given how the feds have been issuing a lot of short-term debt in the past few years to take advantage of the low interest rates, I wonder how real the prospect is this time around.
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