Free Republic

In the predawn hours this morning, over 30 people loaded a chartered bus in a parking lot across from Ross Park Mall were seeing red and it had nothing to do with getting up before 3:00 a.m. "We want to let Washington know that we are not going to let them pass legislation without them knowing how we feel," said Pam Smith of Evans City. Smith was part of a group of grassroots activists and concerned citizens heading down to Washington, D.C., this morning to issue a "code red" alert to stop the health care overhaul legislation from advancing in...

Moody's: The Coming Sovereign Debt Crisis Of 2010 Joe WeisenthalDec. 15, 2009, 5:17 AM The subject of sovereign defaults is definitely the theme of du jour. It's the question everyone will be obsessed with in 2010 -- that, and the related theme, the breakup of the Euro. Moody's, via FT Alphaville, has created a new kind of "misery index" that merely adds a country's fiscal deficit with its unemployment rate. The top of the list reads like a who's who of the names in the news these days: Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Ireland, Greece, the UK, Iceland and the US. Moody's...

If You Thought The Economy Was Being Inflated By The Stimulus, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet Vincent FernandoDec. 15, 2009, 6:41 AM Think the economy is being inflated by economic stimulus right now? Well if that's the case, then get ready for a ride over the next two years.The majority of Obama's stimulus hasn't even been spent yet. Thus the support won't disappear any time soon, and actually could accelerate. There's still another 70% to go. Slate: Since it was passed in February 2009, only $237.6 billion (30 percent) of the $787 billion package has entered the economy. The tax...

Merrill Lynch: Ignore The Bubble In Pessimism, 2010 Will Be Awesome The Pragmatic CapitalistDec. 15, 2009, 4:53 AM We are just about finished wrapping up our series on 2010 outlooks. In this article we’ll outline Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is very bullish heading into 2010 (an outlook similar to RBC). They see many of the trends of 2009 continuing into 2010 and driving equity markets around the world higher by double digits (see JP Morgan’s bullish emerging market outlook here). Ethan Harris, head of North American economics summarized the Merrill outlook: “We believe the...

U.S. Housing Underwater, Securitized, And Screwed by The "Pass The Trash" Strategy Housing-Market / US Housing Dec 15, 2009 - 04:48 AM By: Mike Shedlock Calculated Risk had an interesting post last Saturday about Refinancing with Negative Equity. His post refers to an article written by David Streitfeld from the NY Times Interest Rates Are Low, but Banks Balk at Refinancing citing among other things the plights of Mark Belvedere who owes $235,000 on a condo that would sell for barely half that today, and Andrew Knapp who has tried twice to refinance and failed. From the Times... Mr. Belvedere...

Global Financial Crisis, No Bailout Will Stop It Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2009 Dec 15, 2009 - 04:21 AM By: Mac Slavo Sometimes, a bailout is not enough. When Dubai World black swanned global investors last month with what amounts to be a reported $80 Billion in debt liabilities, it sent shivers down the spine of many a financial manager and stock trader. For those who were paying attention, Dubai’s troubled assets were no surprise, it was simply a matter of time. Oft repeated by contrarian analysts and investors like Dr. Doom Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Jim Rogers, and Karl...

President Obama didn’t exactly look thrilled as he stared at the Polycom speakerphone in front of him. “Well, I appreciate you guys calling in,” he began the meeting at the White House with Wall Street’s top brass on Monday. He was, of course, referring to the three conspicuously absent attendees who were being piped in by telephone: Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup. Their excuse? “Inclement weather,” according to the White House... That awkward moment on speakerphone in the White House, for better...

WASHINGTON, Dec 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. government must craft a plan next year to get its ballooning debt under control or face possible panic in financial markets, a bipartisan panel of budget experts said in a report on Monday. Though the government should hold off on immediate tax hikes and spending cuts to avoid harming the fragile economic recovery, it will need to make such painful changes by 2012 in order to keep debt at a manageable 60 percent of GDP by 2018, according to the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform. Without action, investors could lose confidence in the...

President Obama is the one who still doesn’t get it. In an administration fiendishly adroit at stagecraft, he chose an exclusive interview on “60 Minutes” last night to bash bankers with the “f” word — “fatcats,” he called them — just 16 hours before his scheduled sitdown with the chiefs of J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and other banking giants. What an icebreaker! That impolite precursor on “60 Minutes,” especially when it comes from a guy who most times is charming and almost too ingratiating, shows a President torn between pious populism and prosperous capitalism. Obama needs...

