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Going To Hell In A Very Stylish Handbasket.

"El diablo sabes mas por viejo que por diablo" - old Mexican proverb

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Achtung! Das machine ist nicht für gerfingerpoken und mittengraben. Ist too easen für schnappen der pringenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht für gewerken by dast dumkopfen - das rubbernecken sightseeren ban keepen das hands in der pocketsen, relaxen und vatchen das blinkenlights.

links:
Grandfather Economic Report
Tom Paine
The Nation
RGE Monitor
The Economist
Landover Baptist Church
The Onion
Ernie's House of Whoop Ass

On the plus side, we might just become a more fit nation...

Food price inflation changes how we shop

Associated Press - Steadily rising food costs aren't just causing grocery shoppers to do a double-take at the checkout line — they're also changing the very ways we feed our families.

The worst case of food inflation in nearly 20 years has more Americans giving up restaurant meals to eat at home. We're buying fewer luxury food items, eating more leftovers and buying more store brands instead of name-brand items.

For Peggy and David Valdez of Houston, feeding their family of four means scouring grocer ads for the best prices, taking fewer trips as a way to save gas and simply buying less food, period.

"We do more selecting, looking around, seeing which prices are cheaper," said David Valdez. "We are being more selective. We have got to find the cheapest price."

Record-high energy, corn and wheat prices in the past year have led to sticker shock in the grocery aisles. At $1.32, the average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32 percent since January 2005. In the last year alone, the average price of carton of eggs has increased almost 50 percent.

Ground beef, milk, chicken, apples, tomatoes, lettuce, coffee and orange juice are among the staples that cost more these days, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

...and by golly, they seem to be finding a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As Mark Twain once observed, "I belong to no organized political party - I'm a democrat."

Party fears tight Obama-Clinton finish

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - For all their delight in soaring voter registration and strong poll numbers, some Democrats fear the contest between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton might have a nightmarish end, which could wreck a promising election year.

The chief worry is that Clinton may carry her recent winning streak into Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina and other states, leaving her with unquestioned momentum but fewer pledged delegates than Obama. Party leaders then would face a wrenching choice: Steer the nomination to a fading Obama, even as signs suggested Clinton could be the stronger candidate in November; or go with the surging Clinton and risk infuriating Obama's supporters, especially blacks, the Democratic Party's most loyal base.

Some anxious Democrats want party elders to step in now to generate more "superdelegate" support for Obama, effectively choking off Clinton's hopes before she can bolster them further. But many say that is unlikely, and they pray the final 10 contests will make the ultimate choice fairly obvious, not excruciating.

Barring a complete meltdown by Obama, Clinton has almost no chance of surpassing his number of pledged delegates, even if she scores upset wins in states such as Oregon, which votes May 20. But such victories would encourage her to keep criticizing Obama — her only hope for the nomination — and thus heighten doubts about Obama's ability to defeat Republican Sen. John McCain in the fall.

That scenario troubles many Democrats, especially those who feel Obama's nomination is all but inevitable.

"This is going to give Republicans a chance to try to destroy everything we've been trying to work for for eight years," said Ken Foxworth, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota and superdelegate who backs Obama.

Ummm, so let's see - that's $100B, plus $200B a few weeks ago, plus $30B for the Bear Stearns purchase, plus $20B for the original TAF, plus $100B last month, plus however many $B spent last week in the unsuccessful dollar rally/commodities smackdown...

Doesn't the Fed only have like $790B in reserves? That's like 2/3 of it's piggybank to bail out their banker buddies... Oh, well, we'll just print more - what's a few thousand B's among friends!

$100bn Fed move over credit fears

BBC News - The US Federal Reserve will make a further $100bn (£50bn) available to major banks in April, trying to ease concerns about a global credit crunch.

The sum, offered across two auctions, is in addition to $260bn provided in short-term loans to the end of March.

Other unorthodox steps include the Fed allowing investment banks to borrow from it directly - previously only possible for commercial banks.

The financial crisis has caused chaos on US and global markets.

This month Bear Stearns became the highest profile US victim of the credit crunch - facing near collapse before a deal was struck for it to be bought at a bargain price by JP Morgan Chase.

The rescue was supported by the Fed, which agreed to buy up to $29bn of Bear Stearns debts.

The Fed's chairman, Ben Bernanke, will be quizzed about the auctions, and other Fed actions to ease the credit crunch, when he faces Congress next week.

Critics say that the central bank is bailing out banks who have not assessed their risks properly

Auctions continue

Since December the Fed has held auctions every two weeks, offering short-term loans to commercial banks.

The amounts offered began at $20 billion, rose to $30 billion and were hiked to $50bn in early March as the severity of the credit shortage grew.

They are set to continue until at least September.

The hope is that the extra cash will ease the fears that banks have of lending money to each other, which have pushed short-term interest rates to record highs, despite the Fed's series of interest rate cuts.

This week there were concerted moves by central banks to bring down the Libor - the rate at which banks lend to one another - which is currently close to the high levels at the beginning of the credit crunch.

In Bizarro World today, the Fed announce that it would pump yet another $100 billion into the credit crunch. The following things happened:

- The dollar went up against other currencies

- Gold went down

- The stock market rose

- Consumer credit rates rose

- Oil remains steady at around 106 a barrel.

In Great News, the core PCE (Price Consumer Index minus food and fuel), fell .1% in February. Well, actually, it fell if you compare it to the rate in January, which was 3.5. In February, prices were rising only 3.4%! Wheeee!

So, even though prices were 3.4% higher than the already high prices they were in January, at least Thank Jeebus they weren't at 3.5% - the we would have been really screwed!

Umm, except for fuel and food, those were lots lots higher, but hey, they don't get counted in the "core" PCE, since obviously food and fuel are for wussies!

Here's what Investment Executive Magazine had to say:

"Income growth came in below economists’ forecasts, which were expecting a 0.3% increase in personal income during February and a 0.1% drop in consumer spending.

Consumer spending makes up about 70% of U.S. gross domestic product.

Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending in February was flat, according to the report. The data revealed a price index for personal consumption expenditures rose 0.1% in February compared to the prior month. It rose 0.3% in January. The PCE price index excluding food and energy, or core PCE, also rose 0.1% in February.

Compared with a year earlier, the PCE price index climbed 3.4% in February. The year-to-year climb in January was 3.5%.

The PCE price index excluding food and energy, year over year, climbed 2% in February. The gauge rose 2% in January as well. The U.S. Federal Reserve watches the year-to-year PCE price index excluding food and energy closely for signs of problematic inflation. The central bank's preferred range for this core gauge is considered to be 1.0% to 2.0%."

"Adjusted for inflation", meaning if the consumer had actually made income that kept up with the inflation rate, which doesn't include the gas this consumer needs to go to their crappy job, or food to have enough energy to work their crappy job. But hey, this is "benign" inflation!

... *blink* ...

Well, that's it for this segment of Bizarro World Financial News. I'm sure there will be loads more fun to report tomorrow.

Holy shit. I've studied martial arts for many years, and not that cheesy wushu crap, but combat science. Kids should NOT repeat NOT be doing the kinds of joint-breaking and concussion-giving moves MMA teaches. "Defend themselves?" Bullshit. Any adult can take out any kid. What it does do, however, is teach them to be aggressive very early in life. Practicing katas won't do that. Suckerpunching the poor little shit under you on the mat will.

Ultimate fights expand to include kids

CARTHAGE, Mo., Associated Press - Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV.

But the sport often derided as "human cockfighting" is branching out.

The bare-knuckle fights are now attracting competitors as young as 6 whose parents treat the sport as casually as wrestling, Little League or soccer.

The changes were evident on a recent evening in southwest Missouri, where a team of several young boys and one girl grappled on gym mats in a converted garage.

Two members of the group called the "Garage Boys Fight Crew" touched their thin martial-arts gloves in a flash of sportsmanship before beginning a relentless exchange of sucker punches, body blows and swift kicks.

Check out the Reuters CRB Continuous Commodities Index for 1967 through 2008. The inflation rate for things like, oh, I don't know, FOOD and FUEL and so forth is running at around 16% above last year. The Boyz would like you to believe that inflation is at a 'benign' 3 or 4% (since when is any continuous inflation okay?).

These are the levels, that, if understood by a populace not still blinded by "official" bullshit inflation figures, would cause armed riots and general revolt. Eventually, probably this year or early next, the populace will no longer buy the official bullshit, and there WILL be open revolt:

Lest we forget, there's an entirely different sort of meltdown occurring that we need to urgently be doing something about but that we probably won't because we are greedy, stupid, and self-centered:

Vast Antarctic Ice Shelf on Verge of Collapse

LiveScience - A vast ice shelf hanging on by a thin strip looks to be the next chunk to break off from the Antarctic Peninsula, the latest sign of global warming's impact on Earth's southernmost continent.

