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***In the 1960s, city leaders demolished part of the Fillmore District, a neighborhood once known as the Harlem of the West, displacing 883 businesses and 20,000 people, most of them Black. Decades later, thousands of people remain displaced and the neighborhood has turned into a predominantly White enclave of multimillion-dollar homes. To compensate for that and other instances of racial discrimination, the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee recently recommended that qualifying Black residents receive $5 million each in reparations. ***The proposed reparations program is not a recompense for slavery, which was never legal in San Francisco, but instead, the...

If you’re tired of binge-watching Netflix, there are likely a few restaurants in your neighborhood who would love to hire you. A job might help relieve the boredom. On the other hand, why work when one can just be one of the more than 6 million former workers now collecting “pandemic unemployment insurance”? Those millions are in addition to the 3.6 million former workers collecting ordinary unemployment insurance. For many workers, these benefits now total $300 per week. In March, President Biden extended the program until September. And then there are the many millions more who have recently received a...

There’s a predictable checklist for meltdowns in socialist countries, and it’s playing out with tragic regularity in Venezuela. Nationalize agriculture? Check. Start government-enforced rationing when the food supply dries up? Check. Seal the border when people try to flee to buy food elsewhere? Check. The next step, and usually one of the last before total collapse, is runaway inflation. That’s what we’re starting to see in Venezuela. Rapid inflation, called hyperinflation by economists when it gets really bad, is one of the deadliest poisons for any economy. The spiral is usually triggered when a government prints too much money to...

AN ECONOMIC CHART THAT COULD SPELL TROUBLE Oct. 21, 2013 by Becket Adams Fund flows are interesting in thatthey help market analysts gauge investor sentiment in specific assets or the markets as a whole. “For instance,if net fund flows for bonds funds during a given month is negative by a large amount,this would signal broad-based pessimism over the fixed-income markets,” Investopedia notes, offering a helpful explanation for the concept. That being said, something interesting happened earlier this year with foreign interest in USD-denominated assets. Simply put, foreign interest collapsed. Here’s a chart to help you visualize the drop: “It...

Given that the Trayvon Martin verdict has been used by demagogues to divide America, we need to remind ourselves that Black Americans are among the greatest American patriots. I refer you to this brief 4 minute video by Alan Keyes, where he speaks with great passion in defense of the economic future of the American people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DlTgrMCxPg According to Keyes, the Obama administration is being managed by "insane children". He talks about a budget deficit of 2 trillion dollars, which was eliminated by the printing of paper money, instead of real wealth. Keyes warns America with great emotion, that the...

CNSNews.com) - From fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2011, according to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government increased spending on foreign aid by 80 percent and, in fiscal 2011, spent 76 percent more on foreign aid than it did securing the borders of the United States. In fiscal 2008, the government spent a total of $11.427 billion in international assistance programs, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. In fiscal 2011, according to the statement, it spent $20.599 billion—an increase of $9.172 billion, or 80 percent, from 2008.

Federal Reserve officials are starting to build a case for a new program of buying mortgage-backed securities to boost the ailing economy, though they appear unlikely to move swiftly. The idea would be to target any new efforts by the central bank at the parts of the economy that are most severely impeding a recovery—the housing and mortgage markets—by working to push down mortgage rates. Lower mortgage rates, in turn, could encourage more home buying and mortgage-refinancing, and help the economy by freeing up cash for consumers to spend on other goods and services. Mortgage rates are already very low,...

Many politicians and media pundits who should know better are not thinking very rationally about Governor Rick Perry’s recent critical remarks concerning Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and further additions to the nation’s money supply. It turns out that a constitutional analysis adds weight to Governor Perry’s instructive remarks. As reported, those remarks on August 15th were: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American...

.....Campaigning in Iowa on Monday, the Texas governor said he would consider it "treasonous" if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke "prints more money between now and the election" in November 2012 -- a fresh sign of the political heat the central bank faces as it tries to right the stumbling U.S. economy. The White House responded by saying it is important for the central bank to remain independent, and jabbed back at Perry, who on Saturday entered the race for the Republican nomination to face President Barack Obama. "I certainly think threatening the Fed chairman is not a good idea,"...

