Free Republic

Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy — and How They Will Do It Again if No One Stops Them By Peter Schweizer Harper, $24.99, 217 pp. With Architects of Ruin, Peter Schweizer again delivers a knockout punch of a book that is the must read of the season for conservatives and should be a main topic of conversation for conservative media. Schweizer blows the lid off the 30-year leftist war on banking standards in the name of “equality” that created the housing bubble and caused the foreclosure crisis. (Somebody get this book to Glenn Beck...

America has a bad case of the doomsday jitters. You don't have to be a Glenn Beck follower to know that whenever things go wrong in this country, you can always find all the anger, bitterness and fear-mongering bubbling up and over into our popular culture. As Shakespeare's witches exulted in "Macbeth," when things go wrong, it's time to stir the pot: "double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble." With Wall Street fat cats still cashing in while the rest of the country still suffers from double-digit unemployment, with partisan bickering at an all-time high and a...

Two more workers died overnight after a bridge under construction in the Pyrenees principality of Andorra collapsed, bringing the death toll to five, the government said Sunday. Six other workers were recovering in hospital after the concrete structure of the road bridge gave way around midday Saturday near the Dos Valires tunnel in the Massana valley in northwest Andorra. Emergency teams worked throughout the night to rescue a man who was trapped up to the waist in rubble, but he died shortly after being pulled from the debris in the early hours on Sunday, according to a government spokesman. The...

The current economic crisis is considered a recession, on the verge of depression. The reality is that we are not entering another great depression and the more proper term is "The Great Collapse". What has happened in the past, usually will happen in the future. I approach this problem not with the fuzzy mathematics of the economist but with the certainty and empirical evidence of the historian. Recessions and Depressions are trying times for the citizens of a nation. Collapses are a completely different situation. An economic collapse is followed by exponential increases in misery. The more comfortable the population...

The Japanese Bond Market May Really Be Ready To Collapse The Mad Hedge Fund TraderNov. 4, 2009, 5:11 AM Having spent a decade living in Japan sharing shoe box sized apartments, living on fish heads, rice, and instant ramen, I am something of an authority on that enchanting country. I spent the seventies toiling away learning Japanese, shuffling hundreds of flash cards whenever I rode the train or subways. My friends said I was crazy when I learned obscure, seemingly useless terms like hitokabu rieki (earnings per share) and genka shokyaku (depreciation). I even made the ultimate sacrifice to improve...

10 Ways A China Blow-Up Will Slam America Vincent FernandoNov. 3, 2009, 8:50 AM Beware a surprise economic crash in China. The country is expanding like crazy, and while this may look great in the short term, there are many signs that the country's economic path is unsustainable. The government itself realizes the problem, but must balance the country's bubble concerns with the zealous economic expectations of its population, and most importantly, the massive need for job creation. It's also a huge country and the government has far less control over the economy than it would like to admit. Should...

Seoul, Washington round out plans to handle N. Korean regime collapse: source SEOUL, Nov. 1 (Yonhap) -- South Korea and the U.S. have completed joint action plans to respond to a regime collapse and other internal emergency situations in North Korea, a ranking government source said Sunday. The so-called "Operational Plan (OPLAN) 5029," drawn after years of bilateral consultation, dictates respective military responses by Seoul and Washington to several types of emergency situation in the communist North -- a civil war, an outflow of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the kidnapping of South Korean citizens, a mass influx of refugees...

And So It Begins (Dollar Warnings)Friday, October 23. 2009 Posted by Karl Denninger in Monetary at 08:47 I have been on a potential dollar dislocation - or collapse - for more than two years. Indeed, back in the fall of 2007, it was one of the themes of petitions to Congress and letters I sent under personal cover to all 535 members. The debt liquidation cycle of 2008/early-09 appeared to stop the deterioration. Unfortunately that cycle was interrupted - intentionally - by enabling a continuing pattern of lies and fraud within our government. This has reversed all of the gains...

