You pretty much just need to watch this one. Happy Holidays to Bail readers.
I posted this clip last year at Christmas, and one of our readers had the following caustic comment:
I think Geithner as an elf is scary. He's too grumpy looking. What do you think he's doing in that toy shop? I think he dismembers dollies' limbs before boxing them up, bends up the axles on all the hot wheels cars, and purposefully doesn't sand down the wooden railroad track parts so children will get splinters. Yeah, that's what I think he does. Evil elf!
Thanks to SNK for the laugh.
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This is one of my favorite clips from 2010...
Video - Gin, a border collie that dances...backwards
Blame it on TurboTax - A clip of Geithner playing the fool...
Congressional Video - Geithner explains why he "accidentally" missed paying taxes on his income from the IMF. I've never posted this before and thought today would be a good day to add it to the public record. Happy Holidays.
Regular Bail readers know my thoughts on Krugman's god-forsaken love of useless government stimulus, and his hypocrisy on deficits - they only matter to him when the GOP runs the show - newsflash for Krugman - deficits always matter - but, he's been consistent and correct on the Wall Street heist, and so we post his latest op-ed.
When the financial crisis struck, many people — myself included — considered it a teachable moment. Above all, we expected the crisis to remind everyone why banks need to be effectively regulated.
Which brings me to the case of the collapsing crisis commission.
The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was established by law to “examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.” The hope was that it would be a modern version of the Pecora investigation of the 1930s, which documented Wall Street abuses and helped pave the way for financial reform.
Instead, however, the commission has broken down along partisan lines, unable to agree on even the most basic points.
It’s not as if the story of the crisis is particularly obscure. First, there was a widely spread housing bubble, not just in the United States, but in Ireland, Spain, and other countries as well. This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks,” which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks.
Then the bubble burst, with hugely disruptive consequences. It turned out that Wall Street had created a web of interconnection nobody understood, so that the failure of Lehman Brothers, a medium-size investment bank, could threaten to take down the whole world financial system.
It’s a straightforward story, but a story that the Republican members of the commission don’t want told. Literally. Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”
When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.
In the world according to the G.O.P. commissioners, it’s all the fault of government do-gooders, who used various levers — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored loan-guarantee agencies — to promote loans to low-income borrowers. Wall Street — I mean, the private sector — erred only to the extent that it got suckered into going along with this government-created bubble.
It’s hard to overstate how wrongheaded all of this is. For one thing, as I’ve already noted, the housing bubble was international — and Fannie and Freddie weren’t guaranteeing mortgages in Latvia. Nor were they guaranteeing loans in commercial real estate, which also experienced a huge bubble.
Beyond that, the timing shows that private players weren’t suckered into a government-created bubble. It was the other way around. During the peak years of housing inflation, Fannie and Freddie were pushed to the sidelines; they only got into dubious lending late in the game, as they tried to regain market share.
But the G.O.P. commissioners are just doing their job, which is to sustain the conservative narrative. And a narrative that absolves the banks of any wrongdoing, that places all the blame on meddling politicians, is especially important now that Republicans are about to take over the House.
Last week, Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
He later tried to walk the remark back, but there’s no question that he and his colleagues will do everything they can to block effective regulation of the people and institutions responsible for the economic nightmare of recent years. So they need a cover story saying that it was all the government’s fault.
In the end, those of us who expected the crisis to provide a teachable moment were right, but not in the way we expected. Never mind relearning the case for bank regulation; what we learned, instead, is what happens when an ideology backed by vast wealth and immense power confronts inconvenient facts. And the answer is, the facts lose.
Ratigan goes off Paulson's rarely mentioned role in the crisis...
Awesome short clip. Runs 3 minutes.
Make sure to read the story below from the NY Times on Henry Paulson's role in the SEC rule change (2004) that allowed leverage to expand from 12:1 to 100:1 for only the 5 largest investment banks.
Besides Ratigan's occasional outburst, it is still the event most ignored by CNBC and the rest of the mainstream news media.
Until 2004 U.S. investment banks had a leverage limit of 12:1. After Paulson led the multi-year effort to sway the SEC to drop these rules entirely, allowing 5 banks to utilize unlimited leverage, all 5 became effectively insolvent within 4 years.
It's the most important piece to understanding how this banking crisis was so devastating compared to previous blow-ups, and why it was so widespread -- European banks were (and remain) even more leveraged than our own.
And, it's the easiest part to fix. Just turn the rule back to pre-2004.
UPDATE - After some research, I confirmed that Dodd-Frank made no changes with regard to leverage; there are still no limits and the issue has been consigned to the Federal Reserve for further study.
Nice work. They blew up the world, and still avoided any adjustments to their leverage-based business models.
UPDATE: New Fake Israeli “leak” exonerates Israel, condemns North Korea (see end of original article)
UPDATE 2: From ridiculous to the sublime – Bradley wants you to wish the troops and his “torturers” a Merry Christmas
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Julian Assange has stated on al Jazeera that he will release some 3,700 secret (and even “top-secret”) documents pertaining to Israel in 6 months.
Why would he wait if he had “truth” that needed to be revealed to the world?
What he is doing is providing an existential threat to the state of Israel; one that can and will be used by AIPAC to pressure members of the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass legislation effectively shutting down the open internet as we know it.
The 6 month pending deadline should be just enough time for Israel’s massive propaganda machine.
After Israel’s Dec. 2008-Jan. 2009 attack on Gaza, their more recent attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla, and the assassination of a Palestinian public official, their public opinion rating has taken a nose-dive. Their megaphoned apologists and their public relations efforts failed in the face of an open and uncensored internet.
Assange’s new, unexplainable, 6 month deadline creates just enough of a pending existential threat to the state of Israel to justify AIPAC influenced U.S. congressmen to pass a draconian internet censoring bill in the same vein as the U.S. Patriot Act.
This serves not only the state of Israel, but also the U.S. state department. After Hillary Clinton’s failed efforts to frame North Korea for the sinking of the Cheonan, it is in the best interest of the imperial U.S. that the freedom of the internet and the rapid exchange of information is curbed. This is ultimately the point of the Wikileaks psyop and at least now we have a definitive time-line.
