GLOBAL MELTDOWN WORSENS

EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS:

Real fast posting today because I have to snow plow and do lots of work in the freeeeezing cold!  First: all the states in the US are now running in the red except for three.  The shortfall, altogether, is less than we spend in Iraq in one year, occupying the country by military force.  End the war now!  Also, the economic news is awful.  End the wars and bring home all the troops in the world!  And Denninger talks about our total meltdown and he is scary but then, so am I.  His solutions won’t work due to our fiscal entanglements overseas.  And riots are spreading across the planet.

 

46 Of 50 States Could File Bankruptcy In 2009-2010 « Freedom Arizona

No State has ever filed bankruptcy, but it could be coming to a State near you this year.

We are on the brink of something far worse than the Great Depression.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patriots across the land should be furious about US imperialism.  We spent a trillion dollars, trying to kill Afghani shepherds and wedding parties and Iraqis throwing shoes, not flowers, at us.  This foolish utter waste has bankrupted America.  Bin Laden won the War on Terror.  Our terror has been hideously expensive and we gained absolutely nothing from it.  If the Democrats won’t end this farce, we must remove them and the Republicans.  I say, arrest everyone who voted for war.  And all Presidents including Obama who is trying to expand, not contract, the ugly war against mountain peasants who are the poorest people on earth.

 

Truck Index Plummeted 11.1% In December

The American Trucking Associations’ advanced seasonally adjusted For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index plunged 11.1 percent in December 2008, marking the largest month-to-month reduction since April 1994, when the unionized less-than-truckload industry was in the midst of a strike. December’s drop was the third-largest single-month drop since ATA began collecting the data in 1973. In December, the seasonally adjusted tonnage index equaled just 98.3 (2000 = 100), its lowest level since December 2000.  The not seasonally adjusted index edged 0.6 percent higher in December.

Compared with December 2007, the index declined 14.1 percent, the biggest year-over-year decrease since February 1996.  During the fourth quarter, tonnage was down 6.0 percent from the same quarter in 2007.

I watched a local ABC station last night.  The goofy blonde female with a chirpy, insipid voice was cheerfully talking about how people can be retrained for new jobs!  Wow!  Jobs as truckers and computer repair personnel!  People don’t fix computers, they replace them. This is due to China.  We love cheap computers.  Hiring someone to fix something when it can be replaced, cheaper, is of course, at the root of our problems.  We have a high standard of living.

 

As for the truck driver part: profits for private haulers is a disaster.  They are going bankrupt, one by one, just like small farmers.  Trucking will continue to fall until the economy picks up again.  The people running ABC should be given 100 lashes for lying to job seekers.  Or perhaps, this is like the business of letting Mexican truckers haul in America: drive down wages.

 

U.S. won’t unilaterally block China exports: Biden | Politics | Reuters

 

The United States will insist China play by international trade rules, but will not move unilaterally to keep out China’s exports, Vice President Joe Biden said on Thursday.

“The policy of this administration is to say to China — which occasionally the last administration was reluctant to do — ‘you’re a major player on the world scene economically and you’ve got to play by the rules that everybody else plays by,'” Biden said in an interview on CNBC.

“‘Not more stringent. We’re not going to impose on you, or attempt to impose on you, restraints that benefit our economy inconsistent with international trade agreements that exist,'” Biden said.

We have been in a trade war for the last 50 years.  We are now in the final stages of this trade war.  Look at the US surrender!  This is, of course, a total surrender.  We are simply giving up.  This is a retarded way of doing things.  We must declare a trade war with new weapons which are very, very old: tariffs and barriers.  This is the only way we can even hope to dig our way out of this stupid hole.

 

And no one is playing ‘fair’ because it is stupid to ‘play fair.’  We are in this massive trade war which we are losing.  And all is fair in love and war.  

 

Strikes spread across Britain as oil refinery protest escalates | Business | guardian.co.uk

Workers at refineries and power stations in various parts of the UK walked out, some holding placards quoting the words of Gordon Brown: “British jobs for British workers”. The wildcat strikes mark the latest in a series of protests over the use of foreign rather than domestic labour by large companies in the UK.

More than 700 BP and INEOS workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland walked out this morning after an 8am union meeting. Police were called to the Aberthaw power station, near Barry, South Wales, and 400 workers at a refinery in Wilton near Redcar, Teesside, have also downed tools.

Workers walked off the site at Total’s Lindsey oil refinery on Wednesday, after weeks of discontent over the contract to build the plant’s HDS-3 de-sulphurisation unit. The plant’s owners put the contract out to tender with five UK firms and two European contractors bidding for the work.

The Italian company IREM won the contract and supplied its own permanent workforce, accommodating them in large, grey housing barges moored off Grimsby docks. It is understood 100 Italian and Portuguese workers are already on the site and 300 more are expected next month.

They don’t even bother with dropping wages anymore.  They simply ship in foreign labor and totally ignore the locals.  Our own government encourages this.  This is why it is worthless to get a degree in any of the computing fields anymore.  The minute you get a degree, the job is either outsourced or the people doing this are brought in!  The people of Britain were outbid by foreigners who then brought in foreign labor to do the work.  The workers aren’t even spending any money in England!  They are parked offshore! 

 

Talk about ‘offshoring’ jobs!

