thestatedtruth.com | September 5, 2010
So even though we have nearly 8,000 banks, the bulk of the assets sit with a small number of banks and the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF), the fund that backs the assets of the banks is actually in the red for $15 billion: www.mybudget360.com
thestatedtruth.com | September 4, 2010
Without tax incentives, this may all be for not……..John Mauldin explains the simple facts of job growth…..Want to increase productivity and jobs? The best way it seems, is to encourage private business, and especially startups. “So we can’t count on the Intels or Microsofts to create employment: we need the entrepreneurs.” Delta Force There are [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 4, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | September 4, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | September 4, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | September 4, 2010
A must listen to interview with Jim Rickards about our economy and more. We all need to be aware of the direction of things to come. This interview from Jim Rickards will help in understanding these things better. Click on the following link or paste into your browser: http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/9/4_Jim_Rickards.html Biography of James G. Rickards…..James G. Rickards is [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 3, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | September 3, 2010
Very interesting, but also a worst nightmare for tax payers……….Under Pennsylvania law, Ambac Assurance (which insures some of Harrisburg’s debt) can take Harrisburg to court to seek an order to raise property taxes to pay debt. This is the nature of “full faith and credit” of general-obligation bonds. So the tax payers are stuck for the [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 3, 2010
Bond Vs. Stocks…..Pension Allocations. Looks like bonds are priced to perfection here, so if re allocations take place in the next year like this report says, then the results may not be pretty. If interest rates have any kind of a kick to the upside a broad under performance could be setting up for retirement accounts. Hmmm, isn’t [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 3, 2010
This from Art Cashin on the floor of The New York Stock Exchange On this day in 1666, a massive fire broke out in the city of London, England. It began in a bakery on Pudding Lane, which was on the East End (between London Bridge and the Tower). The fire raged into the shop [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 2, 2010
The Black Swan Theory or “Theory of Black Swan Events” was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain 1) the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology, 2) the non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 2, 2010
Consumers are eschewing fixed-line alternatives for their cell phones, opting to keep connected to a single number whether they’re at home or in the car. www.dailyreckoning.com
thestatedtruth.com | September 2, 2010
Key message here is….. for liquidity ratios, equity fund portfolio managers are at an all-time record low of 3.4%, down from 3.8% in June. Tack on the fact that there are less shorts to be covered – being that the market peaked in April, and short interest is now 4.3% of the S&P 500 market cap (in August 2008 it [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 2, 2010
Key words here are…..”public debt had served for decades as the ultimate shock absorber — rising in bad times but not declining much in good times.” Now things have to change as the wealthiest nations face years of belt-tightening. International Monetary Fund Warns G7 on Debt Thursday, 2 Sep 2010 By: Sewell Chan The world’s most [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 2, 2010
Crisis mode? Hmm…..their words not ours! ECB Keeps Key Interest Rate at 1%, May Maintain Crisis Mode By Christian Vits Sep 2, 2010 The European Central Bank kept interest rates at a record low today and President Jean-Claude Trichet may signal the bank will stay in crisis mode into next year. The ECB’s Governing Council [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 1, 2010
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson, Writings, 1743-1826 I predict future happiness for Americans if they [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 1, 2010
This looks like the worst sales performance since the early 1980′s………If autos looked this bad then one would asume that housing should fare no better as consumers still have too much debt…..Here is a quote from Toyota, “We are bracing ourselves for the coming crisis.”. Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co., [...]
thestatedtruth.com | September 1, 2010
Front Running the Fed September 1, 2010 “… the public is no longer investing in stocks, but rather in bonds. So far this year through July, bond mutual funds have attracted $224.4bn in net inflows including reinvested dividends. Equity funds have attracted only $17.2bn ytd, with $32.2bn going into International funds while $15.0bn flowed out [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 31, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | August 31, 2010
More then one in six Americans are currently on government anti-poverty programs and the number continues to rise. The chart is below. WASHINGTON — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand. More than 50 million Americans are [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 31, 2010
August 30, 2010 Record low temperatures for the day were set Monday in Long Beach and Santa Barbara amid cooler weather that has settled over Southern California, forecasters said. Long Beach recorded 58 degrees, breaking by one degree a record set in 1989, the National Weather Service said. Santa Barbara bottomed out at 48 degrees, [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 31, 2010
Rethinking American Options on Iran August 31, 2010 | 0856 GMT By George Friedman Public discussion of potential attacks on Iran’s nuclear development sites is surging again. This has happened before. On several occasions, leaks about potential airstrikes have created an atmosphere of impending war. These leaks normally coincided with diplomatic initiatives and were [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 30, 2010
According to the Investment Company Institute (ICI), bond mutual funds have attracted more money than equity mutual funds for 30 consecutive months through June, the longest stretch in more than 23 years.