(The following Julian Assange quotes taken from an interview on al Jazeera and published by Information Clearinghouse)
topic:holding “leaks” pertaining to Israel for 6 months
“There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel. In the next six months we intend to publish more files depending on our sources,”
“We will publish 3700 files and the source is the American embassy in Tel Aviv. Prime Minister Netanyahu was traveling to Paris to talk to the US ambassador there. You will see more information about that in six months.”
Why would Assange hold important leaks about Israel for 6 months while knowingly allowing establishment newspapers to publish misleading information about North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and nearly every other Middle East country immediately?
topic:Assange aware that papers he gave “leaks” to are filtering the truth about Israel
files pertaining to the 2006 Lebanon War (Condi Rice’s war) – ”Yes there is some information about that and these files were classified as top secret.
files pertaining to the assassination of a Palestinian leader - “Yes there are some indication to this and may be some special reports published by newspapers. Mossad agents used Australian, British and European passports to travel to Dubai and there are diplomatic files about that.”
“The Guardian, El-Pais and Le Monde have published only two percent of the files related to Israel due to the sensitive relations between Germany, France and Israel. Even New York Times could not publish more due to the sensitivities related to the Jewish community in the US,”
Assange is blaming these entities for filtering the “leaks” yet these cables are in his possession and he could do with them as he pleases. He’s allowing this to happen. Why? If getting out the “truth” is what Wikileaks is all about, why this convoluted and manipulated process?
topic:Official U.S. funding??!?
“We were the biggest institution receiving official funding from the US but after we released a video tape about killing people in cold blood in Iraq in 2007, the funding stopped and we had to depend on individuals for finance.”
What “official funding” is he talking about? Has this money been in place since even before Wikileaks started officially leaking anything? If you read the John Young emails, that would certainly seem to be the case.
Conclusion
It is my sincere hope that this latest ploy by Julian Assange finally exposes this Wikileaks psyop to journalists like Pilger and Greenwald.
By giving this arbitrary and pointless deadline, by creating an existential threat which can only benefit AIPAC lobbyists, Assange has finally exposed his purpose in such a way as there cannot be any more question as to what that purpose ultimately is: the end of the free and open internet.
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UPDATE: A Raw Story headline completely misrepresents the substance of the article.
But the facts within the article show us how the Wikileaks psyop is still working to the advantage of Israel by promoting old, tired propaganda as “fact”.
“On September 6, 2007, Israel destroyed the nuclear reactor built by Syria secretly, apparently with North Korea’s help,” then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice wrote in the cable published in Yediot Aharonot newspaper.
“Our intelligence experts are convinced that the attack targeted by the Israelis is in fact an atomic reactor of the same type built by North Korea in Yongbyon,” she wrote in the message dated April 2008.
“We have good reason to believe that the reactor was not built for peaceful purposes,” she said, adding the attack came only weeks before the reactor was to become operational. Raw Story
Here is some “truth” being revealed by Wikileaks - a statement by Condi Rice which exonerates Israel for the aggressive and illegal strike on a Syrian facility in 2007 which also serves the dual purpose of implicating North Korea at a time when the U.S. and South Korea are doing everything they can to create a reason to “regime change” that nation.
This cable exposes nothing that we didn’t already know about the 2007 attack on the Syrian facility and actually promotes the previously debunked U.S. and Israeli claim that it was a reactor being made for weapons manufacturing purposes.
Clearly this is just more pro-Israel, anti-North Korea propaganda.
UPDATE 2: This shit is so f*cing stupid, it must be being written by a 12-year-old. Now Manning the Magnanimous, is hoping that you will wish for a Happy Christmas for all the troops AND his captors at the detention center who, according to him, are torturing him. Gimmie a fucking break.
“I ask that everyone takes the time to remember those who are separated from their loved ones at this time due to deployment and important missions.
“Specifically, I am thinking of those that I deployed with and have not seen for the last seven months, and of the staff here at the Quantico Confinement Facility who will be spending their Christmas without their family.” Raw Story
I guess the propagandists writing this drivel figure they got everyone eating out of their hands because of writers like Greenwald and Pilger swallowing this shit hook line and sinker, so they might as well pepper all their sappy propaganda with even more sappy propaganda.
What in the world is happening over in Europe? Well, it is actually quite simple. We are witnessing the slow motion collapse of the euro and of the European financial system. At this point, many analysts are convinced that a full-blown financial implosion in Europe has become inevitable. Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France and Belgium are all drowning in an ocean of unsustainable debt. Meanwhile, Germany and the few other "healthy" members of the EU continue to try to keep all of the balls in the air by bailing everyone out. But can Germany keep bailing the rest of the EU out indefinitely? Are the German people going to continue to be willing to hand out gigantic sacks of cash to fix the problems of other EU nations? The Irish were just bailed out, but their problems are far from over. There are rumors that Greece will soon need another bailout. Spain, Portugal, Italy and France have all entered crisis territory. At the same time, there are a whole host of nations in eastern Europe that are also on the verge of financial collapse. So is there any hope that a major sovereign debt crisis can be averted at this point?
One would like to think that there is always hope, but each month things just seem to keep getting worse. Confidence in European government debt continues to plummet. The yield on 10-year Irish bonds is up to 8.97%. The yield on 10-year Greek bonds is up to an astounding 12.01%. The cost of insuring French debt hit a new record high on December 20th.
Bond ratings all over Europe are being slashed or are being threatened with being slashed. For example, Moody’s Investors Service recently cut Ireland's bond rating by five levels. Now there is talk that Spain, Belgium and even France could soon all have their debt significantly downgraded as well. But if the borrowing costs for these troubled nations keep going up, that is just going to add to their financial problems and swell their budget deficits. In turn, larger budget deficits will cause investors to lose even more confidence. So how far are we away from a major crisis point? Professor Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citibank, is warning that quite a few EU nations could financially collapse in the next few months if they are not quickly bailed out....
"The market is not going to wait until March for the EU authorities to get their act together. We could have several sovereign states and banks going under. They are being far too casual."
Many analysts are even calling for some of these troubled nations to stop using the euro for a while so that they can recover. In fact, Andrew Bosomworth, the head of portfolio management for Pimco in Europe says that Greece, Ireland and Portugal must all quit the euro at least for a little while if they expect to survive....