3 signs of the next real estate collapse The latest bubble is about to burst, but this time it's in the commercial market. Here's how to see it coming. By Katie Benner, writer-reporter October 22, 2009: 10:16 AM ET NEW YORK (Fortune) -- When the FDIC closed Chicago's Corus Bank last month, it may have signaled the beginning of the next shock to the banking system: commercial real estate defaults. Corus, whose balance sheet was larded with bad construction loans, is just one of many banks that have a slew of this debt on their books. Refinancing the $2 trillion...

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Jack Bogle published "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" four years ago. The battle's over. The sequel should be titled: "Capitalism Died a Lost Soul." Worse, we've lost "America's Soul." And worldwide the consequences will be catastrophic. That's why a man like Hong Kong's contrarian economist Marc Faber warns in his Doom, Boom & Gloom Report: "The future will be a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today." No, not just another meltdown, another bear market recession like the one recently triggered by Wall Street's "too-greedy-to-fail" banks....

And here you were thinking that the market's collapse had taken only six years or so off the value of your nest egg. After all, the S&P is back to 1,100, about the same level as late 2003. Silly you! As we've noted often in recent days, since your government is quietly destroying the value of the dollar (ostensibly to save your ass), the actual dollar-adjusted value of the S&P 500 is back to 1996 levels. Even after the recent 60% recovery! Here, from the FT, is the S&P 500 plotted after adjusting for the dollar's move relative to a...

Central banks flush with record reserves are increasingly snubbing dollars in favor of euros and yen, further pressuring the greenback after its biggest two- quarter rout in almost two decades. Policy makers boosted foreign currency holdings by $413 billion last quarter, the most since at least 2003, to $7.3 trillion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nations reporting currency breakdowns put 63 percent of the new cash into euros and yen in April, May and June, the latest Barclays Capital data show. That’s the highest percentage in any quarter with more than an $80 billion increase. World leaders are acting...

Gold-The Canary in the Coal Mine Published: Thursday, 8 Oct 2009 | 12:02 PM ET By: Charles Goyette, Author, The Dollar Meltdown The new gold rush is on so you better be prepared to see a lot more of those "cash for gold" neighborhood parties. Gold rose to an all-time high of $1,050 on Thursday. Simon Rose, CEO of Dahlman Rose believes it has the potential to go much higher - perhaps as high as $2000. It all sounds so exciting doesn't it - Gold at a thousand dollars! But words of caution from our guest blogger today. Guest Author...

AS of 7:09 AM ET CNBC and Marketwatch do not have anything on their front page about the Asian intervention in foreign currency markets to prop up the collapsing dollar. FT has a general story on the weak dollar four stories down. WSJ covers it, but only half way down, in the "Before the Bell" segment. Let me make clear what MSM is obviously not getting. Panic out of the dollar is the great tsunami that could rock the financial system to its core. If this escalates. It means soaring--double digit-- U.S. inflation, a near impossible ability for the U.S....

On the Edge With Max Keiser, Risk of Deflationary Economic Collapse Economics / Deflation Oct 04, 2009 - 02:35 PM By: Mike_Shedlock Janet Tavakoli is On The Edge With Max Keiser. Tavakoli says the Risk of deflationary collapse greater now than in 2007. We’ve just interviewed Janet Tavakoli for our first episode of The Keiser Report. If you don’t know her, you should. She wrote a fantastic book, Dear Mr. Buffett. Max and I are on our second read of it. You really must get this book if you want to understand derivatives from one of the foremost experts on...

Gold Tells You U.S. Bubble Hasn’t Popped Yet: Alice Schroeder

Judge napolitano talks to Gerald Celente who says the revolution has already started.

Washington (AP) -- Just moments after delivering a fiery address to the government watchdog group Public Citizen in Washington yesterday, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, director of three of the five highest-grossing documentaries of all time, clutched at his abdomen, groaned loudly, and steadied himself on a nearby railing. All of what followed is still unclear, although witnesses say...