Agri-Food's And The Global Warming Research Dollars Ponzi Scam Commodities / Agricultural Commodities Dec 14, 2009 - 03:34 PM By: Ned_W_Schmidt The Global Warming Scam may finally be on its way to well-deserved oblivion. Take your pick of discrediting events, the snow storms that hit the Midwestern U.S., snow at the start of the Australian Summer, -40 degree temps in Western Canada, or Climategate. The Global Warming Scam appears now to have been nothing more than a giant research dollar Ponzi-like scheme. Researchers would take research dollars, cook some numbers, discard other data, and exchange dubious research for more funding...

Have you read the headlines the past few months? Obama has proposed trillions of dollars in new taxes, and trillions of dollars of irresponsible, unsustainable big government spending. With no way to pay for it all…except to wipe out small businessmen and women, and wipe out the upper middle class…and enslave our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt and heavy taxes for a lifetime. It is, plainly and simply, the VERY definition of Socialism. Let’s say it out loud- Obama is a Socialist. If liberals and the biased liberal media won’t face facts…I’m going to put the facts...

Late this December, the Unites States Treasury will reach the $12.1 trillion statutory ceiling on the national debt. It will mark the 91st time Congress has had to raise the debt limit since the original $43 billion ceiling was established in 1940. Many on the left argue that the United States federal government can borrow and spend as much money as it wants, and that any concerns about what it might cost us in the future are just a Phantom Menace. But as the chart to the right shows, we are already paying a hefty sum in monthly interest payments...

Areas receiving funding will include health, safety, education and training programs More federal funding could be headed to West Virginia. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., Dec. 14 announced that the House of Representatives and Senate have completed action on the Fiscal Year 2010 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations bill. The measure includes funding for health, safety, education, and training programs in the Mountain State. The bill includes more than $630 million for programs in West Virginia. The bill is part of an Omnibus Appropriations bill, which combined six of the 12 annual spending appropriations measures. The bill...

It's bad enough for America that President Barack Obama is a committed far-left ideologue, but when you couple that with his narcissism, you've got a recipe for a major disaster. He told Oprah Winfrey he deserves "a good solid B-plus" for his first year in office. The only things standing in his way for that coveted A are -- for the most part -- other people, such as evil Republicans who oppose socialized medicine. It's obvious that Obama is as self-absorbed as he is delusional. While most Americans are worried about the financial destruction of our country and our resulting...

More than half of the nation’s unemployed workers have borrowed money from friends or relatives. An equal number have cut back on doctor’s visits or medical treatments because they are out of work. Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About four in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they blame on their struggles. Joblessness has wreaked both financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll of unemployed adults, causing major life changes, mental health issues and struggles to maintain even...

Glenn discusses the real inconvenient truth behind climate change. STAND UP AMERICA, GET OUT OF THE FETAL POSITION AND MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD. Welcome to the GLENN BECK television thread...Shake the cobwebs out of your brain...We are another day closer to the REVOLUTION that will change the 2010 elections. All comrades, infidels, sick twisted freaks, ilks and lurkers are welcome and are encouraged to participate in the thread!

Look out below! The US housing market could be looking at a second steep decline in 2010 after statistics released last week show how poorly the Obama administration's mortgage modification plan is working. The millions of families hoping for a permanent mortgage modification may never get one -- and with their homes worth less than they owe on their loans, they may decide to walk away from the home voluntarily or be foreclosed upon as their trial modifications expire. The snail's pace of permanent mortgage modifications -- just 31,382 out of 3.3 million eligible loans have been cut -- could...

President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. The president set the tone for the meeting in an interview broadcast the night before in which he called Wall Street bankers "fat cats"...

This past weekend, President Obama’s top economic advisor, Larry Summers, said the “recession is over.” But in the next breath he called for more government action to stimulate the economy, in particular, the pace of hiring. As far as the Administration is concerned, it is government stimulus that brought us this recovery. Now, it’s just a matter of piling on even more government spending to generate job growth. In one sense we agree completely with Mr. Summers. The recession is over. In fact, the economy has been growing since June. This came as no surprise to us. “An economic recovery...

Job Market Worsens For Recent College Graduates Unemployment among young adults is worse than the U.S. average. Don Lee December 14, 2009 Reporting from Washington - The unemployment rate dropped last month for men and women, blacks and whites, lifting hopes that the long dry spell in the jobs market may be coming to an end. But for recent college graduates and other young adults, the labor situation didn't just remain dire -- it got worse. For 20- to 24-year-olds, the jobless rate rose four-tenths of a percent to 16% in November, even as unemployment nationally slipped to 10% from...