"Greece, Ireland and Portugal cannot get back on their feet without either their own currency or large transfer payments."
Sadly, most Americans don't realize just how bad the situation in Europe is becoming. This is truly a historic crisis that is unfolding. German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared earlier this year that this is the biggest financial crisis that the EU has ever faced....
"The current crisis facing the euro is the biggest test Europe has faced for decades, even since the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957."
So what is the answer? Well, many are speculating that the EU could actually break up over this whole thing, but another possibility is that we could eventually see much greater integration. In fact, for the first time the idea that "euro bonds" could be issued is gaining some traction. This would spread the risk of European government debt throughout the European Union. At this point, Andrew Bosomworth says that things have gotten so bad that it now seems inevitable that we will soon see the creation of euro bonds....
"Whether now or later, there is no way around a euro bond."
"I don’t want to scare anyone but I am considering investing in barbed wire and guns, things are not looking good and rates are heading higher."
So why should Americans care about all this? Well, what is happening to these troubled European states is eventually going to happen to us. If rates on U.S. government debt eventually hit 8 or 12 percent it will literally be financial armageddon in this country. The U.S. government has piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and if we continue piling up debt at the pace that we are, then it will only be a matter of time before the IMF is demanding that we implement our own "austerity measures". As I have written about previously, there are already numerous indications that confidence in U.S. Treasuries is dying. If that happens, we could literally see interest costs on the national debt double or even triple.
But it is not just the U.S. government that is in trouble. A bloodbath in the municipal bond market has already started. Hundreds of state and local governments across the United States are on the verge of bankruptcy. So don't laugh at what is going on in Ireland or Greece. The next victims could be financially troubled states such as California and Illinois. In the history of global finance, we have never faced a sovereign debt crisis like we are seeing now. All over the globe governments are being suffocated by absolutely crushing debt loads. Once a couple of dominoes fall, it is going to be really hard to keep the rest of the dominoes from falling.
This is the biggest crisis that the euro has ever faced. At some point Germany will either be unwilling or unable to continuing rescuing the rest of the EU countries from the unsustainable mountains of debt that they have accumulated. When that moment arrives, it is going to throw world financial markets into turmoil. But this is what happens when we allow long-term debt bubbles to be created. Eventually they always burst. So keep your eye on the euro, because if a financial collapse does happen in Europe it is going to have a dramatic impact on the United States as well. Share and Enjoy:
(NaturalNews) Always on the terror streak, the mainstream media is now warning Americans that terrorists may strike the food supply by dumping poison into restaurant salad bars and buffets, for example. CBS News broke the story, quoting anonymous "intelligence" sources who insist that terrorists might use ricin or cyanide to poison foods in salad bars.
I have news for CBS, the federal government, and the terrorists: If you really want to poison the U.S. food supply, just use aspartame. It causes neurological disorders and yet remains perfectly legal to dump into foods such as diet sodas and children's medicines. You don't even have to dump it into the food supply in secret, either: You can do it right out in full view of the public. Heck, you can even list this chemical right on the ingredients label!
Or get into the MSG business. MSG, which is often hidden on "natural" foods under an ingredient called yeast extract, is a potent neurotoxin that promotes obesity and even cancer, according to some experts. Feed people enough MSG and they'll probably die of cancer sooner or later, and that counts toward the goal of terrorism too, doesn't it?
If you really want to get nasty and up the body count, start a hot dog company and dump sodium nitrite into your processed meat like all the other hot dog companies do. Sodium nitrite promotes aggressive cancers -- even in children -- and yet the USDA and FDA allow its use in the food supply (http://www.naturalnews.com/007133.html).
Better yet, feed the population genetically modified corn and then wait for the mutations to kick in. GMOs might actually be called a biological weapon because they cause so much harm to humans and the environment. (http://www.naturalnews.com/GMO.html)
Why be a terrorist when you can do so much more damage as a processed food company?
If you're a terrorist looking to poison the U.S. food supply, get in line, buddy! The food companies have beat you to it!
In the U.S. food supply right now, you can find toxic mercury, BPA, acrylamides, petrochemicals, dangerous preservatives, synthetic chemicals like aspartame, pesticide residues and artificial colors that alter brain function. The FDA doesn't seem to care about any of this, of course: All these poisons in the food supply are legal!
So here's a message to Al-Qaeda and all the other terrorists trying to kill Americans: Don't bother with bombs and missiles... just get into the processed food business!
Or, heck, if you really want to kill Americans with poison, get into the cancer industry! The "Al-Qaeda Cancer Clinic" could really rack up some body bags by doing what all the other cancer clinics do: Inject patients with chemotherapy and watch them die (http://www.naturalnews.com/029996_c...).
Seriously, if you want to kill Americans, all you really need to do is keep supporting conventional medicine and the FDA with its do-nothing position on dangerous chemicals that threaten the health of Americans right now. FDA-approved drugs kill well over 100,000 Americans each year -- a statistic that dwarfs the body count of any terrorist group.
Come to think of it, how do we know the FDA isn't already being run by terrorists? Their actions, which blatantly endanger American lives, are entirely consistent with the aims of a terrorist organization. (http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html)
This cartoon anticipated today's terror news alerts by four years. That's because when it comes to the U.S. government's rhetoric on terrorism, it's not that difficult to see where they're taking it.
Want to know what the next four years will bring us? I'll soon be publishing a list of predictions for 2011 and beyond. Watch NaturalNews.com for that announcement.
In the mean time, you might want to steer clear of FDA-approved foods and drugs, because you just never know what's really in them.
Plans to set up an online age verification scheme in the United Kingdom to limit access to pornography is not possible, according to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country.
Trefor Davies, chief technology officer at the ISP Timico, told BBC News that it is "technically not possible" to block all online pornography because of its sheer volume.
"You end up with a system that's either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it's just not effective," he said. "The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind."
Critics of the proposed pornography ban say it's one more step in an effort by governments around the world to seize control of the Internet. They say the system would inevitably be used to restrict access to non-pornographic websites.
"If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that's a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see," Davies said.
Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of the Internet Service Providers Association (IPSA), said that ISPs currently block illegal content such as child pornography, but that blocking lawful pornography "is less clear cut" and "will lead to the blocking of access to legitimate content."
