The financial system established in England after 1688, based on usurious lending to the state by private bankers, is reaching its final blowout in the form of a series of devastating bubbles and a massive bailout of the financiers with public money. But the issuance of money doesn’t have to be in the hands of a private consortium: another credit system is possible.
Posted by seumasach on August 22, 2008
21st August, 2008
Lehman Brothers may find themselves edging closer to disaster in today’s trading with word of nervous Federal Regulators supposedly making secret phone calls to follow up on”rumors” that Credit Suisse had withdrawn one of Leman’s remaining lines of credit.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: Lehman | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on August 19, 2008
Suzy Jagger
16th August, 2008
See also: Lehman and the Liars
Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, is understood to be in talks to sell its entire $40 billion (£21.5 billion) real estate portfolio in a move to stem losses incurred during one of the worst property slumps since the Great Depression.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: financial collapse, Lehman | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on August 18, 2008
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tumbled Monday on a report suggesting that a government takeover of the troubled mortgage finance giants is inevitable.
Shares of Fannie (FNM, Fortune 500) and Freddie (FRE, Fortune 500) fell 22% and 25% respectively. Both companies have seen their shares plunge more than 80% since the start of the year.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: fannie and freddie, financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on August 14, 2008
by Ellen Brown
Global Research, August 14, 2008
“I’m in show business, why come to me?”
“War is show business, that’s why we’re here.”
– “Wag the Dog” (1997 film)
Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had just announced record losses, and so had most reporting corporations. Unemployment was mounting, the foreclosure crisis was deepening, state budgets were in shambles, and massive bailouts were everywhere. Investors had every reason to expect the dollar and the stock market to plummet, and gold and oil to shoot up. Strangely, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 300 points, the dollar strengthened, and gold and oil were crushed. What happened? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: economic collapse, georgia, Georgia, south ossetia | 1 Comment »
Posted by seumasach on August 8, 2008
Dr Ellen Hodgson Brown
7th August, 2008
Last week, Congress passed a housing bill that gave the Treasury Department a blank check to inject billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, snatching them from insolvency. To accommodate this blank check, Congress obligingly raised its debt ceiling by $800 billion. Ouch! That’s nearly a trillion dollars. Why was it necessary to incur this potentially crippling public debt to bail out two completely private, for-profit behemoths, which have run themselves into bankruptcy with their own risky investment schemes? Policymakers said it was essential to maintain the country’s creditworthiness with foreign lenders, which today hold about one-fifth of Fannie and Freddie securities. According to a July 21 report by Heather Timmons in The New York Times:
One out of 10 American mortgages is, in effect, in the hands of institutions and governments outside the United States.1
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Posted by seumasach on August 8, 2008
By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor and Richard Blackden
8th August, 2008
“With house prices sliding and consumers deserting the high street, an increasing number of currency analysts now expect sterling to fall to $1.90 and 80p against the euro by the end of the year.”
Sterling tumbled to its lowest in more than a year against the dollar and weakened against the euro on fears that the UK economy is sliding into recession.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: falling pound | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on August 5, 2008
Henry Paulson has lost the control over US finance
William F. Engdahl
2nd August, 2008
When Henry Paulson agreed to leave his job as chairman of the powerful Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs to go to Washington as Treasury Secretary in 2006 he demanded extraordinary powers as de facto economic czar. He got it. Paulson is also head of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets — the secretary of the treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Working Group is the financial world’s equivalent of the Pentagon war room. Paulson, not Fed chairman Bernanke, is the person running the Administration’s crisis management. And his recent actions indicate he has lost control as the snowballing problems from the semi-government mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to the collapse of the multi-trillion dollar market in Asset Backed Securities (ABS) to the real economy are compounding into the worst crisis since the 1930’s Great Depression.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: financial collapse, Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on August 5, 2008
Asia Times
By Martin Hutchinson
The gross domestic product and employment figures released last Thursday and Friday appeared at first sight to show a US economy that had returned to a measure of stability. However, when examined more closely, they painted a much darker picture, of an economy in which a sharp decline in retail spending is likely to cause substantial overall economic contraction over the next several quarters. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: consumer spending, economic collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on August 4, 2008
Associated Press
By MARK JEWELL
The rich are sharing your financial pain — and contributing to it.
It may have taken longer and it may not be as acute, but there are early hints that the economic slump is crimping the lifestyles of the wealthy. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: economic slump, financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 31, 2008
Mike Whitney
30th July, 2008
Monday’s trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was a real humdinger. It started off with the White House announcing that this year’s fiscal deficit would soar to a new record of nearly $500 billion. That was followed by news of rising oil prices, weak quarterly earnings and a slowdown in consumer spending. By mid-morning the markets were in full retreat. That’s when investment giant Merrill Lynch announced that it would notch a $4.6 billion second-quarter loss and write-downs of $9.4 billion on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other mortgage-related assets. Stocks quickly went verticle and the rout was on. By the closing bell the Dow was down 240 points. Traders staggered from floor of the exchange slumped-over and bedraggled, looking like they just got a missive from the draft board.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 31, 2008
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com.
In a culture where credit rating is the key measure of self-worth, the increasing response to huge debts is “Just shoot me!”
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
In These New Times 