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This is an indepth article on Donald Trump's financial holdings, looking at the debt that Trump has built up in his real estate dealings, by Susanne Craig of the NYT. To get a detailed look of this the NYT inquiry into the holdings engaged RedVision Systems, a national property information firm to search publicly available data. Much of Trump's business is shrouded in mystery. But it is well known that Trump has used debt to build his business in a way that is not considered good practice in business, having led to three bankruptcies. Trump says he "is the king of debt." And "he loves debt." The recovery of real estate values during a rescue effort for the country's financial system also helped Trump tackle debt in a way that was not available to other entrepreneurs who suffered from the oil price collapse- one of them McClendon also used debt aggressively and his business collapsed leading to suicidal car crash. You can love excessive debt only if the government supports you with some sort of financial guarnatee misplaced, or you are lucky to get away with it- just ask McClendon. The irony is that the rescue of the financial system led to the low interest rates that hurt savings of the middle and working class, and the lack of help to Main Street in the home foreclosure crisis also hurt the same people disproportionately. The Obama administration policies in this regard rescued the very same business interests such as the New York real commercial estate symbolized by Trump, that are now appealing to those hurt as president Obama worked to let the financial system recover. The intention was never to support excessively overleveraged banks or overleveraged real estate built on debt, but in reality this is what happened. A nation cannot run its financial affairs in this manner of overleveraging to extract high profits that an investment bank such as Lehman or Goldman Sachs does, or a real estate company such as Trump's does- if regulators let them do this. Normally after the financial crisis of such dimensions that it shook the world economy in 2008-2009 leading to fears of a collapse as happened in the 1930's, the same faces would not still be there. But this is a strange period or a transition period where things are being sorted out, and the same faces Blankfein at Goldman Sachs and Trump in New York commercial real estate are with us.  And though the bashing of Goldman Sachs connection to Clinton is evident in the campaigns of Trump and Sanders, the bashing of Trump real estate and finance companies with its overleveraging and bankruptcies is evident in the campaign of Clinton against one posing as a representative of the working class. John Paulson who benefitted by shorting mortgage securities that caused the financial crisis of 2008 is on Trump's top economic advisory team, including the hedge funds and financial interests on Wall Street that Trump is saying support Clinton. No one, not the NYT or WSJ, can answer this, its just the paradox of today's situation. Hillary Clinton can say she has learned her lesson, with her Methodist upbringing and her own supporters such as Robert Reich and others, and break with the past especially as it in no way contributes to her success as president, not one bit. In fact rebuilding the middle class and infrastructure require entirely different connections and views on life, a different imagination.  Trump has billions of dollars and a real estate business that is so complex that even the NYT and property information firms can only say that in the end it is shrouded in mystery. Companies owned by Trump says the NYT from this inquiry have debt of $650 million. Other Trump business activities through 3 passive partnerships owe an additional $2 billion. It is a lot easier for Hillary Clinton to put the speech fees behind her as they have little to do with what she is as a Methodist and a proponent of improving women's lives, than it is for Donald Trump- for whom his business is everything that he is including his art of the deal- to reject who he is. ...

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President Obama attends a filming of a show for "The View" hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and co-host Barbara Walters at ABC studios on Sept 24, 2012. This happens just as world leaders are greeted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as they arrive for a meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. And just as Tim Arango reports in the NYT that the situation in the Middle East is seeing spillover affects from Syria that affect the entire region, and Middle East tensions are rising.

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Entergy is one of the largest energy companies. Its CEO for nine years, Wayne Leonard, talks to Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal. Its the No.2 generator of nuclear power in the USA, and uses coal for only 7% of its energy. He has made his name in nuclear energy, and here he talks about the government's cap and trade program and nuclear energy. He points to today's technology as far superior to the technology that was used in the Failed Three Mile plant, that put back nuclear energy plants in the USA for decades. He believes that price signals are needed for CO2, and the cap and trade program helps to do this, so he supports the cap and trade program. He admits that self interest colors perception of Entergy, compared to coal using utility producers like Duke Energy and American Electric Power. With coal only 7% in its portfolio of plants, and big in nuclear energy, it stands to gains from a cap and trade program, whereby Congress will set a ceiling on emissions, then allows businesses to sell any of its extra allowances that stand for the right to make emissions. And in doing so creating the largest commodity market, in carbon backed securiites. He and the government agree on the point that the allowances should be auctioned off, rather than given away as the companies with many coal plants believe. And the billions in new revenue from these allowances would be returned to the public. He understands that the view of companies like Duke and AEP, that use coal and would have to increase rates, and face the anger of ratepayers as they pay more for the allowances. He also thinks the bill should be written with a fine pen, so that if Congress mandates 20% of energy come from renewables. That it should specify replacing coal not natural gas as what this replaces, to get rid of the most polluting sources. He points to the real need for looking at things globally, as doing things locally, even to show responsible leadership in the world community, can lead to no progress in the global picture. The reason is that China is going ahead with the rapid construction of conventional coal plants. It has surpassed USA coal capacity, and is on track to double it sometime in the next decade. If the USA closed down every single coal plant, and all the time new coal plants are going up in China and India, then we would have ruined our economy, and it was'nt making much difference globally. And he says, if we just say lets lead and people will follow us, "its silly", because China isn't going to follow us, especially when they have $2 trillion invested in their coal plants, and they still aren't feeding feeding all their people. So how to deal with this? Develop the new technology for carbon capture for existing conventional coal plants, and help the Chinese with retrofit technology to curb emissions in a realistic manner. At this time most current funding is devoted to technology for second generation systems, that are still 10-20 years away....