At a time when the White House is projecting the largest deficit in the nation's history, Uncle Sam is trying to recover billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from its own employees. Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe $3,042,200,000. The IRS tracks the voluntary compliance rate of federal employees and retirees each year, and each year feds come up short. The one bright spot in this year's report is that after several years of a steady increase, the...

The unemployment rate dropped last month for men and women, blacks and whites, lifting hopes that the long dry spell in the jobs market may be coming to an end. But for recent college graduates and other young adults, the labor situation didn't just remain dire -- it got worse. For 20- to 24-year-olds, the jobless rate rose four-tenths of a percent to 16% in November, even as unemployment nationally slipped to 10% from 10.2%. And data from the Labor Department show that the unemployment figure for college graduates in that age group was 10.6% in the third quarter --...

Even as the Feds sanctimoniously ban Wall Street executives from receiving end-of-the-year bonuses, the government of D.C. rewarded its employees with a hefty one...to the tune of $15 million bucks. And for what? D.C. is one of the most mismanaged metro areas in the nation, squandering untold millions of dollars each year, even spending itself into oblivion during a recession. That was not enough, however, to prevent D.C. from rewarding its incompetent employees with millions in taxpayer-provided loot.

Niall Ferguson: The World Is In Denial, The Great Repression Lives On Joe WeisenthalDec. 14, 2009, 5:10 AM Niall Ferguson is in the media a lot, but this interview with Consuelo Mack (via Paul Kedrosky) is one of the best summations of he's views we've come across. Some of the points he gets across: * Governments and households are in denial about how the world has changed post-crisis. * Wall Street is in a worse state than prior to the crisis because now the government backstop is explicit, and because the remaining players now have a bigger oligopoly than before....

US Retail Sales Stronger Than Expected By Chuck Butler 12/14/09 St. Louis, Missouri – It was announced this morning that Dubai’s government received $10 billion in financing from Abu Dhabi… Hmmm… You know, I read somewhere a couple of weeks ago, when this debt/loan repayment problem was announced, that in the end, the Abu Dhabi government would step in to bail out Dubai, since the people running the two governments are blood related; and even though there had been shots fired between the two, blood would run thick here… And voila that’s exactly what happened! In fact, at the time,...

America's Race To The Bottom Politics / Recession 2008 - 2010 Dec 14, 2009 - 04:02 AM By: Submissions David Michael Green writes: I sure hope that there is a full and speedy recovery to the massive recession we are all now suffering under. But, I'll be honest. I doubt that there will be. Most of the upticks following our latest national downturns have been dismal enough that economists have had to invent a new term for them. The phrase is "jobless recovery", and the implications are as ugly as they sound. What it means is that GDP rises, but...

U.S. Economy Looking Very Sick Indeed Economics / Recession 2008 - 2010 Dec 14, 2009 - 03:39 AM By: Gerard Jackson No matter how the administration's friends and media lapdogs try to paint it the US economy is still in rotten shape. In fact, the situation is far worse than most people realise. Manufacturing surveys suggest a slow though steady recovery. I don't buy it, at least not yet. These surveys also report that the situation for unfilled orders is deteriorating, which means that orders for capital goods in the form of machinery is falling. Industrial production for October to...

In his 1981 inaugural address, former President Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem." Nearly 29 years later, that still holds true according to CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Both Cramer and Greenspan were guests on NBC's Dec. 13 "Meet the Press" and although neither was making a vain effort to be nostalgic, but instead explained that Congress' deliberations over an "agenda" was creating uncertainty for business. "I think the priority ought to be get rid of the agenda," Cramer said. "I hear the...

Watching the Senate press last week toward passage of President Obama's universal health care, my Red Alert is forced to contemplate whether a socialist agenda is intending to bankrupt the United States with trillion-dollar social-welfare programs there is no way the country will ever be able to afford. In "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," I clearly established that Barack Obama is trained in the Saul Alinsky "Rules for Radicals" methodology of lying to voters to disguise a true intent to transfer wealth from the "haves" to the "have nots." But as we watch President Obama...

