TV News LIES

The Federal Reserve offers details on the loans it gave to banks and others at the height of the financial crisis. One program alone doled out nearly $9 trillion.  The Federal Reserve has lifted its veil of secrecy regarding special lending programs during the financial crisis, responding to a mandate from Congress by revealing the specifics of transactions with firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

Critics of the Federal Reserve are poring over the data, seeking red flags regarding potential improprieties. And Congress has asked its Government Accountability Office to sift through the numbers and offer its own analysis.

All she wanted was $50,000 from the equity in her house to help pay the bills while looking for a job in nursing. What Imogene Hall got was a brutal lesson in the sometimes shady ways of the mortgage industry.

It's a lesson learned by untold numbers of homeowners in Florida, epicenter of the foreclosure crisis gripping the nation. "Everywhere I turn, someone else is scamming me,'' said Hall, a 49-year-old Jamaican immigrant who stands to lose her Miami Gardens home the Monday after Thanksgiving. "All I do is work hard, and I get surrounded by thieves.''

A U.S. trustee in California questioned the salaries and housing expenses of employees of a Protestant ministry going through federal bankruptcy proceedings.

The Justice Department Trustee, working in an administrative role with the bankruptcy court in Santa Ana, found particularly unnecessary a $132,019 housing allowance for Fred Southard, the chief financial officer of Crystal Cathedral Ministries in Garden Grove, the Orange County Register reported Thursday.

Warren Buffett once said:

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning," Obama's deficit-cutting agenda the latest battle.

"Is cutting the public debt really an objective economic necessity, or is it actually a deeply political stance, reflecting the interests of the business and financial elites?"

Among the banks helping General Motors with its initial public stock offering next week are two identified by initials only: ICBC and CICC. Americans uncomfortable with U.S. government ownership of General Motors may want to hear more:

One of those banks is the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, one of China's four big central government banks. The other, China International Capital Corp., is a joint venture run primarily by Central Huijin Investment Ltd., an arm of the state, and Morgan Stanley.

Last Wednesday was a hinge point in history. The United States decided to drop all pretence of being interested in leading – or even being part of – a coordinated global policy response to the most serious economic crisis in more than 70 years.

Up until now, the rest of the world has been willing to tolerate unprecedented money-printing by the US – and the UK for that matter. QE has been used to help various financial institutions avoid facing up to their losses, while covertly recapitalising Western banks that are, to all intents and purposes, insolvent. Money-printing has also pumped up equity prices. After the latest Fed-induced "sugar rush", the FTSE global all-share index hit a two-year high.