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Jeffrey Immelt of GE makes a critical point in this op-ed article- that the concept of the US transitioning from a technology-based, export-oriented economic powerhouse to a services-led, consumption based economy was a bad idea because it would lead to a loss of jobs, prosperity and prestige. Immelt calls it "fundamentally wrong." In this piece he makes the point repeatedly and takes his role as head of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness seriously, saying that there is nothing inevitable about the decline of manufacturing in America, that it can and must be reversed. For over two decades business leaders have taken a complacent attitude about the effects of a continued decline of manufacturing in America and the loss of jobs in the US, even as they built plants and expanded overseas. Now for the first time Immelt articulates a new policy for government and business leaders. He says businesses should invest more in advanced products and technologies that create jobs in the US. In doing this he joins Intel's Andy Grove and other business leaders who expressed a growing frustration with the pessimism that this loss of jobs and competitiveness is creating among young people in the US, and the cloud it is creating about America's future. Immelt adds that it is imperative to care about what happens at home in the US, and the growing pessimism that lack of jobs growth in the US creates should not be accepted....

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WIth extensive experience as Chief Investment Officer from 2003 to 2012, Sauter has seen market swings and extreme volatility over a long period of a decade. For the current investment cycle and the pullback in Oct. 2014, he points to the pullback of -16% in spring 2010, and pullback of -18% in summer 2011. In the bigger picture of the chart for this period since 2010 these pullbacks look less significant. There are reasons for a pullback. The conflicts around the world bring more uncertainty for business investment, though Sauter's point about the conflict being more than any period since 1946 may be an overstatement because this includes the period of the Berlin Airlift, Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, Korean War, Vietnam War, and the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.There are problems in the eurozone economies with near contraction in Germany in the 3rd and 4th quarter. China is slowing down at the same time. The U.S. economy and lower oil prices are the bright side of the picture. Overall the comment by Christine Lagarde during the eurozone crisis in 2012 is still relevant. When asked about the situation then, she suggested adding perspective to what was happening by asking "compared to what?" referring to the situation in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Sauter says investors who remain steady are more likely to be happy some years from now that they remained that way....

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David Obey, head of the House Appropriations Committee who wants to see a war surtax so that the burden of the war does not just rest on military families. Says Obey, who came to the House in 1969, the first year Nixon engaged in the Vietnam war- "I am damn tired of a situation in which only military families are asked to pay any price whatsoever for this war." He asked Obama to listen to the archival audiotapes of President Johnson in Bill Moyers PBS documentary on the Vietnam War in which Johnson tells Dick Russell Senator from Goergia-" Well we know this is damn near a fool's errand but we don't have any choice." Obey has no faith in the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan so he does not see any chance for a strategy to succeed in Afghnistan and he says "I didn't come here to be Richard Nixon's congressman, Reagan's congressman, Obama's congressman, I'm here representing the Seventh District of Wisconsin." To know Obey is to know him through the decades standing in Congress, fighting for spending on health, education and social programs, part of the agenda rooted in his Catholic faith, which he says demands that he try "to make this an equal society for everybody." In his spare time Obey plays the harmonica, with his rendition of "Amazing Grace" at a friend's funeral putting "everybody in tears," according to Governor James Doyle of Wisconsin. ...