The U.S. economy is in bad shape. A growing pile of economic data--slow GDP growth, falling employment, falling consumption--only confirms what more than twenty million people who can't find full-time jobs already know. Yet Congress and the White House are unable or unwilling to do anything about it. As spending from the 2009 stimulus bill peters out, fiscal policy is hurting the economy, and the Republicans' unanimous insistence on spending cuts is keeping it that way. But some Republicans are not content with preventing fiscal policy from reducing unemployment. They also want to intimidate the Federal Reserve--a historically independent agency--from...

ormer Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan explains how the United States can pay down the debt. By printing money. Transcript: David Gregory, moderator of "Meet The Press" on NBC: "Are U.S. treasury bonds still safe to invest in?" Alan Greenspan, Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve: "Very much so. This is not an issue of credit rating, the United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So, there is zero probability of default." Greenspan says the S&P downgrade was just meant to hit a "nerve" and hurt the "self-esteem...

How QE2 Has Changed Everything By Bill BonnerApril 4, 2011 05/04/11 Baltimore, Maryland – Monday was a no-action day on Wall Street. Tuesday was dead too. Except that gold dropped $16. The killing of Osama bin Laden was supposed to raise prices. Especially the price of the dollar. The buck has been going down for 3 years. It’s now within a few cents of its all time low, registered back in the ’70s. We were prepared to advocate more killing, maybe even mass murder, if it would lower the unemployment rate…but the ‘killing lift’ was short lived. It lasted only...

See the South Park-style animation video minus the crude humor and cursing. http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2010/11/video-quantitative-easing-explained.html

There's nothing funnier to 99% of America than Ben Bernanke's claim that he's not printing money. Especially when, thanks to the Jon Stewart, you see Ben's latest 60 Minutes interview juxtaposed against another 60 Minutes interview when the Chairman said he was printing money -- the difference between now and then being that the Fed was buying corporate assets and now it's buying government bonds.

The central bank uses quantitative easing to inflate asset prices, which looks remarkably similar to money laundering. To find economic articles written by Ivory Johnson, click http://www.examiner.com/economy-in-washington-dc/ivory-johnson

The day after the election, the Federal Reserve launched QE2, the second round of Quantitative Easing. This public relations euphemism attempts to hide the fact that the Fed is "printing money" (the Fed actually does it electronically these days). "Cheating, debasing and inflating," as in stealing from the public, is a more accurate description. Bernanke indicated from 600 to 850 billion additional dollars would be created. To put this in perspective, the Tarp package was in this range. The total Federal Reserve balance sheet was $829 billion at the end of 2004 and only $869 billion in August 2007. At...

03:00 pm August 26, 2010 E-mail Share Print Comments (52) Recommend (13) by DAVID KESTENBAUM and CHANA JOFFE-WALT Listen to the Story All Things Considered [5 min 10 sec] Add to Playlist Download Transcript David Kestenbaum/NPR Julie Remache and Nathaniel Wuerffel, in front of the room where they spent $1.25 trillion. That's the table-tennis trophy in the background. In the face of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve decided to buy $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed bonds as part of its effort to prop up the economy. It was a huge departure from ordinary policy — such an extraordinary departure, in...

In the same week that the largest new entitlement program in 45 years just became law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has issued numbers indicating that Social Security is going to pay-out more than it takes in not in 2016 as projected but in 2010! The official “day of reckoning” has been moved from 2041 to 2037. However, according to experts we are “not to expect the date to lurch forward again.” Ha! That, and I can sell you that big bridge in Brooklyn for just a few apples! Why did this happen? The reason is simple: the recession means...

We're Borrowing Like Mad. Can the U.S. Pay It Back? By Greg Ip Sunday, January 11, 2009; B01 In its battle against the financial crisis, the U.S. government has extended its full faith and credit to an ever-growing swath of the private sector: first homeowners, then banks, now car companies. Soon, President-elect Barack Obama will put the government credit card to work with a massive fiscal boost for the economy. Necessary as these steps are, they raise a worry of their own: Can the United States pay the money back? The notion seems absurd: Banana republics default, not the world's...

US Treasury raises Fed funding By Francesco Guerrera in London, Aline van Duyn in New York and Krishna Guha in Washington Published: September 16 2008 14:47 | Last updated: September 17 2008 16:09 The US Treasury on Wednesday announced it was creating a supplemental funding programme to ensure that the Federal Reserve has the cash it needs and its ability to provide emergency liquidity support for the markets is not constrained by the size of its own balance sheet. The move was intended to deal with fears that the US central bank’s balance sheet was overstretched following the AIG loan...