Scientists are shocked by the rapid change of events.

Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles (41 kilometers by 2.5 kilometers - about 10 times the area of Manhattan) that appeared to have broken away from the shelf.

Scambos alerted colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) that it looked like the entire ice shelf - about 6,180 square miles (16,000 square kilometers - about the size of Northern Ireland)- was at risk of collapsing.

David Vaughan of the BAS had predicted in 1993 that the northern part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf was likely to be lost within 30 years if warming on the Peninsula continued at the same rate.

"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened," he said. "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread - we'll know in the next few days and weeks what its fate will be."

<&BlogMore>

Aircraft reconnaissance

The BAS scientists sent an aircraft out on a reconnaissance mission to survey the extent of damage to the ice shelf.

Jim Elliot, who captured video of the breakout said, "I've never seen anything like this before - it was awesome. We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage. Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble - it's like an explosion."

An initial iceberg calved away from the Wilkins Ice Shelf on Feb. 28. A series of images shows the edge of the ice shelf proceeding to crumble and disintegrate in a pattern characteristic of climate-caused ice shelf retreats throughout the northern Antarctic Peninsula. The disintegration left a sky-blue patch of hundreds of large blocks of exposed old glacier ice floating across the ocean surface.

Though these broken chunks of ice have spread into the sea, they won't raise sea levels because the ice shelf was already floating on the water.

By March 8, the ice shelf had lost just over 220 square miles (570 square kilometers) of ice, and the disintegrated ice had spread over 540 square miles (1,400 square kilometers). As of mid-March only a narrow strip of shelf ice between Charcot and Latady islands was protecting several thousand more kilometers of the ice shelf from potentially breaking up.

The region where the Wilkins Ice Shelf lies has experienced unprecedented warming in the past 50 years, with several ice shelves retreating in the past 30 years. Six of these ice shelves have collapsed completely: Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

Antarctic warming

The Wilkins Ice Shelf was stable for most of the last century until it began retreating in the 1990s. A previous major breakout occurred there in 1998 when 390 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of ice was lost in just a few months.

"We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years, but warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing it to break up," Scambos said.

The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere; temperature records show that the region has warmed by nearly 3 degrees Celsius during the past 50 years - several times the global average and only matched in Alaska.

Other parts of Antarctica, including the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, seem to be more stable, though areas of melt have been observed in recent years.

10 reasons your taxes are going up

No matter who's elected president, the debt party's over

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Reason No. 1: "Most Americans have yet to feel any of the costs of the Iraq war," write Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in an excerpt of their new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," in Vanity Fair. "The price in blood has been paid by members of the volunteer military. The price in treasure has been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for the war."

Well, folks, the party's over. Campaign rhetoric won't hide America's excesses, denial, incompetence and arrogance much longer. No matter who's elected, taxes will increase to cover massive debts. Greed has driven America's great economic engine into a "debt contagion" ditch with a recession, bear market, price inflation, and weak job and housing markets ... you bet your taxes will increase.

Yes, our five-year war was totally financed by borrowing. But unfortunately, "deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed. They cannot. Americans will have to pay for the war at some point -- and when they do, they will be paying not the Bush markdown but the full price," the authors say.

We've been mislead by Washington's Enron-style accounting that hides many costs:

* Supplemental financing bills, outside the budget

* No veterans health-care estimates included

* No equipment replacement costs to restore our military

* Nothing about increases in state and homeland security

The real cost isn't $800 billion, it's already $3 trillion. And still, it doesn't include ...

* Interest on the ever-increasing $9.3 trillion federal debt

* Damage to our credibility from a weak dollar

* Out-of-control inflation in energy

* And the brutal damage to Iraq and other Gulf states

Washington's hiding all that from us. We were sold a war-on-the-cheap, to cost a mere $50 billion to $60 billion, to be self-financed out of oil revenues. Today we're spending $50 billion every month! This war is already an economic disaster for America and the bill's still coming due.

If, after years of paying garbage taxes (Social & Medicare, etc) you had any hope for the government to help you in your old age, hope no more, 'coz yer officially screwed:

"To get the money to pay the benefits, the government will have to borrow or close the gap in other ways such as cutting benefits or raising taxes."

Hooo-boy.

Government benefit programs in trouble

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Trustees for the government's two biggest benefit programs warned Tuesday that Social Security and Medicare are facing "enormous challenges" with the threat to Medicare's solvency far more severe.

The trustees, issuing a once-a-year analysis of the government's two biggest benefit programs, said the resources in the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2041. The reserves in the Medicare trust fund that pays hospital benefits were projected to be wiped out by 2019.

Both those dates were the same as in last year's report. But the trustees warned that financial pressures will begin much sooner when the programs begin paying out more in benefits each year than they collect in payroll taxes. For Medicare, that threshhold is projected to be reached this year and for Social Security it is projected to occur in 2017.

The first year that payments will exceed income for Social Security will occur in 2017, just nine years from now, reflecting growing demands from the retirement of 78 million baby boomers. Medicare is projected to pay out more than it receives in income starting this year.

From The Wall Street Journal:

"Thanks to a relatively new accounting rule, firms like Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs last quarter booked hundreds of millions of dollars in gains based on worsening perceptions of their own creditworthiness.

How does that work? If the market decides a company is a bigger credit risk and starts demanding fatter risk premiums to buy its debt, the value of its existing debt falls. Under a rule being phased in throughout corporate America known as Financial Accounting Statement No. 159, that same logic applies to a company’s own debt. Companies that mark their liabilities to a market price, as Wall Street usually does, thus record as revenue a drop in the value of their own debt obligations.

Accounting experts said the exercise is perfectly legitimate, particularly if firms that mark liabilities to market do the same with their assets. At the same time, it highlights one of the ironies of so-called fair value accounting. “If you have a liability that declines in value because your credit worsens, you have a gain,” said Stephen Ryan, associate professor of accounting at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

FAS 159, which brokers are adopting earlier than most companies, couldn’t have come at a better time for Wall Street. The firms are taking writedowns of billions of dollars to reflect the lower value of leveraged buyout loans and securities backed by mortgages and other assets that are stuck on their books."

So let me get this straight:

If I owe my creditcard company $20,000, but I can only afford to pay back $5,000, I'm actually worth $15,000?

I hate that fucker. He's just too right on for my comfort zone. Damn you Ted Rall! Stop telling the truth through your humorous caricatures and child-like scribblings!

Of course, it could be worse. And it is. The administration responsible for the collapse of America has this to say about that responsibility:

Food prices soaring worldwide

MEXICO CITY, Associated Press - If you're seeing your grocery bill go up, you're not alone.

From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions. Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves and growing consumer demand in China and India.

The world's poorest nations still harbor the greatest hunger risk. Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

But food protests now crop up even in Italy. And while the price of spaghetti has doubled in Haiti, the cost of miso is packing a hit in Japan.

"It's not likely that prices will go back to as low as we're used to," said Abdolreza Abbassian, economist and secretary of the Intergovernmental Group for Grains for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. "Currently if you're in Haiti, unless the government is subsidizing consumers, consumers have no choice but to cut consumption. It's a very brutal scenario, but that's what it is."

No one knows that better than Eugene Thermilon, 30, a Haitian day laborer who can no longer afford pasta to feed his wife and four children since the price nearly doubled to $0.57 a bag. Their only meal on a recent day was two cans of corn grits.

"Their stomachs were not even full," Thermilon said, walking toward his pink concrete house on the precipice of a garbage-filled ravine. By noon the next day, he still had nothing to feed them for dinner.

Their hunger has had a ripple effect. Haitian food vendor Fabiola Duran Estime, 31, has lost so many customers like Thermilon that she had to pull her daughter, Fyva, out of kindergarten because she can't afford the $20 monthly tuition.

Fyva was just beginning to read.

In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize. Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down. Already this is happening with wheat, with more crops to be planted in the U.S., Canada and Europe in the coming year.

However, consumers still face at least 10 years of more expensive food, according to preliminary FAO projections.

Among the driving forces are petroleum prices, which increase the cost of everything from fertilizers to transport to food processing. Rising demand for meat and dairy in rapidly developing countries such as China and India is sending up the cost of grain, used for cattle feed, as is the demand for raw materials to make biofuels.

Ahahahahahaha!! Ahhhh-fucking-HAAAHHH!!

Welp, all they're doing is the same as every other idiot government that ever got into trouble for making too much funny money - papering over the problem. Weimar followed by Amero rescue, here we come.

Check out the chart below to see the results of the coordinated dollar-buy/commodity-selloff manipulation the PPT and central banks pulled off last week. Now, NOTHING in the underlying fundamentals has changed, and if anything, they are getting worse as a "whew! back to business as usual, dodged a bullet, let's make money!" mentality takes over the rotting edifice of finance.