"IPSA firmly believes that controls on children's access to the internet should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down," Lansman added.
Under the proposed plan, which appears to have the backing of Britain's major Internet service providers, the government would provide ISPs a list of objectionable websites, which the ISPs would automatically block. An Internet surfer would then have to "opt in" to be allowed to see the content.
"This is a very serious matter," Culture Minister Ed Vaizey said. "I think it is very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children. I'm hoping they will get their acts together so that we don't have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years."
Vaizey said it's a useful step in preventing the premature sexualization of children. He cited a report earlier this year that showed three in 10 British children aged 10 had seen pornography online.
Vaizey is expected to meet with ISPs, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, to discuss the ban.
"Our objective was not to do what the politicians want us but to do what is right for our customers," Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk's executive director of strategy and regulation, told The Sunday Times. "If other companies aren't going to do it of their own volition, then maybe they should be leant on."
"This is not about pornography, it is about generalized censorship through the back door," Mr Killock, chair of the Open Rights Group, told BBC News.
"This is the wrong way to go," he said. "If the government controlled a web blacklist, you can bet that WikiLeaks would be on it."
Germany is supplying a great deal of money to the EU’s bailout of Greece and Ireland and perhaps Portugal, Spain, Belgium or even Italy. The German people are against the bailout and they have told their leadership that they refuse to contribute any further. We have friends in Wiesbaden and the 42-year old father of the family, university educated, took 1-1/2 years to find a job making less than he had before. The position is in Cologne, about two hours away by car on the Autobahn, so he has to stay at a hotel during the week and gets to be with his family on weekends.
We are sure the family doesn’t like the arrangement nor do they relish bailing out other members of the EU and euro zone. Germans never wanted to be in the EU and nor did they want to be in the euro zone, which entailed giving up their beloved D-mark. Germany tells us unemployment is 8%. In checking out their numbers we find this hard to believe, especially in Eastern Germany. As we see it, even though Germany is the economically and financially strongest nation in the EU and the euro zone, all is still not peaches and cream. In this coming year German resolve will be tested to the maximum, as they consider thinking outside the box politically and in many other ways. Europe and Germany are going through a realization that there is life beyond Marxism, fascism and liberalism and a time is soon coming when classical free-market finance and economics will take their rightful place not only among the Germans but all thinking people of the world. It is time for Europeans to break out of the mode and again achieve the remarkable things they have in the past.
After WWII Germany believed a middle way was the path for their future so they chose socialism, the halfway house between communism and fascism. Under much pressure from the West they extended that into the future by being the leading part of the European Union and later the euro zone, both of which the German’s were hesitant to join, particularly the euro zone. Over the past 50 years they accepted multiculturalism in the form of Turkish Muslims, which has resulted in a touch and go relationship. It must be said that relationship has worked out better than that of other European countries.
We lived in Germany during this process in the 1950s. The Marshall Plan and the discipline of the labor unions allowed Germany to perform an economic miracle in the rebuilding of Western Germany. This success spread throughout Europe. Prosperity and Peace were the result along with the assistance and presence of the American military, which we were part of there for several years.
Evaluation of the EU and the euro zone was a megalomaniac effort foisted upon Europe to bring about a stepping-stone for world government and a world currency. What was created was an unnatural anthropological disaster, which you now see being unravelled. The concept of the merging of tribes, an amalgamation, or Balkanization of peoples has not homogenized and never will, even if by force. This is also the result of one interest rate for all despite different states of development and different economic and financial structures.
The Soviet Empire is now gone as is Pax Americanus. The plan mainly designed by the UK and Britain is now after 65 years in serious trouble and will probably finally end up in failure. Again, the villain is one interest rate fits all.
Six countries are on the edge of insolvency: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Belgium, Spain and Italy. We have strikes, demonstrations and riots in many of these countries and it is going to get worse before it gets better. The original plan for Europe is coming unglued irrespective of who is to blame. Millions are living on welfare and unemployment and the most employable have a hard time keeping their jobs and if they lose them it is very difficult to find another job. In addition, the large amount of Muslims is overwhelming England and the Continent. Low indigenous birth rates and out of control breeding by Muslims guarantee in years to come the destruction of what once was European culture. The Muslims absolutely refuse to assimilate. Europe has more problems than simply financial failure.
Sovereign default is nothing new – it goes back to the fourth century BC in Greece and here we are 2,400 years later in the same predicament.
Last week Germany signalled its distaste to extending government – financed aid for debt mired EU partners. That means all EU nations have to participate if they want to keep fighting the crisis in this manner. Germany did endorse an ECB boost in capital. In addition, the latest idea is to create a euro bond, which hasn’t a hope of success, because it would engender a further loss of sovereignty. The EU continues to move in the wrong direction such as further economic integration, which the Germans certainly do not want. Other socialist – one-world types – have told the Germans they are unpatriotic for not paying most of the bills created by these spendthrift near-do-wells. Germany is making all the right noises concerning the euro, but most Germans want the D-mark back. Europe has pushed Germans as far as they are willing to go. Worldwide investors are bailing out of bonds issued by countries in financial trouble in Europe. The ECB is buyer of last resort. The beat goes on as banks worldwide refuse to play the new world order game and continues to bury the ECB. They do not get it, yet, the dream of world government is over. No nation or investor wants to be left holding the bag.
As a result of this mayhem the ECB wants to provide unlimited liquidity for commercial banks, which caused these problems in the first place. They simply cannot give up the ghost. Hundreds of elitist controlled banks are going to go under and there is little that can be done to save them. This is succinctly pointed out in the case of Ireland and what the bankers have done to the Emerald isle.
There is no question that almost all of Europe is bankrupt, but so are the US and UK. German politicians dare not push the German public too far for fear of seeing Germans in the streets in reaction to being forced to bail out Europe’s banks single handedly. Do they really want to put up two or three trillion for a bailout, hardly? What is very concerning is on top of the fiscal mess will Germany be subjected to a false flag terrorist attack as many other countries have? We see some things beginning that we have seen in America, the removal of freedoms from the German people. If this continues we could see Germany sliding into areas we haven’t seen since the early 1930s.
