Economy

(WSJournal) – Fed Sees Slower Growth

Federal Reserve officials, who are likely to reveal Wednesday a cut in their assessment of the growth outlook, are divided on how aggressively the central bank should act if the economy slows further. Read More Here

(ZeroHedge) – Why Watching CNBC Can Be Hazardous To Your Wealth – Read More Here

(ZeroHedge) – Bloomberg Poll Finds Americans No Longer Drinking Kool Aid, 71% See Economy “Mired In Recession” – Tyler Durden – Read More Here

(NYDaily) – Are the jobs gone for good? The facts about this downturn are very grim – Read More Here

(BuffaloNews) – Feeling crunch of a high jobless rate – Read More Here

(WashTime) – Both parties mull raising retirement age – Read More Here

(PoliticsDaily) – Cap-and-Trade Will Be Part of Senate Climate Change Bill

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Tuesday that the Senate will soon debate a bill to reduce pollution and that the legislation will include a scaled back version House-passed language to reduce carbon output by charging some polluters for emissions above a certain threshold. Read More Here

(Stateline) – Collapse in Living Standards in America: More Poverty By Any Measure

15 million unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities Read More Here

(ABCNews) – Autos and Gasoline Drag Retail Sales Lower in June – Read More Here

(Examiner) – U.S. banks laundering Mexican cartels’ drug money – Read More Here

(Independent) – Britain’s debt: The untold story

The true scale of Britain’s national indebtedness was laid bare by the Office for National Statistics yesterday: almost £4 trillion, or £4,000bn, about four times higher than previously acknowledged. Read More Here

(RestoreTheRepublic) – Video: The Reality Report – Tom Woods on the Economic Meltdown!!! – Gary Franchi – Video Link Here

(InflationUS) – Video: Empty Store Shelves Coming to America

(RussiaToday) – Video: Webster Tarpley – ‘Obama, the Wall St. puppet’

The Obama administration could be nearing the finish line for financial reform legislation that has been a political football tossed back and forth between both parties. Will this bill change the way Washington and Wall Street work? Can it turn around the economic downturn?

(NewAmericanRepublic) – Chinese rating agency strips Western nations of AAA status

China’s leading credit rating agency has stripped America, Britain, Germany and France of their AAA ratings, accusing Anglo-Saxon competitors of ideological bias in favour of the West. Read More Here

(Truthout) – How Brokers Became Bookies: The Insidious Transformation of Markets Into Casinos

“You all are the house, you’re the bookie. [Your clients] are booking their bets with you. I don’t know why we need to dress it up. It’s a bet.” – Sen. Claire McCaskill, Senate Subcommittee investigating Goldman Sachs (Washington Post, April 27, 2010) Read More Here

REPOST – (AspenDaily) – Historian warns of sudden collapse of American ‘empire’

Harvard professor and prolific author Niall Ferguson opened the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival Monday with a stark warning about the increasing prospect of the American “empire” suddenly collapsing due to the country’s rising debt level. Read More Here

(RussiaToday) – Video: Economic Collapse – Rich continues getting Richer and Poor gets Poorer

Video: Who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act?

The Glass Steagall Act President Roosevelt signed into law was repealed. See who swept aside the banking firewall protections on the 12th of November 1999.

Video: Goldman Sachs fraud, how they cheated investors with exploding bonds

(MSNBC) – The Dylan Ratigan Show – April 16, 2010

China to Sell U.S. Assets

(WashingtonsBlog) – Something big is happening in China which could have a huge effect on the American economy.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported:

Senior Chinese military officers have proposed that their country … possibly sell some U.S. bonds to punish Washington for its latest round of arms sales to Taiwan.

The Dumping Begins: Chinese Reserve Managers Notified That Any Non-USG Guaranteed Securities Must Be Divested

(ZeroHedge) – It appears that this time China’s posturing is for real. Following up on our earlier post that Chinese military officials want to “punish” America by selling Treasuries, Asia Times Online is reporting that an explicit directive by the Chinese government has notified reserve managers to sell all risky US assets, including asset backed and corporates, and just hold on to explicitly guaranteed Treasuries and Agency debt. And from following TIC data we know that China’s enthusiasm for MBS/Agencies over the past year has been matched solely by that of one Bill Gross.

