By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
President Obama’s speech on health care to Congress was high on emotion but short on details.  When he was finished, I wasn’t sure the “Public Option” was in or out.  I do not know how you can insure an additional 46 million people for free.  Obama said he won’t sign a bill that adds,”one dime to the deficit, now or in the future.”   On the other hand, the Congressional Budget Office thinks health care will add 239 billion dollars to the deficit in the next 10 years.  Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute says,”If the …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
I am not a gold bug, but I can spot a warning sign when I see one.  Gold is near an all time high and this is no fluke!   High prices are the result of  big demand from monster players who are afraid of a dollar crash.    My fears all center around Fed Chief Ben Bernanke’s announcement in mid-August of  plans to end Quantitative Easing.  QE is a program where the Fed used more than 300 billion in “printed money” to buy Treasuries to artificially hold interest rates down.   The Fed wants this program phased out by the end …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
I love the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”  because you tell a lot of people a complicated story in a short amount of time with just one look.   The “Other Real Estate Problem”  I am talking about in the headline is commercial real estate such as malls, hotels, office space and industrial sites.    You have not heard too much about this problem, and most people believe it does not affect them, but it does!   As commercial real estate goes so goes the economy and that could very well mean continued …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
The Friday headline in the Wall Street Journal reads “Job Losses Moderate But Unemployment Hits 9.7%.”  This is just a short post to give you the “Real” number according to John Williams at shadowstats.com.  He recreates government statistics the way they were done before the Bureau of  Labor Statistics changed methods to make things look better than they really are.  According to shadowstats.com, the unemployment rate using the BLS method in 1994 would be 21.1%, an increase of .5%.  By the way, Williams predicted there would be a negative surprise two days ago.  (see USAWatchdog post ”Alert! …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
There are so many reasons why this stock market should be hitting a wall.  Just a few are: high unemployment, plummeting tax revenues, major real estate declines, defaults in both residential and commercial properties, hundreds of banks are expected to fail this year and next, cities and states going broke and wars fought on 2 fronts. There is no end or resolution in sight for any of these problems.
Yet, the stock market has ”climbed a wall of worry” to produce one of the biggest bear market rallies in history.  The DOW is up about 50%  …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
John Williams of shadowstats.com put out an alert today (9/2/09).   It read, in part,”Something Brewing in Systemic Solvency Crisis?” Part of what Williams  does is give forecasts to clients, some of which are big companies and hedge funds.  He  bases his predictions on government statistics but not the way they are done now.  Williams rebuilds government stats the way they were computed before they were distorted.   In other words, the way government statistics are done now makes things look better than they really are.   For example, the official unemployment rate …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair dropped a small bomb on CNBC last night.  She said, “Commercial real estate will be more of a driver of bank failures.”   What! You mean more than the imploding residential real estate market? Oh… at that point I felt a little sick at my stomach.  There already is a huge unrelenting problem in housing.   (see my post from last week “Real Estate at a bottom?…Not!”) Now there is going to be an even bigger drag on the banks!  It will be a colossal second …