The Dead Want Their Tax Credits! (Musical Tribute)

Homebuyer tax credit: 950,000 must repay

The inspector general reported that 1,326 single people listed as dead by the Social Security Administration claimed more than $10 million in credits. The IRS threw out 528 of those 1,326 claims, saving $4 million.

Rumor has it that these 528 also have accounts at our nation's zombie banks and are still buying zombie products from our nation's zombie companies.

Bond investors headed for a doozie of a hangover: Mark Gilbert

The corporate-bond market looks even more like an accident waiting to happen. Investors decided to lend $400 million for 30 years to Stanley Black & Decker Inc. this month. They will be paid an interest rate of 5.2 percent by the toolmaker, which has total debts of $4.5 billion in the form of bonds and loans, according to Bloomberg data.

The job of a fixed-income investor is to balance risk and reward. That interest rate seems like an awfully skimpy reward for quite a big risk.

Peer three decades into the future. Tell me you don't see some new globetrotting enterprise from China -- where Western retailers now do most of their manufacturing -- employing the workers Stanley Black & Decker trained and undercutting the U.S. company with cheaper screwdrivers, drills and hammers.

Ouch.

There's also the connected problem of lax lending standards during the credit boom. The loan covenants that would normally get triggered when a borrower is in distress were watered down to the point of uselessness. So it is entirely plausible that zombie companies are blundering along in the twilight lacuna between alive and dead, distorting the default data.

Zombie companies blundering along in the lacuna? Is that our truth?



Clock is ticking while I’m killing time
Spinning all around
Nothing else that you can do to turn it back