In Hard Times, Kids Ask for Bare Essentials: Shoes, Eyeglasses and a Job for Dad As a longtime Santa Claus at a suburban Chicago mall, Rod Riemersma used to jokingly tell children they would get socks for Christmas if they were naughty. This year, he stopped telling the joke. Too many children were asking for socks. "They've probably heard their parents say, 'Geez, I wish I had some money to get them clothes,' " says Mr. Riemersma, 56 years old. A wintry measure of hard times can be found this holiday season on the knee of white-bearded, red-suited men around...

This is a great short video! Should be shown in the classrooms! Video

Nikkei Falls As Yen Gains; JAL And ANA Rise Sun Dec 13, 2009 9:09pm * Nikkei down as yen gains on dollar, futures sold * BOJ tankan market neutral, but lower capex a concern * JAL, ANA gain after "open skies" deal TOKYO, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Japan's Nikkei stock average lost 0.8 percent on Monday, with exporters such as Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) falling as the yen erased earlier losses to rise against the dollar. Japan Airlines Corp (9205.T) gained 2.1 percent and rival All Nippon Airways (9202.T) also rose after the United States and Japan reached a landmark...

The first year of the Obama administration is almost in the books, and pundits across the political spectrum are assessing its accomplishments. Any assessment must be placed in context of the overall political and class balance of forces, in Congress and within the multi-class, socially diverse coalition that carried Obama to the White House. The success, breadth and extent of President Obama’s new policy direction depend in particular on the strength and unity of the people’s forces and their ability to gain allies and mobilize at the grassroots and influence Congress. The Obama administration must work with and unite a...

Call it a stimulus, paying off a debt, but it's time to call it a work in progress. If the Federal Government is going to prop up the richest of the rich, isn't it time to add up the losses that Blacks have incurred during their time in America? Supporters of slave reparations argue that there is no equal opportunity for African Americans nor has there ever been. Systematic discrimination deprived African Americans of equal chances and deserved justice and parity. The clear lack of parity is seen in the recent instances of bailouts for the rich and distain for...

A sign reading "Welcome to Obamaville Colorado's Fastest Growing Community" appeared at a homeless tent city in Colorado Springs this week. You probably didn't hear about it because outside of two Colorado television stations nobody found this newsworthy. By contrast, when word got out in March of a tent city in Sacramento, California, news media couldn't get enough of the story. Is it because that happened so soon after Inauguration Day that it could easily be blamed on George W. Bush, and that given the name given to this area that's no longer possible?

The Republican Party, the Party of Reagan has been nearly smothered and suffocated by the RINO-virus which has spread more rapidly than any swine flu pandemic, the GOP has been infected from the top down, and IF it is to avoid the fate of the Bull Moose Party, the principles of Reagan conservatism must be re-established, the fair weather collaborators and Quislings (that means YOU Juan McCain and your butt buddy Lindsey 'Goober' Graham!) MUST be driven out and banished and if they join up with the traitorous 'Rats, so be it. Force them to show their true colors. The...

NEW YORK - Eight years ago, President George W. Bush stood on a pile of rubble and told New Yorkers, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Perhaps President Barack Obama should take a cue from his predecessor and hear what New Yorkers say about his administration's decision to prosecute five Sept. 11 suspects here. Finding a New Yorker who is happy about that is difficult. "I don't see the upside," said Louis Polanco, a retired New York City cop. "The unprecedented...

Trade Data Points To L-Shaped Outlook by: Wildebeest December 13, 2009 At first glance the contraction in the trade deficit for October looks positive. I'm generally wary of seasonally adjusted data -- not because seasonal effects don't exist but because I prefer to see the raw data and the algorithm used to do the smoothing. Non seasonally adjusted data for the trade in goods is available here. A seasonal plot of the trade deficit, derived from 22 years of data, is shown in the next chart. From that chart we see that October is typically a larger deficit month. That...

Despite the biased media's attempt to paint a negative picture of Sarah Palin, her recent public appearances, including Oprah's, have served to convince Americans that she really is a pretty down-to-earth, very intelligent lady. She is, despite the constant attacks, becoming more and more popular with the American public. Her popularity, however, doesn't revolve solely around her political views. People are beginning to see that she is "real". She is not the "air-head" that the media has tried to portray. Left-wing idealogues will never embrace her, even if it benefits them, - even so-called "feminists" who turned their backs even...

