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"“They’re still puzzled why is it that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see,” he said. “You guys are drawing down $10 [million], $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in—in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we’ve got 10 percent unemployment.”"

"Click on graph for larger image in new window. " Notice that hires (blue line) and separations (red and green together) are pretty close each month. When the blue line is above total separations, the economy is adding net jobs, when the blue line is below total separations, the economy is losing net jobs. According to the JOLTS report, there were 3.966 million hires in October, and 4.203 million separations, or 237 thousand net jobs lost."

Replacing private credit with public credit Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 9:44 am, by cmartenson Our entire monetary system, and by extension our economy, is a Ponzi economy in the sense that it really only operates well when in expansion mode "Executive Summary The Federal Reserve and the federal government are attempting to "plug the gap" caused by a slowdown of private credit/debt creation. Non-US demand for the dollar must remain high, or the dollar will fall. Demand for US assets is in negative territory for 2009 The TIC report and Federal Reserve Custody Account are reviewed and compared The Federal Reserve has effectively been monetizing US government debt by cleverly enabling foreign central banks to swap their Agency debt for Treasury debt. The shell game that the Fed is currently playing obscures the fact that money is being printed out of thin air and used to buy US government debt. The Federal Reserve is monetizing US Treasury debt and is doing so openly, both t...

11/05/2009 by By Mohamed El-Erian and Ramin Toloui (This article was originally published on www.ft.com on November 5, 2009.) It has become fashionable to speculate on the future of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Amid an average 10 per cent decline in the past six months, analysts have tended to favour one of two conclusions. Some argue that, since you cannot replace something with nothing, the dollar’s global role is secured. Others feel that America’s medium-term prospects are now inconsistent with such a role. As with many post-crisis issues, the reality is much more complex. This is not just because the dollar will be caught between these two extremes in the muddled middle for the foreseeable future, but also because the dollar is part of a bigger picture that concerns the evolving role of the US as the sole provider of a range of global public goods. At a time when the global system needs such anchors, this uncertainty raises a set of important policy issues. A cou...

South Hampton Doesn't Give a Hoot About "Clawbacks" : "Problem is, the contract for that now-obsolete insurance policy is locked in place through 2019. That’s right, the state of New Jersey is paying Goldman almost $1 million bucks a month to insure bonds that no longer exist. There’s Just No Way I Can Compete One might presume that there is some sort of “buyout clause.” But no one in Jersey can seem to figure out what it is, or whether it is more or less than the $11.4 million that has been funneled across the river – and most probably out to the Hamptons – since the bonds were sold. So long as the bureaucrats in New Jersey and Washington remain clueless, and the con men at Goldman et al. remain shameless, the Lass clan is pretty much assured to be sweating out its summers right here in Maryland." Norton: So what has changed? Destiny of Greed and fleesing of the majority continues. For one reason, the majority that used to be the middle class engine of Americ...

"There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street."

Why Is Congress Agnostic About Natural Gas? -- Seeking Alpha : "The only cure for eventual US insolvency (and loss of sovereignty) is a strategic long-term comprehensive energy policy that reduces foreign oil exports, invests in natural gas transportation infrastructure with an eye toward a future hydrogen based economy, and a reduction in US deficit spending. Still, Congress is asleep and content to support failed 20th century liquid and solid fuels like oil and coal while ignoring the one domestic fuel that is cleaner, cheaper, abundant, and can significantly reduce foreign oil imports: US produced natural gas." Noe=rton's comment: We are missing an obvious energy future in the USA here. Let's get going for vehicles that run on natural gas!

Will the Downturn in the Baltic Dry Index Lead to a Correction in the S&P 500? greenfaucet : "There's been some chatter on the recent down-turn in the Baltic Dry Index, which has been a rough leader of the S&P 500 at key turning points. Let's take a look at the recent relationship between the two indexes and what the current BDI Index is showing."

The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic (May 2009) : " "...Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company... Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government... Becoming a Banana Republic In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging...