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama's world grows bleaker. Liberalism's world is bleaker. At home and abroad, liberalism, as advanced by the President, is failing. Are we witnessing the beginnings of another historic event, loosely comparable to the fall of communism twenty years ago? Now the fall of liberalism?

Marc Faber Predicts The Collapse Of Capitalism By Kate Incontrera 09/25/09 As contrarians, we’re used to holding unpopular views on the economy. We believe the recovery is a sham; that things will get worse before they get better; and that the effects of the current recession will reach farther than most people think. Well, our good friend Dr. Marc Faber couldn’t agree more. And in a recent interview for Yahoo’s Tech Ticker, he explains why.[snip]

H.R. 3200 would enact a series of synergistic causal sequences. This would start with an instantaneous increase in demand as new consumers enter the system or existing consumers demand more medical goods and services. Clinics, practices, and hospitals currently rely on higher private insurance payouts to make up for the low reimbursement rates from Medicare. Under the new system, they would not receive it, either from the government plan or the private insurers. The government will not pay it. Insurance companies, required to cover pre-existing conditions, maintain coverage unconditionally, and cap premiums, will have no choice but to cut payments...

His policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says. There are "troubling similarities" between the US President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Could the big pullback in global equities on Aug. 17 mark a turning point for the stock market? After a 50% advance in the S&P 500 since March, some argue stock investors had gotten too enthusiastic.

I have noticed that many leftist/socialist/communist regimes end in bloodshed. Well save a few, like Poland. Any reasons why that happens and why the end in bloodshed? Nazis Germany-World War II Soviet Union-Christmas Day Coup Fascist Italy-World War II. Benito Mussolini was executed and hanged in public. Salvador Allende-September 11, 1973 Coup Communist Romania-Nicolae CeauÅŸescu got executed Baathist Iraq-America invaded Iraq in 2003

... The crux of the matter is that the United States is no longer in control of its fate. Meetings with creditor nation leaders result in new orders given, and new policy directives enacted. Comparisons are made to China, but they too are a distraction. China can embark on its ... The USGovt creditors are in control. The August Hat Trick Letter reports have identified five major factors pointing to a severely stressful period of time at the end of August and into September.... The risk of accidents is rising exponentially from incredible backroom movement of massive funds to avert...

Ron Paul and Peter Schiff pegged it. David Walker, former Comptroller General, pegged it. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, international oligarchs (like Soros and satanists higher up hiding in the shadows) and others who are ready to devour the U.S. pegged it (which is why they paid for Obama to be elected). Stooges with narcissistic personality disorders like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, George Bush, Federal Reservists, Fannie Mae bonus-boys, Insane Islamists, Narco-elites and a whole barrelful of shills, idiots, and moral zeros either don't get it or use it for their own power. We have not been alert to live...

Hotel Swept into River after Typhoon Source:Xinhua Updated: 2009-8-10 11:08:53 A six-storey hotel building leans before falling into a flooded river after Typhoon Morakot hit Taitung county, eastern Taiwan, August 9, 2009. People watch as a six-storey hotel building leans before falling into a flooded river. A collapsed hotel building is seen in flood waters.

<p>When everyone is thinking the same thing, it never happens, and what everyone is thinking right now is that when August is over, and we get down to business, this market's going to be in for some hurt.</p> <p>Folks have been saying it all summer, as bulls make mincemeat of bears without mercy. And now traders are starting to place their bets on the wheels coming off soon.</p>

On December 9, 2008, $65 billion of investor money was at peace. On the fear-greed seesaw that is said to characterize investor emotion, fear was down on the ground, while greed was high in the sky, having all the fun. Greed was earning a steady 1% per month, making fear look like an over-cautious fool. On December 10, 2008, six simple syllables transformed that greed into lead, sending it crashing to earth while launching fear to the moon. The syllables were these: "It's all just one big lie," and they were spoken by Bernard Madoff. It was an admission that...

