Wednesday, Nov 19th
Last update09:25:02 AM GMT
Economic Glance
New York’s Public Advocate, Bill de Blasio, recently released a very important study about Wal-Mart’s effects on local communities. It represents a major step forward in the understanding of the effects of Big Business.
The main conclusions are shocking, to the point, and make clear what damage Wal-Mart actually managed to do to the American economy. The fundamental conclusions are these:
An AMAZING fact: The Federal bailout is more than the cost of the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Marshall Plan, the New Deal, the Invasion of Iraq, and landing on the moon COMBINED!
And, with this bailout Obama has nearly created more debt than ALL the previous presidents COMBINED.
Dr. Paul is now the Chairman of the Congressional subcommittee overseeing the Federal Reserve, which as you may know, is a private entity yet largely responsible for our economic policies.
U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end. U.S. corn, soybeans and wheat prices -- which surged by as much has 50 percent last year and hit their highest levels since mid-2008 -- will dip by at most 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to the poll of 16 analysts.
The forecasts suggest no quick relief for nations bedeviled by record high food costs that have stoked civil unrest. It means any extreme weather event in a grains-producing part of the world could send prices soaring further.
Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs Group has tripled the base salary of chief executive Lloyd Blankfein to $2m (£1.3m), up from $600,000. And company filings show he was also awarded shares currently worth $12.6m, a 42% hike from the the stock bonus he received for 2009.
It comes even after the bank's profit fell 38% in 2010 to $8.35bn. Banks were pressed to reduce bonuses in 2009 after the 2008 global economic collapse, largely blamed on bankers.
Wall Street's plunge into the U.S. housing market reached such a level of madness that three giant banks kept buying billions of dollars in risky mortgage securities when most investors were shunning them, a congressional commission said Thursday in its long-awaited report on the causes of the U.S. financial crisis.
An offshore market for the securities became "self fueling," the politically divided Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in its 533-page report, including lengthy dissents from Republican commissioners.
Banks repossessed a record one million US homes in 2010, and could surpass that number this year, figures show. Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac said about five million homeowners were at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.
Foreclosures are likely to remain numerous while unemployment remains stubbornly high, the group said. Among the worst hit states were Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California, once at the heart of the housing boom.
The Federal Reserve was set up by bankers for bankers, and it has served them well. Out of the blue, it came up with $12.3 trillion in nearly interest-free credit to bail the banks out of a credit crunch they created. That same credit crisis has plunged state and local governments into insolvency, but the Fed has now delivered its ultimatum: there will be no “quantitative easing” for municipal governments.
On January 7, according to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed had ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments. "We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," he said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states "should not expect loans from the Fed."
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