Tag Archives: Money/Economy/Taxes

Radio Free Market Interviews Tom Woods on Economic Crisis

If you haven’t already, check out Radio Free Market for weekly internet broadcasts on economics and freedom.

August 15th 2009
* Special Interview * with New York Times Best Selling Author Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Author of Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Host Michael McKay and Special Commentator Jeffrey Hedquist discuss with Tom what really happened in the fall of 2008 and how we can still avert a bigger crisis – if enough of us act now.

U.S. Banking crisis just BEGINNING

“The dichotomy between the fantasy-world of U.S. business reporting and the real world continues to widen. While media propagandists have unequivocally claimed that ‘the worst is over’ for the U.S. banking sector, the employees and shareholders of the 77 U.S. banks which have already gone belly-up this year might choose to dispute this claim.

Five more insolvent U.S. banks were seized by the FDIC in its weekly salvage operations Friday night. As is becoming increasingly common, even with the large bribes which it offers potential buyers, it couldn’t find takers for all of these bankrupt companies.

Bank bankruptcies have already more than tripled the total for all of last year, and are steadily accelerating. Meanwhile, for a nearly endless list of reasons, the crisis in this sector can only get much worse.

Thanks to the U.S. accounting ‘watch-dog’ – the FASB – legalizing fraudulent accounting (see ‘FASB strong-armed into mark-to-fantasy accounting’), the ‘solution’ which the bankster oligarchs have come up with to the mass-insolvency of U.S. banks is to simply hide a lot more bad loans. Indeed, fraudulent accounting has become a way of life for the U.S.” (Read more from seekingalpha.com)

Federal Reserve Board coming to Des Moines IA

Dear Iowa friends, It seems the Fed board is doing some desperate PR in Des Moines on Saturday. I hope you all go ask them what the hell they are doing with OUR money.

“Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) will continue its campaign for economic justice at a public hearing with the Federal Reserve on Saturday, August 22, at the Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa. This unprecedented hearing — one of nine being held across the U.S. – was won after grassroots members of Iowa CCI and other community organizations across the country pressured Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to begin putting people before profits.

Who: Iowa CCI members and allies

What: A community meeting and public hearing with Federal Reserve Board officials

Where: Highland Park Presbyterian Church, 321 Euclid Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa

When: Saturday, August 22, 1:30-4:30pm”

(Read more from journalexpress.net)

Three In Four Americans Support Federal Reserve Audit

“ALEXANDRIA, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A recent poll conducted by highly respected Rasmussen Reports found that 75 percent of Americans support an audit of the Federal Reserve, our Nation’s secretive, quasi-governmental central bank. Only 9 percent of respondents opposed an audit, a further indication of overwhelming support for Fed transparency. . . .

Congressman Ron Paul’s bill H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Bill of 2009, and S. 604, its Senate companion bill, are experiencing tremendous momentum on Capitol Hill.

H.R. 1207 currently has 279 bi-partisan cosponsors, including every Republican and 101 Democrats. S. 604 enjoys 20 cosponsors including Independent Bernie Sanders (I-VT), progressive Russ Feingold (D-WI), and conservative stalwart Jim DeMint (R-SC).

Campaign for Liberty has been the leader in a push for a Federal Reserve audit, using its nationwide grassroots network to educate millions of Americans about sound monetary policy and the need for transparency in our banking system. The groups has generated hundreds of thousands of petitions and phone calls to lawmakers, distributed massive amounts of educational material and canvassed countless neighborhoods across the country.” (Read more from businesswire.com)

Rasmussen? Hmpf.

See Also:

I think she uses disinformation techniques 9 & 13, play dumb & Alice in Wonderland.

1 in 9 Americans now on food stamps

“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – For the first time, more than 34 million Americans received food stamps in May, the government said on Thursday, another symptom of the longest and one of the deepest recessions since the Great Depression.

Enrollment surged by 2 percent to reach a record 34.4 million people, or one in nine Americans, in the latest month for which figures are available.” (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

Remember the Newsweek headline? “The Recession is over”

Al Jazeera headline: ‘US officials bullish about growth’

Ha! I read “bullshit” instead of bullish. I thought it was embarrassing, but accurate. Here’s the article:

“US economic growth is highly likely to resume in the second half of the year, senior US administration officials have said.

But Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary, warned in an interview with ABC television on Sunday that once recovery was regained, there would be “hard choices” to contain rising deficits.

He said he would not rule out higher taxes in the future, adding: “We’re going to have to do what is necessary.”

Geithner and Larry Summers, the White House economic adviser, went on the Sunday television talk shows to make the case that the economic stimulus programme by Barack Obama, the president, was gaining traction, despite rising unemployment and worries about the US deficit.

Summers told NBC television: “A very great likelihood – and this is what most professional forecasters say – is that we’ll see growth going forward in the second half of this year.”

The two men were seconded by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who told ABC the worst US financial crisis in a half a century was “not quite” over, “but we’re getting there”.

‘Pretty sure’

Greenspan said he was “pretty sure” the broader US economy had hit bottom and begun to turn around in mid-July.

Summers pointed to the success of a “cash for clunkers” programme where motorists can trade-in old vehicles for a government payment against a new one as a sign that the US car industry was coming back to life.

He said industries will have to replace inventories that have been massively cut.

But both he and Geithner acknowledged that the US jobless rate would continue to climb from its current level of 9.5 per cent.

Geithner cited private analysts as saying the rate will not start coming down until the beginning of the second half of 2010.

Gross domestic product figures released on Friday by the commerce department estimated that the US economy contracted 1.0 per cent in the second quarter, better than forecasters expected.

The administration said the new report showed the economy was in deeper trouble than believed when Obama took office but that its recovery programmes were working.” (Read more from english.aljazeera.net)

Obama praises his economic policy

The only good thing about Obama’s speech, is him calling bullshit on Newsweek.

Every single one of the things he takes credit for is Keynesian bullshit. If you print a bunch of money out of thin air, of course you can “create” jobs, and prop up artificially high home and stock prices.

People NEED to lose jobs. Values of things we don’t want NEED to drop. There has been so much mal-investment that resources need to realign in the production of goods and services that people actually want. Obama is making it worse.

Also, the vast quantities of money printed so that Obama can take credit for propping up prices and creating jobs are a huge transfer of wealth AWAY FROM the poor and working classes. When the government prints (ie legally counterfeits money) it is a transfer of wealth from money holders at large to the institutions who have the privileged of dealing directly with government – banks, military industries, our 22 million government employees, etc.

Marc Faber on the Fed, Government intervention, 17% real unemployment & more

Mark Faber @ 7:30 – “The best reaction to a crisis is not to increase your fiscal deficits and government spending and ease money, what you should do is fire half the government staff, because the government in the U.S. , municipalities, states and the federal government is already half the economy. So you fire half of them, and make these characters work instead of just looking after their offices and doing nothing all day.”

“There are 33.8 million food stamp recipients in the United States out of an elligible population of about 200 million. . . so in short the unemployment rate is much higher in the U.S. than what the government is publishing. The publishing is lying.”

Marc Faber on the Fed, government intervention, 17% real unemployment, & more