As expected we are witnessing Republicans refusing to cut spending in order to obtain an extension of the Bush tax cuts, and the funding of health care reform. There were only some 96 changes in Congress and 1/3rd of them were resignations. The supposed irate public returned the worst of the worst to the House and the Senate. As a result you can expect even more corruption and scandals, as America sinks further into the great dark pit. Reform of health care could have been de-funded, but these whores are going to allow it to continue and in that process destroy the American medical system. Probably 1/3rd of doctors will retire or leave the country or find other professions. The affect on the availability of medical care will be staggering, as will the rationing of medical care, which will mean all older people and those with chronic problems will be allowed to die, as all useless eaters will be removed from society. What you are going to see will be horrible.
The death tax will be back in vogue to destroy American businesses, so further concentration can take form as the corporatist fascist government moves further to control America’s services and industry. This result was as usual the result of secret meetings with the financial hand of the elitists hidden from view. It wasn’t bad enough to see this happen but there is absolutely no effort to stop runaway spending that will be in part funded by such actions. In just 2011 we’ll see $75 to $100 billion in new spending. We can promise you your politicians are not listening to you, but to the elitists who control them with their money. The Republican pre-election pledges are a joke, already long forgotten. If you extend the new spending it could be as much as $200 billion and the loss in jobs as a result of some cutbacks in tax breaks could cost 80,000 jobs a year. As major corporations continue to lay off workers, and are sitting on almost $2 trillion in cash, they will now be allowed to write off 100% of capital investments for a year. They will also continue to get research and development tax credits. The pork continues to flow and the generations of taxpayers to come will have to pay for it.
A big question is how effective will the $858 billion stimulus package be? This is a bill that started out as an extension of the Bush tax cuts and morphed into a pork laden stimulus program. There is no question in our minds that Republicans and Democrats knew long before joint meetings, what this bill would become. If we add $600 billion that is in the process of being spent by the Fed between now and June the Fed we have $1.458 being spent to keep the economy from faltering. We expect that Fed spending will exceed that level by 9/30/11 moving up to a net $1.4 billion in the creation of money and credit by the Fed. The result should be GDP growth of 2 to 2-1/2 percent for the fiscal year. From what we have seen of the contraction in the credit market recently we could see stimulus being used to reduce debt, or go into savings. The market has put too much faith into a stronger recovery, as has the public and business, which could very well be disappointed. The current firm market could last into February and surprise us, but the rest of 2011 could produce downward market pressures. Present professional bullish statistics could prove a hindrance as well, as the majority is almost always wrong. As a result of this and other things gold, silver and commodities probably will do quite well.
The spending bill is still up for grabs as we write, as is the debt ceiling. That means Republicans may have gone as far as they are willing to go on spending for now and may pursue cuts in other areas. If that is the case the market would not react favorably. That leaves the economy’s liquidity in the hands of the Fed, which is always more than happy to comply, an on demand money machine. They’ll be needed if a budget battle occurs and we believe conservative freshmen congressmen and women will lead it.
There are some developments that are positive and one is the awakening of the public to what the Fed has been up too. The positioning of Rep. Ron Paul in the House and Bernard Sanders in the Senate should present formidable opposition to the elitists who run the Fed from Wall Street. More than 60% of Americans want to get rid of the Fed and that is positive. The Fed’s purchases of bonds over the last few years has suppressed interest rates and increased bond prices. Those low rates make quantitative easing easier. This monetization heads straight through the open doors of Wall Street to produce ever more leveraged profits in derivatives, options, foreign exchange, stocks and commodities and shorting gold and silver, in what is now nothing more than a vast casino. In this process the Fed stands by to absorb the losses in behalf of the American taxpayer. When it looks like the Fed cannot handle it anymore then the elitist think tanks can supply war on demand as a diversion to cover up financial problems. In all likelihood that will be accompanied by the call for currency controls in and out of the country and rules regarding restriction of travel. We lived in currency blocked Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and South Africa and so we know what it is like. We found it similar to living in a financial prison. You have to understand the corporatist fascist mind. It believes all of the wealth of the country and its citizens belongs to the fascists.
If IRA’s, 401Ks, pension plans and government retirement plans are not taken over in whole or in part, then you can expect these plans to be forced to acquire a certain percentage of Treasury, Agency and toxic bonds. Foreign travel will have so many rules, like the TSA, that people will refuse to use planes, trains and buses. There may even be price controls that won’t work. The use of cash will be discouraged as government phases in credit and debit card usage. They may go even so far as to demand the return of foreign investments to the US. If Americans do not comply they may confiscate these assets. Remember, they believe all your assets belong to them.
If you want to understand why Wall Street, banking and corporate America think the way they do, just look at the poor Keynesian education they get. They cannot see the forest for the trees. Look at Bernanke, he has never worked in the real world in his life. Does he understand what he is doing and its consequences, of course he does. Keynesianism has been a failure over and over again, as the economic and monetary model for corporatist fascism. This is the path Mr. Bernanke has chosen, as did Sir Alan Greenspan. We were in the vanguard of exposing what has been going on in the US and world economy for many years, since 1960. Finally a few are speaking up today, but we need hundreds and thousands more to assist us. Due to the lack of those who will expose what is going on we have to do this at 75 years old. The reason we continue is to let people know, who will listen, what a precarious situation we are in. The elitists are in a very precarious position, but they are not going to tell you that. They have lost total control but yet, still have partial control. There will be concern, but do not expect panic. We have got to show them that they can be beaten and that is exactly what we have to do. The system has to be purged of its excesses and malinvestment. That is a painful process that everyone must endure, whether they like it or not. That means no more fiat currencies, only gold backed currencies.
Fed extends swap lines, scheduled to expire on January 1, 2011, through August 1, 2011. The swap arrangements are with the Banks of Canada, England, Japan, Switzerland and ECB. The extension is to improve liquidity in the global currency markets and minimize risk that global strains could spread to the US. The swap lines with the banks are similar to arrangements that had previously been in place.
