Economics

Huffington Post | The Treasury Department is vigorously opposed to a House-passed measure that would open the Federal Reserve to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a senior Treasury official said Monday. Instead, the official said, the Treasury prefers a substitute offered b...

Huffington Post | Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) gave up the fight for a new super-regulator over the weekend, and will propose financial reforms this week that leave the Fed in control of big banks and the rest of the major Wall Street players, sources told the FT.

Daily Kos | The appearance of the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, Elizabeth Warren, on Charlie Rose is a must watch. In addition to an in depth discussion of the the consumer protection agency, which despite all valiant attempts to the contrary, will likely end up under the Fed's j...

Financial Times | Gold bug extraordinaire Professor Antal Fekete shines a light on the case of the SPDR GLD specifically –the largest of the gold-backed ETF funds in the US in terms of money managed. In a report published about two weeks ago Fekete notes the fund’s listed bars  shrank rat...

Coin Update News | Recently, the German television station ProSieben ran a news story covering W. C. Heraeus in Hanau, Germany, the world’s largest privately owned refinery.  In the story, Wilfried Hörner, the head of the gold foundry, shows a 500 gram bar (16.0755 troy ounces) received f...

Black Listed News & New World Order Report | For the big have gotten even bigger since the start of the financial crisis. At the end of 2007, the Big Four banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — held 32 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions. As o...

Alternet | It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life.

Examiner | Hoping to keep the news low-keyed and under-reported, Fannie Mae announced late Friday afternoon after the markets closed that it had lost over $74 billion in 2009, bringing its 3-year loss totals to $137 billion.

Daily Reckoning | Last year, the firm says, folks with FICO scores of 760 or higher defaulted on real estate loans at three times the pace they defaulted on plastic.

Bloomberg | The mortgage-finance company posted a fourth-quarter net loss of $16.3 billion, or $2.87 a share, Washington-based Fannie Mae said in a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Economic Collapse | On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress that the Federal Reserve does not plan to "print money" to help Congress finance the exploding U.S. national debt.  In fact, Bernanke told Congress that the U.S. could soon face a debt crisis ...

CBS Atlanta | The city solicitor said a bank executive in New York is the person responsible for cleaning up the hundreds of tires that are piled up on the property. The arrest citation names James Dimon as the responsible person.

Bloomberg | U.S. banks may expand their short- term lending at interest rates of 120 percent or more as they seek to replace more than $15 billion in lost revenue because of regulations limiting overdraft fees.

Bloomberg | When a congressional panel convened a hearing on the government rescue of American International Group Inc. in January, the public scolding of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner got the most attention.

Money News | Early in its history, debt is unknown except for home mortgages and some consumer loans, and people live within their means. Speculation is discouraged, and commodities markets are small and tightly regulated.

New York Times | Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Rolling Stone | Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman's ...

Business Journal | The agreement outlines former Chief Lending Officer David Kennelly’s guilty plea on a count of “scheme to conceal material facts.” It also provides new insight into the causes of the Vancouver, Wash., bank’s Jan. 16, 2009, collapse.

Huffington Post | TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren sat down for an interview with Bill Maher on last night's episode of "Real Time." One of the topics she and Maher discussed was the current credit card legislation and how usury has regained a place within our society.

Snardfarker | Is this an April Fool's joke? A contingency plan to defend against the idea of what "would happen if thousands of [bank] customers pledge to withdraw their money from the bank on a certain day, unless the bonuses are capped?"

Business Week | The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that the average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproporti...

BBC | The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.  It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy.

Campaign for America's Future | Yes, there is a class war, Warren Buffett once said, and my class is winning. The IRS study of taxes paid in 2007 makes his point. The top 1% of taxpayers averaged about $138 million in income, and paid taxes at a rate of 16.6%.

Telegraph | George Soros doubled his investment in the world's largest gold fund – just weeks before claiming investing in the precious metal is now the "ultimate bubble".  The new shares were bought at a price of $421m, taking his total holding in the fund to $663m at the end of De...

Rolling Stone | Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldma...

NPR | Bailouts and bonuses have many Americans frustrated with big banks. Some consumers think these giant institutions have lost touch with customers and basic good business practices. They're so fed up that they're holding these behemoths accountable by moving their money to community banks.