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Admiral Mullen chairma joint cheifs confirms most of what the British Ambassador in Afghanistan s saying about deteriorating prospects in the country. He understands the heroin growing issue brought up by US counter narcotics experts in the NYT recently, by saying "we've got to impact pretty significantly, pretty fast on the poppy issue". He is aware that poppy growing is abundant in the south and in Helmand province pours upwards of $100 million to finance the Taliban. General McKiernan who heads NATO forces there says that NATO forces would be authorized to attack narcotics bosses, their soldiers and infrastructure, if they are linked to movement of weapons, improvised explosives or foreign fighters in Afghanistan. Which is possibly a waiting mode till more troops are sent to Afghanistan as policing this rugged mountanous country with tribal regions and loyalties complicated by the narcotics layer and widespread corruption in the Karzai government and its loss of popular support requires many more troops than are now in the country and a sustained campaign. So far the US and European forces possibly outnumbered have resisted alienating the poppy farmers in the south through land based eradication. But with more troops Mullen's new approach and Petraeus's has to shift to something like that, at the same time as they follow Petraeus's new counterinsurgency doctrine in display in Iraq to draw down the Taliban strength to its core supporters by winning other tribal factions with no hardcore loyalties over to the American side....

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As OPEC members met again in June 2015 for the first time since the meeting in November 2014, there is a sense that OPEC no longer exerts the same influence on oil prices. There are 4000 oil companies in the U.S., says one U.S. State Department official, even if OPEC were to cut production the cuts could be matched by shale oil producers in the U.S. quickly increasing output. This is the new reality, say experts. OPEC expects to keep production at the same level of the current production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day in place for the 7th meeting in over 3 years. Algeria and Nigeria, both hurt badly by the drop in oil price, have called for cuts but failed to persuade the Saudis. With Russia unwilling to join a coordinated production cut, there is not much talk about doing this. The Saudis and Iraq have continued to pump more oil, with April 2015 production of 30.84 million barrels a day the highest monthly average since 2012. Other factors also remain in the minds of the Saudis and other producers such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar- policies on climate change, use of less energy and more from friendlier sources for the same amount of economic output demonstrated by countries such as Germany, advances in technology, energy saving transitions in emerging markets such as China and India....

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Huge losses sustained by sovereign wealth funds. Estimated $350 billion for Gulf foreign reserve funds and SWF's, according to RGE Monitor's Rachel Ziemba, or 27% of assets. Sovereign Wealth funds are either using their funds for supporting their local banks as in the Gulf areas, or buying back stakes of cash strapped western banks like RBS in the case of China. Russia, China and other countries are using their SWF's for stimulus spending. And Russia, Gulf economies that are dependent on oil prices, are looking at possible sale of foreign assets at oil prices between $50 and a deterioration to $25. Only China has a surplus that is sustained through the last quarter of 2008, but this is changing quickly as imports pick up after the stimulus kicks in, and exports drop precipitiously in 2010. South Korea and Russia have also learned of the need to have liquid safe investments preferably in dollars in the current crisis, as they have learned how large capital outflows can get in a short time. And the US is not looking at these large capital inflows from overseas as a benevolent thing, because it overvalues American assets, and leads to all sorts of distortions in liquidity and pricing of risk that contributed to the current crisis. In short the whole situation with SWF's has a suprising ending, as with everything in the current crisis, nothing worked out as expected or planned....

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One reason Republicans and Democrats are looking at taxes paid by business is that some corporations are paying very low taxes. This report in the WP cites GE's annual filing showing GE (General Electric) paid a low of 4.2% in taxes in 2013. By plugging tax loopholes U.S. president Obama's budget proposal for 2015 would raise $276 billion in higher taxes from these large corporations for overseas earnings over the next decade.

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On Thursday October 8, Morgan Stanley shares dropped by 26% to $12.45, the lowest price in a decade. And fears swirled around possible reconsideration by Mitsubishi UFJ of Japan of a $9 billon investment in Morgan Stanley. This put Morgan's head John Mack in a busy day dispelling rumors about Morgan.

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There does not appear to be a noticeable shift in gasoline consumption, its gone up by half to one percent compared to 2005, even when gasoline prices are over $3.00 per gallon. This survey and the Pew poll were done about the time of the closing of BP's pipelines from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

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This report in WSJ shows that remote work is a lasting trend because companies can now hire talented individuals from anywhere in the country or the world, and pay less for the same talent. In the past talented individuals were attracted with high pay packages to cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Companies can now choose to avoid paying these high pay packages and have a broader talent pool to choose from. This is because these cities became costlier and less attractive with cramped apartments relative to the choices for remote work. In the example cited here a machine learning expert shifted from a small cramped apartment in San Francisco to work for Twitter from a small town named Katy in Texas where she has a 5 bedroom large apartment and a nicer community of 20,000 people to live in west of Houston. One in 8 jobs posted on Linked In as of August 2021 are for remote work, many times the percentage of remote work job postings in 2020, showing this trend is here to stay. There is a large shift of millions of workers in tech related fields exiting the cities of San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Boston for smaller cities in other parts of the country such as Utah, Texas and other states in the US. A similar trend is observed in Europe. America's professional classes are moving to hybrid or remote work in large numbers says this report in WSJ. At one point in 2020 about 35% of workers in the US or 50 million workers were doing remote work during the lockdowns. In August 2021 this figure is closer to about half of these workers even as workers return to work offices. It is believed that the BLS statistics understate the number of remote workers at 20 million and 14% of workers in August 2021. Large crowded and hugely expensive cities are no longer attractive for employers or for tech employees or professional workers. ...