Going Broke on $50,000: The Story of the Struggling American Middle Class. The $50,000 Median Household Budget. Posted by mybudget360 in Employment, baby boomers, banks, budget, debt, economy, frugal, government, income, investing, recession, retirment planning, savings, wealth preservation 3 Comment ..The recent recession is exposing how many American families have been treading on the edge. Problems were already in the system before the recession began but the downturn in the economy was the ultimate catalyst. Many families were using credit cards as a means of supplementing a decade of stagnant wages. The median household income for the entire country is $50,740. In addition we have 34,000,000 Americans now receiving some form of food stamps. They are not part of the middle class group. Yet when we dig deeper into the data, it is clear why so many Americans are going broke on $50,000 a year Norton's comment: And now you know why it is a struggle! And it is going to get worse so...

Jesse's Café Américain : "Until the median wage improves, there will be no recovery"

Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine | Marketplace From American Public Media : "The Upside Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine Not everyone has the money to buy a new refrigerator or washing machine. So when large appliances break, people call on repairman David Khorsandi to get their machines back in working order. He explains why his phone has been ringing non-stop" Norton's comment: This could be my Plan B..........keeping food on the table. No bad!

Paul Craig Roberts: Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs : "The great American superpower and its 300 million people are being driven straight into the ground by the narrow interest of the big banks and the munitions industry. People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars" Norton's comment: Ugh! this rings true. Being led to our demise by gullibility and fear mongering and the illusion of a Great matho American ego.

Op-Ed Columnist - Is Obama Punking Us? - NYTimes.com : "What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media." Norton: this is a good summary of the pervasive ill-ease that many of us feel about the conduct of the fixes that are moving forward: the economic, health, sustainable energy promotions... most seem still rooted in the same power mechanisms on wall st and corporate board rooms, and congressional behavior that got us to this disaster in the first place. And then we have the Republicans that are doing their best to throw gasoline on the fires of change. Obama is right. Our current course, be it economics, deficit, national debt, health care is unsustainable. It seems to me that public education is lacking to discern truth from the f...

August 12, 2009 By Arthur Hill The PerfChart below shows the key commodity related ETFs and the S&P 500 since early March. As the stock market surged, the US Oil Fund ETF (USO) and the Base Metals ETF (DBB) were the only two commodity ETFs able to keep pace. The Natural Gas ETF (UNG) remains the weakest of the group - by far

Jesse's Café Américain: If You Read Nothing Else About the Financial Crisis Read (and Remember) This... : "The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time." "...The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights...Looking just at the fina...

Mega-Bear with the S&P since 2000 by dshort.com: by Norton: So where do we go from here? If you can wait awhile and tolerate potential drop in oil and commodities in the interim, then it seems that the LT future for various commodities (hard assets) looks the best by category and may outpace even blue chip and tech sector favorites.

EBAY | Snapshot The crash's hidden losers [The Philadelphia Inquirer]BY Knight Ridder/Tribune — 12:06 PM ET 08/05/2009 Aug. 5--Will someone please tell me how this happened? I'm not talking about Jon and Kate and their troubled televised marriage. Or Arlen, Joe and their congressional cage match -- two recent attention grabbers in the ignore-the-economy media swirl. I'm talking about something that's not all over the news, but all over the nation, and hitting particularly hard, in my opinion, at Generations X and Y. I'm talking about how middle-class life, and its promise of generational upward mobility, is unraveling before today's younger workers have had the chance to collect even a fraction of their due. I'm talking about you! You're invisible . . . to policymakers, to the media, to yourselves. And many of you seem more worried about Jon, Kate and the kids. Even if you've done all that your parents, teachers or college mentors told you to do back...

Rail traffic: The economic indicator that's not improving : "If you're skeptical of the economic data that pundits tout as a sign the economy is starting to recover, you're not alone. In fact, you might have one very good reason to believe that economic activity is still tepid and is not showing signs of improvement. Stock research house Zacks points out that rail traffic, a direct indicator of economic activity, hasn't recovered at all. Rail shipments in the last four weeks are down 18.6 percent compared to 2008, which is comparable to the 18.8 percent year-to-date decline versus the same period in 2008." Norton: It is not over yet.

