US & International Economic News Round-Up
October 25, 2009, 3:32 pm
Filed under:
Asia,
Barack Obama,
China,
Europe,
International news,
Latin America,
US dollar,
business,
collapse,
dollar collapse,
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news,
obama,
politics
As the Senate debates whether to extend unemployment benefits, more than 200,000 jobless Americans are set to see their checks stop in October.
A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government’s official figure.
The disparity occurs because of differing formulas the Census Bureau and the National Academy of Science use for calculating the poverty rate. The NAS formula shows the poverty rate to be at 15.8 percent, or nearly 1 in 6 Americans, according to calculations released this week. That’s higher than the 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million, figure made available recently under the original government formula.
Many Americans have a hard time wrapping their mind around a declining currency or the hidden tax that is inflation. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve understands this and for decades has exploited this issue to slowly siphon off the buying power of the U.S. dollar. Openly they tell the public that they are for a strong dollar policy but every action they take is guided to slowly debasing the currency. Take for example the current stock market rally. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 56 percent from the March lows. A stunning rally only seen one other time in history and we would need to go back to the 1930s for that. Yet at the same time, we have seen a collapse in the U.S. dollar. That is why oil, even though demand is relatively the same, is now back near $80 a barrel.
Russia has dropped its $22.5bn lawsuit against Bank of New York Mellon after agreeing an out-of-court settlement
I am hearing repeated anecdotes from multiple areas that foreclosed property held by banks with multiple full-price offers that include a financing requirement are being sold instead to people with actual cash at radical reductions from that price. This implies that these financing contingencies are regarded as not only potentially no good but factually no good, as if the banks know for a fact that the credit pipeline will (not might), within weeks or months (in the time required to close), disappear. There is no other rational explanation for this behavior.
The above chart shows the dollar’s performance since the Fed announced its Quantitative Easing program in March. This chart tells us two things:
Americans just got 15% poorer on the world stage thanks to Ben Bernanke
A currency crisis is in the works (and perhaps already starting)
Thank you for your interest in war tax resistance. If you decide to register and resist, you will join a long line of courageous resisters, from Henry David Thoreau’s time to the present. Many of us are angry and frustrated by the U.S. government’s military actions around the world, and it often seems as if there is not much we can do about it. War tax resistance is a powerful way to resist the state and oppose its harmful actions. By conscientiously resisting taxes, you take a solid step towards refusing to be a part of the destruction. Our military can only harm people when citizens allow it. If enough of us withhold from war and pay for peace, we can stop the harm.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) is a coalition of groups from across the U.S., formed in 1982 to provide information and support to people involved in or considering some form of war tax resistance (WTR). Affiliate organizations and individual supporters are joined together in a common struggle for a more just and peaceful society. We oppose militarism and war and refuse to complicitly participate in the tax system which supports such violence. NWTRCC sees poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation, environmental destruction and militarization of law enforcement as integrally linked with the militarism which we abhor.
Top Economic News Round-Up: Dollar Collapse, Supranational Currency Plans, and the Pending Financial Apocalypse
October 18, 2009, 1:10 pm
Filed under:
Europe,
International news,
US dollar,
business,
collapse,
colonialism,
consumerism,
corporate corruption,
dollar collapse,
domestic news,
economy,
empire,
fascism,
hypocrisy,
illegal,
imperialism,
infowar,
interesting,
news,
politics
On May 10th, 2007, this video was banned in Congress. Robert Greenwald, the director of IRAQ FOR SALE, was invited to testify before Congress by Rep. Jim Moran. He prepared four minutes from the documentary to show. Republicans insisted this not be shown.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the United States should not take the dollar’s status as the world’s key reserve currency for granted because other options are emerging.
“The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency,” he said. “Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options.”
If you haven’t seen Matt Taibbi’s interview with his documentation of Goldman Sachs involvement with the US Treasury and manipulations of our economy, it is a must see. This article also links to mainstream economists’ and Pulitzer journalists’ documentation and analysis of our plutocracy in rather strong language.
Paul Kedrosky points to this very cool tool for visualizing the jobs people have done between 1850 and 2000; you click on any one or write it in the window and see how they have changed. Kedrosky writes “Too bad it ends at 2000, thus taking away the fun of watching the profusion of real estate agents and mortgage brokers.”
Just a few weeks ago, while Chairman Bernanke was testifying to Congress, we examined the Fed balance sheet and P&L statement only to find what looked like the Fed handing over half a trillion dollars to foreigners. This was very surprising! When I asked Chairman Bernanke if this was true, he said, “Yes.” When I asked him who got the money, he said, “Fourteen foreign Central Banks.” And when I asked to who did they give the money, he said, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” is not good enough when you’re talking about $500 billion. That’s $1700 for every man, woman, and child in this country.
In First National Bank v. Daly (often referred to as the “Credit River” case) the court found: that the bank created money “out of thin air”:
[The president of the First National Bank of Montgomery] admitted that all of the money or credit which was used as a consideration [for the mortgage loan given to the defendant] was created upon their books, that this was standard banking practice exercised by their bank in combination with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneaopolis, another private bank, further that he knew of no United States statute or law that gave the Plaintiff [bank] the authority to do this.
A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world’s finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system’s vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.
Two social ills come together in Miami for a positive outcome, at least on a small scale.
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