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.

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
What is happening in the economy is signaling enormous changes for the U.S. and the world.  The scale of what the Federal Reserve is doing is unparalleled in human history.  No country has ever produced so much money and so much debt in such a short amount of time.   The Fed has embarked on another round of money printing (Quantitative Easing or QE2). 

By Greg Hunter’s
USAWatchdog.com  
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave testimony to the U.S. House Budget Committee a couple of days ago.  His preposterous statements seemed to go unquestioned by the Committee.  So, I am going to tackle the highlights, ask a few questions and make several statements of my own that I think should have been made by our Congressmen.

 
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 
Please remember the men and women of the U.S. Military who paid the ultimate price for the country on this Memorial Day.  Their sacrifice and that of their families makes our freedom possible.

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 
Alf Field has been called the “world’s best gold analyst.”  He is best known for his many spot-on predictions in the precious metals market.  Field has written extensively on debt, the dollar and has predicted the gold price per ounce will reach $10,000.  Before you laugh, the “paper” gold market was cited as a “Ponzi Scheme” at last week’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission hearing on increased transparency for the market.  A recent story on “Zero Hedge” covering the CFTC hearing documents the big bomb dropped about the …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com    
One of my consistent views on this site is “real” inflation is much higher than what the government is telling us.  For example, recently the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced February’s inflation number (CPI) was “unchanged” at a 2.1% annual rate.   Over the years, the BLS has changed the way it calculates inflation by using accounting gimmicks that understate what most people would consider the true cost of living.  So, the government inflation numbers of today make inflation look much lower than it really is for main …

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com    
According to Middle East news sources, Iraq will sue the U.S. over the residue from Depleted Uranium munitions. These types of munitions are also commonly referred to as DU.  This may sound like the story of an ungrateful nation, but Iraq has a legitimate beef.

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 
I have been hearing about how we as in “We the people…” have to fix the banks so they can lend money again.   Many options have been discussed and it looks like the President is strongly leaning toward a “Bad Bank” type of rescue where toxic securities will be dumped into a newly created institution.  It’s a magical place where bad debt bets will disappear like tears in the rain, of course, with taxpayer help.  This has never been done before on a scale this large, so …