The annual rate of 329,000 units seen in January of this year was not only less than the 1981 low in nominal terms, but, after accounting for the increase in population, it was not much more than half that level. housing stock vs. new home construction inventory Interestingly, there couldn’t have been two different eras for the homebuilders as far as the cost of money is concerned - back then they were sending truck loads of sawed up two-by-fours to the Federal Reserve building in Washington D.C. because Paul Volcker was on a mission to squash inflation with interest rates approaching 20 percent, whereas, today, the Fed has interest rates pegged at zero. And speaking of the central bank, their legions of economists might think that housing has bottomed when looking at new home construction because this has a direct impact on economic growth - residential construction has been a drag on GDP for about four years now and, from a direct macro-economic perspective, the worst is probably beh...

Anyone who tells you that this is a good time to make a position trade is foolish. From current levels, and for the foreseeable future, the market could fall just as easily as it could rise. This balance of probability tells us that we must be willing to trade both long and short. Most individual investors are one-sided, but almost all professional traders are willing to switch from one side to another when the market calls for it. In my opinion, the market is telling us that we should be willing to trade both long and short for the time being . ...

Published on Monday, June 15, 2009 by TruthDig.com by Chris Hedges There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit. To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar wi...

Op-Ed Columnist - The Joy of Sachs - NYTimes.com : "The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. .....The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007. ... The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else." Norton's comment: So we haven't broken out of the same good old boy network that is running the economy for their own corp. benefit ...

Need I say more? Well, they must be packed for a ride on the FREE yacht, waiting for Hank paulsen to give them a taxi ride to the pier........Norton .........hmmmm. No that is not it! They are waiting for TARP funds to hit Mainstreet!

All is not lost even in this economic turmoil! How to Get a Free Yacht : "Intro How to Get a Free Yacht. Sound impossible? It's not. Before long you'll be giving them away yourself. Here's the table of contents of the whole saga: Chapter 1: How to Get a Free Yacht Chapter 2: Maiden Voyage of the Free Yacht Chapter 3: Fix Broken Stix and other Trix Chapter 4: Outboard Motor Mutilates Foot Chapter 5: It's sinking and it's on Fire. Chapter 6: How To Give Away a Free Yacht Chapter 7: Get an Even Better One and Fabulize it. Chapter 8: Celebrate Freedom Chapter 9: Technicolor Dreamboat Chapter 10: Privateer Knot Chapter 11: Dismasted! Chapter 12: Kiteboat!" CLICK FOR DETAILS How to Get a Free Yacht : norton's comment: Aha! Voila! My new motto: "living high on living low!"

UPDATE — COMMENTARY - Hyperinflation Special Report - June 2nd, 2008 "Have you ever wondered why the CPI, GDP and employment numbers run counter to your personal and business experiences? The problem lies in biased and often-manipulated government reporting. ... How has the hyperinflation outlook changed since the Hyperinflation Special Report was published in April 2008?" Such is the most frequently asked question I receive these days. The answer is that the outlook is little changed, since the following report outlines the basic issues and limited options for the U.S. government that were in play well before the current crises broke. The actions taken since by the federal government, U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, in response to the still-deepening recession and ongoing systemic solvency woes, just exacerbated the long-range problems described in the report. The official actions likely have advanced the timing of the hyperinflation to the much nearer future, perhaps...

Recession prompts Americans to embrace the simple life "...Pastor Eric Dykstra, of Crossing Church, in Elk River, Minnesota, read a book by Julie Morgenstern, called Shed Your Stuff, Change Your Life, then found a blog by Dave Bruno of San Diego called the " 100 Thing Challenge " where he encourages people to pare down their personal possessions to only 100 items. Bruno says he reduced his own possessions to fewer than that. Dykstra started to encouraged the members of his church to follow Bruno's example, and people began donating a lot to charity, including boats, furniture and snow blowers, until they had filled a warehouse. He, himself, went from five suits to one, and from a dozen ties to two. The Northwest Earth Institute in Portland, Oregon offers "voluntary simplicity" courses and enrollment is up 50% in the past year. A 20-minute film called The Story of Stuff has been shown in hundreds of schools and been seen by 6.6 million people online since De...