 

FT.com / Global Economy – Call for teamwork on global stimulus

Mr Zoellick said the necessary solutions to the global economic crisis were well known: co-ordinating fiscal stimulus, keeping credit markets moving, dealing with bad loans in banks, fixing regulation, resisting calls for trade protectionism and safeguarding the most vulnerable developing countries. “There is a lot of good economic advice out there,” he said. “The challenge is the political leadership.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, echoed Mr Zoellick’s concerns saying the Group of 20 big economies had failed to fulfil promises to co-ordinate global action to boost the economy and rebuild shattered banks.

At the G20 meeting in November, “governments spoke with one voice”, he said, pledging to recapitalise troubled banks, remove toxic assets from the financial system and co-ordinate fiscal stimulus. “But very little has been done and time is running out,” Mr Strauss-Kahn said. “It is moving very slowly.”

 

This is a cry for the US and UK to go deeper into debt so all trade rivals can resume flooding the planet with labor and goods.

 

U.S. Economy May Keep Deteriorating After Biggest Contraction Since 1982

 

 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy is likely to keep deteriorating in early 2009 after shrinking last quarter by the most since 1982, as consumers and businesses retrench.

The 3.8 percent annual pace of contraction in the fourth quarter was less than forecast, with a buildup of unsold goods cushioning the blow. Excluding inventories, the decline was 5.1 percent, the Commerce Department said yesterday in Washington.

Job cuts announced this month by companies from Starbucks Corp. and Pep Boys – Manny, Moe & Jack to Eastman Kodak Co. mean there’ll be little respite in the first half of this year, economists said. The Obama administration used the figures to reinforce its call for Congress to pass a stimulus package in excess of $800 billion to arrest the economy’s decline.

“The recession is going to last through most of 2009, and we’ll be lucky to have growth back at zero by the end of the year,” Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economics professor, said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Davos, Switzerland, yesterday. Economic growth “will be pretty tepid for a long time.”

 

And of course, if we resume business as usual, yes, we will continue to collapse.  We can’t run on a 75% consumer economy.  We have to have production and it has to hire local labor. See how simple this is?  Very simple.

 

On The Edge of The Abyss – The Market Ticker

This, should Obama or others in Congress and The Administration try to play “too cute by half” and jack around the markets, the public, and the world, is what is going to happen:  That structure is known as a “pennant” or “symmetrical triangle.”The rules of technical analysis for this pattern are:

• Pennants are continuation patterns – that is, whatever direction the market is moving when it comes in, it will move when it comes out.
• The minimum target for the move is given by the length of the pole to which the pennant is attached.

In this case the pennant prognosticates a move downward of six hundred S&P 500 points from the break, which occurs at approximately 810.

That gives us a target on the S&P 500 of 210.

No, that’s not a misprint. 

I said two hundred and ten, and I meant two hundred and ten.

This puts the DOW at TWO THOUSAND.

I will go further into this story, later.  Denninger is a good read, as always.

 

On The Edge of The Abyss – The Market Ticker

Therefore, the only rational answer to this mess is to:

1. Defang the CDS monster.  This must be done now.  CDS provide a limited-risk and near-unlimited reward for shorting a firm’s credit; this is exactly backwards from the equity markets where shorting is limited-reward but unlimited risk.  Short-selling is essential to a balanced market but allowing CDS to be abused to invert the long/short risk profile is outrageous and must be stopped. The proper approach to doing this is to:
   1. Force capital adequacy to be proved for all outstanding contracts.  If you can’t prove the ability to cover the contract, it is declared void.
   2. Bar the writing of new CDS on any TARP recipient.  The government has said it will not allow these firms to fail.  The bets have been made; existing ones that can be covered by the writer are ok, but no new positions can be opened until the government’s interest is extinguished in that name.
   3. Require that all new CDS be written against a public exchange and direct the ISDA to produce, immediately and nightly until that has taken place, bid/ask/OI on an accessible public interface.
   4. Consider barring all CDS that are written “naked” – that is, not against a deliverable bond.  There are already-existing means to short a firm you believe is in trouble in the equity, options and futures markets.  The inversion of the risk:reward profile in the CDS market is a big part of the problem and we must consider putting a stop to it.
   5. Do this all right here, right now.  Give market participants a very short term (two weeks, maybe four) to get their act together or face having their contracts rendered noncollectable.

This is all about the Derivatives Beast. Who is still very much alive and still eating faux paper wealth at an amazing pace and we can’t fix the other stuff unless we slay this creature.  Arresting the many fathers and mothers of this monster will be a requirement. 

 

On The Edge of The Abyss – The Market Ticker

Start investigating the fraud, and be vigorous about it.  The public is not going to sit for their 401ks being destroyed as they have already (and will be as this plays out) without blood.  There are lots of bad actors out there, starting with the officers and boards of failed institutions.  These were not just “bad bets” that caused our banking system and economic problems – I’m willing to wager that it can be proven that they were knowingly-unsound bets and the mismarking of “asset values” was not accidental either.  Down this road should lie plenty of securities fraud charges and maybe more than a bit of Racketeering.  Go for disgorgement of the ill-gotten gains to at least provide the people with something to refill the treasury and assuage the anger, along with prison sentences. 

I agree 100% with this.  ARREST THEM ALL.  I keep saying that.  Of course, if the present government won’t do this, then we have a revolution.  It happens all the time.  History is very clear about this!

 

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