In an obvious attempt to divert attention from the GOP’s quite obvious war on women, presumptive Presidential nominee Mitt Romney today fired off his opening salvo claiming Obama’s policies have hurt women most.  By being very selective in what time period he references Romncy is able to claim that women had lost 92.3% of ‘net total of jobs lost’ since his inauguration.   From the Economix column at the New York Times, written by  Catherine Rampel:

As my colleague Trip Gabriel reports, Mr. Romney has been pointing to the fact that 92.3 percent of the net total of jobs lost since President Obama took office in January 2009 belonged to women.

The net number of jobs held by women has fallen by 683,000 since Mr. Obama’s inauguration, while those held by men have fallen by 57,000. But the statistic is misleading for several reasons.

First, women have lost a lot of jobs in the last three years, but men lost far more jobs during the recession. For this reason, the great recession has also been nicknamed the “mancession.”

Technically, the recession ended in June 2009, but let’s give Mr. Romney the benefit of the doubt and use his chosen benchmark of the start of the Obama presidency. From December 2007, when the recession began, to the Obama inauguration, men lost 3,264,000 jobs, while women lost “only” 1,157,000 jobs.

The chart below shows the monthly change in jobs held by men and women over the last five years. You can see the magnitude of losses by gender  from 2007 to 2011 — and also that job losses have actually turned into job gains in each of the last 10 months for both men and women.

Beezer here.  So Romney cherry picks his dates (notice the recession technically ended a mere six months after Obama was sworn in!) and thus avoids mentioning what is known as the ‘mancession’ because men lost soooo many jobs, and that lets him blame Obama for women losing their jobs.    He also fails to mention that under Obama jobs are being added, not subtracted.  Also not mentioned is that municipal and state governments have been shedding jobs all along and most of those jobs, such as teaching and lower level administration, are dominated by women.  And finally the ‘war on women’ is all about the GOP defunding programs aimed at women, such as planned parenthood and aid to single women and their children. 

As we’ve explained before, a lot of money that flowed into building a housing bubble came from derivative securities.

These derivatives included several layers, or ‘tranches.’  The topmost tranche was rated very safe, AAA.  As you went down the tranches the ratings fell until you got to the smallest and riskiest tranche, the ‘equity’ tranche which normally amounted to about 5% of the derivative’s value.   The problem for investment banks who constructed and then sold these derivatives–normally valued at $100 million in total–was that pesky equity tranche.  It was hard to sell because of its risk.  But if it wasn’t sold to someone, the entire derivative fell through.

So along comes Magnetar, a hedge fund.  They basically bought the equity slices and thus made the derivative securities possible for sale.  Why would they do this?  Because they shorted the derivatives they made possible.  In fact they were often allowed to pick the underlying securities that went into the derivative, thus making it more likely the whole caboodle would collapse if housing prices fell.  And the Magnetar guys were smart.  They could see that this was a bubble and it was headed for a crash.  In fact, a lot of Wall Street saw it coming and did the same thing.  Magnetar wasn’t alone, it was just among the largest.

What about the investment bank?  It was making hefty commissions all along the way and Magnetar’s equity purchases increased those commissions.  But didn’t the investment bank have a whiff that this stuff was toxic, or ‘nuclear’ as was a common descriptor?  Of course they did.  Like Magnetar they were shorting their own product even as they were selling it to supposedly sophisticated clients.  The investment bank’s problem wasn’t that they didn’t realize the crash was coming, what they didn’t realize was they would get caught with hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, worth of unsold nuclear derivatives.  When the turn came, the investment banks found out the market for this security toxic waste was very thin.  That’s known as an ‘illiquid’ market.

So Magnetar made billions of dollars shorting that which they made possible.  And the investment banks, en masse, became insolvent almost overnight, in the end to be bailed out by taxpayers.     Socialism for the rich.

And that dear reader is how you loot an economy.

Beezer here.  In any sane world this is considered fraud and subject to criminal prosecution.  So now we’re supposed to believe further de-regulation is going to help?