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US government has been working on this since the start of second Bush administration The Coming Wars by Seymour Hersh The New Yorker, 24 January 2005 www.globalresearch.ca 18 January 2005 The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER501A.html What the Pentagon can now do in secret George W. Bush’s reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bus...

Bloomberg.com: News : "World Economy Would Collapse If Oil Hit $200, Deutsche Says By Shigeru Sato and Yuji Okada Enlarge Image/Details June 25 (Bloomberg) -- The global economy would collapse if oil hit $200 a barrel, said the top energy analyst at Germany's largest bank. ``Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy,'' Deutsche Bank AG's Chief Energy Economist Adam Sieminski said in an interview today in Tokyo. ``Next step after $200 would be global recession and bad news for everybody.''"

Here is the history of household liabilities as a percent of personal income: This looks like a major crack in our household foundation to me. by Norton 7/28/08 courtesy of Federal Reserve Bank and Financial Sense

Financial Sense by Christopher Laird, PrudentSquirrel.com | June 19, 2008 First of all, let’s list some of these dangers and danger periods that we foresee coming. • The US and Israel are getting ready to do something about the newly militant Iran. The nuclear debate is only one dimension of that issue. Another is the threat that Iran is becoming too big a bully to the other more moderate Mid East nations, and not just Israel. • There is a very large unease again building in the world financial markets. Not only is the credit crisis not really improving (new estimates out now that financial institutions are looking at $1.3 trillion of losses) but world financial markets are actually way down over the last year. Many Asian markets and also many US stocks are down 30% and more. A building unease is accumulating that can only lead to another real big world financial sell off, lasting probably up to a month, before any settling comes in after a month long bout of central bank firefighting ...

Marc Faber: Let Big Brokers Fail; Buy Gold Not Oil - Economy * US * News * Story - CNBC.com : "Let Big Brokers Fail; Buy Gold Not Oil: Marc Faber" Fears that another major investment bank may get into trouble have hammered stocks recently but some analysts have said the major Wall Street banks were safe as the Fed cannot afford to let them fail. "I think there's a good chance that the Fed itself will fail one day if they say 'We're not going to let you fail,' and the government will have to bail out the entire system," Faber said. "If I'm a bad businessman and I go out of business, who's gong to help me?" he said. "But Bear Stearns and the Wall Street elite, because they are tied into the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and they have lunch together, it's a club and so forth, they're bailed out. It's a joke!" "I think a lot of banks are already bankrupt … but they hide their rotten assets … in categories w...

Safehaven | When Central Bankers Clash, Stock Markets can Crash | Printer Friendly Version : "ECB and Fed in Game of high Stakes Poker Central bankers of fast-growing emerging economies are navigating through the stormy seas of commodity inflation by tightening monetary policies. But the 'Group of Seven' central bankers have acted in a different fashion. The British, Canadian, and US central banks are focused on the global banking crisis, and the slide in US home prices, and have lowered their interest rates, while the Bank of Japan has stood motionless. But the European Central Bank was moving in the opposite direction, and guided Euro-zone money market rates to their highest in 7-years. And when powerful central bankers clash, - moving in opposite directions, - nasty accidents can happen in the global stock markets."

Let's start with the P&F chart, which is a great way to cut out the market noise and see what prices are really doing. With the P&F chart, notice the dollar has been dropping since 2001. Combine that with the fact the US experienced an expansion starting at the end of 2001 and you get an idea for how deep the problems with the dollar go.