By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Just a few weeks ago, an uprising toppled a little known Tunisian leader (President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.)  Tunisia is due west of Egypt, separated only by Libya.  About the only thing that seemed newsworthy was the family reportedly took flight with a ton and a half of gold. 

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Barack Obama addressed the country for the third State of the Union address of his Presidency this week.  In broad terms, he talked mostly about innovation, education and jobs.  To be fair, he also briefly touched on the deficit, the two wars we are fighting and unity.  But because so much emphasis was put on education, it sounded more like an address to a local PTA

I was on Coast to Coast AM early Wednesday morning.
Coast to Coast AM is a nation-wide radio show with a network of more than 500 radio stations.
I was on the first hour of the show (1am EST) to talk about the “REAL” State of the Union.
Check out the Coast to Coast website  here: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
New USAWatchdog.com visitors from Coast to Coast AM – welcome to USAWatchdog! You are always welcome here.  Please leave a question or comment on what you think the “Real” State of the Union is in your neck of the woods.  I guarantee …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
In November 2010, the Federal Reserve announced a second round of economic stimulus commonly referred to as Quantitative Easing (QE2).  The reason, according to the Fed, was “progress toward its objectives has been disappointingly slow.”   So, to try and turn the economy around, the Fed said, “. . . the Committee intends to purchase a further $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Housing starts are a tried and true barometer of business activity.  If there was a real economic recovery going on, housing starts would be, at the very least, edging up.  Please keep in mind the government is providing some of the lowest mortgage rates in a generation.  A 30-year mortgage is around 4.75%.  This week, the Commerce Department reported housing starts were down 4.3% last month.

Nearly every state in the Union and nearly every large city are facing ballooning budgets and shrinking tax revenue (confiscation).  Some, such as Illinois and California, are boarding on insolvency and need to fill budget holes that are tens of billions of dollars.  Tax receipts everywhere are plummeting because of the high unemployment rate that, in reality, is above 22%.  On top of that, foreclosures hit another record nationwide in 2010 and are expected to set yet another one this year.

Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
For months now, the Federal Reserve has been worried about inflation being too low.  So low, that the Fed claims it is unhealthy to the U.S. economy.  When it announced its second wave of money printing (QE2) in early November 2010, the Fed said, “Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters. . . .

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 
I was shocked to see this headline from an Associated Press story yesterday, “Economists project home sales, construction to rise sharply in 2011 from extreme lows of 2010.”   I was dumbfounded by the title of the article and even more taken back when I read the story which said, “The forecast delivered at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando sees U.S. economic growth sharply lifting home sales and residential construction over the next two years, but from near-historic lows posted last year. “ 

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Just after the first of the year, the Chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, emphatically pushed for Congress to raise the debt ceiling.  Goolsbee said on the ABC Sunday talk show, “This Week,” if it was not raised, the “impact on the economy would be catastrophic . . . “If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”

Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com   
 
The massacre that happened this past weekend in Tucson, Arizona, is a horrific tragedy.  Twenty people were shot (including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords), and six died at the hand of a lone gunman with a questionable mental history.  Yet, the country is now engaged in a discussion about what is and is not acceptable speech in America.    The local Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, started the controversy at a press conference the day of the shootings by saying, “Let me say one thing, because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all …

The 2011 Predictions post garnered more than 100 comments and several hundred predictions.  I want to thank everyone for taking the time to make a prediction or comment.  Your involvement is what makes this site come alive.   I put together a few of your predictions below.  I thought they were, for the most part, deductive and rational.  Here are a few of the highlights from USAWatchdog.com readers:

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
In case you have not heard, Fannie and Freddie (also known as Government-Sponsored Enterprises or GSE’s) settled a big lawsuit with Bank of America Monday.  The case was settled for cents on the dollar, even though the GSE’s had had a strong case to force B of A to buy back billions in sour mortgage-backed securities (MBS.)