Bank Rescues Means Exact Replication Of Great Depression

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Everyone at the very apex of the economic pyramid are celebrating the 'rescue' of Wall Street. Commodities are collapsing thanks to this 'rescue' mission run by the Fed. But cause and effect are harder to see than people expect. The underlying trade/debt problems, far from vanishing, are reaching a critical melt-down stage. Bernanke and his greedy friends all think they have prevented a descent in to a Great Depression II. Instead, the very actions they took to save their own status quo has triggered the exact same forces that created the Great Depression. This is because they misunderstand what the collapse of 1929 was all about: the bankruptcy of the Great Powers, Germany and England, due to excessive war debts which both were unable to pay when Wall Street loaded even more debts on top of that huge mountain of debts. Now we see the Federal Reserve trying to dump more debts on top of our mountain of war and speculative debts.

[Read the whole thing:]

The lead story in Sunday's (today) New York Times biz section calls a spade a spade, names names and points fingers. BOOM, baby!

What Created This Monster?

New York Times - LIKE Noah building his ark as thunderheads gathered, Bill Gross has spent the last two years anticipating the flood that swamped Bear Stearns about 10 days ago. As manager of the world’s biggest bond fund and custodian of nearly a trillion dollars in assets, Mr. Gross amassed a cash hoard of $50 billion in case trading partners suddenly demanded payment from his firm, Pimco.

And every day for the last three weeks he has convened meetings in a war room in Pimco’s headquarters in Newport Beach, Calif., "to make sure the ark doesn’t have any leaks,” Mr. Gross said. "We come in every day at 3:30 a.m. and leave at 6 p.m. I’m not used to setting my alarm for 2:45 a.m., but these are extraordinary times.”

Even though Mr. Gross, 63, is a market veteran who has lived through the collapse of other banks and brokerage firms, the 1987 stock market crash, and the near meltdown of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund a decade ago, he says the current crisis feels different — in both size and significance.

The Federal Reserve not only taken has action unprecedented since the Great Depression — by lending money directly to major investment banks — but also has put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in questionable trades these same bankers made when the good times were rolling.

"Bear Stearns has made it obvious that things have gone too far,” says Mr. Gross, who plans to use some of his cash to bargain-shop. "The investment community has morphed into something beyond banks and something beyond regulation. We call it the shadow banking system.”

It is the private trading of complex instruments that lurk in the financial shadows that worries regulators and Wall Street and that have created stresses in the broader economy. Economic downturns and panics have occurred before, of course. Few, however, have posed such a serious threat to the entire financial system that regulators have responded as if they were confronting a potential epidemic.

[Read the whole thing:]

Excellent analysis on the commodities sell-off. Amero, here we come. Got gold?

The Fed-Engineered Commodities Cave-In

by Alex Wallenwein

The world-wide fiat system functions like a roach motel: Investors check in - but they NEVER check out! By it's latest hit on commodities, the Fed as the system-leader gave investors a shot across the bow. The message: "If you try to leave, we will hurt you!"

("Leaving the fiat system" here means to store your wealth in more tangible forms that are not as susceptible to engineered currency collapses.)

Well, wasn't that just too neat?

JP Morgan Chase got to buy its long-time competitor Bear Stearns at less than ten cents on the dollar, even at Bear's super-low share price of the previous trading day (while the JPM co-owned Fed itself supplies 30 billion USD by "loan" to bolster Bear's balance sheet), and suddenly everything turns around. Stocks are up, the markets calm down, and even the commodities decline. Wow!

If all of the commodities sag at the same time, then at least nobody can reasonably accuse anyone of "gold manipulation", can they?

Well, maybe it wasn't gold manipulation, but something surely doesn't smell right (sniff, sniff...)

Ask yourself: has anything fundamentally changed in the markets to cause this across-the-board commodities sell-off? Let's see:

* Mortgages are still toxic, they are still on every US bank's balance sheet or tucked away in off-balance sheet SPVs and other "conduits".

* Banks are still loathe to lend money to each other because they all know how polluted the other's asset positions are (all they have to do is look at their own balance sheet and remember how it got there).

* The economic outlook hasn't changed and home prices are not improving any, so homeowners are still going to default on mortgages like they've been doing. Result: mortgages are still as toxic as they were before. Even the "AAA-rated" top-grade ones.

* Persian Gulf nations are still under enormous pressure to go off their dollar-pegs because their inflation figures simply do not allow them to follow the Fed's successive interest-rate cliff jumps.

* The US economy is still in recession by all ascertainable data, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.

* Foreigners have stopped buying long term US treasuries as shown in last week's 10-year note auction (down to under 6 from previously 25%). Yet, treasury prices are still going up (so who on earth is doing the buying, hmm?)

* There are still way too many dollars in the world.

* There is still way to much other fiat currency in the world.

* Ben Bernanke is still the chairman of the US Fed.

* Bush is still in office.

* Euro-zone inflation is still above three percent.

This list could be longer, but we'll stop here to preserve precious cyberspace.

Here is another ground for suspicion: Sunday's mega-intervention was done right at the point where the Dow hit theoretical support from its 2000 high at 11,750, to create the impression among investors that this technical level has "held" and that the ensuing rally could be for real. Hope springs eternal, you know.

[Worth reading the whole thing:]

Don't forget the, what is it now, some 100,000 wounded?

Alex Jones is paranoid, but he has a lot to be paranoid about. Some pointed commentary on some serious shit, in particular the severe and continued devaluation of the dollar:

With the deep polar icepacks now melting and spring coming earlier, summer droughts will be deeper and longer. The world is changing violently, both physically and socially. There are too many people, and too many of those using the resources of all in wastrel ways. There WILL be wars, over food, water, space, power...

Minister: Water Could Be Source Of War

Independent - The world faces a future of "water wars", unless action is taken to prevent international water shortages and sanitation issues escalating into conflicts, according to Gareth Thomas, the International Development minister.

The minister's warning came as a coalition of 27 international charities marked World Water Day, by writing to Gordon Brown demanding action to give fresh water to 1.1 billion people with poor supplies. "If we do not act, the reality is that water supplies may become the subject of international conflict in the years ahead," said Mr Thomas. "We need to invest now to prevent us having to pay that price in the future."

What the fuck? The White House has a 'no comment' policy on the value of the dollar? Does not the Treasury Secretary work for the president, and therefore THE PEOPLE? Is not the Federal Reserve, that lying, manipulating, for-profit unelected private corporate weaselpack institution the one that fixes the price of the U.S. Dollar? Is the White House just the puppet of the ex-Goldman Sachs CEO and the banks that own the Fed? Oh, duh *headsmack*...

Think I'll start fiddling, because Rome is burning...

Part 1:

Part 2:

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Jim re-iterates his call for abolishing the Fed and firing that asshat Bernanke:

Somewhere between six and nine, probably, going back and forth like ripples in a soupbowl.

Here is Financial Time's Martin Wolf's paraphrasing of Professor Nouriel Roubini's (one of the finest economic minds on the planet, and a guy that's been sounding the red alert for a while now) "12 Steps To Financial Disaster":

Step one is the worst housing recession in US history. House prices will, he says, fall by 20 to 30 per cent from their peak, which would wipe out between $4,000bn and $6,000bn in household wealth. Ten million households will end up with negative equity and so with a huge incentive to put the house keys in the post and depart for greener fields. Many more home-builders will be bankrupted.

Step two would be further losses, beyond the $250bn-$300bn now estimated, for subprime mortgages. About 60 per cent of all mortgage origination between 2005 and 2007 had “reckless or toxic features”, argues Prof Roubini. Goldman Sachs estimates mortgage losses at $400bn. But if home prices fell by more than 20 per cent, losses would be bigger. That would further impair the banks’ ability to offer credit.

Step three would be big losses on unsecured consumer debt: credit cards, auto loans, student loans and so forth. The “credit crunch” would then spread from mortgages to a wide range of consumer credit.

Step four would be the downgrading of the monoline insurers, which do not deserve the AAA rating on which their business depends. A further $150bn writedown of asset-backed securities would then ensue.

Step five would be the meltdown of the commercial property market, while

step six would be bankruptcy of a large regional or national bank.

Step seven would be big losses on reckless leveraged buy-outs. Hundreds of billions of dollars of such loans are now stuck on the balance sheets of financial institutions.

Step eight would be a wave of corporate defaults. On average, US companies are in decent shape, but a “fat tail” of companies has low profitability and heavy debt. Such defaults would spread losses in “credit default swaps”, which insure such debt. The losses could be $250bn. Some insurers might go bankrupt.

Step nine would be a meltdown in the “shadow financial system”. Dealing with the distress of hedge funds, special investment vehicles and so forth will be made more difficult by the fact that they have no direct access to lending from central banks.

Step 10 would be a further collapse in stock prices. Failures of hedge funds, margin calls and shorting could lead to cascading falls in prices.