Will China Implode? by Isabel Hilton Obama and Chinese officials met this week for high-level policy talks, and avoided exchanges on human rights. But China expert Isabel Hilton says minority revolts in China recently show it is an empire in crisis. There is a story that the Chinese government likes to tell: that China is the world’s oldest continuous, unchanging civilization (the dates vary, according to the exuberance of the moment, from 2,000 to a mythical 5,000 years). This unique history, the story continues, will determine China’s future. In this narrative of Chinese exceptionalism, the leadership remains immune to demands...

Kurland left Countrywide in 2006. The lender went under last year and Bank of America took over. PennyMac now services assets similar to those that played a hand in fate of Countrywide and also purchases mortgages from other financial firms.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The head of a group of fiscally conservative Democrats says negotiations with House leaders on health care have collapsed.

It turns out that last fall when our financial system was near a collapse, the Bush administration and Congress had discussions about a potential breakdown of law and order in our country. They also talked about how the nation’s people would be fed and how long the food supply would last. Scary stuff in this article. We’re not crazy after all!!! A major economic collapse is one of the things we SurvivalMoms are preparing for. I hope this article confirms what you already know deep down inside: if your family is to survive and thrive, it will be because of...

was curious what a 'collapse' would look like for a superpower and the most recent reference point is the former Soviet Union 1991-1998 meaning these events reach a tipping point rather then instantaneous collapse. The Russians experienced both a deflationary environment on non-essential goods and hyperinflationary on essential goods such as energy and food. If you lived in the colder portions of Russia you could expect enough diesel or electricity for two to three hours a day which kept a few people together under one roof from freezing. Food rations such as wheat were provided so starvation was rare but...

We are getting closer - I can smell it - just watch bubble vision these days. Resident CNBC court jester Dennis Kneale recently announced on his freak show that the ‘recession ended in June’. Meanwhile Goldman (GS) is shoveling out huge (tax payer sponsored) bonuses for the past quarter. It really didn’t take much - did it? After extreme pessimism in early March good ole’ greed and irrational bullish exuberance have returned in four months flat. Which is exactly what I predicted late February, remember?

Barack Obama has been president for only six months. Last November the American electorate handed him an overwhelming victory in hopes Obama would deliver the “change” he promised. It appears even by the most objective of standards, Obama may be over-reaching. Much was expected from the great orator from Illinois; perhaps too much for a man without executive experience. In just four years Obama has gone from being a state senator, to the U.S. Senate, to winning the Democratic nomination for president and to the presidency. In my many years in sales and marketing, I witnessed countless young, personable, talented...

Amazing pictures

We estimate fiscal 2009 to have a deficit of more than $2 trillion and incoming revenues will only make up less than half of that. In spite of the protestations of our Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that the deficit will be reduced, our president guarantees $1 trillion annual deficits as far as the eye can see. Cuts will never come and the dollar will fall because that is the way the elitists want it to be. Only from the ashes of economic and financial collapse can the new world order rise. Our government says one thing and does another. They...

The first, which will have the most visible impact on John/Jane Doe, is in relation to California's financial woes and their issuance of IOUs. While certainly rare enough (fortunately), the issuance of IOUs by a state in lieu of payments isn't without prescedence. California did the same thing back in '94. What has changed between then and now, is the response of banks to the issuance. Back in 1994, the banks all accepted the IOUs as legal tender, so once the public got over the initial shock, they quickly found that they could deposit the scrip into their accounts and...

Thus far, analysis the financial collapse has been framed almost entirely in terms of money. All the research I’ve seen has delved into lending standards, securitization, inflation, interest rates, housing and the like. Yet underneath this veneer lies one larger, mega-trend that has driven all of these themes to a greater or lesser degree. It created one of the largest stock bull markets we’ve ever seen from 1982-2001. It helped drive the Bubbles in Tech stocks AND Housing. And now it will guide the coming collapse in stocks and consumer spending. That trend is AGE: specifically the Boomer generation and...

