Economy Tank

The Buck Stops Where?

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ:

In the credit market panic that began in August, we have now reached the point of maximum danger: A global run on the dollar that could become a rout. […]

Yet the conventional wisdom -- on Wall Street and in Washington -- continues to be precisely the opposite. In this view, the Fed is "behind the curve" and needs to cut interest rates even faster and further than it has. Never mind that this is precisely the path the Fed has followed since August, yet the crisis has grown worse and now bids to tank the larger economy. Does it make sense to do more of what isn't working?

The dollar sinks. Economic crisis worsens.

Is anyone in charge?

SFGate:

That sound of tectonic plates shifting, crushing under their massive weight the head of a little bird that has been running around Wall Street crying, "The sky is falling in!", is the sound of the American dollar's once rock-solid value plummeting and of the Bush gang's yawning indifference to the fate of the nation's currency - and to the role its failed economic policies and overspending on its long, endless wars has cost U.S. taxpayers. (Even now, the U.S. government continues to borrow some $2 billion a day to finance its activities, including the wars.)

How the GOP Will Benefit

From Impending Economic Collapse

The Existentialist Cowboy:

Republicans benefit from the fact that recessions are class conscious, affecting worse those who can least afford them. An era of highly leveraged US economic expansion and empire is about to come crashing down and swept away. Count on the GOP to make out like bandits.

It seems like ages ago, the US was at peace, there was a budget surplus, the economy was growing, and the unemployment rate was very low. But not everyone was happy. There was an entire group of people who harbor not good, but ill will; an entire class wished for bad times and got it.

Until now, China had an interest in keeping the US ponzi scheme propped up --they sold billions to US citizens via Wal-Mart, the economic Kudzu that ate America. But since a Chinese sub popped up undetected in the middle of the US fifth fleet, it has been apparent that the honeymoon is over. China now leads the world in dumping dollars. Everywhere, it seems, it has become a habit.

If this were mere recession staring back at us from a fun house mirror, it might be shrugged off. After all, the GOP has always loved recessions and benefited from them.

Bernanke Saves Bear Stearns

While Americans Live In Tents

Prison Planet:

After bailing out America's broke banks to the tune of $200 billion, the Federal Reserve turned their philanthropic eye to Bear Stearns, and they're not even a bank! In a similar exchange to the bank bailout, Bear Stearns traded worthless mortgage backed securities for Treasury notes.

The Fed, having pledged $30 million in Treasuries to the bankrupt firm, and $200 billion to the broke banks, now owns the homes of almost a quarter of a million Americans. Meanwhile, Illuminati controlled JP Morgan Chase just announced that they had bought Bear Stearns for a paltry $236 million.

And while most devastating to the working and middle class, even the wealthy are loosing their homes. Maryland recently reported that the total number of foreclosures this year alone equals 40% of all homes sold in 2006.

The worst is yet to come," warned Eric S. Friedman, director of Montgomery County's Office of Consumer Protection. "A lot more adjustable-rate mortgages are going to be resetting in 2008 and 2009."

In a very real sense, the Federal Reserve has just perpetrated the biggest land grab in the last 100 years by trading worthless paper for real estate. Now good people, United States citizens, having been sold out by their government and stripped of their homes and property, must live in tents and shanties, while criminal, predatory bankers get rich and fat off of the sweat and effort of our country.

This is economic destruction and financial slavery. It has to stop. The press in this country are obviously propaganda outlets controlled by the Elite. Why else wouldn't they warn us? Why else would they omit such a serious breach and cover up the fact that their own countrymen are living outside?

Leading Economic Writer:
Financial Meltdown A "Gigantic Fraud"

Info Wars:

A leading economic journalist has described the current financial crisis as a "gigantic fraud", the fallout of a deliberate and preconceived profit agenda to enslave the middle classes in a debt bubble.

The economics editor of the London Guardian, Larry Elliott, has hit out at the global financial elite in a refreshing piece that marks a rare shift away from the establishment hackery we are used to from the corporate media.

In an article titled America was conned - who will pay? Elliot writes:

Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans. [...]

Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade households to do their patriotic duty. The method chosen was simple. Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll in.

As they did - for a while. Now it's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned. They have been duped by a bunch of serpent-tongued hucksters who packed up the wagon and made it across the county line before a lynch mob could be formed.

Elliot, like former chief economist of the World Bank turned whistleblower, Joseph Stiglitz, points a finger of blame squarely at former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, stating:

"In the longer term, lessons must be learnt from the turmoil. One is that you don't solve the problems of a collapsing bubble by blowing up another, which is what Alan Greenspan did after the dotcom fiasco in 2001 - the most irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory."

Another cogent point Larry Elliot makes is the following:

"If this is, heaven help us, The Big One, one of the only consolations will be that the repugnance at the orgy of speculation that has sapped the strength of the US economy will put a new New Deal on the political agenda."

It should be added that, given that this crisis has been engineered by a financial elite Ponzi scheme, we should be extremely wary of any "new deal" that is brokered by the financial and political elite posing as our saviors.