Video: Second Wave Of Mortgage Defaults

(60Minutes) – December 28, 2009

Ponzi Scheme: The Federal Reserve Bought Approximately 80 Percent Of U.S. Treasury Securities Issued In 2009

No, the headline is not a misprint.  According to CNBC, the Federal Reserve bought approximately 80 percent of the U.S. Treasury securities issued in 2009.  In other words, the Federal Reserve has been gobbling up the massive tsunami of U.S. government debt that has been created over the past year.  This is absolutely unprecedented, and it is yet another clear indication that the U.S. financial system is on the verge of a major economic collapse.

Video: Ron Paul on Washington Journal

(CSPAN) – December 03, 2009 – “The fed came into existance in 1913 and it wasn’t too many years later that they gave us the depression”

Trickle-up Economics – Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me

(PaulCraigRoberts) – Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com.  The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”

Video: Greg Gordon on Alex Jones Tv – Goldman Sachs’s Little Secret!!

Greg Gordon, a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, talks with Alex about Goldman Sachs Group peddling more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages and never telling the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Three Government Reports Point to Fiscal Doomsday

When our leaders have no awareness of the disastrous consequences of their actions, they can claim ignorance and take no action.

Video: DHS Doles Out Fed Cash to Deploy Military LRADs in U.S. Cities

The LRAD devices used against protesters and the residents of Pittsburgh last month were a beta test for things to come. As reported by the Washington Times on October 1, the Department of Homeland Security is doling out federal money to get police departments around the country stocked up on the LRAD weapons.

The US Financial Structure is Doomed. Monetization, Crisis of Retail Trade, Decline of the Dollar

(BobChapman) – Nearly half the nation’s 25 biggest retail chains expect to hire fewer holiday workers this season than they did last year, another sign that retailers aren’t counting on recession-strained shoppers to relax the tight grip on their pocketbooks this year.

MSM: Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential Mortgage Crisis

(WSJ) – Federal Reserve and Treasury officials are scrambling to prevent the commercial-real-estate sector from delivering a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat.

The Spend-And-Borrow Economy – Nouriel Roubini

In the last few months the world economy has been saved from a near-depression. That feat has been achieved by a range of extraordinary government stimulus measures: In the U.S. and in China, and to a lesser extent in Europe, Japan and other countries, governments have pumped liquidity, slashed policy rates, cut taxes, primed demand and ring-fenced and back-stopped the financial system. All of this has worked, but at a cost. Governments have been spending and borrowing like never before. The question now is: how do they stop?

MSM: Common Sense 2009

(HuffPost) – The American government – which we once called our government – has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists,” who choose our elected officials – indeed, our very form of government.

America is now the world’s biggest debtor

The latest Treasury auction of $19 billion of 10-year notes was at a yield of 3.365%. The bid to cover was 3.28 to 1, the highest ever. This was the third of four sales this week totaling $73 billion.

Proud To Be American? You Should Be Ashamed

We have seen the largest looting operation in history perpetrated against The American People. Over $5 trillion dollars in junk securities were marketed and sold. They had a real value of about $2 trillion dollars; the other $3 trillion, roughly, was pure fiction.

Jumping on the inflation train

(MarketWatch) – Less than 90 days ago, the financial markets were melting down, with the world’s economies mired in a deflationary death spiral that threatened to usher in another 1930’s-like extended downturn.

Russia Dumps US Dollar as basic reserve currency

The US dollar is not Russia’s basic reserve currency anymore. The euro-based share of reserve assets of Russia’s Central Bank increased to the level of 47.5 percent as of January 1, 2009 and exceeded the investments in dollar assets, which made up 41.5 percent, The Vedomosti newspaper wrote.

MSM: Fed Shrouding $2 Trillion in Bank Loans in ‘Secrecy,’ Suit Says

U.S. taxpayers need to know the risks behind the Federal Reserve’s $2 trillion in lending to financial institutions because the public is now an “involuntary investor” in the nation’s banks, according to a court filing by Bloomberg LP.

The Fed Did Indeed Cause the Housing Bubble

This text by Catherine Austin Fitts is a response to an article entitled “The Fed Didn’t Cause the Housing Bubble” by Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, published in the Wall Street Journal

Launching Lifeboats Before the Ship Sinks – Paul Craig Roberts

On March 19 the New York Times reported: “The Fed said it would purchase an additional $750 billion worth of government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities, on top of the $500 billion that it is currently in the process of buying. In addition, the Fed said it would buy up to $300 billion worth of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.”