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This example of how Forest Laboratories hoped to market an antidepressant Lexapro to doctors through financial incentives to prescribe the drug is detailed in a document that was made public by the Senate's Special Committee on Aging. The document is the "Lexapro Fiscal 2004 Marketing Plan." Forest licensed Celexa from Lundeck of Denmark and brought it to the US market in 1998. Then as the drug's patent life was short it tinkered with it and developed a new version calling it Lexapro and introduced it in the US market in 2002. Withits marketing effort Lexapro had $2.3 billion in sales in 2008, while all the time generic versions of Celexa and other durgs in its class sell for afraction of the Lexapro price. For instance amonth's supply of 5 millgram tablets of Lexapro costs $87.99 at drugstore.com, while a month's supply of generic version of Prozac is $14.99. Forest spends a lot compared to its larger rivals on sending money to doctor's. In the plan $34.7 million was to go to pay 2,000 psychiatrists and primary care doctors to deliver 15,000 marketing lectures to their peers that year. $36 million was to go to providing lunch to doctors in their offices. Asks Senator Herb Kohl, a Democrat from Wisconsin who is chairman of the Committee on Aging- "is the line between medical education and marketing blurred." For these companies there was no line. ...

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Karen Elliott House, who has reported extensively from Saudi Arabia for a long time, says the Saudi succession to a younger generation is established, yet the different strains on the fabric of Saudi society continue. The parts of the society that are Islamic fundamentalist see the monarchy as too worldly compared to a militant Islamic State, and the western educated class sees the monarchy and religious clerics as not making enough room for modern ideas, for women and a free press. Inside the kingdom the very dichotomy that allowed the Saudi state to flourish from its beginnings in the feudal period of the late eighteenth century with Wahhabbi given the role of religious authority in exchange for guaranteeing political legitimacy of the monarchy now creates tensions in a modern state. Outside the kingdom Iran is seen as a rival state in the region, and the Saudi monarchy is seeking the support of the U.S. to fight Islamic State. Ibn Saud, described as a skilled statesman by John Foster Dulles, carefully strengthened the monarchy's role in the region for the first half of the twentieth century in his dealings with Britain and the U.S., and successors including King Abdullah continued his policies. Saudi Arabia now is in a new period of radicalism, and conflicts in the region, with an aging leadership in transition, a house divided against itself, as Karen Elliott House who as observed the kingdom for so long points out....

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Kudos to Ellen Barry for hands on reporting right from Amethi, Uttar Pradesh state in India. For years UP (Uttar Pradesh) has been seen as one of India's most backward states, even though it is the largest state in India centering around the Ganges valley. Politicians were content to use backward parts of the state as mere vote banks at the time of elections. The elections in 2014 focussed on development are beginning to change this. The Gandhi family based in Allahbad, India, had Amethi in UP as the place where family members stood for parliamentary elections. In recent years as the Gandhi family's grip on UP loosened, the same vote bank policies were employed by caste group parties led first by Ms. Mayawati and then Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav. The elections of 2014 were about making the shift and sea change in Indian politics in the heart of the country- the north central Ganges valley region- away from vote bank politics and caste groups. The BJP under Gujarat's Modi focussed the election on development and delivery on infrastructure and jobs. For too long reporting on an important part of Asia has been laid back from metropolian centres without the hard work needed to grasp the situation in the countryside and on site. Kudos also to NYT's Bearak's report from Ladakh on the enormous logistics required for an election of this magnitude with about half a billion voters. ...

