record numbers Archives - Where Is The Outrage?

Friday Morning News Roundup

The Carolina Panthers thought that they were ready to take the next step. Not!!! The New York Giants beat them early and often.

Tiger Woods is tied for the lead in the FedEx Championship at East Lake in Atlanta. It is only round one, but he and Rory have been playing some really great golf.

Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown debated last night. For reasons that are unclear to me, Scott Brown is still talking about her Indian heritage.

I’m not sure what is so confusing about the Voter ID laws. Conservatives have been telling us for years that the government has too much power and that the government is doing too much, but when comes to limiting your right to vote, they love the government to step in and make sure that you have to pay this poll tax.

From MaddowBlog:

* Libya: “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday she was forming a panel to investigate the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials.” (Ed note: I don’t think that we are close to figuring out what happened in Libya.) (more…)

Shhh, don’t tell the GOP

One of the great lines that the GOP has been feeding us over the last three years is that we have too much debt. According to the GOP, we need to do everything that we can, including killing Social Security and Medicare, to decrease our debt. If we, as the GOP claims, really had too much debt, then no one would want to buy our debt, right? Had we too much, investors would be increasing their risk if they were to buy our debt and should, therefore, want to stay away from US debt. Right? Then why are investors buying up US debt at record numbers? Maybe, just maybe, the GOP is 100% on this.

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. government received record demand for its bonds in 2011, pushing longer-maturity Treasuries to their best performance since 1995 in a sign that President Barack Obama may have little difficulty financing a fourth consecutive year of $1 trillion budget deficits.

The Treasury Department attracted $3.04 for each dollar of the $2.135 trillion in notes and bonds sold, the most since the government began releasing the data in 1992 during the George H. W. Bush administration. The U.S. drew an all-time high bid-to- cover ratio of 9.07 for $30 billion of four-week bills it auctioned on Dec. 20 even though they pay zero percent interest.

While Standard & Poor’s stripped the U.S. of its AAA credit rating on Aug. 5, Treasuries due in 10 years or more returned 25.6 percent this year. The spreading sovereign debt crisis in Europe and slower global growth are driving investors to the safety of U.S. assets, helping to contain borrowing costs and making it cheaper as a percentage of gross domestic product to finance deficits than when the nation last had budget surpluses.

“If the last two weeks are any indication of how next year will start, there’s near-insatiable demand,” Ira Jersey, an interest-rate strategist at Credit Suisse Group AG in New York, one of 21 primary dealers that are required to bid at the auctions, said in a Dec. 21 telephone interview. “We have a significantly shrinking supply of risk-free assets in the world and U.S. Treasuries are one of the few left.”