Gold, the U.S. Dollar, and the Chinese Yuan :: The Market Oracle :: Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting Free Website : "Commodities / Gold & Silver 2009 Jul 09, 2009 - 05:42 PM By: Jennifer_Barry In late April, a Chinese sovereign wealth fund, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, announced that China had purchased 454 metric tons of gold over the past six years. Officials indicated that this increase was accomplished by tapping domestic mine supply and refining scrap gold. As China reported gold production of 282 t last year, the reserves have absorbed about 25% of this output since 2003."

Interactive graphic of the day Free exchange Economist.com : "Interactive graphic of the day Posted by: Economist.com WASHINGTON IT MAY seem silly to devote an entire post to a link to an interactive graphic at the New York Times, but it won't once you go look at the graphic. It's mesmerising and informative. And it broadly comports with my view of the American economy, which is a bonus." Norton's comment: Economics for the non-economist. COOL! CLICK HERE FOR THE SHOW

The Car That Makes Its Own Fuel Renewable Energy : by noor on July 6, 2009 "The depletion of natural resources and their high prices has forced everyone to look for other alternatives to run cars and other electronic devices. This change of thought has made way to the invention of a new car that can make its own fuel, by an Israeli company. This car uses a unique system that can produce hydrogen inside the car using common metals such as magnesium and aluminum. " Norton's comment: "Yes we can!" Detroit better grab this and run with it! It's my money of the barrel head.

Posted by Noah Rosenblatt on April 30, 2009 at 12.27 PM "...The estimate is for $900 Billion in off-balance sheet assets in 2010, as the rule takes effect. I think it would be safe to say that this estimate is highly conservative, as were most estimates of the depth of the writedowns since the beginning of this debt deflation episode. If Citigroup had over $1Trln of these assets placed off-balance sheet in mystery entities, what do you think the rest had? Understand, that banks probably used excessive leverage to finance these assets! How about $5.2 Trillion? Bloomberg's David Reilly discussed the threat in late March: At the end of 2008, for example, off-balance-sheet assets at just the four biggest U.S. banks -- Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- were about $5.2 trillion, according to their 2008 annual filings. Even if only a portion of those assets return to the banks - - as much as $1 trillion is one dark possibil...

by Mish's Blog "Canadians' household debt is about 140 per cent of disposable income, compared with about 150 per cent in Britain and almost 170 per cent in the United States. The level is about 90 per cent among the countries that use the euro. Canada's consumer debt to GDP ratio is quite high but not as bad as in the US. However, 140% is much worse than in the Eurozone. The real measure of how bad things will get is the unemployment rate. I suggest things in Canada will get a lot worse, yet not as bad as in the US. That said, I cannot avoid pointing out the complete silliness of the Bank of Canada's statement: 'On the whole, the country's banks and credit markets are as strong as could be expected amid the deepest global recession since the Second World War'."

FreeStockCharts.com - Web's Best Streaming Realtime Stock Charts - Free Best interactive real time charting I have found. Track your portolio here. Best, Norton

Mourning Our Money at SmartMoney.com : "Mourning Our Money After last year’s market meltdown wiped away huge chunks of their savings, more investors have decided to seek professional help. Just not from a financial advisor. Manhattan grief counselor Diana Nash, for one, typically sees clients who are struggling with the loss of someone close—a parent, a child, a spouse. But lately, she’s taken on a handful of clients who want help dealing with a different kind of loss: their gutted retirement account. Though months have passed since the market meltdown, they still can’t deal with the fact that their nest egg is fried. “Some of them can’t get out of bed,” says Nash. In some cases employers are footing the bill. Ken LeBeau, director of employee-assistance programs for health care giant Cigna, says that since last fall, call volume grew 25 percent thanks to all the folks grappling with financial fears, while calls seeking immediate counseling rose 60 percent. “The sense of urgency in...

Imminent Crisis in Forex Markets? "Posted by Adam Kritzer...The problem that Rogers (and all other investors who are worried about currency debasement) faces is how to construct a viable strategy to protect yourself and/or exploit such an outcome. Rogers himself has admitted, “At the moment I have virtually no hedges…I’m trying to figure out what to do there.” The difficulty can be found in the inherent nature of currencies, whose values are derived relative to other currencies. While you can short the entire stock market or the entire bond market (via market indexes), you can’t short all currencies simultaneously- at least not yet. Instead, you can pick one currency or a basket of currencies, that you believed is best protected from currency collapse and buy it against threatened currencies. But how do you deal with an environment when all currencies appears equally questionable- when all governments all loosening monetary policy and risking inflation? Really, the only answer is ...