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Solyndra Inc. and what went wrong. Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in Sept. 2011, after investments of private and government capital of over a billion dollars. Of this $535 million was a loan backed by the U.S. Department of Energy, leaving taxpayers with large losses. When emails were being exchanged between Vice President Biden's advisor and OMB staffers on August 31, 2009, according to the Washington Post, Solyndra was already in trouble. OMB pleaded for more time to do due diligence and analysis of the company. A $535 million loan was approved just when the economics behind Solyndra's cylinder coated solar materials were being made obsolete by the existing technology of polysilicon cells laid out on a flat panel. At Solyndra's inception in 2005 the cylinder based technology held promise, as the polysilicon cells technology relied on polysilicon material which was costly to make. In 2009 China was investing heavily in the polysilicon technology and bringing prices down to where the material cost was coming down quickly-down as much as 80%. By the end of 2009, it cost $4.00 per watt to produce Solyndra's product, while the competing Chinese polysilicon product cost $1.00 per watt- today this is down to 75 cents for the polysilicon product. The Solyndra product was harder to manufacture and had more defective material that had to be discarded. It is in the midst of these sea changes in technology, costs, and the economics of the project, that the government pushed for and OMB approved the Solyndra loan of $535 million to build a new factory that could produce 500 megawatts. In 2010 the economics worked as it would be expected, leading to Solyndra sales of 65 megawatts. The original factory had a capacity with improvements of 100 megawatts. Solyndra lost $172 million in 2009 on revenue of $100 million. Private investors attitude to their investment changed in 2009. The Wall Street Journal quotes one investor who saw the government loan followed by an IPO as a way to exit and cash out. A press release by Solyndra in July 2009, stated the company had a contractual backlog of $2 billion, even as the economics of the Solyndra product were collapsing. Yet these orders were not firm orders but framework agreements. In Dec. 2009 the lead underwriters, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, made an initial filing for an IPO, which was cancelled by the board 6 months later when the new factory had to be closed. The private investors interests and the governments interests had already diverged by the time of the email pushing for the $535 U.S. government loan from McSweeney, Biden's domestic policy advisor, to the senior OMB staffer, cited in the Washington Post, Stephens and Leonnig, 9/14/2011. OMB and the White House staffers failed to see this and the bankruptcy outcome that seemed highly probable in August 2009, based on the economics and competitive technology and pricing. This does prove the often cited comment that the government is not good at choosing winners and losers when handing out money. It goes beond this to show the whole process of due diligence failing at agencies such as the Energy Department and the Office of Management and the Budget, where one would think technically qualified staffers could catch the problems and risks of a project that were so apparent. ...

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Xie Xurenreplaces Jin as Finance Minister. Jin was 2 years from retirement and had merely maintained the status quo. With the global financial crisis in 2007 the Chinese government brings in Xie who at one time headed the Agricultural Bank of China. More appointments are expected by the Party National Congress by Oct 15, 2007.

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The unemployment rate in the U.S. state of Ohio drops to 7.2% in June 2012 from 10.6% in the second half of 2009. But polls show two thirds of the respondents see the economy as being worse or the same as in 2011. Because of lower wages in some industries such as auto manufacturing which are reviving there appears to be a lowering of incomes and expectations.

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With yields on ten year Greek bonds reaching new highs, the Economist says it is time to go to Plan B. The German government wants to see something different from a continuation of the 2010 plan and merely loaning more funds to Greece. One option is for Greece to pledge privatization proceeds as collateral for new loans. Another option is the restructuring of Greece's debt, even though the German government is reluctant to impose losses on holders of Greek bonds. But Trichet and the ECB are opposed to any restructuring. ECB officials fear this could cause a crisis like that caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. And privately ECB officials say they could go so far as to refuse to accept Greek bonds as collateral for ECB loans if a restructuring goes through. The contagion from a Greece default could affect Ireland, Portugal, and impact the European banking system and the ECB's own balance sheet. Yet a sounder plan would be for European governments to come up with the funds to recapitalize hard hit banks, knowing that Greece will never be able to pay back its loans under the current plan. The IMF and the German government should push for an orderly restructuring of Greece's debt as the only workable solution, says the Economist....

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The Swiss National Bank gives up on its effort to maintain Swiss competitiveness by dropping the 2011 peg of 1.2 euros to the franc. That effort was becoming costlier as the central bank piled up hundreds of millions of euros on its balance sheet buying up euros to keep the value of the franc down. Investors have put money into francs as a safe haven since the 2008 financial crisis. By offering negative yields of 0.75% the central bank hoped to limit the damage with a surging franc. The franc went up by 15% on January 15, 2015, with the surprise announcement, and stocks of exporters declined sharply. The immediate decision was taken as the ECB planned to weaken the euro with a large quantitative easing program in its Dec. 22, 2015 meeting. The central bank said - "Recently the divergences between the monetary policies of the major currency areas have increased significantly- a trend that is likely to become even more pronounced." A December Swiss initiative was intended to force the Swiss National Bank to convert much of its foreign exchange holdings into gold, as public criticism of the large euro holdings increased with each currency market intervention. The SNB justified its peg to the euro and currency interventions saying that this gave the country's exporters time to make the transition to a stronger Swiss franc....