thestatedtruth.com | August 30, 2010
News For Thought From Dr. Joe Duarte’s Market I.Q. Public Hospitals May Be A Thing Of The Past. According to The Wall Street Journal: “Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that can be the caregiver of last resort.” [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 30, 2010
Another fraudulent entity, this time it’s a state……The state of New Jersey’s most recent report said that as of June 2009, its pension funds should have assets of $112 billion to meet their future obligations, but have only $66 billion now — This is one of the largest shortfalls of its kind, and is known as an unfunded liability! The state [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 30, 2010
Interesting facts we haven’t heard of before! For the first time since at least 1997, fewer than 29 percent of ratings for stocks covered by brokerages worldwide are buys, according to 159,919 recommendations compiled by Bloomberg. Analysts are turning more pessimistic even as they push up estimates for profit growth among Standard & Poor’s [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 30, 2010
The Daily Reckoning Presents AAA Ratings: A Grim Fairy Tale How the ratings agencies have managed to emerge from the credit crisis unscathed and unregulated is a mystery…and a sham.”Nothing is ever clear or certain in public,” we wrote in The New Empire of Debt. “Every error is someone else’s fault. That is [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 30, 2010
The Emperor, The Gladiator & The Lion August 30, 2010 The last surviving gladiator stood alone in the Coliseum as the crowd shouted approval of his victories. The emperor called for a lion. In bounded a fierce beast that loped to the gladiator. As it was about to pounce on him, the gladiator whispered [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 29, 2010
Only three states had declining revenue, Illinois revenue declined 7%, while Michigan’s collections fell 3.8%. So, not sure just how this could happen, but….California, tax revenue declined 0.9%, despite 12% increase in income-tax collections, this according to the Rockefeller Institute. Hmm Best to remember it’s just one quarter and most state budgets are still busted. Question: Inquiring minds want to [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 29, 2010
Interesting to say the least….rare earth elemnts are used in almost everything that is high tech……. Bloomberg reports that China is cutting back 72% of its exports of Rare Earth metals. China has said that environmental issues are the reason for the cutbacks. 72% drop in availability of any commodity is important. RE’s are important. Japan [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 29, 2010
Some food for thought from George Friedman, CEO of STRATFOR, who believes China “will have a collapse” in the coming decade due to internal striff, an export based economy, and low internal rates of return, It will set America up as the primary beneficiary in a new Golden Era. Mr. Friedman’s views are controversial but well worth listening [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 29, 2010
Last week, the Liscio Report posted an interesting comment on their blog, Where we are?: Here’s an updated guide to “where we are”—how the U.S. economy is faring relative to the average of previous financial crises around the world. Though individual details vary, we’re following the script pretty well. In the graphs of four major [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 29, 2010
Yep, this is a true fact….Lawmakers have changed the tax code more than 15,000 times since the last major overhaul in 1986. Unbelievable! The current income tax forms (other than the 1040 short form) are so complicated that the average educated person still needs a tax preparer to do their taxes. This new report from Paul Volcker proposes a [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 29, 2010
By Todd Harrison of Minyanville Seeking Solutions In An Uncertain World We used to play for silver, now we play for life; ones for sport and one’s for blood at the point of a knife. –Grateful Dead We live in interesting times. During the last two years, a financial virus spawned and infected the economic [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 28, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | August 28, 2010
This continues to be a hot subject and the problems continue to get worse. Question: Why should communities have to support bloted state and government pension and benefit plans that are guaranteed no matter what the loses are, and totaly out of control while the rest of the country in the private sector has to live with less because of loses to IRA’s and [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 28, 2010
We need this crew in congress. They look smart, tentative, hard working and hungry. To sum it up, they’re a big improvement over the dogs we have there now!
thestatedtruth.com | August 28, 2010
But Fat Uncle Sam Needs To Slim Down So Instead, We’re All Going To Be Paying More To Uncle Sam !