Now, compared to that new consensus among macro forecasters, who got it wrong in the past, my views are much more bearish. I would agree that the rate of economic contraction is slowing down. But we're still contracting at a pretty fast rate. I see the economy contracting all the way through the end of the year, going from minus 6 to minus 2, not plus 2. And next year the growth of the economy is going to be very slow, 0.5 percent as opposed to the 2 percent–plus predicted by the consensus. Also, the unemployment rate this year is going to be above 10 percent, and is likely to be close to 11 percent next year. Thus, next year is still going to feel like a recession, even if we're technically out of the recession. The outlook for Europe and Japan, both this year and next year, is even worse. Most of the advanced economies are going to do worse than the United States for a number of reasons, including structural factors in Japan and weak policy response in the case of the Euro zo...

Seeking alpha article: OUCH! It's kind of funny how the IMF (International Monetary Fund) has gone from irrelevance to center stage in just a matter of months. Following quickly on the heels of last week's news that the Federal Reserve plans to print up another trillion dollars came this announcement that a UN panel wants to replace the greenback with a shared basket of currencies. Monday, according to this Reuters report (hat tip MA), China loudly seconded the plan. Earlier Monday, China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, offered a bold proposal to overhaul the global monetary system and replace the dollar with the IMF SDR (Special Drawing Right). The SDR, an international reserve asset created by the IMF in 1969 but little used since that time, has the potential to act as a super-sovereign reserve currency, eliminating risks inherent in any single currency used for that purpose. In a speech that took the unusual step of being issued in both Chinese and English, Mr. Zhou...

Awesome overview of history of bear markets Click here for an interactive CHART

When will this horrible recession be over? According to one surprising source, it’s over right now. The source is Robert J. Gordon, an acclaimed macroeconomist and professor at Northwestern University. It’s surprising to learn he thinks the recession is over, because he is one of seven members of the elite Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Analysis . These are the people who decide officially, for the record books, when recessions begin and end—usually many months after the fact, when the decision is really obvious. I’m unaware of any previous case in which a member of this Committee has ever stepped forward and declared the end of a recession in real time. Gordon bases his gutsy call on an indicator that he says the Committee never even looks at: claims for unemployment benefits. He’s talking about the so-called “jobless claims” number that is released every Thursday morning before the market opens. Based on detailed data from state agencies, it repor...

Jessies Americain Cafe' Jesse's Café Américain : "Don't blame the Democrats alone for this. Instead blame a political system that is corrupted by Wall Street and lobbyist money, and a mainstream media dominated by four corporations feeding a stream of managed news and perception spin to gullible US households. The day of reckoning is nearly at hand, in which the currency crisis in the US will shake the financial foundations of the global economy. 'Outlays are rising at 17% YOY the fastest nominal pace since late 1981. With receipts falling 14.6% YOY their fastest drop in at least 40 years the gap between their growth rates is also the widest in the record. All these rates are accelerating and are threatening to push the deficit to more than 50% of receipts and - at $1.1 trillion and rising - to more than 10% of private GDP.' Thanks to Sean Corrigan at Diapason Trading for this chart."

April 2009 Chart: Durable Goods New Orders Durable Goods New Orders AS of Mid-2008 - the long view

Jesse's Café Américain : Take the RED Pill of the Blue Pill? "...You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."Morpheus in The Matrix ..The elite and their acolytes seem to believe that by sustaining the illusion of the Financial Matrix that we create a confidence that will support a national economic system that is based on a credit bubble and a mass illusion of wealth based on paper.... Can we delude ourselves to prosperity? Can a powerful nation and otherwise intelligent people be that venal, faithless and craven?Yes we can. We have been doing it for years. And it can only continue if we gain more control over the real world and the people in it, and bend them to our increasingly irrational will. The triumph of the will."

