Fed Lends to Foreign Banks, Unemployment Falls (So Do Labor Participants) and Mises and Hayek Mentioned in the Onion!

Big news on the recent Fed document dump via Bloomberg:

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.
Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch from the Fed’s “discount window” lending program, according to Fed documents released yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion.
The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record.

Everyone expected this type of outcome, but Libya?  You gotta love the fact that we both fund and fight our enemies at the same time.  By funding foreign banks, it won't make a difference in who pays for the "boots on the ground" the EU just approved of for Libya. The outrage just won't come soon enough.  Especially with this idiotic, yet scary, statement from the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Narayana Kocherlakota:

But I suspect that it may be optimal for central banks to guarantee fiscal authority debts in some situations.

Hmm... I wonder how connected you will have to be to get a bailout? Obviously GM qualified for such protections with the federal government.  How are they doing?

Keynesians must be salivating over those "idle resources."  If only the government enacted a program that provided subsidies to those willing to destroy their own car for the sake of going into debt to buy a brand new Chevy.  Oh wait...

So the unemployment rate dropped to 8.8% today while the U-6 rate dropped to 15.7%:

Great, right?  Take a look at labor participation:

Participation is at a 25 year low.  To put it simply, the unemployment rate is a crappy statistic and should be much higher.  What ever happened to "Welcome to the Recovery?"  Zerohedge poster slow_roast sums it up perfectly:

"Maybe the unemployed are too busy eating Ipads."

I will start the weekend with mentioning a few goodies.  First Sen. Rand Paul, who continues to impress, has halted business in the Senate until Monday by including this little nugget into a small business re-authorization bill:

To make his point, Paul quoted, in the legislative language, from Obama’s 2007 remarks on the subject: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” According to Paul’s office, “the measure aims to put the Senate on record affirming Congress as the body with constitutional authority on matters of war.”

GOP sources tell National Review Online that Paul’s proposal flummoxed Reid, who does not want his members to have to weigh in on Obama’s dusty quote about congressional authority, even if the vote is only to table the measure.

David Paul Kuhn has a great article on RealClearPolitics today regarding GOP presidential hopefuls and their hypocritical (disgusting in my opinion) stance toward ethanol subsidies.

Here is an interesting first hand account of what happened in Fukushima right when the earthquake hit from the BBC.  I will also mention that TEPCO may be nationalized any day now:

(Reuters) - Japan's government plans to take control of Tokyo Electric Power Co , the operator of a stricken nuclear power plant, by injecting public funds, the Mainichi newspaper said on Friday.

And Mises and Hayek actually get mentioned in The Onion!

Even many of the nation's staunchest neoliberal economists, who have long advocated laissez-faire policies, acknowledged that the ideas of F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman cannot account for how Edible Arrangements operates from more than 1,000 locations in 13 countries, including Hong Kong, Italy, India, and Kuwait.

A Mises reference in mainstream satire!? The influence is growing!