Zero Hedge: The Last Time The Dow Was Here…
If you follow markets, you’re probably aware of all these facts. But to see them compiled like this is shocking. From Zero Hedge:
- Dow Jones Industrial Average: Then 14164.5; Now 14164.5
- Regular Gas Price: Then $2.75; Now $3.73
- GDP Growth: Then +2.5%; Now +1.6%
- Americans Unemployed (in Labor Force): Then 6.7 million; Now 13.2 million
- Americans On Food Stamps: Then 26.9 million; Now 47.69 million
- Size of Fed’s Balance Sheet: Then $0.89 trillion; Now $3.01 trillion
- US Debt as a Percentage of GDP: Then ~38%; Now 74.2%
- US Deficit (LTM): Then $97 billion; Now $975.6 billion
- Total US Debt Oustanding: Then $9.008 trillion; Now $16.43 trillion
- US Household Debt: Then $13.5 trillion; Now 12.87 trillion
- Labor Force Particpation Rate: Then 65.8%; Now 63.6%
Read the rest here.
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Can You See It Coming? “Fund’Em”
A long-time colleague sent me an article about a former Countrywide Mortgage employee turned whistle-blower. The whistle-blower was completely amazed that Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide’s CEO and the country’s pioneer in the massively fraudulent mortgage bubble, was never put on trial. Not only that, but the whistle-blower’s $3+ million court case award for wrongful termination from Countrywide/Bank of America was recently overturned by California’s Appellate Court. You can read about just how corrupt Countrywide was and other sordid details here: LINK
My response to the above article was this:
Don’t hold your breath on the Judiciary Committee hearing of Holder. Holder will be well rehearsed and we already know what the questions will be. Don’t forget, Holder is the guy who wrote the Marc Rich pardon letter that Clinton signed as he was walking out of the Oval Office for the last time.
This country is completely corrupted from State legislatures to the Supreme Court. Look at that verdict overturn in the article. Corrupted court system. The apparatus has been put in place, for those in a position to do so, to steal everything before the country collapses. IRA/401-k’s are next.
The bottom line is that the citizens of this country are ultimately to blame. Guys like us sit around and dig up the evidence, yet we do nothing. 95% of the middle class could give a shit. They’re robotic drones who basically go through the day lapping up what’s fed to them and losing themselves in prime time garbage tv.
Anyone who thinks our system can be saved is hopelessly naive or tragically ignorant.
http://truthingold.blogspot.com/2013/03/can-you-see-it-coming-fundem.html
The Hollowing Out of Private-Sector Employment (March 5, 2013)
The vast majority of the bottom 90% don’t know because they spend their waking hours trying to survive and can’t do anything about it were they to know. Those who do know tend to be well-positioned economists, politicians, and similar types who have no financial or professional incentives to share the information because no one in the top 1-10% cares to know or do anything about it.
How do you maintain a mass-consumer, debt-based economy with only half of the labor force with full-time private employment outside of health care, accelerating automation of labor and loss of incomes and purchasing power, 40% of the youth with little or no purchasing power, and 90% of the population relying in old age on transfer payments from the wages of younger wage earners and their struggling employers? You can’t.
So the mass-consumer economy and welfare-state for the bottom 90%, elderly, underemployed, disabled, young, and poor is not sustainable. Now what?
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar13/employment3-13.html
Why cyber currency Bitcoin is trading at an all-time high
Bitcoin sounds like something from science fiction: A purely digital currency, created by an anonymous hacker, that operates outside the world’s traditional banking systems. The four-year-old currency is very real, though, and it’s trading an all-time high, tripling in value in the last two months alone.
One bitcoin is was worth about $40 U.S. dollars on Tuesday, and surged on Wednesday to nearly $49. That’s up from around $13 in January, and 5 cents in 2010, according to Mt. Gox, the bitcoin market’s main exchange. On that and other trading sites, buyers can swap their digital coins for cold, hard cash.
Watchers of the alternative currency attribute some of bitcoin’s rise to the recent decision by several popular-in-geek-circles vendors to accept the coins — most notably, blog hosting site WordPress and the online community Reddit.
“These guys are killing it on retail,” Peter Vessenes, chairman of the trade group Bitcoin Foundation, said of bitcoin’s growing acceptance with merchants.
Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an anonymous developer using the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” — the Japanese equivalent of a bland name like “John Smith.” It has no central-bank backing. The idea was to create a currency that’s free from government intervention and can be used to conduct transactions without hefty exchange or processing fees.
One deal chronicled on the bitcoin data site BlockChain involved a transfer worth nearly $80,000. The processing fee was 1.8 cents. Beat that, Western Union.
Coins are “minted” by a network of computers running specialized software on powerful (and often pricey) hardware systems. The software is designed to release new coins at a steady — and finite — pace. Right now, one new “block” of 25 bitcoins is generated roughly every 10 minutes, adding to the pool of around 10.8 million circulating coins.
Still, bitcoin backers think its recent rise is a sign of its growing community and more widespread acceptance. They see it as a valid alternative to traditional cash.
“The U.S. dollar is an obvious Ponzi scheme,” said Thomas, who thinks the U.S. government has too much debt to raise interest rates high enough to defend the dollar if there were ever a run on it. With Bitcoin, “you feel like you’re in control of your money.” To top of page
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/06/technology/innovation/bitcoin/index.html?