Why This Rally Is Unsustainable -- Seeking Alpha : "The selling/deleveraging into the rally has already started and should start picking up on volume soon. According to Washington Service, NYSE listed company insiders have been selling into this rally at the fastest rate since October 2007. Insiders sold over $8 for each dollar they purchased of stock in the first three weeks of April. To give that some context, the S&P topped out on October 11, 2007 and declined 57% before hitting March 2009 lows. If everything is so peachy-keen in the market and economy, why aren't insiders buying or at least holding stakes in their own companies? Possibly because they recognize that the 'green shoots' are just weeds."

Smart Grid Technology coming to your home electric meter By Michael Kanellos In the relatively near future, you can expect to see some announcements about Intel (INTC) getting its chips into smart grid equipment like intelligent meters. That’s the word from Joe Jensen, general manager of the Intel Embedded Computing Group. The company has been working with a few companies on experimenting with Intel chips in smart grid equipment, he said. The smart grid deals are part of an overall effort within Intel’s embedded processor division to expand where possible. The company already sells chips that are incorporated into wind turbines. Some wind turbines have up to 16 processors that track everything from power output to the pitch of the blades. If the blades don’t adjust to wind speed, they can shear off. “A lot of the processing goes into preventing them from going into self-destruct,” he said. “They vary the blade pitch constantly.”

The worst six months in 50 years - How the World Works - Salon.com : "Despite all the negative attention devoted to the big spending Obama government, government spending fell by a pretty sharp 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Bloomberg says that 'the drop reflected cutbacks in defense spending and the biggest decrease in state and local government outlays since 1981.' This means a) the stimulus spending isn't getting disbursed quickly enough, and b) the federal government's aggressive efforts to boost demand aren't keeping up with collapsing state economies"

Jesse's Café Américain : "Insiders Sell Insiders from New York Stock Exchange-listed companies sold $8.32 worth of stock for every dollar bought in the first three weeks of April, according to Washington Service, which analyzes stock transactions of corporate insiders for more than 500 mostly institutional clients. That’s the fastest rate of selling since October 2007, when U.S. stocks peaked and the 17-month bear market that wiped out more than half the market value of U.S. companies began."

The anticipated target for the current bull market by year end is 50%, the move to date amounts to more than 54% of the target in less than than 15% of the time period which gives ample time for several reactions lower against the trend. Therefore the only question now is how deep could the downtrend be, in that regard we have price points, retracement levels, and the MACD indicator to look at. MACD - The MACD indicator cross has given a SELL signal, at best this means sideways price action, but more probably a significant downtrend that will seek to correct the up trend from Dow 6470. Trend Analysis - The rally has been strong AND powerful, but it is showing signs of running out of steam, this is evidenced by the shrinking gap between each up thrust following each correction with the most recent correction 'so far' failing to break to a new trend high which gives a risk of a lower low. The rally is tired folks, it needs to take a break. Retracement Levels - 33% - 50% - 66% - T...

How We Get Out of the Great Depression II By Steven Stoft, March 2, 2009 Here we go again: Hoover got us in, and WWII got us out. Bush got us in, and to his credit, starting trying to get us out. Though, mostly he threw money at bankers. In the Great Depression, Roosevelt tried deficit spending, but he was too timid. Then he stopped in 1937 and the economy nose-dived. It took the humongous deficits of WWII to pull us out of the Great Depression. Those deficits blasted the economy from depression into overdrive. Of course after the war, we had to pay off a huge national debt, but during that time, from 1946 to 1980, the economy was mainly quite prosperous. We hit a bad recession when Reagan took office, and his early deficit spending made sense (though he didn't know it). But then he continued to drive up the debt through the boom years that followed. That didn't make any sense. We are now headed into the worst slump since 1938, and you better hope Obama can fix it because th...