Step 11 would be a drying-up of liquidity in a range of financial markets, including interbank and money markets. Behind this would be a jump in concerns about solvency.

Step 12 would be “a vicious circle of losses, capital reduction, credit contraction, forced liquidation and fire sales of assets at below fundamental prices”.

These, then, are 12 steps to meltdown. In all, argues Prof Roubini: “Total losses in the financial system will add up to more than $1,000bn and the economic recession will become deeper more protracted and severe.” This, he suggests, is the “nightmare scenario” keeping Ben Bernanke and colleagues at the US Federal Reserve awake. It explains why, having failed to appreciate the dangers for so long, the Fed has lowered rates by 200 basis points this year. This is insurance against a financial meltdown.

---

Prof. Roubini's 8 Reasons Why The Fed Can't Stop The Meltdown:

1- US monetary easing is constrained by risks to the dollar and inflation

2- aggressive easing deals only with illiquidity, not insolvency

3- the monoline insurers will lose their credit ratings, with dire consequences

4- overall losses will be too large for sovereign wealth funds to deal with

5- public intervention is too small to stabilize housing losses

6- the Fed cannot address the problems of the shadow financial system

7- regulators cannot find a good middle way between transparency over losses and regulatory forbearance, both of which are needed

8- the transactions-oriented financial system is itself in deep crisis.

In other words, fasten your seatbelts.

Dick Cheney has himself a lovely upscale house in Dubai, the better to have lunch with his buddies at Halliburton headquarters, dontcha know...

... the fun part is how there's no extradition treaty between Saudi Arabia and the USA, so he can't ummm, be brought back on criminal charges or anything once the next administration is in power... plus the bit about no taxes, that's fun too...

Can you believe these asshats, pretending they are leading a glorious patriotic parade of fiscal recovery, instead of what they are really doing, which is running to Mommy Fed for free taxpayer dollars to bail their sorry, near-bankrupt ponzi schemes out? The blatantness is mindboggling!:

"The Federal Reserve, in its first extension of credit to non-banks since the Great Depression, lent $28.8 billion as of yesterday to large U.S. securities firms with financing aimed at stabilizing capital markets.

Other credit extensions including loans to facilitate JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. averaged $5.5 billion a day for the week ended yesterday, and the balance ended at zero, according to the Fed's weekly balance sheet. The report listed loans to Wall Street firms under a plan announced March 16 to alleviate a cash shortage.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said yesterday that they borrowed to "test" the new lending facility, while Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s financial chief said the company was using the facility to "show some leadership.""

Un-fucking-believable.

The reason the Fed's discount window is anonymous, is because there is (or, apparently, was) such a stigma to going hat in hand to the Fed for a bailout. Only insolvent banks use the discount window! Have we got it? Broke = Fed bailout.

Testing? Leadership?! BULLSHIT!!

Short Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Lehman, those fuckers are tapped out. Short Citigroup as well. Come next couple of weeks, these guys' leaks will make Bear Stearns look like a drop in the bucket. Which it is.

Speaking of teevee, I just heard some spritzhead on the tube gush, "now that the financial crisis is over, what's next for the markets?"

There is coffee-flavored smoke coming from my keyboard now...

World trade decelerates almost to standstill

Financial Times - Global trade slowed almost to a standstill over the new year, threatening to shrink for the first time since the US economy went into recession in 2001.

An indicator produced by the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a Dutch research institute, showed that in the three months to January world trade in goods rose at annualised rate of 0.2 per cent over the previous three months.

The equivalent growth rate in the three months to October was 6.9 per cent

"This is a substantial deceleration," the institute said. "World trade volume growth is on a downward trend."

The reality:

What the moneyboys want you to focus on:

What has just occurred this week in the markets is the central banks in full panic mode, madly prolonging the rowdiest frat party ever.

Think of this analogy: the party has been an all-nighter. The house is completely trashed, and the back bedroom is on fire. The sun is coming up, and some partiers are sobering up and realizing they are starting to get the mother of all hangovers. People are starting to look for their coats and underwear and heading for the door.

In comes the firemen with a gallon of ultra-cheap vodka and a new mix CD. They crank up the 120bpm jams, pour cheap booze down everyone's throats, and declare the smoke, wrecked furniture and sunlight the best party special effects ever. Plus, it's not a hangover, dude, its righteous party buzz, and if you have one, wow are you cool.

The firemen are the PPT (Plunge Protection Team: Sec Treasury Paulson, Fed chair Bernanke, SEC chair Cox, Commodities chair Lukken) and the US & Euro central bankers. Henry Paulson was not joking when he flat-out stated last week that they were ready to do "anything it takes" to prevent a meltdown. Anything.

The cheap vodka is the taxpayer-subsidized 'liquidity'.

The party mix CD is manipulation of the still-small precious metals markets, which has a big influence in the huge forex (currency) markets.

The ego-stroking bullshit is the just-released 'good' production, employment, and inflation figures, more heavily and blatantly doctorerd than ever before in history.

Watch the markets - the asia markets keep going down, selling dollars down and buying gold up. The european and american markets are doing the opposite, drinking 'liquidity' and partying to 'sound dollars' and 'good economical indicators'. The house is wrecked and on fire, and the party is over, and the firemen are pouring gasoline on the flames.

The "fixes" benefit only the bankers. Although the underlying conditions have not changed in any way, perceptions have been successfully manipulated in enough 'investors' to accomplish the following:

- the equities market has stabilized a little bit, allowing companies that are on the verge of imploding a la Bear Sterns to last a bit longer,
- the dollar has stopped its downward slide, so that these same near-bankrupt entities can now take their worthless toxic derivatives to the Fed and exchange them for dollars,
- gold has been successfully pushed down somewhat, so that these same entities can exchange their dollars for cheap gold
- emerging markets have been depressed (they hold a lot of dollars), so their equities, though solid, have become attractively cheap,
- once the exchange of garbage for gold and solid foreign equities has played out, who cares? We got ours!

And in the end, the USA, Inc goes bankrupt and Joe Sixpack gets stuck with the bill. Brilliantly played!

Economists the world over are just shaking their heads in disgust at these machinations, and re-iterating that the house is still on fire and the sun is indeed going up. No doubt the PPT will try anything and everything to squeeze out a few more minutes of party time, but it's all illusion.

Here's what Citigroup, a seriously major player had to say last night:

"The Great Unwind has begun, Citigroup warns

Avoid leveraged companies, countries and consumers, bank's strategists say"

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/great-unwind-has-started-avoid/story.aspx

This is the closest you will ever get to seeing a major world bank put a "sell" recommendation on itself. It explicitly says to sell the U.S.: "Leveraged economies, like the U.S., should also be avoided".

Gads. This would make an awesome TV movie of the week.

Lots of people who just got into gold must be pretty freaked out by the $60 drop in price since yesterday. All I've got to say is, have the fundamental economic circumstances changed? Not one iota. Has the Fed, the PPT and the central banks been in panic mode and vowing to do "anything it takes" to prevent total meltdown? Yes they have. Did you see the overt manipulation in the markets yesterday and today? I sure did, and so did a lot of savvy people. Did the US markets give back their euphoric sucker rally gains of the day before? Yeah, they sure the fuck did, didn't they. That whole overtly manipulating the markets thing kinda blew up in the PPT's face, huh?

Now, get hold of yourself.

GENERAL ELECTRIC --(donated 1.1 million to GW Bush for his 2000 election campaign)

Television Holdings:

* NBC: includes 13 stations, 28% of US households.
* NBC Network News: The Today Show, Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, Meet the Press, Dateline NBC, NBC News at Sunrise.
* CNBC business television; MSNBC 24-hour cable and Internet news service (co-owned by NBC and Microsoft); Court TV (co-owned with Time Warner), Bravo (50%), A&E (25%), History Channel (25%).

The "MS" in MSNBC means microsoft, the same Microsoft that donated 2.4 million to get GW bush elected.

Other Holdings:

* GE Consumer Electronics.
* GE Power Systems: produces turbines for nuclear reactors and power plants.
* GE Plastics: produces military hardware and nuclear power equipment.
* GE Transportation Systems: runs diesel and electric trains.

==================================================

WESTINGHOUSE / CBS INC.

Westinghouse Electric Company, part of the Nuclear Utilities Business Group of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) Who is #1 on the Board of Directors? None other than: Frank Carlucci (of the Carlyle Group)

Television Holdings:

* CBS: includes 14 stations and over 200 affiliates in the US.
* CBS Network News: 60 minutes, 48 hours, CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, CBS Morning News, Up to the Minute.
* Country Music Television, The Nashville Network, 2 regional sports networks.
* Group W Satellite Communications.

Other Holdings:

* Westinghouse Electric Company: provides services to the nuclear power industry.
* Westinghouse Government Environmental Services Company: disposes of nuclear and hazardous wastes. Also operates 4 government-owned nuclear power plants in the US.
* Energy Systems: provides nuclear power plant design and maintenance.

