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President Obama's excuses for firing AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin look weaker every day. The FBI has opened an investigation into a Sacramento program formerly run by a close ally of President Obama's, giving credence to the IG's work.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil prices broke through the $70 per-barrel barrier Friday and more forecasters are broadening expectations for an upward swing in crude. Benchmark crude for July delivery lost 37 cents to settle at $68.44 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, finishing the week with a gain of nearly $2 a barrel. Earlier in the day oil jumped as high as $70.32 per barrel, the highest since October. Oil prices have been soaring for months despite a massive surplus of petroleum and natural gas. A large amount of speculative money has flowed into the markets, according to government...

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear to those who follow US economic statistics that there is something dubious about the numbers released by official government agencies and used to guide many aspects of social and public policy. The details and chronology of the corruption of economic data are presented in a new book by Kevin Phillips, the political commentator and former Republican Party adviser who has become something of a muckraking critic of the “excesses” that he helped set in motion. The book is entitled, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism...

The psychic tells him that he will soon be $50 poorer. The psychic then charges the man $50 for the session. The man, being somewhat simple, is so impressed by the psychic’s abilities that he tells his friends. The friends, also gullible, experience similar sessions with the psychic and are similarly impressed. They in turn tell their friends. Eventually the psychic is world renowned as the Ultimate Guru for forecasting the future. As laughable as this scenario seems, it’s roughly how today’s stock market rally is playing out. And the psychic is the “futures market.”

China does not manipulate renminbi exchange rate During an economist dialogue event held on May 11, Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Economics Prize winner claimed that China's huge trade surplus is the result of government intervention and the world cannot continue to accept such tremendous trade deficit caused by China. Long Yongtu, Secretary General of the Boao Forum for Asia, responded by saying that China should not be criticized for its huge trade surplus. China blamed for trade surplus Krugman argued that China's huge trade surplus is a result of government policies and the deficit would not run this high...

Time To Breakup Goldman Sachs It's time to breakup Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and for that matter any bank or holding company deemed too big to fail. It's not just the "too big to fail" hazard that is troubling, it's also the power these corporations have and the potential to abuse that power that is also troubling. /snip Readers know that I am not a subscriber to Plunge Protection Team (PPT) theory. However, I am open to the idea that it is possible for Broker Dealers or Bank Holding Companies to be trading their own accounts ahead of customer accounts and/or...

Can we just drop the pretense and start calling the bank bailout what it is: Financial terrorism. Terrorism can be defined as achieving one’s aims through fear. And it sure seems to me that bankers and their friends in government are extorting money from the taxpayers (you and me) with a threatening “or else” that goes something like this: “Give us the money or the entire financial system will implode.” And as we fork over the extortion money, these corporate gangsters put us on the hook for trillions of dollars MORE. Obama’s bailout of AIG is just one example of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - California's attorney general is reviewing a request by former employees of IndyMac Bancorp Inc to investigate whether a New York senator triggered the bank's collapse by releasing confidential information. At issue is a much-publicized letter that Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, sent in June to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) and Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) questioning the company's ability to survive. The FDIC took control of IndyMac on July 11 after depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion over 11 days. It was the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history. At the time, OTS Director John Reich...

Gold is shifting from West to East – along with the balance of power By Dominic Frisby Jan 21, 2009 What's going on with gold? Twice a day – at 10:30AM and 3PM - the price of gold is set on the London market by the five members of the London Gold Pool (HSBC, SocGen, Deutsche Bank, Scotia-Mocata and Barclays). This is known as the London fix and it's used as the benchmark to price gold, gold products and derivatives in markets around the world. I've been looking at some charts and an astonishing pattern has become apparent. It's a...

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market. So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike...

If Sen. Barack Obama loses the presidency or wins by far narrower margins than the double-digit lead some mainstream media polls predict, his weak performance will not be the result of the so-called “Bradley Effect,” which holds that black candidates underperform at the polls due to latent racism. Rather, the true culprit will be something public opinion scholars call the “Spiral of Silence Theory.” In the 1970s, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced a provocative and startling theory of mass communication she called the “Spiral of Silence.” Noelle-Neumann argued that when mass media create an impression that the majority of...

In 2007, Shaw personally earned an estimated $210 million and he spent a chunk of it on contributions to prominent Democratic politicians during the 2008 presidential cycle according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Overall, the hedge fund’s employees skew heavily Democratic, contributing more than $200,000 to political candidates in the 2008 campaign cycle, according to the center. Only $2,000 of that went to a Republican. The hedge fund also has gotten much more involved in Washington policymaking in recent years (snip) resisting increased regulation and taxation of hedge funds in Washington.

The very last statement made by the male newscaster that assists Geraldo Rivera on the Geraldo at Large Show on FOXNews tonight [it ended at 10 p.m. EST] was: "The government is investigating 24 corporations who were manipulating the [stock] market in September!" I don't know anything more about this statement because only except sign-offs by guests happened after that. Wayne Rogers [Trapper John on M*A*S*H], a guest on the show, was even cut off in mid-sentence signing off.

Now in a time of war and financial meltdown, we have a relatively unknown candidate for the highest office in the land, who keeps fluffing off reports of radical associations as if he is swatting a mosquito away, and you just accept his nonsensical answers at face value. Let's recap some of what Barrack Obama seems to have skated passed the American media -- and by default -- much of the American public. First comes the twenty-year association with a very racist, radical and politically-incorrect Reverend Wright, who is on tape ranting and raving about the American government, white people,...

<p>George Soros, Al Gore, Warren Buffet, Maurice StrongThe Democrat-loving mainstream media is missing the boat on Warren Buffet’s take of America’s economic meltdown as …”a sort of economic Pearl Harbor we’re going through.”</p> <p>That being the case, then surely the first question should be: “Who is attacking the U.S.?”</p>

I searched for a live thread but didn't find one so here it is. The NYSE is down 136 points after the first 4 minutes.

Big jump in gold sale spurs manipulation talk Some analysts say only manipulation is government's attempt to take down oil By Moming Zhou, MarketWatch Last update: 7:54 p.m. EDT Aug. 29, 2008 NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Recent heat from Congress and regulators, along with public speculation, over whether commodity prices are being manipulated has also reached gold pits, where the debate was stirred by a surge in bets last month that gold prices would fall. "Congress is already investigating allegations of manipulation in the oil market, and it seems likely that it is only a matter of time before a...

Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife From Amazon This massively documented study of Nazi cinema...notably succeeds in analysing how Nazi films created a dreamworld that seemed neither realistic nor fantastic, but agreeable and persuasive--indeed closer to Hollywood than to Stalinist cinema. Above all, [Rentschler] stresses how films belong to a German cultural continuum, reaching into the present. Fifty years after Siegfried Kracauer's landmark book From Caligari to Hitler, this is the study that's long been needed of the movies' most disturbing triumph. (Sight and Sound ) Fifty years after Kracauer's monumental 'From Caligari to Hitler' comes the next...

A few speculators dominate vast oil market Regulators: Swiss energy firm holds 11 percent of contracts on NYMEX Regulators had long classified a private Swiss energy conglomerate called Vitol as a trader that primarily helped industrial firms that needed oil to run their businesses. But when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission examined Vitol's books last month, it found that the firm was in fact more of a speculator, holding oil contracts as a profit-making investment rather than a means of lining up the actual delivery of fuel. Even more surprising to the commodities markets was the massive size of Vitol's...