Depression Hits Detroit: Average home price $18,513 – Unemployment rate 21%

The Great Depression has reached Detroit. The average price of a home is now $18,513 and unemployment has reached 21%, and it’s expected to get worse. Detroit is facing a crisis of epic proportions that officially puts Detroit statistically (and real term) on par with the great depression. Many readers of Tribble Ad Agency are advertising centric.. and due to the rash of layoffs within all Detroit Advertising firms has put the city on the map for the wrong reasons.

It has become the center of all that is wrong with America… and nothing of what is right.

Iran urges ECO to drop dollar

The Iranian president calls on a regional economic body to abandon the US dollar in order to reduce the effects of the financial crisis.

In a Tuesday speech to a meeting of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the 10-member group of Asian nations could adopt a single currency instead of the US dollar to shield their financial systems from the negative impacts of the global economic crisis.

MSM: U.S. Home Resales Fall; Prices Drop by Record 13.2% (Update2)

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) – Sales prices for existing U.S. homes fell the most on record in November, tearing a deeper hole into households’ already tattered finances.

The median resale price fell 13 percent from a year before, to $181,300, “probably the largest price decline since the Great Depression,” National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in Washington. Sales slid to an annual rate of 4.49 million, lower than forecast.

Greed has pushed political credibility and financial trust into freefall

Recent scandals in America reveal a value system that puts the wealth of a few before the welfare of many

‘What an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality,” Alan Greenspan told the Congressional House oversight and government reform committee on 23 October. “Everyone has one. You have to – to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.” As the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, from 1987 to 2006, Greenspan stood at the helm of US monetary policy during the time conditions for the current meltdown were being created.

“And what I’m saying to you,” he continued, “is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact … [I found a] flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”

End of the year or end of the world (as we know it)?

Before all the Xmas BS gets in the way, an end-of-year essay of sorts is in order, especially so given the bumpy ride capitalism has bestowed on us this past twelve months. And the portents for 2009 look to be even worse as capitalism, desperate to shed over-valued assets, descends into the abyss.

Look at it this way: after the Crash of ‘29 and the launch of the New Deal, it took some six years to engineer the outbreak of WWII, the surefire way of literally burning up surplus capital in awesome quantities.

And if history has any lessons for us, some equivalent global conflagration is now in order. However, is this possible under these new circumstances and over what timescale can such a capitalist catastrophe be engineered?

Analyst: One Third Of Banks Could Collapse In 2009

Silva tells CNBC up to a thousand face failure or forced mergers

Financial analyst Ralph Silva of TowerGroup told CNBC this morning that he expects no less than one third of banks to fail in 2009 and that anything up to a thousand could collapse if they don’t merge.

Silva said that only five or six global banks have enough funds to survive comfortably throughout 2009.

“The rest of the banks, and that means a thousand other banks, don’t have enough money to get themselves through 2009,” added Silva.

Israel Warns America Yet Again–There’s “Hell To Pay” For Not Attacking Iran

To most, the language appears all-too-familiar and not unlike the childhood story of the “boy who cried wolf”. Indeed, it has all the hallmarks of the typical fear-mongering all have come to know all-too-well in recent years featuring a paranoid Zionist military commander working for a notoriously paranoid nation and warning of the next “holocaust” if everyone does not immediately stop what they are doing, pay strict attention and follow the prescribed course of action as laid down by the Jewish state.

MSM: U.S. unemployment lines longest in 26 years

Initial jobless benefit claims rise 30,000 to 586,000 in latest week

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The nation’s labor market continued to worsen in recent weeks, with the unemployment lines stretching to the longest in 26 years, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
First-time applications for state unemployment benefits jumped by 30,000 to a seasonally adjusted 586,000 in the week ended Dec. 20, the government said, based on reports of actual filings at state offices around the nation. That’s the highest since November 1982.

Video: Ron Paul on Martial Law

Ron Paul discussing the possibility of Martial Law.