Craig Steiner | The government can have a surplus even if it has trillions in debt, but it cannot have a surplus if that debt increased every year. This article is about surplus/deficit, not the debt. However, it analyzes the debt to prove there wasn't a surplus under Clinton.

Boing Boing | Facing a $2.8 billion deficit and pending insolvency, Washington State's House Bill 3176 proposes changes to its B&O Royalty tax that would give Microsoft an estimated $100 million tax cut annually and possible amnesty for more than a billion dollars in past tax evasion.

New York Times | Mark Pittman, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News, had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Reserve Board, seeking the details of its unprecedented efforts to funnel money to the collapsing banks of Wall Street.

Yahoo | If you have bad credit in the new era of credit card regulation, be prepared to pay -- dearly -- for the privilege of using credit. That's the message underlying recent credit card offers that feature jaw-dropping interest rates of up to 79.9 percent.

The Star Press | Working people would argue that raising the minimum wage was the right thing to do. But would business owners agree? Most of those that I've spoken to say that the increase in minimum wage was another blow to their company's bottom line.

Seeking Alpha | In my view, there is little chance the Germans are going to allow the EU to ride to the rescue of the Greeks. All of the bailout chatter does not really consider the domestic political constraints in Germany.

Failure Mag | The world’s number one debtor nation, that is. And in “The End of Influence,” authors Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong illustrate the far-reaching and potentially long-lasting consequences of other nations—mostly oil producing states and Asian manufacturing countries—having the lion’s...

TampsBay.com | Just one problem: The Massachusetts couple paid for their future retirement home in Spring Hill with cash in 2005, five years before agents for Bank of America seized the house, removed belongings and changed the locks on the doors, according to a lawsuit the couple have filed in ...

Wall Street Journal | About a quarter of the 8.4 million jobs eliminated since the recession began won't be coming back and will ultimately need to be replaced by other types of work in growing industries, according to economists in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey.

Spiegel | Greeks aren't very welcome in the Rue Alphones Weicker in Luxembourg. It's home to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office. The number crunchers there are deeply annoyed with Athens. Investigative reports state that important data "cannot be confirmed" or has been requested b...

MINA | The allegation of the Vatican bank's financial corruption has been made by an Italian magazine that pointed to the financial institute's purported involvement in stealth fiscal transactions —via several accounts —with Italy's UniCredit Bank, Russia Today television network quoted the Pano...

Daily Kos | In yet another damning overview of Goldman Sachs' business practices relating to their relationship with American International Group (AIG), Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story report in a lede in Sunday's NY Times how Goldman worked with other banks--most notably French banking con...

Economic Collapse | A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are  demanding a solution. What they don't realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system.

Telegraph | In an extraordinary ultimatum that has shocked some of the City's biggest companies, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) told bank bosses that 60pc of all pay must be deferred, with no exceptions, even for those whose contracts conflicting with the edict.

Washington Post | Instead of helping to finance the rest of the government, as it has done for decades, our nation's biggest social program needs help from the Treasury to keep benefit checks from bouncing -- in other words, a taxpayer bailout.

Business Week | The decision marks the first unified retraction by central banks around the world of extraordinary support measures to boost lending after credit markets seized up in late 2007, causing the global economic downturn.

New York Times | The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they wou...

Financial TImes | Senate Banking Committee ranking member Richard Shelby (R-AL) said he opposes the so-called Volcker rule and the Obama administration’s call to levy a USD 90bn tax on banks. His comments come as House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) predicted the prop...

Gold Seek | The aims of the Act are fairly simple to (1) repeal federal law which currently decrees unconstitutional forms of currency legal tender, (2) prohibit federal taxes on gold, silver, platinum, palladium or rhodium bullion, (3) prohibit States from assessing tax or fees on any currency...

Global Economic Trend Analysis | Inquiring minds are reading the SIGTARP Quarterly Report To Congress. The report is a massive 224 pages long. I will do my best to condense it down to the critical highlights involving Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, etc.

Times Online | Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts.

Mother Jones | UBS was one of eight large investment banks that benefited from the now-infamous backdoor bailout of AIG—resulting in government cash infusions totaling $182.5 billion—in the dark days of September 2008.

Bloomberg | Roubini said more than half of the 5.7 percent expansion reported yesterday by the government was related to a replenishing of inventories and that consumption depended on monetary and fiscal stimulus. As these forces ebb, growth will slow to just 1.5 percent in the second half of 2010, ...

Bloomberg | We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.