Derivatives: A $700+ Trillion Bubble Waiting to Burst -- Seeking Alpha : "In the past three years, while banks all over the world and Wall Street were imploding, while some $40-$50 trillion of capital was being destroyed in global stock markets, one financial market kept growing. That market is the financial derivatives market. According to the Bank for International Settlements [BIS], the global Over the Counter [OTC] derivatives market has grown almost 65% from $414.8 trillion in December, 2006 to $683.7 trillion in June of 2008. On the BIS’s own website, there are no updated figures for the notional derivatives market since June 2008, so we can likely assume, with some margin of safety, that this market has now grown to more than $700 trillion. Comparatively speaking, the total market cap of all major global stock markets is approximately $30 trillion. Before I discuss how financial products could grow more than 65% during a time period when financial companies were imploding a...

Jesse's Café Américain: Bank Credit Growth Drops Precipitously : "08 April 2009 Bank Credit Growth Drops Precipitously The Growth Rate of Total Credit at all US Commercial Banks is dropping precipitously as can be seen from the chart below. This is a negative indicator for most banks involved in the actual business of banking, even as the spreads between Fed money and money on loan widen. Advantage goes to those banks who are gaming the markets, also known as trading profits, which is probably the opposite outcome which Tim and Ben would desire, if they were thinking about it. Should banks be trading in the markets at all for their own accounts? We think not. Glass-Steagall should be reintroduced as quickly as possible to get the banks back in the business of banking."

Chris Martenson's Blog - America is Being Looted - Apr. 14, 2009 | Blogs at Chris Martenson - Chris Martenson's Blog, geithner, Goldman Sachs, TARP : "America is Being LootedTuesday, April 14, 2009, 9:20 am, by cmartenson As cynical as I am, I just can’t keep up. That sentence is a paraphrase of a quote by Lily Tomlin that reads, “No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.” I have long been a cynic of the bailouts, and, unfortunately, I cannot detect even the slightest sliver of daylight between the prior and current administrations. The reason, I fear, is captured by this quote from Simon Johnson, the former Chief Economist at the IMF and current professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management: The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that mo...

Jesse's Café Américain: The Credit Bubble Was a Ponzi Scheme Enabled by the US Dollar : "They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here is a picture of the US credit bubble, with the deleveraging which has just begun. It is/was a Ponzi scheme, enabled by the advantages of controlling the reserve currency of the world, pure and simple. It was the US dollar that was monetized, or more specifically US debt obligations, which are now substantially worthless and will have to take a significant haircut in real terms. This is similar to the Japanese experience in which they monetized their real estate."

China Financial Markets : "New trade and reserve numbers from China April 13th, 2009 by Michael Pettis Filed in Balance of payments, Consumption and production, Exports and imports, Hot money, Reserves Exports in March dropped a less-than-expected 17.1% from the same time last year – below expectations of 20% and the 21.1% drop for the first two months of 2009. Most of the articles I read in the Chinese and foreign press including, not surprisingly, comments from the customs bureau, hailed this as a sign that the export slump is bottoming out. According to an article in Saturday’s South China Morning Post, for example"

The US doesn’t name China a currency manipulator Posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 By bsetser Make no mistake, China’s currency still looks undervalued. It is only a bit higher — according to the BIS index– than it was in 2001 or 2002, back when China was exporting a fraction of what it does now. In other words, the rise in the productivity of China’s economy hasn’t been mirrored by a rise in the external purchasing power of its currency. That is a big reason why China’s current account surplus remains large. And the underlying issue remains: the biggest driver of moves in China’s real exchange rate remains moves in the dollar. History suggests that China cannot count on dollar appreciation to bring about the real appreciation it and the global economy need if China’s surplus — and thus China’s accumulation of money-losing foreign assets — is going to come down. It will be hard — in my view — to have a stable international monetary system if the currencies of all the major economie...

NEW YORK, April 15 (Reuters) - Credit default swaps insuring the debt of The Rouse Company, a unit of General Growth Properties Inc GGP.N, were found to be worth 29.25 percent of the debt they insure in an auction on Wednesday to determine the contracts' value, auction administrators said. That means that sellers of protection will need to pay out 70.75 percent of the value of the bonds they insured, or $7.07 million per $10 million of insurance sold. Credit default swaps are used to insure against a borrower defaulting. Payments on the contracts were triggered after the company failed to pay more than $2 billion in debt due on March 16. A group of General Growth's bondholders have asked their trustee to sue the mall owner for payment on their past-due bonds, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. For details, see [ID:nN13392097.. Norton's note: GGP.N who owns the Maine Mall has filed ch 11 bankrupcy April 16, 2009. Ouch!