Led by declines in employment-related indicators, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index decreased to – 0.46 in November from –0.25 in October. Three of the four broad categories of indicators that make up the index deteriorated from October to November, with only the production and income category improving. http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/cfnai/2010/cfnai_december2010.pdf
$2tn debt crisis threatens to bring down 100 US cities Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble
Since 1937, 619 local US government bodies, mostly small utilities or districts, have filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News recently reported. US cities tend to default more than European municipalities as they usually rely on bonds issued to investors, which enter into a default if the creditor misses payments. European towns, by contrast, traditionally depend on bank loans and government bailouts. http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
State Budgets: The Day of Reckoning (CBS’s “60 Minutes”)
“The most alarming thing about the state issue is the level of complacency,” Meredith Whitney, one of the most respected financial analysts on Wall Street and one of the most influential women in American business, told correspondent Steve Kroft…
“It has tentacles as wide as anything I’ve seen. I think next to housing this is the single most important issue in the United States, and certainly the largest threat to the U.S. economy,” she told Kroft.
Asked why people aren’t paying attention, Whitney said, “‘Cause they don’t pay attention until they have to.”…And nowhere has the reckoning been as bad as it is in Illinois, a state that spends twice much as it collects in taxes and is unable to pay its bills.
Last week the Dow gained 0.7%, S&P rose 0.3%, the Nasdaq 100 rose 0.1% and the Russell 2000 rose 0.3%. Consumers rose 1.4%; utilities 1.1%, as banks fell 1.7% along with broker/dealers off 0.4%. Cyclicals gained 1.1%, while transports fell 0.9%. High tech fell 0.2%, semis 0.3%, Internets 1.4%, as biotechs jumped 10.1%. Gold bullion gave back $10; the USDX rose 0.4% to 80.36.
The two-year T-bill fell 4 bps to 60, the 10-year T-notes rose 1 bps to 3.33% after having traded as high as 3.54%. The German 10-year bund rose 6 bps to 3.01%.
Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed rate mortgage jumped 22 bps to 4.83%, the 15’s surged 21 bps to 4.17%, the one-year ARMs rose 8 bps to 3.35% and the 30-year jumbos jumped 17 bps to 5.63%.
Fed credit jumped $22.8 billion to a record $2.374 trillion. It is up 7.2% annualized and 8.4% yoy. Fed foreign holdings of Treasury and Agency debt fell $3.6 billion to $3.337 trillion. Custody holdings for foreign central banks have increased $381.7 billion ytd, or 13.4%, and up 13.2% yoy.
M2 narrow money supply added $1.0 billion to a record $8.813 trillion. It is up $280 billion ytd or 3.5% annualized. Year-on-Year M2 rose 3.0%.
Total money market fund assets fell $33.2 billion to $2.803 trillion; yoy it has fallen 14.3%.
Total commercial paper fell $26.3 trillion to $981.7 billion, that is the first time we have seen it below $1 trillion.
Yields on top-rated tax-exempt securities due in 30 years climbed twice as fast as those on U.S. Treasuries, reaching the highest level in almost 16 months. ‘Nobody’s bidding,’ Tony Shields, a principal in the public-finance department at Williams Capital Group said There’s ‘an avalanche of bid-wanteds, and there is just not enough liquidity to accommodate this much sell-side pressure.’”
“Federal Reserve policy makers indicated that signs of economic strength won’t deter them from pumping money into the financial system so long as unemployment remains elevated. The Federal Open Market Committee said… growth is ‘insufficient to bring down unemployment’ and inflation has ‘continued to trend lower.’ U.S. central bankers affirmed a plan to buy $600 billion of bonds through June and renewed their pledge for an ‘extended period’ of low interest rates.”
“A slump in government-backed mortgage bonds that’s sent yields to the highest level since May is threatening a recovery in the U.S. housing market… Yields on Fannie Mae-guaranteed securities that most affect loan rates jumped as high as 4.21% yesterday, an increase of 1 percentage point from an all-time low in October… Higher loan rates ‘won’t be fun’ for a fragile housing market, said Scott Simon, head of mortgage bonds at… Pacific Investment Management Co. ‘If you were looking at buying a house a few weeks ago, the same house, to you, looks as much as 9% more expensive,” he said.”
The gift that keeps on giving: Congressman Paul says Fed transparency is his goal “And then they can still hide behind the law if I want to demand every transaction with foreign banks,” he said, adding that it would benefit Americans to know who was getting bailed out.
A key cooperating witness working for the U.S. in a major insider-trading investigation made more than 60 calls with corporate managers, seeking to gather evidence for the government, a person familiar with the probe says. The activity by the witness who was identified by prosecutors in a complaint unveiled
Thursday only as “CW-2″ suggests that the insider-trading investigation could grow significantly from the initial charges.
Investors who forget what they paid for shares of stock will get help starting next year, courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service.
That’s when the U.S. tax-collection agency will require brokerages to track the cost basis on equities bought after Jan. 1, and send taxpayers and the government an annual form recording it when investors sell shares.
Brokerages already are required to report the proceeds from sales of securities to the IRS. Next year, they’ll also have to provide information on the purchase price, known as the cost basis, of stocks.
“We’ve been really hammering it home with our clients,” said Brian Keil, director of cost basis and reporting at San Francisco-based Charles Schwab Corp. “We expect our clients are going to get a 1099-B form in 2012 and they could have an outcome that they don’t expect.”
Investors who buy shares of the same company on different dates or prices will see the biggest change, said Eric Smith, a spokesman for the IRS. They’ll need to identify which shares they’re selling before the sale settles, which typically means within three days for stocks.
About 46 percent of U.S. households owned equities in 2010, including stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and variable annuities, according to the Investment Company Institute, a Washington-based mutual-fund trade group.
Nigeria withdrew corruption charges against former vice president Dick Cheney and companies including Halliburton after the company agreed to pay a fine and repatriate funds, a spokesman for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said.
Halliburton, where Cheney was chief executive until 2000, offered to pay $120 million in fines and repatriate an additional $130 million to Nigeria, he said. A person who answered a call to Halliburton’s Houston office said no one was available to comment.
Nigerian prosecutors filed bribery charges on Dec. 8 against Cheney; Albert “Jack’’ Stanley, former chairman of KBR Inc., a former unit of Halliburton; current KBR chairman William Utt; and Halliburton chief executive David Lesar, according to court documents. Companies charged include Technip SA of France; Snamprogetti SpA, a unit of Eni SpA; KBR; and JGC Corp. of Japan.