Washington is bluffing that it will not bail out California, and every other state suffering from collapsed revenues and massive job losses. If cuts in police and schools don’t force DC off from its current position, then the math will. Because in many states the aggregate revenue losses and looming cuts to state payrolls will largely render the intended effects of federal stimulus as moot. Frankly, unless Washington prints money and bails out every state that needs capital, including California, federal power will decline...

Health Care will Cause U.S. Dollar Collapse It is becoming increasingly likely that health care will be the straw that causes the U.S. Dollar to collapse. There is no doubt about it that health care costs are out-of-control in America. Unfortunately, most Americans are calling for the government to do something about astronomical health care costs, when the government is actually the cause of the crisis and will only make it much worse. Medicare costs have increased from $3 billion in 1966 to an estimated $408 billion in 2009. This equals a compound annual growth rate of 12% and proves...

Empire America is on the verge of collapse. Its social, economic and political systems are failed and failing, observes Trends Research Institute Director, Gerald Celente, in the Summer Trends Journal. “The measures taken by successive governments to save the politically corrupt, morally bankrupt, physically decrepit giant from collapse have served to only hasten its demise. While the decline has been decades in the making, the acceleration of ruinous policies under the current Administration is leading the United States — and much of the world — to the point of no return,” says Celente.The “green shoots” sighted by Field Marshall Bernanke...

This past Saturday, an entire apartment building in Shanghai collapsed. To be fair, the building was under construction and thus unoccupied, but it's still a minor miracle that there was only one fatality. Sounds like there was a problem with some nearby flood prevention walls at the Dianpu River, but there's no hard evidence as to why this huge building simply fell over. Anyway, here are some sweet pictures of the architectural carnage.

At around 5:30am on June 27, an unoccupied building still under construction at Lianhuanan Road in the Minxing district of Shanghai city toppled over. One worker was killed. According to information, a 70 meter section of the flood prevention wall in nearby Dianpu River and that may have something to do with this building collapse.

“My concern about the legislation is that if the GAO is auditing not only the operational aspects of the programs and the details of the programs but making judgments about our policy decisions would effectively be a takeover of policy by the Congress and a repudiation of the Federal Reserve would be highly destructive to the stability of the financial system, the Dollar and our national economic situation.”

Here are the facts: * We witnessed one of the biggest collapses of all time in “open market paper” — mostly short-term credit provided to finance mortgages, auto loans, and other businesses. Instead of growing as it had in almost every prior quarter in history, it collapsed at the annual rate of $662.5 billion. (See line 2.) * Banks lending went into the toilet. Even in the fourth quarter, when the meltdown struck, banks were still growing their loan portfolios at an annual pace of $839.7 billion. But in the first quarter, they did far more than just cut back...

...t is hard for most of my friends and family to understand why I have been so negative on the Detroit autos for years. Unlike the mass media, I don't think the product they produce was the main problem at the end. I told people these companies would eventually go bankrupt / or something along those lines for several reasons. Why? Well for the following reasons and after each point I follow with a parallel to the United States. 1. GM had massive pension / post retirement liabilities which made it almost impossible to stay in the black and service...

As the Federal Reserve continues to monetize the money supply (quantitative easing) at a breakneck pace, nations around the world have become very concerned about their holdings of US dollars and dollar backed assets. The dollar at this point in time looks like it's virtually guaranteed to lose its status as the international reserve currency.

Rebuilding the banks May 14th 2009 From The Economist print edition A tamer banking industry is already emerging from the debris of the old, failed one, says Andrew Palmer (interviewed here) BANKING is the industry that failed. Banks are meant to allocate capital to businesses and consumers efficiently; instead, they ladled credit to anyone who wanted it. Banks are supposed to make money by skilfully managing the risk of transforming short-term debt into long-term loans; instead, they were undone by it. They are supposed to expedite the flow of credit through economies; instead, they ended up blocking it. The costs...