Free Republic

CHART OF THE DAY: Financial Conditions Are At Their Weakest Level Since Lehman Mamta Badkar Sep. 23, 2011, 4:52 PM When you put together all the variables -- credit conditions, corporate bond spreads, interest rates, stocks, home prices and more -- the macroeconomy is in really poor health. Societe Generale's Financial Conditions Indices (FCI) are currently at their weakest levels since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. At current levels FCIs act as a 1.1 percent drag on euro-area GDP and 1.5 percent on U.S. GDP over the next four quarters. SocGen analyst Michala Marcussen says next week could see some...

Nervous Breakdown? 21 Signs That Something Big Is About To Happen In The Financial WorldSeptember 21, 2011 Will global financial markets reach a breaking point during the month of October? Right now there are all kinds of signs that the financial world is about to experience a nervous breakdown. Massive amounts of investor money is being pulled out of the stock market and mammoth bets are being made against the S&P 500 in October. The European debt crisis continues to grow even worse and weird financial moves are being made all over the globe. Does all of this unusual activity...

The Coming Collapse: “We Can Buy Time, But We Can’t Change the Outcome” By Aaron Task | Daily Ticker – Fri, Sep 16, 2011 1:23 PM EDT The Ayn Rand Institute held its annual "Atlas Shrugged Revolution" dinner Thursday night in New York City. In attendance were a number of financial luminaries and hedge fund managers, including Peter Schiff of EuroPacific Capital, John Tamny of RealClearMarkets, Dmitry Balyasny of Balyasny Asset Management and Scott Schweighauser of Aurora Investment Management. The setting was the tony St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue but there was nothing pleasant about the primary message coming...

Link only - 'Bernie Madoff of campaign finance' charged with stealing from Democrats

20 Signs Of Imminent Financial Collapse In EuropeSeptember 13, 2011 Are we on the verge of a massive financial collapse in Europe? Rumors of an imminent default by Greece are flying around all over the place and Greek government officials are openly admitting that they are running out of money. Without more bailout funds it is absolutely certain that Greece will soon default on their debts. But German officials are threatening to hold up more bailout payments until the Greeks "do what they agreed to do". The attitude in Germany is that the Greeks must now pay the price for...

A Whopping 77% Of Financial Professionals See No Recovery In Next Year Gus Lubin Sep. 13, 2011, 9:19 AM Here's a particularly grim survey of financial professionals from Sageworks Inc. 76.5 percent expect no recovery within the next year. 22.2 percent expect things to get worse. (If you're looking to make a contrarian bet, the door is wide open.) Sageworks calls this a big deterioration from past polls in January 2011 and October 2010 which, not surprisingly, were optimistic about the recovery. From the release: The new Sageworks data suggests a general sense of malaise about the economy in which,...

Even Goldman Sachs Secretly Believes That An Economic Collapse Is ComingSeptember 1, 2011 Even Goldman Sachs is doing it again. Goldman is telling the public that everything is going to be just fine, but meanwhile they are advising their top clients to bet on a huge financial collapse. On August 16th, a 54 page report authored by Goldman strategist Alan Brazil was distributed to institutional clients. The general public was not intended to see this report. Fortunately, some folks over at the Wall Street Journal got their hands on a copy and they have filled us in on some of...

Jeff Saut: It's Too Late To Panic Joe Weisenthal Aug. 8, 2011, 9:05 AM The latest strategy comment from Jeff Saut is below. Gist: It's too late to panic. That's what you should hvae done months ago. The call for this week: For weeks I have stated that a credit rating downgrade was a fait accompli and possibly already discounted by the markets; this morning that doesn't seem to be the case with the pre-opening futures down ~30 points. Whatever the various markets' near-term reaction, the fact is that everyone is merely offering their intelligent guesses as to the outcome...

Japan to Mull Backup of Tokyo's Capital Functions Tokyo, Aug. 8 (Jiji Press)--The Japanese government will consider having a backup of Tokyo's capital functions to prepare for possible terrorist attacks or large-scale natural disasters like the one that hit northeastern Japan in March. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism plans to organize a new panel as early as this autumn to discuss the matter, informed sources said. The move comes amid concern that a major disaster in the Tokyo metropolitan area, where important political and economic functions are concentrated, could do grave damage to the whole country. The...

NEW DELHI: India is set to fund bailouts in financially-stricken Europe, marking a dramatic role reversal from 20 years ago when it went knocking on the doors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to avert a balance of payments crisis. The government on Tuesday sought parliamentary approval to provide over Rs 9,003 crore (over $2 billion) in loans to the multilateral agency's New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB), a fund whose corpus was raised to over $500 billion in March when the debt crisis in Europe showed no signs of abating. So, from Greece, which has received $300 billion so far,...