thestatedtruth.com | August 27, 2010
Here is a summary of parts of a Wall Street Journal article by California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger on government pensions and employee benefit compensation. Roughly 80 cents of every government dollar in California goes to employee compensation and benefits. Spending on California’s state employees over the past decade rose at nearly three times the rate our [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 27, 2010
By Brian Pretti on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 The most important information in the Treasury International Capital flow stats concerns equities. Have a look at the chart below. To the point, the top clip of the chart is the twelve month moving average of foreign purchases of US equities. Clearly there is cyclical rhythm here. [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 27, 2010
08/27/2010 The WSJ’s Simon Constable interviews Robert Shiller. He says that an economic double dip may be “imminent.” Shiller also believes that when the NBER looks back at the data, Q3 of this year will mark the beginning of the second dip of the recession. Ironically, since up to now the previous recession has never actually [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 26, 2010
We’re on the road to no where as things degenerate, Rome is burning and the President is on another vacation…..what’s the matter with this picture? By Wes Goodman Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — The signals from U.S. economic data are “alarming” and the recovery has lost momentum, Mohamed A. El-Erian, Pacific Investment Management Co.’s chief executive officer, wrote in an [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 26, 2010
Modest is putting it bluntly…..There was some modestly encouraging news. The percentage of mortgage borrowers receiving foreclosure notices fell slightly to 4.57 percent in the April-to-June quarter. Government efforts haven’t made much of a difference. Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who have enrolled in the Obama administration’s main mortgage-relief program have been cut loose [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 26, 2010
One reason of many for a tough road ahead….. From JPM……The latest profit recovery (the three red dots) is reliant on declining labor costs like none before it. A profit recovery whose foundation is so reliant on sustained high productivity and low real wage growth should not command a very high P/E multiple. A recent JPM [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 26, 2010
The Canary in the coal mine. Sounds like a bad situation is setting itself up here…… We went over some of this just a few days ago……It’s an unfolding disaster…. Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, Springfield, plans to sell $3 billion in investments, or about 10% of its $33.1 billion in assets in the current fiscal year [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 26, 2010
Hmm…..Two months in a row, right in the middle of the traditional best seasonal time of the year for real estate….not one new home was sold valued above $750,000 in the whole U.S. according to David Rosenberg (he worked for Merrill Lynch and now resides in Canada as chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff). …..Attitudes towards [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 26, 2010
In a bid to stem taxpayer losses for bad loans guaranteed by federal housing agencies Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn) proposed that borrowers be required to make a 5% down payment in order to qualify. His proposal was rejected 57-42 on a party-line vote because, …………Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) explained, “passage [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 25, 2010
An economic recovery doesn’t look anything like this: www.dailyreckoning.com
thestatedtruth.com | August 25, 2010
NIKOLA TESLA THE GENIUS WHO LIT THE WORLD Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, which was then part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, region of Croatia. His father, Milutin Tesla was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor in her own right of household [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 25, 2010
The big players always knew that real estate loans were non-recourse loans. They walk-away voluntarily. Remember the commercial market is more professional than housing. As more of the big boys bite the dust, the huge bounce will crest, and down she comes. Pension funds, insurance companies, small banks, retirement accounts etc. get hammered. Commercial Property Owners Choose to Default By [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 25, 2010
Yra Harris. ……..Listen carefully, he knows what is coming! CNBC-CME Trader Sounds Off August 25, 2010 at 9:19 am More at: www.jsmineset.com/
thestatedtruth.com | August 24, 2010
Pension funds everywhere had better pay attention to what’s going on with the Illinois Teachers Retirement System. It’s a wake up call……Hello, anybody there! When the financial crisis erupted, it first hit banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, real estate/ private equity funds, asset managers, and then hit pension funds. But pensions remain very vulnerable because [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 24, 2010
Beijing has a 62-mile traffic jam near the Chinese capital that could last until mid-September. It has become a symbol of the dark side of China’s automobile age. Officials say traffic has been snarled along the outskirts of Beijing stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started Aug. 13. The jam [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 24, 2010
Existing home sales fell to their lowest level in over 15 years in July as inventories soared. It portrays a grim picture for the housing market absent government support. Home resales dropped a record 27.2% or nearly twice as much as analysts had expected to an annual rate of 3.83 million in July, according to the National Association of [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 23, 2010
By Todd Harrison of Minyanville Seeking Solutions In An Uncertain World We used to play for silver, now we play for life; ones for sport and one’s for blood at the point of a knife. –Grateful Dead We live in interesting times. During the last two years, a financial virus spawned and infected the economic [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 23, 2010
Let’s keep this in mind…..Quoting PIMCO’s Bill Gross on real estate mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac….”To suggest the private market can come back in and take the place [of the government] is simply impractical. It won’t work”. Sources say the Obama administration is floating the idea that any federal backing of mortgages be paid for [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 23, 2010
Bill Gross reviewed demographics in his PIMCO August Investment Outlook, and he showed a graph, “Deep Demographic Doo-Doo”…..Now we can read David Rosenberg’s take on the matter. Today David Rosenberg begins to tackle the U.S. demographic issues from his own perspective, with his preliminary conclusions, not validating any current optimistic perspectives in the U.S. economy: “starting next [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 23, 2010
Milton Friedman: “The most efficient way of spending money is to spend your own, and the least efficient way is to spend other people’s”…“If you go out to lunch and have to pay your own bill, you have what you can afford. If someone else is paying, you may just have the steak and lobster.”.