================================================================

VIACOM INTERNATIONAL INC.

Television Holdings:

* Paramount Television, Spelling Television, MTV, VH-1, Showtime, The Movie Channel, UPN (joint owner), Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Sundance Channel (joint owner), Flix.
* 20 major market US stations.

Media Holdings:

* Paramount Pictures, Paramount Home Video, Blockbuster Video, Famous Players Theatres, Paramount Parks.
* Simon & Schuster Publishing.

=============================================

DISNEY / ABC / CAP (donated 640 thousand to GW's 2000 campaign)

Television Holdings:

* ABC: includes 10 stations, 24% of US households.
* ABC Network News: Prime Time Live, Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America.
* ESPN, Lifetime Television (50%), as well as minority holdings in A&E, History Channel and E!
* Disney Channel/Disney Television, Touchtone Television.

Media Holdings:

* Miramax, Touchtone Pictures.
* Magazines: Jane, Los Angeles Magazine, W, Discover.
* 3 music labels, 11 major local newspapers.
* Hyperion book publishers.
* Infoseek Internet search engine (43%).

Other Holdings:

* Sid R. Bass (major shares) crude oil and gas.
* All Disney Theme Parks, Walt Disney Cruise Lines.

======================================================

TIME-WARNER TBS - AOL (donated 1.6 million to GW's 2000 campaign)

America Online (AOL) acquired Time Warner–the largest merger in corporate history.

Television Holdings:

* CNN, HBO, Cinemax, TBS Superstation, Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies, Warner Brothers Television, Cartoon Network, Sega Channel, TNT, Comedy Central (50%), E! (49%), Court TV (50%).
* Largest owner of cable systems in the US with an estimated 13 million subscribers.

Media Holdings:

* HBO Independent Productions, Warner Home Video, New Line Cinema, Castle Rock, Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera.
* Music: Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, Sire, Warner Bros. Records, EMI, WEA, Sub Pop (distribution) = the world’s largest music company.
* 33 magazines including Time, Sports Illustrated, People, In Style, Fortune, Book of the Month Club, Entertainment Weekly, Life, DC Comics (50%), and MAD Magazine.

Other Holdings:

* Sports: The Atlanta Braves, The Atlanta Hawks, World Championship Wrestling.

=======================================================

NEWS CORPORATION LTD. / FOX NETWORKS (Rupert Murdoch) (donations see bottom note)

Television Holdings:

* Fox Television: includes 22 stations, 50% of US households.
* Fox International: extensive worldwide cable and satellite networks include British Sky Broadcasting (40%); VOX, Germany (49.9%); Canal Fox, Latin America; FOXTEL, Australia (50%); STAR TV, Asia; IskyB, India; Bahasa Programming Ltd., Indonesia (50%); and News Broadcasting, Japan (80%).
* The Golf Channel (33%).

MEDIA HOLDINGS:

* Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight.
* 132 newspapers (113 in Australia alone) including the New York Post, the London Times and The Australian.
* 25 magazines including TV Guide and The Weekly Standard.
* HarperCollins books.

OTHER HOLDINGS:

* Sports: LA Dodgers, LA Kings, LA Lakers, National Rugby League.
* Ansett Australia airlines, Ansett New Zealand airlines.
* Rupert Murdoch: Board of Directors, Philip Morris (USA).

*(Phillip Morris donated 2.9 million to George W Bush in 2000)*

Excellent post by professor Kevin Depew at Minyanville, read the whole thing there:

"Denial remains the most powerful force operating in financial markets today. It is so pervasive, bullish sentiment so deeply entrenched, many are simply refusing to accept, and in some cases not bothering to even notice, the sheer magnitude and severity of this debt crisis. "

..."Ironically, the growing furor on Main Street over the declining dollar and the destruction of purchasing power is the epitome of a "Careful What You Wish For" scenario. When the dollar stops going down, the real point of recognition will arrive. Days like today, gold and silver down 5% to 7%, bonds higher, stocks down, commodities down, that is what a deflationary credit unwind looks and feels like. The dollar will again have its day, and when it does the myth of the bull market will be exposed for the fraud it really was. "

..."Perceived political capitulation on the GSE's is not bullish for shareholders of Fannie and Freddie, it's simply indicative of government laying the groundwork and taking another step closer to full nationalization of them. The least complicated way to facilitate the necessary bailout of the banking industry is to consolidate as much of the bad debt in one place as possible."

..."it is critical to understand that this is not an event, but a process. The U.S. economy is dependent on credit consumption. Currently, only those who do not need credit are able to obtain it. Those who need it face increasingly tight lending standards. "

Bush says Iraq war was worth it

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - President Bush says he has no doubts about launching the unpopular war in Iraq despite the "high cost in lives and treasure," arguing that retreat now would embolden Iran and provide al-Qaida with money for weapons of mass destruction to attack the United States.

Bush is to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Wednesday with a speech at the Pentagon. Excerpts of his address were released Tuesday night by the White House.

At least 3,990 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in 2003. It has cost taxpayers about $500 billion and estimates of the final tab run far higher. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglizt and Harvard University public finance expert Linda Bilmes have estimated the eventual cost at $3 trillion when all the expenses, including long-term care for veterans, are calculated.

----

Totally worth it to him - he made bank, his buddies in finance, oil, and munitions made bank, the Treasury was completely looted while everyone was misdirected by 'war', and HE DIDN'T HAVE TO GET HIS ASS SHOT OFF.

Wheeeee! Damned right it was worth it!

----

Tell it like it is, bro:

One of the most amazing humans of the last 100 years died today.

Writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90

[Science fiction author Arthur Clarke poses near his personal satellite antenna at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka in this Jan. 28, 1977 file photo. (AP Photo)]

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Associated Press - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.

He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.

Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

Bill Bonner: "A major failure on Wall Street usually means the end of a market downturn, says John Authers in the FT: Continental Illinois in '64, Drexel Burnham Lambert in '90, Kidder Peabody in '94 and Longterm Capital Management in '98.

But was Bear the end of the problem…or just the beginning?

"Wall Street waits for the next domino to fall," says an FT headline from yesterday.

In the aftermath of the Bear saga, investors started asking questions about Lehmann Bros (NYSE:LEH). The firm had to publicly announce that it was solid. Of course, Bear said it was solid too. And as Walter Bagehot remarked in 1873, "every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit…in fact, his credit is gone.""

---

James Turk: "Let’s take a look at the big fish, namely, the commercial banks. In fact, let’s look at the biggest of them all to ask: “Will Citibank survive?” "

---

Reuters News: "Dozens of U.S. banks will fail in the next two years as losses from soured loans mount and regulators crack down on lenders that take too much risk, especially in real estate and construction, an analyst said. The surge would follow a placid 3-1/2 year period in which just four banks collapsed, all in the last year, RBC Capital Markets analyst Gerard Cassidy said in a Friday interview.

Between 50 and 150 U.S. banks -- as many as one in 57 -- could fail by early 2010, mostly those with no more than a couple of billion dollars of assets, Cassidy said. That rate of failure would be the highest in at least 15 years, or since the winding down of the savings-and-loan debacle."

---

Mish: "Lehman may not be Bear Stearns but it is still leveraged 30.7 to 1. Citigroup and many financials are hugely leveraged as well. Eventually the market will have to face a deleveraging of those assets. Huge additional writeoffs are coming. Furthermore, many homebuilders are going to go bankrupt and today does not change that. But that is not today's business.

Today's business is simple: The much anticipated end of world did not come. Looking forward however, the underlying economic fundamentals have not changed."

---

Paul Krugman: "Here’s one way to think about the liquidity trap — a situation in which conventional monetary policy loses all traction. When short-term interest rates are close to zero, open-market operations in which the central bank prints money and buys government debt don’t do anything, because you’re just swapping one more or less zero-interest rate asset for another."

---

Jim Sinclair: "All Is Well In La La Land: Lehman's conference call declaring no problems due to sufficient capital and a fine core business has the equity market up 250+ points and Lehman's shares are in the process of erasing previous losses. The general financials are following suit.

The Fed works with perception. The perception today is outlined in the title of this missive.

The implication that the Fed is the guarantor of all things financial is a repeat of the Weimar situation as the tools being applied will have the same results."

"The equity markets and the financial sector stocks love the Fed so why doesn’t everyone?

To understand the following article make sure you first understand the following:

Inflation is two fold. First it is the expansion of monetary aggregates which always result in price inflation.

Deflation is debt failure first. Debt failure clear of no monetary expansion will reduce prices.

We now have unprecedented monetary inflation on top of price inflation coming from the monetary and fiscal stimulus of 2000 to present.

We are headed to some degree of the Weimar experience, which can be summed up as debt failure, collapse in business activity and an explosive rise in prices for goods and services while a currency collapse took place.