Philanthropist and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg​ is the kind of anti-freedom politician every gun owner should despise. Whether it is the food we eat or the kind of car we drive, Bloomberg likes to stick his nose in other people’s business, and tell us what to do. Bloomberg’s viewpoints are not just for the New York City folks either, but for all of us, and when it comes to his position on guns, his ego reaches new, obscene levels. Instrumental in assembling “Mayors Against Illegal Guns," which boosts 500-plus members across the Nation, Bloomberg is on a crusade...

You may remember J. Wellington Wimpy, more commonly known simply as Wimpy, Popeye's beloved friend from the iconic comic strip. Wimpy was soft-spoken and intelligent, but also cowardly, lazy, stingy, and gluttonous. A true scam artist, Wimpy usually finagled his favorite meal, a hamburger, from some unsuspecting patron at the local diner. Wimpy's parsimonious ways included his famous con line, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." Decades later, this character, created in 1932 during the Great Depression, has become a symbol of fiscal irresponsibility. Today, the United States is facing its own Wimpy-esque moment in the form...

Republicans and Democrats are locked on a collision course with little room to maneuver. Republicans promise no tax increases. Democrats refuse to consider entitlement spending cuts. That’s a bit of a problem. How can you balance a budget if you can’t increase revenues or cut spending? In the current gridlock on Capitol Hill, Republicans are refusing to increase the debt limit unless Democrats capitulate on major spending cuts. It’s the unstoppable force hitting the immovable object. But what will be the result? All three major credit rating agencies are warning that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, they will be...

Cut Cap Balance

American taxpayers must be the most generous people on Earth. Not only did they bail out Wall Street, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the world’s largest insurance company (aig), the world’s largest automobile manufacturer (General Motors), multiple credit card companies, and a host of other companies including Caterpillar, Harley Davidson and MacDonald’s, but now, taxpayers are at it again. For these generous-hearted stalwarts, no bailout seems too much. Swamped with debt, rising unemployment, and a higher cost of living, taxpayers are now helping bail out big-spending Greeks, and Portuguese too. And that is not all. (Excerpt) Read more at The...

Future of America: Harder Than Anything You’ve Experienced In Your Lifetime Mac Slavo July 11th, 2011 SHTFplan.com In February 0f 2009, while on the Glenn Beck show, trend forecaster Gerald Celente was asked to comment on global events and extraordinary times in which we live. His response should have been a wake up call. [It will be] Like nothing we’ve ever seen in our lifetime or I would say anyone’s life time. Since then we’ve seen not billions, but trillions upon trillions of dollars committed to bank bailouts, toxic asset purchases, stock market liquidity infusion, so-called job creation programs, tax...

She was the most likely candidate: Christine Lagarde, French minister of finance and economy, had been Europe’s favorite to succeed her fellow countryman Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund. When the US and Russia officially joined the group of her supporters earlier Tuesday, it was clear that the Parisian would snap the post from her last remaining competitor, Mexican central banker Augustín Carstens. “The executive board agreed that both candidates are highly qualified,” the IMF said in a statement read out by senior adviser David Hawley in Washington. “The objective was to select one by consensus. Ms....

The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, issued an outstanding decision today (PDF) properly applying the First Amendment when it struck down as unconstitutional Arizona’s public financing system for political candidates. There is no doubt that Roberts and the four justices who joined him in the majority opinion in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett will be assailed by the same misinformed critics that went after the Court for its decision in Citizens United. But our history and fundamental principle of protecting free speech leaves no doubt that the Court acted properly when it threw out a law...

You’d be William Munny out of Missouri, killer of women and children”. – Little Bill Daggett – Unforgiven ”That’s right, I’ve killed women and children, I’ve killed just about everything that walked or crawled at one time or another, and I’m here to kill you Little Bill, for what you did to Ned” – Willam Munny – Unforgiven Funny thing, killin’ a man. You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s gonna have. – William Munny – Unforgiven Clint Eastwood’s final western was one of the darkest, most violent, vicious westerns ever made. Much of the film takes place...

The Mechanics of Fractional Reserve Banking Imagine Jack wants to by Jill’s house for $100,000 and he has no money to buy it so he goes to his local bank and asks for a mortgage which is approved. The bank will ask Jack for a promissory note, an IOU, for the $100,000 and once he signs it, they open an account in which they create from nothing $100,000 for Jack in exchange for his IOU. That $100,000 is a liability for the bank, their asset is the IOU. The bank just ‘created’ $100,000 which is backed by the good faith...