thestatedtruth.com | March 31, 2010
From The Wall Street Journal: At the root of governments’ problems today are promises made in past decades. As a group, state and local governments have promised an estimated $3.35 trillion in pension and health-care benefits to be paid over the next three decades, but are estimated to have 70% of the money to cover [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 31, 2010
From The Wall Street Journal………………. Many private-company workers have seen their retirement accounts shrivel, while public-sector benefits have been relatively unscathed. Defined-contribution plans such as 401(k)s had $3.33 trillion in assets at the end of 2009, down 4% from $3.48 trillion in 2006, according to the Federal Reserve. Such accounts have lost value even [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 31, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 31, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 30, 2010
www.ingerletter.com
thestatedtruth.com | March 30, 2010
www.ingerletter.com
thestatedtruth.com | March 30, 2010
By Dunstan McNichol March 30 (Bloomberg) — The two-year slide in tax collections that opened a $196 billion gap in U.S. state budgets has stopped, easing pressure on credit ratings and giving leeway to lawmakers as they craft spending plans for next year. The 15 largest states by population forecast a 3.9 percent gain [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 30, 2010
By David M. Levitt March 30 (Bloomberg) — Downtown Manhattan, where demand for office space began to surge three years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is about to lose its spot as the best- performing U.S. market. Vacancies may exceed 14 percent of the area’s 87 million square feet by late 2011, empty space that’s [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
Arch Crawford Sets His Opinion On Outlier Event Expected To Happen Between May 1st and Nov 1st Of This Year Posted By thestatedtruth.com Is It Written In The Stars? Peter Brimelow devotes his column this morning to the latest projections from Arch Crawford. Crawford in case you didn’t know, bases many, in fact most, of his projections through the use [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
Borrowing costs borne by Government increase dynamically as the cost of forward debt service jumps. As servicing debt consumes the bulk of the Federal budget, it becomes a crisis almost immediately. The bloating of Governmental services, help to the states, and concurrent reluctance on the part of major creditors, just adds to what is an [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
03/29/2010 “We have 3,500 nuclear weapons left over from the cold war we don’t need, they take 20 seconds to re-aim, we’re not afraid to use them, and by the way, they’re already aimed at you.” That is the approach James Baker III thinks America should take with Iran, Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 29, 2010
The decline in the U.S. bee population, first observed in 2006, is continuing, a phenomenon that still baffles researchers and beekeepers.Data from the US Department of Agriculture show a 29 percent drop in beehives in 2009, following a 36 percent decline in 2008 and a 32 percent fall in 2007. This affects not only honey [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 26, 2010
www.ingerletter.com
thestatedtruth.com | March 26, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 26, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 26, 2010
Household Net Worth The typical household has a net worth of about $84,000, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s down 30% since 2007, thanks to losses in stock portfolios and declining home values. For the 50% of families in the middle of the scale, household income ranges from $51,000 to $123,000 for a typical two-parent, [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 25, 2010
By John Gittelsohn March 25 (Bloomberg) — More than half of U.S. borrowers who received loan modifications on delinquent mortgages defaulted again after nine months, according to a federal report. The re-default rate of loans modified in the first quarter of 2009 was 51.5 percent by the end of the year, the Office of [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 25, 2010
STEVE FORBES, Forbes.com “Fact and Comment” (3/25/10): Socialists believe that the way to paradise is for governments to own “the means of production.” Thus, decades ago even democratic countries such as France and Britain nationalized considerable swathes of their economies to achieve “social justice.” That didn’t work so well; therefore, since the days of Margaret [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 24, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 24, 2010
www.ingerletter.com
thestatedtruth.com | March 24, 2010
Gene Inger’s Daily Briefing . . . for Thursday March 25, 2010: Good evening; A looming trade war with China . . . superficially seems the least desirable tact, for both China and the United States. However, the trend has been building for a couple years now; as we’ve forewarned with respect to [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 23, 2010
States Sue Over Healthcare Overhaul By Pat Wechsler March 23 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama faces a fight over the health-care overhaul from states that sued today because the legislation’s expansion of Medicaid imposes a fiscal strain on their cash-strapped budgets. Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania are among 14 states that filed suit after [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 23, 2010
How the Middle Class Slowly Evaporated in the Last 40 Years – Loss of Manufacturing, Bank Deregulation, Hyper Consumption, and Short-term Profit Seeking from Wall Street. Posted: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:06:51 +0000 Some like to think that the middle class has always been a fixture of American society. In fact, the rise of a [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 22, 2010
States Rebel Against Washington The pushback against federal power began under Bush, but may now be accelerating. Atlanta There’s an old joke in South Carolina: Confederate President Jefferson Davis may have surrendered at the Burt-Stark mansion in Abbeville, S.C., in 1865, but the people of state Rep. Michael Pitts’s district never did. With revolutionary die-hards [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 22, 2010