Nigeria, Africa’s biggest crude oil producer, alleges that the companies, which were part of group known as TSKJ, paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials between 1994 and 2004 to win a $6 billion liquefied natural gas plant contract.
Di Giovanni Gianni, a spokesman for Eni, said by e-mail that the company has no comment, while Gabriela Segura, a KBR spokeswoman, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
KBR agreed in February 2009 to pay a $402 million fine in the United States after admitting it bribed Nigerian officials, and Halliburton paid $177 million to settle allegations by the US Securities and Exchange Commission without admitting wrongdoing.
The estate of Jeffry Picower agreed to forfeit $7.2 billion that the investor got from Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, bringing the amount collected by authorities for victims of the fraud to $9.8 billion.
Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, sued Picower in May 2009, claiming he withdrew $7.2 billion more than he invested. Picower died in October 2009 at age 67. Picard and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who is probing the Madoff fraud, yesterday announced the settlement with Picower’s widow, Barbara.
“I commend Barbara Picower for agreeing to turn over this truly staggering sum, which really was always other people’s money,” Bharara said at a news conference in New York. “This settlement provides a significant measure of hope to the many victims of Bernard Madoff’s horrific crimes.”
Picard said that investors in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the largest in U.S. history, lost $20 billion in principal. Account statements at the time of Madoff’s arrest in December 2008 showed total balances of $65 billion. Picard, who filed hundreds of lawsuits seeking $50 billion, has now recovered $9.8 billion.
Picower began investing with Madoff in the late 1970s, controlling dozens of accounts. He had a heart attack and drowned in his swimming pool in Palm Beach, Florida.
The settlement “honors what Jeffry would have wanted,” Barbara Picower said in a statement by her lawyer, William Zabel of Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP.
Regulators shuttered six banks holding a total of $1.23 billion in assets, including three in Georgia and one each in Arkansas, Minnesota and Florida, as real-estate losses drive this year’s bank failures to 157.
Florida has lost 29 lenders this year while 21 banks in Georgia were seized, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said today in statements on its website. Regulators have closed 322 banks since the start of 2008. Today’s six closures cost the FDIC’s deposit-insurance fund a total of $267.6 million.
“We’re over the hump in terms of number of failures and the average size, and potentially in the cost of them,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Virginia, said in an interview. The crisis is “far from over but we’re making headway.”
This week’s failures may be the final closures for 2010 because regulators seldom shut down banks on holiday weekends, Ely said. The next two Fridays are Christmas Eve, a market holiday in the U.S., and New Year’s Eve.
More than 500 banks may fail before the cycle that started in 2007 comes to a close, “given the severity of the problems and the prolonged nature of the recovery,” Ely said.
The FDIC said last month that its list of “problem” banks — those at heightened risk of failure — rose 3.7 percent to 860 in the third quarter, the most in 17 years. Banks on the confidential list had $379.2 billion in assets as of Sept. 30, down from $403 billion at the end of the second quarter.
Payrolls decreased in 28 U.S. states and the unemployment rate climbed in 21, showing most parts of the world’s largest economy took part in the November labor- market setback.
North Carolina led the nation with 12,500 job cuts last month, followed by Massachusetts with 8,600 dismissals, and Ohio with 7,800, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Joblessness increased most in Georgia and Idaho, while workers in Nevada faced the highest rate in the country at 14.3 percent.
The report is consistent with figures on Dec. 3 that showed unemployment increased last month for the first time since August. The Federal Reserve’s pledge to buy an additional $600 billion of Treasuries by June and the $858 billion bill passed by Congress extending all Bush-era tax cuts for two years may help boost growth and cut unemployment.
The report shows “an uneven distribution of improvement with some disappointing results,” said Russell Price, a senior economist at Ameriprise Financial Inc. in Detroit. “We’ve seen pretty clear evidence that demand is starting to improve and with the tax program that was passed last night it should further accelerate. That increased demand is going to pull forward further improvements in employment.”
Senate Democrats deflected an initiative by Republicans yesterday that would have forced US and Russian negotiators to reopen an arms treaty reducing stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
But the 37-59 vote against an amendment by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, exposed doubts about whether President Obama can win Senate ratification of the treaty before a new, more Republican Congress assumes power in January.
Treaties require a two-thirds majority of those voting in the Senate, or 67 votes if all 100 senators vote.
Led by McCain, Obama’s GOP opponent in the 2008 presidential election, Republicans tried to strike words from the treaty’s preamble that they say would allow Russia to withdraw from the pact if the United States developed a missile defense system in Europe.
The treaty is a foreign policy priority for Obama, who signed it in April with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
It would limit each country’s strategic nuclear arsenal to 1,550 warheads, down from the current ceiling of 2,200, and establish a system for monitoring and verification. US weapons inspections ended a year ago with the expiration of the 1991 arms control treaty.
Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address yesterday to call for ratification.
He also tried to allay GOP doubts with a letter yesterday to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, pledging to carry through with planned US missile defense facilities in Romania and Poland that would be capable of intercepting a missile from Iran aimed at the United States.
The treaty has received the backing of current and former military and national security officials, as well as former Republican President George H.W. Bush.
Democrats said a reference in the treaty’s preamble on missile defense systems is nonbinding and has no legal authority. In his letter, Obama said the United States disagrees with Russian statements about the threat that a missile defense poses to the strategic balance between the two countries.
“If you change it, it requires this treaty to go back to the Russian government, and then we don’t have any treaty,’’ said Senator John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Republican critics said Russia is using the treaty to continue its opposition to a US missile defense shield.
The use of food stamps has increased dramatically in the U.S., as the federal government ramps up basic assistance to meet the demands of an increasingly desperate population.
The number of food stamp recipients increased 16% over last year. This means that 14% of the population is now living on food stamps. That’s about 43 million people, or about one out of every seven Americans.
In some states, like Tennessee, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oregon, one in five people are receiving food stamps. Washington, D.C. leads the nation, with 21.5% of the population on food stamps.
“The high unemployment rate caused the high participation rate,” said Dottie Rosenbaum from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.
But it’s not just the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.8% that’s driving the increase in food stamp use. Some states are expanding their definitions of poverty to include more people.
