Steeds meer tentenkampen, steeds meer daklozen

De kredietcrisis heeft vooral voor de modale en benedenmodale Amerikaanse belastingbetaler desastreuze effecten. Werk kwijt, hypotheek onbetaalbaar, bank weg, huis weg. Tent.

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Ron Paul: This Bailout Won't Be the Last

But don't we need to get these toxic assets off banks' balance sheets?
"Sure, they need to be removed. Somebody needs to suffer the consequences [but] not the taxpayer. Everybody knows that they have to be removed. They are priced too high. The assets don't have real value—some have zero and some have 10 cents on the dollar.

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Beurzen blijven wereldwijd dalen

De grootste Britse hypotheekbank HBOS zit in grote problemen en is inmiddels in gesprek over een fusie met Lloyds TSB. Op de beurzen in Europa lagen vooral de financiële fondsen onder vuur. In Amsterdam leverde Fortis 10 procent in.

Lees verder op AD.nl

'Washington Mutual in de etalage'

NEW YORK - De Amerikaanse bank Washington Mutual verkoopt zichzelf aan de hoogste bieder. Het door de kredietcrisis in nood geraakte bedrijf heeft zakenbank Goldman Sachs ingehuurd om de veiling in goede banen te leiden.

Lees verder op Nu.nl

Goldman, Morgan Stanley face post-Lehman funding issues: analysts

Analysts expressed concern about the funding supporting the surviving independent Wall Street investment banks Monday, following the sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. and the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Lehman's "apparent demise and the likely damage to its bondholders indicates significant spread-widening for independent broker-dealers and probably considerably narrower access to funds," Merrill Lynch banking analyst Guy Moszkowski said in a research note Monday.

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Tent city highlights US homes crisis

The meltdown in the US mortgage market has led to record foreclosures and forced thousands from their homes. In few places is it worse than southern California, where the BBC's Rajesh Mirchandani reports on an extreme consequence of the downturn, but one that some observers fear could grow.

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Merrill Lynch axes 4,000 jobs

Merrill made the announcement after posting a 1.96 billion US dollar (£1 billion) first-quarter loss. The Wall Street bank had already recorded more than 24 billion US dollars (£12.1 billion) of write-downs in previous quarters.

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Is Cheney betting on Economic Collapse?

Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in “Old Europe”. As Blackburn sagely notes, “Not all ‘bad news’ is bad for everybody.”

This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the “Bush Economic Plan” is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation's wealth from one class to another. It’s also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn’t have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.

Reasonable people can dispute that Bush is “intentionally” skewering the dollar with his lavish tax cuts, but how does that explain Cheney’s portfolio?

It doesn’t. And, one thing we can say with metaphysical certainty is that the miserly Cheney would never plunk his money into an investment that wasn’t a sure thing. If Cheney is counting on the dollar tanking and interest rates going up, then, by Gawd, that’s what’ll happen.

The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP.

This is lunacy. No country, however powerful, can maintain these staggering numbers. The country is in hock up to its neck and has to borrow $2.5 billion per day just to stay above water. Presently, the Fed is expanding the money supply and buying back its own treasuries to hide the hemorrhaging from the public. Its utter madness.

Last month the trade deficit climbed to $70 billion. More importantly, foreign central banks only purchased a meager $47 billion in treasuries to shore up our ravenous appetite for cheap junk from China.

Do the math! They're not investing in America anymore. They are decreasing their stockpiles of dollars. We’re sinking fast and Cheney and his pals are manning the lifeboats while the public is diverted with gay marriage amendments and “American Celebrity”.

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