I.M.F. Gives Debt Warning for the Wealthiest Nations BEIJING — The global economic crisis has left “deep scars” in the fiscal balances of the world’s advanced economies, which should begin to rein in spending next year as the recovery continues, the No. 2 official at the International Monetary Fund said on Sunday in Beijing. In [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 21, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 20, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
http://lcmgroupe.home.comcast.net/~lcmgroupe/Tipping_Points.htm
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
http://lcmgroupe.home.comcast.net/~lcmgroupe/Tipping_Points.htm
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
The current national average interest rate for credit cards is 14.56 percent yet they are offering clients who want to save 0.1% or even lower on their savings account. In business lingo this is what you call the margin and it is gigantic. This is why the banking system is fundamentally flawed. They borrow taxpayer [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
www.ingrletter.com
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
Saving and the restoration of the average family unit’s retirement coffers is what this is about. And in that case current and former officials should be encouraging building citizen savings; not just trying to return us as a nation to the irresponsible practices of the past, which would only help the Chinese economy more than [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 19, 2010
Military Priorities in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in Washington this week, saying that military progress in Afghanistan will be difficult this year. Afghan security officials recently have issued similar warnings, noting that the number of violent assaults is likely to [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 18, 2010
By: Carrie Bay 03/18/2010 Notice of defaults, which represent the start of the foreclosure process in California, increased by 19.7 percent in February, according to new data released this week by a locally-based company that tracks every foreclosure inthe state. The sudden jump comes after four straight months of declines, when default notices fell to [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 18, 2010
Mar 18, 2010 6:16 am US/Eastern NEW YORK (CBS) ― For hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, the check won’t be in the mail — at least not on time. New York State has stopped paying tax refunds and won’t start again until next month. The tax refund delay is part of a bigger cash [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 17, 2010
To activate interactive clock click here: www.usdebtclock.org Image: www.usdebtclock.org
thestatedtruth.com | March 17, 2010
By Tim Catts and Sarah Mulholland March 17 (Bloomberg) — SLM Corp., the largest U.S. student-loan company, raised $1.5 billion in the bond market, paying more than it charges some borrowers to begin addressing $11 billion of bonds maturing through next year. Sallie Mae, as the company is known, sold $1.5 billion of 8 percent [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 17, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 17, 2010
On this day in the year of our Lord 389, there lived a foin broth of a lad who was…. dependin’ on the boyographer ye read: a Spanish peasant, a French herdschild, a Celt from Bannavem or a Gael from Dumbarton, Scotland. At any rate, at age 16 this lad was kidnapped by pirates and [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 16, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 16, 2010
Pink Slips Sent To Thousands Of Calif. Teachers By ROBIN HINDERY, Associated Press Writer Monday, March 15, 2010 California’s budget crisis could cost nearly 22,000 teachers their jobs this year. State school districts had issued 21,905 pink slips to teachers and other school employees by Monday, the legal deadline for districts to send preliminary layoff [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 16, 2010
Moody’s fears social unrest as AAA states implement austerity plans The world’s five biggest AAA-rated states are all at risk of soaring debt costs and will have to implement austerity plans that threaten “social cohnesion”, according to a report on sovereign debt by Moody’s. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Published: 6:48PM GMT 15 Mar 2010 The US [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 16, 2010
Is It A Bluff Or Is It Battle Preparation? – Several blogs have picked up on reports that the U.S. may be transferring “bunker-buster bombs” to a base in the Indian Ocean. Here’s a part of a story in the Sunday Herald of Scotland: Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 16, 2010
When Money Supplies Go Wild! By James Turk The US money supply is much bigger than the official numbers indicate…$1.25 trillion bigger, to be exact. If you care about the value of the dollars in your pocket, this information should matter greatly to you. As the financial crisis has unfolded over the last two [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 16, 2010
. Germany: Mitteleuropa Redux By Peter Zeihan | March 16, 2010 The global system is undergoing profound change. Three powers — Germany, Iran and China — face challenges forcing them to refashion the way they interact with their regions and the world. We will explore each of these three states in detail in our [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 15, 2010
For the last two years, Gallup has been asking 1,000 Americans every day how much they’ve been spending at stores, restaurants, gas stations, and online. The average for upper-income households–those with incomes above $90,000–in February plunged to a new low of $98, down 13% from January. The numbers aren’t seasonally adjusted, so the monthly changes [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 13, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 13, 2010
From Barron’s
thestatedtruth.com | March 13, 2010
From Barron’s “The municipal-bond market, for one, seems vulnerable to the growing public pension mess. Warren Buffett, in his 2007 Berkshire Hathaway annual report, inveighed against the “woefully inadequate” funding in many public pension funds to meet “huge” promised payments to retirees. True to his word, Buffett has sold precious little municipal-bond insurance in a [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 13, 2010
