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UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a $100bn (£69bn) global fund to underwrite world trade as his pre-G20 summit tour continues in Brazil. Mr Brown is on a three-continent trip ahead of next week's London summit. He was speaking after holding talks with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Brazil's exports fell 25% in the past three months and the PM, who will also meet ex-football hero Socrates, urged the World Bank to provide trade credit. Trade finance In a joint statement, the two leaders called for measures to boost global economic demand and for action to...

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has introduced legislation that would "bar the dollar from being replace by any foreign currency." A statement from Bachmann's website:

<p>ANNANDALE, Va. (MarketWatch) -- Call it the retreat of the gold bugs.</p> <p>Over the past three weeks, the editor of the average gold timing newsletter I monitor has hastily jumped off the bullish bandwagon. And a not insignificant number have taken the occasion to furthermore jump onto the bearish bandwagon.</p>

Hail moves by Switzerland, other tax havens to increase cooperationHORSHAM, England (MarketWatch) -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday downplayed a rift between the United States and Europe over Washington's calls to boost government spending to lift global demand."Every country has made a major contribution to fiscal stimulus," with efforts by major nations resulting in the largest round of global stimulus "the world has ever seen," Brown said at a London news conference following a meeting with Merkel. The bilateral meeting came as finance ministers and central bankers from the world's 20 most powerful...

HORSHAM, England (MarketWatch) -- The joint statement issued by the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers on Saturday:We, the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, met today to prepare for the Leaders' London Summit. We agreed further action to restore global growth and support lending, and reforms to strengthen the global financial system. Restoring Global Growth 1. We have taken decisive, coordinated and comprehensive action to boost demand and jobs, and are prepared to take whatever action is necessary until growth is restored. We commit to fight all forms of protectionism and maintain open trade and investment....

LONDON (MarketWatch) - Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 most powerful industrialized and emerging nations begin meeting Friday in an effort to come up with a uniform plan to deal with a historic global recession and persistent financial turmoil. See full story.How did we get here? Here are some of the major milestones - so far -- in the financial crisis. Bear warning Warning signs had been visible for years, but became increasingly apparent in 2007 as losses began to mount on subprime loans and the once-booming housing market began to lose its luster. Investment bank...

Critics say the financial sector is holding the economy hostage WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The world's largest financial institutions urged the G20 financial leaders on Friday to endorse the "bad bank" approach to dealing with the credit crisis, an expensive model one expert likened to another ransom note.The request came in a letter to U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown from the Institute of International Finance, a trade group of the world's largest global banks. The IIF wants Brown and his G20 colleagues to push the Obama administration in the direction of setting up a bad bank. Under this approach, governments would...

U.S. officials turning up pressure on Europe to boost stimulusLONDON (MarketWatch) -- Don't look for the world's most powerful economic policy makers to come up with a sweeping prescription for a deepening global recession when they gather this weekend in southern England.The meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the world's 20 largest industrialized and emerging economies Friday and Saturday at a luxury hotel near Brighton comes amid a growing disagreement between the United States and Europe over Washington's call for additional government spending to rev up slumping global demand. 'The possibility that the upcoming [G20] meeting could provide...

Barack Obama is Destroying Our Economy on Purpose. A pair of radical Columbia University professors by the name of Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article in the radical magazine known as The Nation. The article was published on May 2, 1966 and laid out what is now known as the "Cloward-Piven Strategy". The plan calls for the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions. Cloward and Piven studied Saul Alinsky just like Hillary Clinton and President Obama....

The world is suffering through the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a crisis that has precipitated a sharp downturn in the global economy. Its fundamental causes remain in dispute. In my view, however, it is impossible to understand this crisis without reference to the global imbalances in trade and capital flows that began in the latter half of the 1990s. In the simplest terms, these imbalances reflected a chronic lack of saving relative to investment in the United States and some other industrial countries, combined with an extraordinary increase in saving relative to investment in many emerging market nations....

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke stressed Tuesday that major financial institutions would not be allowed to fail given the fragile state of financial markets and the global economy. In a speech in Washington, Bernanke repeated that a sustainable economic recovery will "remain out of reach" until the banking sector is stabilized. A recovery later this year is not out of the question, Bernanke said. ************************* 'It was the...collapse of banks and other institutions in late 1930 and early 1931 that made the Great Depression great.' — Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

Barack Obama’s top economic adviser has urged world leaders to pump more public money into the economy in a co-ordinated effort to boost demand and lift the world out of recession.In an interview with the Financial Times, Lawrence Summers said the urgent need for a short-term increase in spending by governments temporarily overrode the longer-term goal of tackling the global imbalances many economists believe caused the financial crisis. The US administration had no choice but to take strong public action to “save the market system from its own excesses”, he said.His comments, ahead of next month’s crunch G20 summit in...

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There's a $700 trillion elephant in the room and it's time we found out how much it really weighs on the economy. Derivative contracts total about three-quarters of a quadrillion dollars in "notional" amounts, according to the Bank for International Settlements. These contracts are tallied in notional values because no one really can say how much they are worth. But valuing them correctly is exactly what we should be doing because these comprise the viral disease that has infected the financial markets and the economies of the world. Try as we might to salvage the...

An excerpt from the second paragraph: "The IMF . . . is suggesting governments adopt a 'binding code of conduct across nations' to coordinate how and when they would intercede in troubled firms, and how to share losses from major financial institutions that operate across borders." From further down in the article: ". . .the IMF is endorsing a G-20 idea to have financial firms overseen by 'colleges of supervisors'--essentially regulators from a financial firm's home country and other countries where it does business." more at the link.

British government stake could rise to 77%, reports say NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - Lloyds Banking Group PLC and the U.K. government have reached an agreement in which the government's stake in the financial giant could increase to as much as 77% in exchange for its insuring up to 260 billion pounds ($365 billion) of the bank's risky assets, according to reports Saturday. The deal would involve Lloyds giving the government 15.6 billion pounds in non-voting B shares in return for the British Treasury's insurance against further losses on its assets, Reuters reported. The move would bump the government's stake in...

'Run on UK' sees foreign investors pull $1 trillion out of the City http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/run-on-uk-sees-foreign-investors-pull-1-trillion-out-of-the-city-1639413.html

by Peter Hördahl (Extract from pages 10-11 of BIS Quarterly Review, March 2009) In recent months, break-even inflation rates, ie the difference between yields on nominal and real bonds, have been abnormally volatile, falling to unprecedentedly low levels before recovering somewhat in early 2009. The US 10-year break-even rate, for example, dropped to almost zero in late 2008 after having remained relatively stable at around 2.5% over the past several years (Graph A, left-hand panel). A similar pattern, albeit less pronounced, has been seen in euro area break-even rates (Graph A, centre panel). A natural question to ask is: to...

Chief executives of leading banks from Japan, Europe and the United States will meet in London to discuss regulation of the financial sector, according to a report. The British government will host the talks on March 24, ahead of an April summit of Group of 20 leaders, the Nikkei economic daily said, without naming sources. Invitations have been sent to the chiefs of leading institutions including US-based JPMorgan Chase and Co. and British bank HSBC, it said.