A cartoon in the Sunday comics shows that mustachioed fellow with monocle and top hat from the Monopoly game--"Rich Uncle Pennybags," he used to be called--standing along the roadside, destitute, holding a sign: "Will blame poor people for food." .. Bill Black wrote a book about his experiences with a title that fits today as well as it did when he published it four years ago--The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. On last Friday night's edition of Bill Moyers Journal, he said the current economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud and banks that got away with it, in part, because of government deregulation under prior Republican and Democratic administrations. [Watch it here.www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/profile.html#savingsandloan] "Now we know what happens when you destroy regulation," Black said. "You get the biggest financial calamity for anybody under the age of 80."... Black asked, "Why would we keep CEO's and...

Jesse's Café Américain : "11 April 2009 G7 Industrial Production Crashing The production of real goods in the developed nations is plummeting. Even the mighty export driven economy of Japan appears to be heading lower as though it had fallen off a cliff. Countries must begin to encourage consumption in their own economies. To do this, they ought not to be stimulating the old credit/speculation machine called the neo-liberal financial system" And the Baltic shipping index has returned to a down trend. Record number of cargo ships are in dry dock. BALTIC DRY INDEX (ABOVE) G7 INDUSTIRAL PRODUCTION

PAUL B. FARRELL 6 reasons I'm calling a bottom and a new bull Forget Roubini: I'm the new Dr. Boom, ahead of Dr. Doom (again!) By Paul B. Farrell , MarketWatch Last update: 7:22 p.m. EDT March 30, 2009 ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- OK, so you're one of millions of investors impatiently waiting on the sidelines, sitting with $2.5 trillion cash under your mattress, waiting for the right moment, that signal screaming: "Bottom's in, start buying!" Yes, it'll go down again, but the bottom's in, thanks to a great March, possibly the third best month since 1950, so it's time to jump back in and buy, buy, buy! You heard me, I'm calling the bottom, beating Dr. Doom to the punch again (yes, again). Last time we were predicting the recession. This time we're calling the market bottom and a new bull.

International Monetary Fund Warning You heard this here first. from Jessies Crossroads Cafe "The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time." The Quiet Coup - Simon Johnson - The Atlantic Monthly

Double-digit unemployment rates are un-American A total of seven states have passed the 10% unemployment rate as the Jobless Slump Spreads . The number of U.S. states with a jobless rate exceeding 10 percent almost doubled in February as the worst employment slump in the postwar era spread....

Dayton Business Journal - by G. Scott Thomas Seven states posted unemployment rates above 10 percent in February, as Ohio inched toward the double digits, according to seasonally adjusted figures released Friday morning by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ohio's unemployment rate for February was 9.4 percent, an increase of 3.5 percentage-points. Michigan registered the nation’s worst rate, with 12 percent of its labor force out of work as of February 2009. Also in double digits were South Carolina (11 percent), Oregon (10.8 percent), North Carolina (10.7 percent), California (10.5 percent), Rhode Island (10.5 percent), and Nevada (10.1 percent). All seven of those states experienced rapid rises in unemployment during the past year. North Carolina’s increase was the sharpest in the nation, up 5.5 percentage points from its February 2008 jobless rate of 5.2 percent. Job Losses Compared

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: Worst Recession In 100 Years: comments by Ed Ball, "Ed Balls, the PM's closest ally, warns that downturn is ferocious and says impact will last 15 years.In an extraordinary admission about the severity of the economic downturn, Ed Balls even predicted that its effects would still be felt 15 years from now. The Schools Secretary's comments carry added weight because he is a former chief economic adviser to the Treasury and regarded as one of the Prime Ministers's closest allies...." "The minister stunned his audience at a Labour conference in Yorkshire by forecasting that times could be tougher than in the depression of the 1930s, when male unemployment in some cities reached 70 per cent. He also appeared to hint that the recession could play into the hands of the far right. 'The economy is going to define our politics in this region and in Britain in the next year, the next five years, the next 10 and even the ne...