Overrating Agencies (Economy) By Joel Bowman 12/13/09 Taipei, Taiwan – As nervous investors await news of the next sovereign debt debacle, Moody’s Senior Vice President Tom Byrne gave them another reason to remain on guard this week. During an interview in Singapore on Friday, Byrne made the following comment concerning the health of the US and UK economies. “The outlook is stable.” Byrne’s placating remarks came in quickstep after a report from his firm earlier in the week let slip that the two massively indebted sovereigns may “test the AAA boundaries.” That report, in turn, emerged after the kafuffle in...

Current mortgage rates should be the answer to everyone's prayers--the chance to refinance at articificially low rates and enjoy artificially low payments into the hereafter. But, as David Streitfeld explains in the NYT, banks aren't refinancing all that many loans. Why not? They've raised lending standards to where they should have been on the first go-round, which makes many homeowners ineligible Many loans are underwater, and banks won't lend more than the house is worth (shocking, we know). Many loans have been securitized, so your current bank can't just modify them on its own. Some key stats: An estimated six...

Today I have read a piece of "journalism" by a freelance writer whose Slate article shows me why the profession has fallen on such hard times. The piece on fast food drive thru windows is not only pretentious but it is filled with enough fluff to stuff a mattress and leaves the impression that the writer thinks it all resembles wit. It simply amazes for its vacuous nature. And, worse, it doesn't even pay off fulfilling the premise of its headline. In fact, it is so ridiculous for its assumptions and its presumption of surety that one wonders if the...

New claims for unemployment benefits rose more than analysts expected last week, while an unexpected narrowing in the trade gap in October provided some indication that the U.S. economy is steadily growing. First-time claims for jobless benefits rose 17,000 last week, reaching 474,000 in total. This came after the number had declined for five weeks in a row, according to the Labor Department. The upward spike in claims is being blamed on seasonal layoffs in construction and similar industries and on the number of applications that had been held back from processing during the week of Thanksgiving. Analysts who had...

As many exotic adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) are set to recast in 2010, the Consumer Mortgage Audit Center (CMAC) is projecting a mortgage crisis in 2010 as large as the subprime. “We’ve spoken to Florida attorneys who sit at the forefront of the U.S. foreclosure crisis and have learned that 53 percent expect recasting ARMs to present a mortgage crisis as large as subprime and 61 percent expect to work on more loan modifications in 2010 than they did in 2009,” said Sylvia Alayon, VP of operations for CMAC “The New Year is going to hold very rude awakenings for...

This link goes to several interviews with Celente, the most recent of which right now is listed as "A Corrupt System Is Failing and It Needs to Fail," from December 9, 2009 Gerald Celente discusses the economy, financial system, Ben Bernanke and future trends forming from current events.

WASHINGTON — US President Barack Obama has hit out at Wall Street "fat cats", expressing anger that banks bailed out by the government plan huge bonuses while millions of Americans battle poverty and unemployment. "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama said Friday in excerpts of an interview with CBS television to be aired on Sunday. With unemployment still hovering at around 10 percent, amid a recession triggered in part by the excesses of financial institutions, Obama voiced frustration that "some people on Wall Street still don't...

"Developed countries, especially the U.S. and western Europe, produced an enormous amount of paper that represents assets that are unaccounted for," he says. The Bank for International Settlements put total notional value of outstanding derivatives at $591 trillion at end of 2008. "The amount of paper you have in America and western Europe that is unanchored to anything you can put your hands on is enormous," "Why should you be listening to me, a Latin American? Because we know something about flooding a market with paper." He's alluding to such crises as Argentina's repeated bouts with inflation or the loose...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc. Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms. A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG's trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks. Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of...

I have read the media in the past week with splashes like “Uganda puts case at climate change summit” and columnists saying “What do scientists mean when they talk about global warming?” Specifically, one article with such a message as “it’s grassroots activists and not politicians who will influence change” got me thinking about what politicians are doing in Copenhagen. Developing countries, especially the African ones, are seeking inter alia, reparations by developed nations to poor nations, but I can’t help thinking that this entire environmental arena is a grand political theatre. Sound science has been thoroughly corrupted with petty...

Maybe it’s the smoke from Mt. Vesuvius that keeps Arianna Huffington and the financial community from seeing that the economic collapse has nothing to do with the Fed "missing" the warning signs leading up to the October meltdown. “Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.” John F. Kennedy The Fed didn’t miss anything; the October meltdown was an inside job. Capitalism never made senseProfessor Ebeling, the Ludwig von Mises professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, understood something was wrong when he wrote: "the perverse development and evolution of historical capitalism, the institutions necessary for a truly free-market economy...