On Tuesday, Indiana Republican voters turned away from a senator who had been in Congress for 36 years by voting out 80 year old Richard Lugar and voting in Tea Party backed Richard Murdock. This was not a close race and Murdock won with over 60% of the vote. Yet, Lugar didn’t acknowledge that the electorate had sent a clear message and instead lashed out at his opponent. “His (Murdock) embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has … ...READ MORE

Last night, former Bank of England governor Sir John Gieve said that the regulatory drive for banks to strengthen their safety buffers is dragging down lending and holding back the recovery. This is the conundrum for regulators in banking as they attempt to strengthen the financial system by making banks hold more reserves, which creates the unintended consequence of lower lending that undermines the economy and spirals back into undermining the financial system. … ...READ MORE

Topics Today: The Busch Update April 25th, 2012: Middle Markets, FOMC, Spring Data, and Social Security

The Middle Market The National Center for the Middle Market has produced a new indicator for the middle market that looks promising. The indicator is a quarterly business performance update and economic outlook survey conducted among 1,000 C-suite executives of companies with annual revenues between $10MM – < $1B. Here are their key findings and interesting graphics...

FOMC Quickie: Status QuoThe three legged stool of Bernanke, Dudley and Yellen all support the language of 2014 and believe the data is too mixed to change it.

Speaking of mixed data… Our Jennifer Lee writes, … ...READ MORE

In a follow-up to what I wrote yesterday and to highlight the massive challenge to US policy makers, I thought it would be instructive to share comments from uber-blogger Keith Hennessey on the state of Social Security. Hennessey makes these two disturbing points:

Point 1: If you do not change Social Security’s promised benefit payouts you would need to set aside $23.2 trillion today to permanently fill the hole between promised Social Security benefits and dedicated Social Security taxes (almost all of which are payroll taxes).

Point 2: For the next two decades demographics are a bigger driver of entitlement … ...READ MORE

Yesterday, Social Security released their Trustee’s report on the state of the fund’s finances and it wasn’t pretty. Here’s their sobering commentary: “Social Security and Medicare are the two largest federal programs, accounting for 36 percent of federal expenditures in fiscal year 2011. Both programs will experience cost growth substantially in excess of GDP growth in the coming decades due to aging of the population and, in the case of Medicare, growth in expenditures per beneficiary exceeding growth in per capita GDP. Through the mid-2030s, population aging caused by the large baby-boom generation entering retirement and lower-birth-rate generations entering employment … ...READ MORE

From the Heritage Foundation, here is a graph that shows how Medicare and Medicaid have massively expanded over the last 11 years with Medicare expanding 86% over that time frame…..

– Read More -… ...READ MORE

With the soft jobs data, both political camps were in full spin mode over the weekend on what it meant and what they could do to assist the economy going forward. To me, the untold story remains the low level of the participation rate in the labor force. As jobs become more difficult to get for longer periods of time, this rate declines as people stop looking for work. It provides a false sense of improvement as it takes less job creation to lower the overall unemployment rate as the participation rate declines. In June of 2008, the rate was … ...READ MORE

Last night, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney went 3 for 3 as he swept Wisconsin, District of Columbia and Maryland. As of today, Romney has 655 delegates to Santorum’s 278 with the magic 1,144 threshold still needed to win outright before the convention in August. On April 24th, there will be primaries in Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York. Romney is expected to win every one except Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania. If Santorum loses his home state, then he has no solid ground to stand on to stay in the race.

Sensing the end is near; Romney … ...READ MORE

From the CPFB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) blog by Rohit Chopra, “Our initial findings on the size of the private student loan market are sobering. When we add in the outstanding debt in the federal student loan program, it appears that outstanding student loan debt hit the trillion dollar mark several months ago – much larger than estimates from other recent reports. It seems that this market is too big to fail….Unlike other consumer credit products, student debt keeps growing at a steady clip. Students borrowed $117 billion in just federal student loans last year. And students continue to borrow … ...READ MORE