That is a mouthful, but also totally accurate concerning the present situation."

---

Mogambo Guru: "So stocks are over-priced, bonds are over-priced, houses are over-priced, and government is over-priced and over-sized, at the same time as previous inflations in the money supply are showing up as inflation in consumer prices, at the same time as consumers are over-burdened with debt, at the same time as they are losing their jobs, at the same time as (courtesy of JMR Ed. S) the juxtaposed Bloomberg.com headlines announce "Producer Prices in U.S. Increase More Than Forecast, U.S. Consumer Confidence Declines to Five-Year Low, U.S. Consumer Confidence Declines to Five-Year Low, Goldman, Lehman May Not Have Dodged Credit Crisis, at the same time as JMR Mikael K. sends headlines from InformationClearingHouse.com that "Oil hits new peak at $102 a barrel as commodities boom. Dollar sinks to low ($1.50) against euro. Manufacturing data fuel US recession fears. U.S. Economy: Confidence Falls, Producer Prices Rise. U.S. new-home sales for January fall 2.8%. U.S. Home Foreclosures Jump 90% as Mortgages Reset. US mortgage finance firm Fannie Mae posts 2.1 bln loss. Key home price index shows record decline. Bush: US in 'slowdown' not recession.""

---

etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

Billionaire Jim Rogers states the obvious, over and over again. Note the CNBC dim bulbs just not getting it:

His brain has clearly turned to cheesecake. To read his latest drivel you have to assume that not only is this drooling idiot completely blameless for the current fiasco, but no one could have possibly foreseen the blatantly obvious:

"Those of us who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder equity have to be in a state of shocked disbelief."

Are you shitting me, Alan? Just nip off and shoot yourself, you useless bastard.

We will never have a perfect model of risk

By Alan Greenspan

Financial Times, Sunday Mar 16 2008 13:30

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war. It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities.

Home price stabilisation will restore much-needed clarity to the marketplace because losses will be realised rather than prospective. The major source of contagion will be removed. Financial institutions will then recapitalise or go out of business. Trust in the solvency of remaining counterparties will be gradually restored and issuance of loans and securities will slowly return to normal. Although inventories of vacant single-family homes - those belonging to builders and investors - have recently peaked, until liquidation of these inventories proceeds in earnest, the level at which home prices will stabilise remains problematic.

The American housing bubble peaked in early 2006, followed by an abrupt and rapid retreat over the past two years. Since summer 2006, hundreds of thousands of homeowners, many forced by foreclosure, have moved out of single-family homes into rental housing, creating an excess of approximately 600,000 vacant, largely investor-owned single-family units for sale. Homebuilders caught by the market's rapid contraction have involuntarily added an additional 200,000 newly built homes to the "empty-house-for-sale" market.

Home prices have been receding rapidly under the weight of this inventory overhang. Single-family housing starts have declined by 60 per cent since early 2006, but have only recently fallen below single-family home demand. Indeed, this sharply lower level of pending housing additions, together with the expected 1m increase in the number of US households this year as well as underlying demand for second homes and replacement homes, together imply a decline in the stock of vacant single-family homes for sale of approximately 400,000 over the course of 2008.

The pace of liquidation is likely to pick up even more as new-home construction falls further. The level of home prices will probably stabilise as soon as the rate of inventory liquidation reaches its maximum, well before the ultimate elimination of inventory excess. That point, however, is still an indeterminate number of months in the future.

The crisis will leave many casualties. Particularly hard hit will be much of today's financial risk-valuation system, significant parts of which failed under stress. Those of us who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder equity have to be in a state of shocked disbelief. But I hope that one of the casualties will not be reliance on counterparty surveillance, and more generally financial self-regulation, as the fundamental balance mechanism for global finance.

"Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd."

- J. P. Morgan

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."

- David Rockefeller

Fucking YIKES.

A trillion here, a trillion there...

House seeks debt limit increase to $10.2 trillion

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government's debt limit would be raised to $10.2 trillion under a budget plan for next year approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The House's fiscal 2009 budget, which passed on Thursday, would increase U.S. borrowing authority by $385 billion from the current limit of $9.815 trillion, according to the House Budget Committee.

[Note: please note current debt as tallied by the National Debt Clock on the left side of this page]

The impoverishment of America. The rich get richer, the poor definitely get poorer... so break out the riot police and club those poverty-level women and children into dispersing!

Hundreds seeking housing money overwhelm Boca Authority

BOCA RATON, Palm Beach Post — A crowd of more than 500 people waiting for hours this morning for housing voucher applications were dispersed by police in riot gear at the Boca Raton Housing Authority when the applications ran out sooner than expected.

Two people were arrested and six to eight people hospitalized for exhaustion during the ordeal.

Hundreds of people, mostly mothers who had spent more than eight hours in line, were forced to leave the property at 2333 W. Glades Road by 30 Boca Raton Police officers, including SWAT team members, who walked toward the crowd in unison holding their police shields up about 10:30 a.m.

"Leave or face arrest," police officers shouted at the crowd as they urged them out of the housing authority parking lot. People were made to leave the vicinity altogether, with officers forcing them to cross the street and move toward their cars.

The overwhelming turnout of people desperate for housing money came as little surprise to Suzanne Cabrera, president of the Housing Leadership Council of Palm Beach County.

"This is an indication that housing it's still a huge problem," Cabrera said this afternoon. "It's a reflection of people's concern for housing, their uncertainty. I got people today asking me: was this my last chance to get housing I can afford?"

Several other things, such as mortgage foreclosures and high gas prices, are contributing to that feeling of insecurity and desperation, she said.

This was Jim Cramer on television last week:

The Hillbilly Report on Hank Paulsen's bullshit:

Professor Nouriel Roubini, who has been 100% correct about the meltdown for the last several years:

"The Fed has no idea of which other primary dealers may be insolvent as it does not supervise and regulate those primary dealers that are not banks. But it is treating this crisis – the most severe financial crisis in the US since the Great Depression – as if it was purely a liquidity crisis.

By lending massive amounts to potentially insolvent institutions that it does not supervise or regulate and that may be insolvent the Fed is taking serious financial risks and seriously exacerbate moral hazard distortions. Here you have highly leveraged non bank financial institutions that made reckless investments and lending, had extremely poor risk management and altogether disregarded liquidity risks; some may be insolvent but now the Fed is providing them with a blank check for unlimited amounts.

This is a most radical action and a signal of how severe the crisis of the banking system and non-bank shadow financial system is. This is the worst US financial crisis since the Great Depression and the Fed is treating it as if it was only a liquidity crisis. But this is not just a liquidity crisis; it is rather a credit and insolvency crisis. And it is not the job of the Fed to bail out insolvent non bank financial institutions.

If a bail out should occur this is a fiscal policy action that should be decided by Congress after the relevant equity holders have been wiped out and senior management fired without golden parachutes and huge severance packages."

The Feds loaned JPMorgan billions of taxpayer bucks ($30 billion, to be precise) to buy imploding giant Bear Stearns for $2/share. That comes out to $240 million for the sale (wait a minute, wasn't the 'loan' $30 billion?).

Last year, BSC was running at something like $170/share, and only last week BSC was $54/share. To put it all in perspective, $240 million (the buyout price) is about 1/4 what the Bear headquarters building in Manhattan is worth on the open market right now.

Grunt employees of Bear Stearns are dealing:

Gallows humor, realtor greet Bear's stunned staff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shocked Bear Stearns (BSC.N) employees trudged into work Monday morning desperately seeking clarity on their futures.

The fact that the first person they met on entering their headquarters in midtown Manhattan was a salesman hawking cheaper apartments did little to lift their mood -- an ironic twist, perhaps, given that it was risky speculation in the housing market that got the bank into trouble in the first place.

"I've been at Bear for 11 years and I want to vomit," said a Bear Stearns employee, who described himself as a partner, as he entered the striking seven-year-old octagonal building two blocks from Grand Central Terminal.

To add insult to injury, someone had taped a $2 bill to the revolving glass doors at the 46th and Vanderbilt Avenue entrance -- some gallows humor on the bargain-basement $2-a share price JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) paid for Bear Stearns.

"Where is the $2 bill?" joked one employee, "I might need that tomorrow!"

Dollars tough to sell on streets of Amsterdam

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands.

"Our dollar is worth maybe zero over here," said Mary Kelly, an American tourist from Indianapolis, Indiana, in front of the Anne Frank house. "It's hard to find a place to exchange. We have to go downtown, to the central station or post office."

That's because the smaller currency exchanges -- despite buy/sell spreads that make it easier for them to make money by exchanging small amounts of currency -- don't want to be caught holding dollars that could be worth less by the time they can sell them.

Damn, tonight is tight! The dollar is bottoming out, gold is skyrocketing up, and Asian markets are tanking as I type this, and the Fed cut .25bp on a Sunday afternoon two days ahead of a scheduled deep cut...

