Wednesday, Dec 17th
Last update09:36:22 AM GMT
Economic Glance
One year after the near collapse of the global financial system, this much is clear: The financial world as we knew it is over, and something new is rising from its ashes. Historians will look to September 2008 as a watershed for the U.S. economy.
TVNL Comment: Keeping consumers in constant debt is the strategy that feeds capitalism as we know it. Don't kid yourself. The cycle will crawl back and debt will rule once again.
In a radical report, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said the system of currencies and capital rules which binds the world economy is not working properly, and was largely responsible for the financial and economic crises.
It added that the present system, under which the dollar acts as the world's reserve currency , should be subject to a wholesale reconsideration.
A breakdown in communications at the highest level between the US and the UK led to the shock collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in September last year, a Guardian/Observer investigation has revealed.
Companies eliminated more jobs than forecast in August, a private survey indicated today, signaling that employers have yet to gain confidence about a recovery from the deepest recession since the 1930s.
The 298,000 drop followed a revised 360,000 decline the prior month that was smaller than previously estimated, according to figures from ADP Employer Services.
We construe this as an admission that the U.S. gold reserve has been put into private hands to some extent or has been compromised in some way by possession by private interests, such as financial houses that trade in gold. Really, why should any Federal Reserve record involving the national gold reserves be confidential, except perhaps records involving the most ordinary security of the reserve's vaulting? Plainly the Fed has knowledge of something that has been done with the gold reserve that the U.S. government does not want the American people and the financial markets to know.
Millions of older people face shrinking Social Security checks next year, the first time in a generation that payments would not rise.
The trustees who oversee Social Security are projecting there won't be a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for the next two years. That hasn't happened since automatic increases were adopted in 1975.
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