Fixing the budget would require a kind of joint political suicide, with Democrats agreeing to trim costly social programs and Republicans acquiescing to a major tax hike. That kind of bargain seems highly unlikely now, even for a popular new presiden
Let's just use the $45 billion deficit for the sake of argument in looking at what this number really means. The Trumpet reports that if the Governator fired all the 149,000 legislative aids and people working in the courts and universities that
Here is a collection of 20 real estate and economic graphs from January provided by CalculatedRisk.com. I hope you will take the time to go over these charts so you can fully appreciate the nature of the crisis we face.
Income tax and sales tax numbers are frightening with many state governments reporting double-digit drops in the last month. All these handouts and bailouts sound good but where is the money going to come from? When the money runs out the game is ov
Hi everybody Just the other day I got my bank activity report from my credit Union. Well it say that bolth WAMU and Bank of America have set up an auto withdraw form my account w/o my permission or knowledge It’s only a few bucks a month
Read Letter
John Williams, Founder of Shadow Government Statistics, calculates that the jobless rate is a full l0 percent higher than the government is reporting. 5 minute interview.
You want leverage? Imagine a 20 billion dollar portfolio of mortgage backed securities with a capital base of $10k, literally 2 million-fold leverage. Imagine the shock of the inventor as he watches as his successors expand similar portfolios up to $
Federal regulators seized Suburban Federal Savings Bank in the first bank failure in the Washington area since 1993. Suburban Federal, a small bank with 7 branches, was immediately sold to Virginia-based Bank of Essex. All deposits were protected.
The U.S. economy shrank at its fastest pace in nearly 27 years in the fourth quarter, government data showed on Friday, sinking deeper into a recession. A broad-based contraction across nearly all sectors, the Commerce Department said gross domestic
Widgets and cars are piling up in the warehouses, even as production costs decrease. Why won't cash-starved manufacturers liquidate these inventories?
Accountability is one of the essentials to a free society. So when will it begin?
The "dirty secret" behind a lot of these "assets" is that they are literal zeros. A lot of the debt issued in the last few years was in fact fully synthetic - that is, it was not backed by an actual mortgage or other actual debt
It is very hard to find this kind of honesty on any American network.
The Justice Department says it foiled a plot by a fired Fannie Mae contract worker in Maryland to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant's 4,000 computer servers nationwide. [Hopefully he will go to work for the IRS.]
"One thing that you can depend on, you don't have be worried about what the middle class is going to do. Things are so bad. They have to put food on the table, get clothes for their kids, put them in school..." -Rep. Charles Rangel (D,
It’s coming dear reader. No doubt about it. The only questions are: When? How much? We’re talking about inflation. First a word of caution. Everything that MUST happen DOES happen. But it doesn’t always happen when and how you think it should.
Goldman Sachs economists said ideally the public sector would step in to remove the hardest-to-value assets, which would alleviate nagging worries about future losses and hopefully help get lending going again.
In Wall Street terms, that's throwing good money after bad. All told, the government's annualized rate of return on its investment in the nation's largest banks is -1,096%. That's well beyond Bernie Madoff territory; he topped out at
In this Lew Rockwell podcast Gerald Celente predicts that commercial real estate will start to crash in about 2 weeks.
In the week ending Jan. 24, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 588,000, an increase of 3,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 585,000.
restructuring the foreclosure rule can eliminate the credit crisis in a period of months at vastly less cost and without a full blown depression
understanding this curve and matching it to the current state of taxation policy will inform you as well as any finance minister of the future condition of the economy.
Massive deficits could force the post office to cut out one day of mail delivery, the postmaster general told Congress on Wednesday, in asking lawmakers to lift the requirement that the agency deliver mail six days a week.
In a swift victory for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House approved a historically huge $819 billion stimulus bill tonight with spending increases and tax cuts at the heart of the young administration's plan to revive a badly
AAA bonds do not fail unless collusion existed to subvert the credit system. Everyone who signed off on these pieces of script was guilty of treason. They need to be so charged and ordered to disgorge their illegal gains for an ounce of mercy. Those
In the “7 Fallacies of Economics” series, I have covered the fallacies of “collective terms” and “composition,” and now turn to the third fallacy: Money is Wealth. FEE president Lawrence Reed writes:
"What we’re worried about right now, well certainly I am, is that it’s worse than the 30’s because we’re on the verge of destroying the dollar. So if you think the financial crisis is bad, and the financial system isn’t working, wait ’til you fi
As many as 40 of the biggest 100 buyout firms may collapse by 2011 as their debt-strapped assets default, according to a 2008 report by Boston Consulting Group Inc., which didn’t identify the firms in its study.
Jumbo mortgages average about $750,000 and can run as high as $5 million or more. More borrowers with such loans are being hit by layoffs that are spreading through practically every sector and pay level of the U.S. economy.”
Therefore, down the road this is going to be insanely destructive, and probably not far down the road either - I suspect the market will figure this out in a few months and then the wheels will really come off.