Fed acts Sunday to prevent global bank run Monday

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Acting quickly to prevent a run on major global financial firms, the Federal Reserve cut its discount rate by a quarter percentage point to 3.25% and offered to lend money to a longer list of firms than ever before.

The extraordinary weekend moves came as J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM: 36.54, -1.57, -4.1%) sealed a deal to buy Bear Stearns Cos. (BSC: 30.00, -27.00, -47.4%) for just $2 a share backed by up to $30 billion borrowed from the Fed. The Fed board gave its approval to that unique funding arrangement, which guarantees JP Morgan against losses from buying Bear.

The Fed board also approved the creation of a special lending facility through the New York Fed that would be available to members of its primary dealers list, which includes both commercial banks and investment banks. Investment banks, such as Bear Stearns, have not been allowed to borrow directly from the Fed.

JP Morgan has access to the discount window through its Chase Bank subsidiary, but Bear Stearns does not have direct access.

Events have unfolded at warp speed over the past week. On Tuesday, the Fed announced a new lending program for primary dealers in the bond markets, but that program won't go into effect for two more weeks. On Friday, the Fed allowed Bear Stearns to borrow money via JP Morgan in a desperate bid to save the firm, which has been pummeled by losses on exotic securities backed by subprime mortgages.

The Federal Open Market Committee meets on Tuesday. Analysts expect the FOMC to cut the target for the federal funds rate by as much as a full percentage point to 2%. Another cut in the discount rate is also likely.

Below is a chart that reflects the official government Consumer Price Index, comparing the figures it released in 1980 with the figures its releasing now in 2008.

Can anyone with even an ounce of brains believe that prices have dropped since 1980?

And yet, with a totally straight face, that's exactly what the moneyboys want you to believe:

Clearly, they are fudging the figures so badly that even a cursory glance shows them for the blatant, boldfaced lies they are. Here's what the CPI is REALLY running at:

Dubya calls an emergency meeting of the Plunge Protection Team:

Bush to Meet with Financial Policymakers

WASHINGTON, Reuters -- President George W. Bush plans to meet on Monday with top U.S. financial policymakers, the White House said, with the meeting coming at a time of increased strains in credit markets.

The White House said on Saturday that the meeting, scheduled at 2:10 p.m. EDT, is with members of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets.

The group is led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and also includes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as well as the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The meeting comes as a sharp downturn in the U.S. housing market has led to a full-blown credit crisis that has reverberated throughout the U.S. financial system.

On Friday, Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank, said it was turning to JPMorgan Chase and the Fed to secure emergency financing, an effort also involving the Treasury.

The president's working group on Thursday issued a wide-ranging set of recommendations for changes that would toughen rules for mortgage brokers, lenders, and credit agencies to try to prevent a recurrence of the problems roiling credit markets.

Democrats in Congress are pushing for legislation under which the Federal Housing Administration could play a larger role in helping to stem the rising tide of home foreclosures that threatens to swamp the financial system.

However, the Bush administration has been cool to any proposals that would expand the government's role.

* * *

Mind-numbingly scary research charts from Financial Ninja (right click and "View Image" to see larger chart):

1) Total Borrowings are up from around $16 billion in December to $46 billion in February, almost a 200% increase.

2) Non-Borrowed Reserves dropped from around $25 billion in December to LESS than ZERO. NOT cool.

3) Net Free or Borrowed Reserves are around zero. While this may SEEM like an improvement, factoring the ever increasing TAF borrowings (which the Fed has removed from this data series) paints a more accurate picture. Including TAF credit, Net Free or Borrowed Reserves are approaching -$45 billion.

4) The Monetary Base has turned down. That is the monetary base is being eroded faster than it can be replaced as debt destruction continues to accelerate. The Fed is ‘injecting’ liquidity through REPO agreements. The Fed is NOT ‘printing’ money. Either way, debt destruction is exceeding liquidity injections. As (Financial Ninja) wrote in in an earlier blog post:

“In the land of economics, debt and money are ‘fungible’. That simply means they are interchangeable and for all intents and purposes the same. Debt is money and money is debt. The sudden rapid destruction of debt (every write down you hear coming out of the financial sector) has the effect of destroying money. If debt is destroyed fast enough, and it will be, then you get a rather sudden contraction in money supply. This is known as DEFLATION… and it ALWAYS happens when a debt bubble bursts. ALWAYS.”

5) Despite lower rates, Household Financial Obligations (debt) as a percentage of Disposable Personal Income are still at historic highs. Can you say ‘crushing burden’?

6) The trend is not your friend. Personal Savings have been trending down for years now and have been ‘skipping’ around ZERO. A ZERO Personal Savings rate is NOT what you want to see on the eve of a GIANT financial CRISIS.

OKAY, PEOPLE - not joking. We are seriously, seriously financially fucked here.

Okay, this is the fella whose job it is to actually declare an "official recession", which he has not officially done yet. Now, when the goobermint guy whose job it is to declare the official bad news (and be upbeat until that point) comes out before the official declaration and tells you in plain english that we're economically screwed and the "situation is very bad", you can believe that the reality is we're totally fucked. Yoda Marty is not given to drama, if anything he tends to severely underplay the negatives. We are SO fucked:

U.S. faces severe recession: NBER's Feldstein

BOCA RATON, Florida (Reuters) - The United States is in a recession that could be "substantially more severe" than recent ones, National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein said on Friday.

"The situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad," Feldstein said in a speech at the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.

"There's no doubt that this year and next year are going to be very difficult years."

NBER is a private sector group that is considered the arbiter of U.S. business cycles. Feldstein is also a Harvard economics professor and former economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

Answering questions from the audience, Feldstein said the downturn could be the worst in the United States since World War Two.

From "The Richter Report", Jim breaks down the BS into straight talk:

Facing The Facts

It's almost the Ides of March. Let us examine some facts about the current situation:

1) The US Dollar has lost more than 40% its buying power since 2000. It traded for about 120 on the US Dollar Index in 2000. It went below 72 on the day I wrote this. It is headed lower.

2) More than 7 TRILLION dollars of wealth has evaporated from the world's balance sheets SINCE 1/1/08. How much is 7 TRILLION? Is that a significant amount?

3) Gold has gone from around $250 per ounce in 2000 to around $1,000 per ounce since that time. Gold is a lousy investment, isn't it? It doesn't pay interest. You could be getting 3% interest from a CD!

4) Oil averaged about $28 per barrel in 2000. Can you say $110 per barrel?

5) Silver traded between $4 and $5 in 2000. It is now trading for more than $20 per ounce.

6) Real estate is doing GREAT, isn't it? Real estate always goes up, doesn't it? Actually, it went down during the Great Depression, and we might be about to get another Depression. How will real estate do if that happens?

7) The Dow hit a then-all-time high of about 11,717 in January, 2000. On the day I wrote this, it closed just above 12,145. WOW! About 428 points since January 2000! BUY AND HOLD! Stocks always go up! Actually, they don't. People who bought the Dow in 1929 had to wait until the 1950s for their portfolios to get back to where they had been in nominal terms. People who owned gold mining shares during the 1930s got rich.

8) Most bonds are yielding NEGATIVE real rates of return when inflation is considered.

9) The total monetary supply is being expanded by over 16% per year in the US.

10) The Dow has just about completed a "head and shoulders" pattern. Technical analysts normally regard this as a very bearish sign. I'm not a technical analyst. I'm a fundamentals guy. The fundamentals are crappy as well!

11) The Fed has announced that it is going to loan the bankers at least 200 BILLION dollars within the next month in order to "inject liquidity" into the system. In exchange for this, the Fed will accept a bunch of CDOs and other insane "investments" held by the banks as "security" for the loans. I don't think that the Fed will actually make the banks pay anything back. The Fed will create more billions out of thin air when the current rescue plan fails. The loans will "revolve" into outer space!

12) The Fed creates all its "money" out of thin air. It isn't backed by anything of value.

13) Inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused when central banks and their member banks (through the fractional reserve system) increase the supply of currency relative to the available goods and services. This causes prices to rise.

14) Our government and its"information organs" such as the BLS are LYING to us about the real rate of inflation and money creation.

15) Most people have not done ANYTHING at all to protect themselves from the evil policies which are robbing the middle class of what little wealth it has.

This is not complicated. if you had bought some gold in 2000, your initial investment would have gone up by 300%. No trading. No technical analysis. No watching CNBC. You could have taken a nap, played golf, gone fishing, read a good book, or done anything you wanted to do. This is the absolute POWER of identifying the trend and then staying with it. Gold and tangible assets have been the investments of the decade, and they will remain the investments of the decade (and perhaps the next decade) as long as we have morally and ethically corrupt purveyors of fiat currency in charge of our monetary policy.

