Free Republic

A few days ago but current events so I posted in "News/Current Events"

Stocks rallied to start the week thanks to a better-than-expected ISM services sector report and a Goldman Sachs upgrade of big banks, including Wells Fargo, Comerica and Capital One. But all is not right in either the economy or the banking sector, according to Christopher Whalen, managing director at Institutional Risk Analytics. In fact, Whalen says most observers are drawing the wrong economic conclusions from the stock market's robust rally. "Why is liquidity going into the financial sector? It's because the real economy is dying [and] everyone is fleeing into the stocks and bonds because they're liquid at the moment,"...

For the last few months I have been casting around looking for bullish data points as counterfactuals to my more bearish long-term outlook. I have found some, but not enough. If you recall, early this year, I stated that we are in depression, making the case for the ongoing downturn as a depression with a small ‘d.’ Nevertheless, I was quite optimistic about the ability of policymakers to engineer a fake recovery predicated on stimulus and asset price reflation and I certainly saw this as bullish for financial shares if not the broader stock market. But, I saw these events...

New orders received by U.S. factories posted their first drop in five months in August, government data showed on Friday, going against Wall Street expectations that they would rise. Orders fell 0.8 percent after rising 1.4 percent in July, which was originally reported as a 1.3 percent increase, according to the Commerce Department. Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting them to gain by 0.3 percent. The drop was the first since March, when they fell 1.9 percent. Factory orders were also down when compared to August 2008, by 22.5 percent.

New orders to U.S. factories fell in August by the largest amount in five months, as American manufacturers struggle to emerge from the recession. The Commerce Department said Friday that demand for manufactured goods dropped 0.8 percent, much worse than the 0.7 percent gain that economists had expected. The August decline reflected plunging demand for commercial aircraft, a category that surged in July.

October tumble

I don't agree with Dr. Manning that this government will deliberately create a lasting depression so as to create a Socialist country. We are already there. I also want to say that Economies are . . . .

Though CEOs of dozens of high profile companies are bullish on their sales prospects in the next six months, the additional sales won’t translate into more hiring or spending, a recent survey has found. According to the survey of CEOs by the Business Roundtable, 51% of respondents see sales increasing in the next six months, but only 13% expect to increase work force and 21% anticipate increased capital spending.

Hong Kong is pulling all its physical gold holdings from depositories in London, transferring them to a high-security depository newly built at the city's airport, in a move that won praise from local traders Thursday. The facility, industry professionals said, would support Hong Kong's emergence as a Swiss-style trading hub for bullion and would lessen London's status as a key settlement-and-storage center. "Having a central government-sponsored vault would create a situation where you could conceivably look at Hong Kong as being a hub, where metal could be traded for the region," The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, which functions as the...

You have to wonder when you see statistics like this (through 9:30 this morning): Remove SPY, ETFC and LEHMQ (none of which trade on the NYSE) from the list and you get 606 million shares. How many shares have traded in total with one hour in? 1.491 billion. Forty percent of the volume is comprised of four used dogfood stocks, just as we've seen for the last couple of weeks - all people passing shares back and forth among each other, many of it being "computer HFT games." The other used dog-food stocks (LEHMQ and ETFC) are really no better;...

Rep. Ron Paul’s proposal to fully audit the Federal Reserve system by the end of 2010 appears likely to find its way into legislation in some form. Mr. Paul and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank plan to meet with other lawmakers in the coming weeks to determine how the Government Accountability Office would conduct the audit and what information would be released. What does the GAO audit now? The GAO’s oversight of the Fed system is limited to areas outside of monetary policy. That includes everything from bank supervision to consumer issues to payment systems. The Fed’s annual...

The Office of Management and Budget has released its annual mid-session review that updates the budget projections from this past May.[1] They show that this year, Washington will spend $30,958 per household, tax $17,576 per household, and borrow $13,392 per household. The federal government will increase spending 22 percent this year to a peacetime-record 26 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). This spending is not just temporary: President Obama would permanently keep annual spending between $5,000 and $8,000 per household higher than it had been under President George W. Bush.[2]

President Obama is turning a blind eye to Bernanke's all too many errors of judgment. An old boss of mine, who is well versed in the ways of Washington, once cynically explained to me that in Washington nothing succeeded so well as failure. President Obama's decision to reappoint Ben Bernanke for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman would suggest that my former boss continues to be right about the way Washington works. Despite Bernanke's many egregious errors of judgment during his first term, which have cost the nation so dearly, President Obama is choosing to give him a second...

Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke, who was reappointed to a second four-year term Tuesday, is a renowned expert on the Great Depression, driven to avoid a repeat of such devastation. Bernanke has earned plaudits for helping steer the US economy through one of its most perilous periods and toward recovery, with President Barack Obama repeatedly thanking him for his contribution. He was aided in his bid for a second term at the helm of the Fed by the strong working relationship he has forged with Democrat Obama's economic team -- despite being a holdover from George W. Bush's Republican...

Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, notes that the forecasts presume no change in current tax laws...As Elmendorf dryly puts it: “Putting the nation on a sustainable fiscal course will require some combination of lower spending and higher revenues than the amounts now projected

On the heels of the Obama administration's revised deficit numbers which show a projected 9-trillion-dollar deficit rather than 7 trillion as originally predicted, the Feds today rolled out some more 'revised' figures that should send the warning flags waving frantically.

This is an alert that a stock market crash is imminent in the TSX, Dow, and other global stock markets. Get out now before it's too late! Safety can be found in gold, silver, and bonds. It is imperative that you take cover now. The coming weeks will be turbulent to say the least. The crash will start Wednesday or Thursday of this week. Get out of long positions. REPEAT: Get out of long positions! I don't care if you're invested for the long term. The Dow is going to 2300. It will be a stomach-churning ride if you have...

Taylor Bean was one of the largest independent home-loan providers before it closed down its mortgage-lending operation Wednesday in the wake of the FHA move. Among originators of FHA mortgages, Taylor Bean was the third-largest, and it was the nation's 12th-largest home-mortgage lender overall, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication.