Overall, it strikes me that the markets have wholeheartedly embraced the view that the recent downturn was nothing but a typical and purely transitory post-war wrinkle. Yet income continues to deteriorate...
So, the Fed knew, the Treasury knew, the FBI knew, the OCC knew, the FDIC knew, Bush knew, the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America knew, Fitch ratings knew, all the states AG's knew. Everyone knew, except the unlucky people...
Private residential construction spending appears to have bottomed in early 2009, but has been mostly moving sideways since then. Residential spending is now 62.8% below the peak of early 2006.
Investment in multimerchandise shopping structures (malls) peaked in 2007 and has fallen by over 50% (note that investment includes remodels, so this will not fall to zero).
BP chief executive Tony Hayward said Monday that "the worst-case scenario is that we would need to contain this for two to three months whilst a relief well is drilled."
On Friday, the FDIC closed down 7 banks at a stunning cost of $7.4 billion to the FDIC. As we have mentioned, the FDIC deposit insurance fund (DIF) is already depleted yet the FDIC has front-loaded premiums to make sure they have a buffer...
The France of 1789 and the USA of today have a few important elements in common: a striking inability to sort out any national problems, an arrogant, depraved ruling elite resistant to reform, and an intellectual underclass motivated by blind fury.
The banks are discovering a long forgotten lesson. A house is a lousy investment if it is based solely on its natural earning capacity. In fact on a cash flow basis a house is normally worth less than its replacement value before the land component
The Fed is contracting the M-3 Money Supply at an annual rate of over 8.5%. This rate is accelerating, and means that Meredith Whitney is spot-on in her predictions of credit lines contracting by $2.5 Trillion dollars.
We expect to see the deterioration of the economic statistics for the US to reveal the onset of this oil-slick crisis in May, and the negative impact will intensify during the summer months.
Bankruptcy is not a bad word – insolvency is! Bankruptcy is a legal proceeding where the court restructures the financial condition of a debtor – balancing its income and expenditures so that it can become successful. Insolvency is...
Let nobody try and fool nobody else anymore. Fannie and Freddie have nothing to do with the less privileged: they are the ultimate tools for Washington to keep Wall Street alive.
The status quo is morally degenerate: both politically and financially, it is based on an interlocking foundation of lies, half-truths, misdirections, misinformation, propaganda, embezzlement, fraud, prevarications, bogus statistics...
Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff.
Meredith Whitney said the financial conditions of U.S. states resemble those in Greece, whose debt was downgraded yesterday by Standard & Poor’s to junk status.
"Median household income is below 1999 levels. What kind of imbecile is out there saying we have to raise taxes to keep things going more?"
The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $11.4 million. ... BC National Banks is the 63rd FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the third in Missouri.
The idea is to push slimy packages of derivative debt onto people who don’t know what they’re doing. Serving lumps to chumps, in other words. Like a high-school cafeteria. Sometimes the victims are German banks. Sometimes they’re hedge funds. And
This awesome chart/picture hybrid from VisualEconomics.com explains the underlying problems with American families and finance.
They are quietly drawing the line at 99 weeks of aid, a mark that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already reached. In coming months, the number of those who will receive their final government check is projected to top 1 million.
I don't like it folks. All the claims of "economic recovery" are in fact claims of "government is propping up 10% of final demand, and that propping up is disappearing into a black hole."
The really scary thing for me as an American is that the longer this goes on and the more empty cities and malls the Chinese create the greater their incentive and need to collapse the United States becomes.
Iowa now has over 25,000 wind turbines and doubled its proportion of wind-generated electricity from 7% to 14% in 2009, the biggest jump in the U.S. Estimates put the current 2010 percentage of Iowa's electricity coming from wind above 17%.
On 10 April 2010, at the Mises Circle in Phoenix, radio talkshow host and author of bestselling book, “ The Dollar Meltdown” Charles Goyette, presented his perspective in a talk entitled “The Inflationary Path to Despotism.”
It shows who paid for the New Deal and there can be little doubt that something similar is going to happen this time around — especially since Obama is running deficits relative to GDP that are double what FDR ever ran to “save the system”.
In this interview Meredith Whitney states that the middle class is de-banking, and moving to predatory loan sharks. Toward the end of the interview she states that small business and consumers funding sources are the same, and both are on their rears
The propaganda machine's favorite subversive mechanism to instill confidence in the prevalent population, is by nudging none other than the Confidence Index itself. And indeed, over the past few months, the Conference Board and UMichigan indices...
49 out of 50 U.S. states are still showing less economic activity than a year ago, based on February 2010 coincident economic indicators from the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia.
Harrisburg has missed $6 million in debt payments since Jan. 1, should consider seeking Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, City Controller Dan Miller told a 3-hour special committee hearing. At an “informational session” on insolvency convened by
Amidst growing pessimism about the financial condition of U.S. cities and states, investors are increasingly buying financial instruments that essentially allow them to short sell - or bet against - cities and states, says a Wall Street Journal repor