thestatedtruth.com | August 23, 2010
One more reason that the average person on main street has no chance, and that’s official! Interest rates continue to drop for the U.S. Treasury, large companies and home buyers, but for most of the 381 million U.S. credit-card accounts borrowing rates have been flying to the upside at an alarming pace. Amoung the reasons: [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 22, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | August 22, 2010
The Phillie Fed report was just awful. Buried in the details was the fact that the hours-worked index is collapsing, consistent with previews to past recessions. Very worrisome. (From my favorite slicer and dicer of data, Greg Weldon: www.weldononline.com) Bottom line? It is going to be a tough environment for the next 6-8 years. That [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 21, 2010
So, what does our government (boneheads) expect. The emerging new economic power of the world is China. They are also the largest holder of our debt (by the way, this sets up the potential of financial warfare). Doesn’t logic say that military power will follow! It might behove the United States NOT to sell Taiwan [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 20, 2010
HAMP stands for Home Affordable Modification Plan…… The key here is that these borrowers are still up to their eyeballs in debt after the modification. From Treasury: HAMP Servicer Performance Report Through July 2010 According to HAMP, there are 255,934 “active trials”, down from 364,077 last month. There is still a large number of borrowers in limbo [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 20, 2010
Quoted from Art Cashin on the floor of The New York Stock Exchange Yesterday, there was a bit of floor buzz on a Bloomberg TV item. The story was that when the President headed off to vacation, he assigned two top defense aides to follow him. That raised some discussion about whether an Israeli move [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 20, 2010
Aug 20, 2010 PIMCO’s Bill Gross Has A Big Idea…..Actually JP Morgan might have started these thoughts. Question: Is It Fair To Save The Irresponsible At The Expense Of The Prudent And Conservative? Where is the bonus for being fiscally responsible? Auh, there is none unless your in financial trouble! At Tuesday’s [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 20, 2010
We’re sure that everyone has the best intentions to pay these hardship loans back, but……. A new study by Fidelity says record number of workers tapped their retirement funds and made hardship withdrawals from their accounts in the second quarter. According to the Fidelity study, “Among the 11 million workers whose 401(k) plans are run by Fidelity, [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 19, 2010
Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf who said that in reality the budget deficit could come in much higher than the just disclosed estimates, and the recent economic data releases have been “more negative” than data factored into the projection. Which, in government talk, means that the real deficit will likely come at least 20-30% higher, [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 19, 2010
U.S. commercia real estate mall prices fall almost 11% in second quarter. Question……To whom would one sell commercial property to if forced in this environment? The red ink is going to be massive. The plunge is on. Let’s hope the powers to be never require this stuff to be marked to market by the small banks or pension funds [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 19, 2010
A scary setup……Greece is just the beginning, not an end, we have started a spiral. The dominoes are now falling one by one. Life will get a lot harder for the entire world including here in the U.S (we haven’t even got to the austerity part here), we’re now entering the twilight zone. The solutions are [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 18, 2010
This chart from Deutsche Bank, which appeared in U.S. Global’s weekly Investor Alert, shows the progression of China’s crude oil imports going back to 2002. As you can see, the trend—represented by the red annual average lines—shows that China is importing three times more crude than eight years ago to support its economic growth. [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 18, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | August 18, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | August 18, 2010
By David Mildenberg and Jody Shenn // Aug 18, 2010 Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among 11 lenders that could suffer $133.8 billion in combined losses as mortgage-bond investors and insurers demand refunds for soured loans, according to an analysis by Compass Point Research and Trading LLC. That’s the base estimate by [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 17, 2010
From Zerohedge.com 08/17/2010 The one must watch interview of the week (if not of the year) features Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass. Bass, who correctly called the subprime implosion (and profited handsomely from it) as a iconoclast contrarian to conventional wisdom, tells David Faber that “given my outlook on the world, I don’t know how I [...]
thestatedtruth.com | August 17, 2010
American households pared their debts last quarter, closing credit card accounts and taking out fewer mortgages as unemployment persisted near a 26-year high, a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed. Consumer indebtedness totaled $11.7 trillion at the end of June, a decline of 1.5 percent from the previous three months and [...]