At the same time, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act boosted annual funding to the nationwide food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, by $10 billion.
The average recipient receives $133 in food stamps per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That amount varies from state to state; in Hawaii the average is $216, while it’s $116 in Wisconsin.
But the Recovery Act funding increased the maximum food stamp benefit by 13.6%, which translates to about $20-24 dollars per person per month.
The U.S. government considers food stamps to be effective stimulus for the economy, because the recipients usually spend them right away.
Idaho saw the biggest increase in its food stamp program, with a spike of 39% compared to last year, followed by Nevada, at 29%, and New Jersey, at 27%.
New Jersey’s food stamp program expanded at least in part because the state raised its poverty level in April, according to Nicole Brossoie of the state Department of Human Services. That let the state add 35,000 people to its food stamp rolls, an increase of 5%.
Also, Brossoie said that program has been made more accessible to poverty-stricken residents.
“Through newsletters, posters, counseling and other outreach, the stigma associated with food stamps has diminished and more individuals and families are seeking assistance,” she said.
The government is also beefing up unemployment benefits. The unemployed will get a 13-month extension to file for additional unemployment benefits, which can last as long as 99 weeks in states hit hardest by job loss.
As the job market continues to dog the economy, the increase in food stamp funding is set to remain in place for nearly three years.
Dottie Rosenbaum said the hike in food stamp benefits is set to expire Nov. 1, 2013. Typically, food stamp funding increases every year to match inflation. But if Congress does not extend the stimulus funding beyond the 2013 cutoff, then food stamp benefits will revert to their original levels, but still be adjusted for inflation.
She said the budget office is forecasting a potential drop of $49 a month in food stamp benefits for a family of three, or $59 for a family of four, if the stimulus program is not continued.
President Obama, while signing a child nutrition bill on Dec. 13, said he was working with members of Congress to extend the food stamp funding. [All of the control and operation of the Food Stamp Operation is controlled by JPMorgan Chase and is one of their largest profit centers.]
Metro Phoenix bankruptcy filings have hit an all-time record this year, with another month of filings still to go.
The filings, a major indicator of economic stress, reflect the dual effects of the housing and financial meltdowns on the Arizona economy.
Still, there are signs the worst could be over. For example, bankruptcies both for metro Phoenix and the state have dropped in seven of the past eight months.
Another 2,501 consumer and business filings logged in November pushed the year-to-date total for metro Phoenix to 28,849, according to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Phoenix. That exceeds the 28,277 filings recorded for all of 2005, when thousands of people rushed to seek protection before a tightening in the federal bankruptcy laws took effect.
This year’s total through November also tops the 25,104 filings for all of 2009.
“My guess is that 2011 will be equal or greater for filings than 2010, but it’s just a gut feeling,” said Diane L. Drain, a Phoenix bankruptcy attorney.
Forty-eight percent of workers in the financial services industry consider changing jobs if annual bonuses disappoint, said recruiter Astbury Marsden, which advises companies in Europe and Asia.
Forty-five percent of the 1,122 bankers surveyed said they expected bonuses to be higher this year than last, the London- based recruitment firm said in an e-mailed statement today. Collective bonuses are likely to be less than the 7.3 billion pounds ($11.3 billion) paid last year.
“Employers could see unprecedented levels of staff attrition,” Jonathan Nicholson, managing director at Astbury Marsden, said in the statement. “We could see large numbers of staff defect to rivals.”
Pay in the sector increased 17 percent this year to compensate for reduced bonuses, the recruiter said. Forty-five percent of the workers anticipating a higher bonus this year expect it will amount to 47 percent of their base salary, according to the survey.
America is exceptional - utterly and absolutely exceptional - because the rest of the world depends on American guns, American money and American mediation in a way that no other country or combination of countries possibly might replace. Any other power that suffered the setbacks that America sustained during 2010 under the Barack Obama presidency would have been pushed off the top of the hill. The reason America still has diplomatic currency to spend in Asia as well as actual currency to borrow demonstrates its indispensable role: no one, least of all Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao or Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, wants America to fail.
That is why a conspiracy of silence surrounds the observation that the emperor is naked. But the facts are depressingly clear.
After one trillion dollars and 5,000 casualties, America will leave Iraq with nothing to show for its Quixotic commitment to build a nation in the Mesopotamian sand. As Steven Lee Meyers reported on December 18 in The New York Times, "The protracted political turmoil that saw the resurgence of a fiercely anti-American political bloc here is casting new doubt on establishing any enduring American military role in Iraq after the last of nearly 50,000 troops are scheduled to withdraw in the next 12 months, military and administration officials say." The pro-Iranian government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will eliminate America's role in Iraq after America's scheduled withdrawal.
ATHENS -- The Greek Parliament early Thursday approved the Socialist government's 2010 austerity budget, which aims to slash Greece's fiscal deficit through a mixture of spending cuts and higher taxes.
Parliament passed the measure along party lines, with the Socialist 160-seat majority voting in favor and Greece's four opposition parties voting 139 against, with one lawmaker absent.
The vote comes amid pressure from the financial markets and other European Union countries for Greece to fix its public finances, and just days after the country was slapped with its third ratings downgrade in a month.
"This budget is not just about reordering our economy, but also about rebuilding our credibility," said Prime Minister George Papandreou just ahead of the vote.
Greece has been under intense scrutiny since it disclosed two months ago a ballooning budget deficit that is on track to reach 12.7% of gross domestic product this year.
The 2010 budget aims to cut that deficit to 9.1% of GDP next year through a combined €8 billion ($11.46 billion) in spending cuts and tax increases.
However, the budget has been criticized by the EU and the ratings agencies for relying too much on one-off measures, and too little on permanent reforms like cutting the public sector wage bill or stamping out widespread tax evasion.
On Tuesday, Moody's Investors Service cut its sovereign debt rating for Greece to A2 from A1, following similar moves this month by peers Standard & Poor's Corp. and Fitch Ratings, and warned of further downgrades ahead.
"A further downgrade will depend on the Greek government's plan being followed through -- as demonstrated, for instance, by a sustained increase in tax revenues and/or the effectiveness in reining in expenditure," Moody's said.