Source: TGR 03/12/2010 Charismatic, articulate, contrary and persuasive, Rick Rule probably could draw an audience if he were talking about the weather. But combine his presence with character, knowledge, understanding, experience and a track record of success, particularly in the resource arena, and the crowd falls silent. People listen to what Rick has to say and, [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 13, 2010
Cumberland Advisors What Is He Thinking? March 12, 2010 Bob Eisenbeis is Cumberland’s Chief Monetary Economist. Prior to joining Cumberland Advisors he was the Executive Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Bob is presently a member of the U.S. Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee and the Financial Economist Roundtable. [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 12, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 11, 2010
Silverstein May Default on Debt for 575 Lexington By Brian Louis and David M. Levitt March 10 (Bloomberg) — New York developer Larry Silverstein, who teamed with the California State Teachers Retirement System to buy a 35-story skyscraper in 2006, now faces “imminent default” on debt tied to the property, Fitch Ratings said today. Silverstein [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 11, 2010
631 Million Credit Cards for 113 Million Households – Credit Card Excess Contracting for First Time in 40 Years. How Plastic Hid Middle Class Financial Decay. Posted: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:10:22 +0000 It is estimated that in 2010 we will have 181 million Americans carrying credit cards. Now this is interesting given that [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 11, 2010
Here‘s a rundown of average income tax rates for 10 high-tax countries, based on information from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. The data are for 2008, the most recent numbers available. 10. Australia Income tax rates: Single, no child: 22.6% Single, two children: 22.6% One-earner married couple, no child: 19.1% One-earner married couple, two children: [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 11, 2010
From Art Cashin on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange………A little color on state bankruptcy procedures. California And Bankruptcy – Earlier this week Slate ran an informative piece explaining why California can’t go into bankruptcy. The simple reason is that there is no law to allow it to do so. Here’s a [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 10, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 10, 2010
Pimco’s El-Erian Says Public Finance Shock May Deepen By Garfield Reynolds March 11 (Bloomberg) — Mohamed A. El-Erian, whose company runs the world’s biggest mutual fund, said deteriorating public finances around the world may affect the global economy more than is currently realized. “The importance of the shock to public finances in advanced economies is [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 10, 2010
The response to slumping gasoline use would likely mean higher prices for drivers. Some of the nation’s biggest oil companies are looking at permanently reducing how much gasoline and diesel fuel they make, a move that analysts say would almost certainly trigger higher prices for drivers. Energy companies are suffering huge losses from refining [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 10, 2010
There are two considerations here……. 1. Wall Street owns Washington and derivatives are their main source of income. That makes it doubtful that meaningful changes will occur. 2. The argument will be that they did not play the euro short via CDS pressure on debt. They are correct. They played the debt itself short. [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 10, 2010
From Art Cashin on the floor of the NYSE……… On this day in 1349, in the midst of the infamous Black Plague epidemic, the forces of government, science and academia came together with a plan to save the people. As you recall from earlier episodes, the Black Plague had spread from the eastern Mediterranean throughout [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 9, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 9, 2010
China’s Challenge March 9, 2010 | 0958 GMT By Jennifer Richmond and Rodger Baker China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) remains in session. As usual, the meeting has provided Beijing an opportunity to highlight the past year’s successes and lay out the problems that lie ahead. On the surface at least, China has shown remarkable [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 9, 2010
It is happening everywhere. There is no way out that supports political expedience other than “QE to infinity.” If the Fed doesn’t play ball they are history. The shot caller is political expediency. Jim Sinclair Top Bell aide says Toledo likely to face ‘fiscal emergency’ Potential strategy to secure labor concessions disputed. By IGNAZIO [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 9, 2010
http://jsmineset.com/
thestatedtruth.com | March 9, 2010
EU, Merkel Urge Swap Regulation as Greece Takes Plea to U.S. By Rainer Buergin and Ben Moshinsky March 9 (Bloomberg) — The European Union’s top regulatory official said the bloc will consider banning “purely speculative” credit-default swaps as German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a crackdown on derivatives trading to prevent a rerun of the [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 9, 2010
SULTANS OF SWAP: Fearing the Gearing! Ever imagine getting your tie caught in a mechanical set of gears (sorry ladies – but I will spare you). The results are nasty! Now you know what the Sultans of Swap in the $695 Trillion global OTC derivatives market feel like. Every day the slow moving gears of [...]
thestatedtruth.com | March 8, 2010
thestatedtruth.com | March 8, 2010
This will probably start to ”spread like wildfire” to courts around the State of California and the country for that matter in the next few months. L.A. County Superior Court to lay off 329 staffers April 1 March 8, 2010 | 11:38 am In the first of a series of projected cuts, the Los Angeles County Superior Court [...]