Please buy gold and silver bullion. Buy mining shares. Invest in the energy sector and in other commodities. Just do it!

Jim Richter

This kind of thing has not happened since the Great Depression:

Bear Stearns bailed out by Fed, JPMorgan

NEW YORK, Associated Press - Bear Stearns Cos., one of Wall Street's venerable investment banks, received a bailout Friday by the federal government and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a surprise, last-ditch effort to save the 86-year old institution.

---

Bear Stearns Gets Emergency Financing from Fed. J.P. Morgan

Morgan Stanley, Goldman On Intervention Watch

Fed pledges to supply cash

SEC to widen range for asset valuations: report

---

The oligarchy that controls the system is throwing away hundreds of billions, probably in the end trillions, of taxpayer money. To save the crooks that created the mess: Citigroup, Lehman, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, Morgan Stanley, UBS, HSBC, Bank of America, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, etc... These are the ratfuckers that pulled the handle on the Big Flush.

And they can do it, because for the last decade, America has complacently allowed all kinds of sneaky regulatory shenanigans to occur without so much as a whimper. Hey, the good times were rollin', don't rock the boat, right?

We are SO fucked.

Smells like, walks like, must be, etc...

Headline on front page of lowest-common-denominator news channel, Yahoo News:

"BREAKING NEWS: U.S. has slid into recession, economist survey says (Wall Street Journal)"

Completely buried in the business news section:

"# Gold hits record $1,000 an ounce AP - 26 minutes ago"

"# Gas, oil rise to records as dollar falls AP - 1 hour, 43 minutes ago"

"# Consumers retrench, labor market weak Reuters - 2 hours, 3 minutes ago"

"# Foreclosures up 60 percent on year Reuters - 2 hours, 37 minutes ago"

From Yoda Peter Schiff's latest investor newsletter (italics ours):

"Most on Wall Street are downplaying the significance of what is happening. To them, what we are now experiencing is a normal cyclical down-turn, perhaps even a mild recession by historical standards. They could not be more wrong as the current recession will be anything but typical. To appreciate the scope of what is happening, the closest examples are the 1930s and the 1970s. However, even those comparisons are not exact. My prediction is that this will be much worse than the 1970s in that the current recession will be much deeper and longer lasting and inflation rates will rise much higher. How the entire period ultimately compares to the Great Depression is still an open question, but there is certainly a possibility that in some ways it will be worse.

The main reason so few on Wall Street appreciate the problem is that they still do not understand that we were living in a bubble in the first place. As a result, what is happening is not placed into its proper context. If you do not understand the nature of the preceding boom, how can you possibly appreciate the extent of the coming bust? As a result most on Wall Street are waiting for the Fed to put the pieces of our economy back together without understanding why they never really fit in the first place. An economy built on consumer credit was destined to fall apart. As such, all the Fed's horses and all the Fed's men will never put that phony economy back together again."

I understand about mental illness and emotional dysfunctionality. Regardless of what slasher movies and teevee shows try to tell you, usually people with mental illness are no threat to anyone but themselves.

Like the sorry person in this story. Imagine what kind of demons must be in your mind to voluntarily keep you in such a space:

Sheriff: Woman sat on toilet for 2 years

WICHITA, Kan., Associated Press - Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years — so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman's 36-year-old boyfriend.

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

"And her reply would be, `Maybe tomorrow,'" Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."

... to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

From Mish, a synopsis of the chain of events leading up to the financial crisis we are currently experiencing. Mind you, the underlying cause was unmitigated greed, overconsumption at obscene levels, and a completely irrational euphoria that the fake good times would never end and we could keep pretending that debt is production:

* Real short-term interest rates were reduced around the world.

* Global savings appeared to rise faster than did perceived real investment opportunities.

* Emerging market economies built up very large levels of official reserves to hold the value of their currencies stable against the dollar.

* The exchange rate policies in those economies made overall global financial conditions more accommodative.

* Expected and realized volatility in both debt and equity markets dropped. Term premiums declined and remained low.

* Credit spreads across a wide range of asset classes fell to levels that assumed unusually low levels of future losses.

* Many households, including those previously lacking access to credit or with access only to expensive credit, found they could borrow on a significant scale to finance the purchase of a home and other expenses.

* Prices rose across a range of real and financial assets, most notably the prices of homes.

* This constellation of broad economic and financial conditions was accompanied by rapid innovation in financial instruments that made credit risk easier to trade and, in principle at least, to hedge.

* Issuance of asset-backed securities (ABS), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), as well as credit default swaps (CDS), expanded on a dramatic scale.

* The proliferation of credit risk transfer instruments was driven in part by an assumption of frictionless, uninterrupted liquidity.

* A sizable fraction of long-term assets—assets with exposure to different forms of credit risk—ended up in vehicles financed with very short-term liabilities and was placed with investors and funds that were also exposed to liquidity risk.

Do they still make homegrown nazi nutz in the heartland? Yes, they do. Here's crazy punkass bitch Oklahoma elected official Rep. Sally Kern spewing serious hate when she didn't think she was being recorded:

Send all righteous indignation missives and assorted hatemail to: sallykern@okhouse.gov. And if you go by her house, throw some flaming dogshit on her porch - after all, it's only fair to get as good as you give.

You know, I don't really understand what Sally's problem with fags is (it's always a problem with fags, dykes are invisible). She likes sucking dick, gay boys like sucking dick, you would think that right there is enough common ground to get a support group going!

You can learn more about dear sweet homophobic Sally on her Oklahoma State Legislature page, watch the blogosphere go ballistic over what is essentially Fred Phelps in drag, and try not to get too weirded out by the crazy axe-murderer eyes in her official portrait...

The New World Order website: http://spp.gov/

How many cases of things like fibromyalgia, CFDS, environmental illness and autoimmune diseases start with a glass of pharma-cocktail municipal water? How many kids hit puberty at nine nowadays because their water has 'perfectly safe' bovine growth hormone?

AP probe finds drugs in drinking water

Associated Press Writers Sun Mar 9, 1:00 PM ET

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public "doesn't know how to interpret the information" and might be unduly alarmed.

[Well, no shit, sherlock. You have no fucking idea what decades of pharmaceutical cocktail will do to a human. "Utilities insist their water is safe"? "Unduly" alarmed? How about "justifiably" alarmed, you smarmy bureaucratic wanker?

Worried about tranquilizers in your water? No, you're not, because there's tranquilizers in your water!]

Bullshit from the Bureau of Labor Statistics February Jobs Report:

BLS BS: "Nonfarm payroll employment edged down in February (-63,000), and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 4.8 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Employment fell in manufacturing, construction, and retail trade. Job growth continued in health care and in food services. Average hourly earnings rose by 5 cents, or 0.3 percent, over the month."

It takes an increase of about 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the birth rate and immigration. Minus 63,000 jobs is a disaster, fancy goobermint spin notwithstanding.

BLS BS: "Both the civilian labor force, at 153.4 million, and the labor force participation rate, at 65.9 percent, declined in February."

In English. "The unemployment rate dropped because we stopped counting everyone who is unemployed."

Balance the budget, protect the borders, and otherwise leave people alone.

"When I say a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

- Lewis Carroll, 'Through The Looking Glass'.

The first stage is denial. The second stage is fear/anger:

Economic woes raise fear of 1970s rerun

Christian Science Monitor - The echoes seem ominous: a sagging economy, rising inflation, a record price for gold, and plunging stock prices. Could a return to 1970s-style stagflation be just around the corner?

That dreaded blend of economic stagnation and persistent rising prices is suddenly a topic of concern.

The word stagflation cropped up 562 times in major newspapers and wire services in February, compared with 12 times in the same month last year. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked about the danger last week on Capitol Hill. Democrats and Republicans alike peppered him with questions about soaring consumer prices, a sign that their constituents would prefer not to watch that 1970s show all over again.

Now, THAT's useful:

Famed geneticist creating life form that turns CO2 to fuel

MONTEREY, California (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.

Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California.

"We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.

"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."

Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or octane-based fuels as waste, according to Venter.

Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste, according to Venter.

"We have 20 million genes which I call the design components of the future," Venter said. "We are limited here only by our imagination."

His team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that already exist, not making new life, he said. Organisms already exist that produce octane, but not in amounts needed to be a fuel supply.

"If they could produce things on the scale we need, this would be a methane planet," Venter said. "The scale is what is critical; which is why we need to genetically design them."

The genetics of octane-producing organisms can be tinkered with to increase the amount of CO2 they eat and octane they excrete, according to Venter.

The limiting part of the equation isn't designing an organism, it's the difficulty of extracting high concentrations of CO2 from the air to feed the organisms, the scientist said in answer to a question from Page.

Scientists put "suicide genes" into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves.

Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu and other illnesses.

"We will see an exponential change in the pace of the sophistication of organisms and what they can do," Venter said.