WHY THE NUMBERS ARE WRONG
Fri, 02 May 2008 20:19:38 +0000
By Danny Schechter
The official headline for U.S. Q1 GDP growth says a
positive 0.6% growth but the details are ugly and
confirm that we are in a recession.
First of all, if you exclude the increase of inventory
of unsold goods (that moved positive after a negative
figure in Q4) the Final Sales of Domestic Product were
a negative 0.2%. In [...]
25 YEARS OF DEEP RECESSION?
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:42:36 +0000
Yes, you read well… and if we’re lucky “deep recession” is a mild terminology. The worse case scenario is the “D” word - like depression.
Whie this is true that we do not have to become paranoid every time somebody is ‘crying wolf’, this time we’d take it very seriously because the fundamentals say so.
Let’s [...]
150 BANK FAILURES PREDICTED
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:44:29 +0000
Major headlines today and simply shocking.
Some US banks face failure as credit problems mount-RBC
Mon Apr 7, 2008 (Reuters) - During the next two to three years, U.S. bank failures will likely increase dramatically from the low levels recorded from 2004 to 2007, as credit problems mount for the industry, a RBC Capital Markets analyst [...]
THE COLLAPSE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS - VIDEO
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:30:35 +0000
Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law,
bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. She is an outspoken critic of America’s credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&eurl
BANKS CREATE ABSURD MORAL HAZARDS
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:46:30 +0000
It ain’t over yet until it is over.
Faced with a growing number of homeowners walking away, even sometimes with their pet still inside, banks are so overwhelmed that they have found a new way to handle the crisis.
April 4 (Bloomberg) — Banks are so overwhelmed by the U.S. housing crisis they’ve started to look the [...]
GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE NEWS
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:34:52 +0000
Great Depression questions resurface amid current economic conditions, just as they have during other downturns, Chicago Tribune declared as of 03/24/07
Fears resurface amid latest turmoil, as they have during previous downturns, but parallels are few and regulation has changed… (but further we read)…. HOLC took over 1 million mortgages in default starting in 1933, worked [...]
THE GREAT UNWIND HAS BEGUN, CITI WARNS
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:16:25 +0000
Dear Readers: This could be gloomiest day of the month. And here is why… As of March 19, 2008, CBSmarketwatch ran one of the scariest headline ever: The Great Unwind has begun:
As markets and economies de-leverage across the globe, investors should avoid companies and countries that have grown to rely too much on borrowed money, [...]
BANKERS ASK: WHO IS NEXT?
Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:53:00 +0000
Today, Reuters ran an article whose headline gave us the creeps: Bank-to-bank lending freezes; bankers ask “who’s next?”
… In an effort to minimize the fallout and in conjunction with the fire sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan, the Fed on Sunday cut its discount lending rate by a quarter percentage point to 3.25 percent [...]
ECONOMIC TERRORISTS
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:27:51 +0000
Paul Krugman does a good job at analyzing the financial arcane and picturing its deficiencies. This weekend in the New York Times, he said the following:
To understand the gravity of the situation, you have to know what the Fed did last summer, and again last fall. As late as August the favorite buzzword of financial [...]
THE REAL CREDIT SQUEEZE
Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:06:49 +0000
While central banks give us the (false) impression that they flood the markets with as much commercial paper as needed to counter the global liquidity crisis, the real credit squeeze is coming. Not many have noticed this extremely relevant internet headline: Global debt markets fall 45% in fourth quarter - amid fears of rising defaults [...]
