By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com  

Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest unemployment numbers.  The BLS said, “Nonfarm payroll employment edged down (-85,000) in December, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 10.0 percent.”  Shadow Government Statistics founder, John Williams, looked at the same data the government did and said, “…payrolls likely declined by about 500,000.”  (more…)

 By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

There has been some positive financial news to start 2010.  Some auto makers reported good sales in December to end the year.  Retail sales also perked up in December, and even home sales in some areas showed a small rebound.  Does this good news mean the recession is over?  I say, not a chance.  In a large part, we saw a bounce in economic activity because of all the bailouts and spending.  Even Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is worried about a double-dip recession.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Monday, I did a post called “Bank Ratings Keep Slipping Away.” My colleague across the pond, Max Keiser, sent me an email with his thoughts on the post.  Max is a former Wall Street broker turned financial journalist.  He does a couple of different financial TV and radio shows in Europe.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

I was checking the financial health of my local bank and discovered that it had slipped to a (C-) rating.  Not more that three years ago, this bank carried a solid (A) rating.  The ratings I am talking about come from TheStreet.com.  The top rating is (A) or “Excellent” next (B) or “Good” followed by (C) for “Fair” then (D) meaning “Weak” and finally (E) for “Very Weak.” Checking your bank is a free service provided by TheStreet.com and other sites.  I have been checking banks for friends and family for years.  This free service will allow you to quickly track the trend of your bank.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com   

Everybody on Wall Street is breaking out the balloons and party hats and celebrating the end of the recession.  Even Larry Summers, the top economist in the Obama Administration, says “Everybody says the recession is over.”  Really? “Everybody” says it’s over?  I’ll bet you the more than 15 million out of work Americans won’t say the recession is over.   Sure, we did have an upturn in the economy, but it took trillions of dollars we do not have to do that.  We paid people to buy cars and houses.  The Congress passed and injected the biggest economic stimulus into the economy in history.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

The government has made some pretty big financial announcements during the Christmas holiday season.  So-called Pay Czar, Kenneth Feinberg, decided to boost the pay of an unnamed AIG executive by $4.3 million.  Was Feinberg just playing Santa or taking strategic action to get the least attention possible while the media was busy with Christmas and snow storms?   (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com  

In September, I wrote a post called “Prediction: Obama Wins Health Care, Loses Economy.”  It appears the Senate has the votes for passage of its version of health care legislation; so the prediction is halfway complete.  I am not going to argue whether or not health care reform is a good idea.  Do we need to take care of sick people?  The answer is a resounding yes!  My problem is putting health care before the biggest crisis facing America, and that is unemployment.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com   

According to economist John Williams at Shadow Government Statistics (SGS), we are getting “… false positive signals…” for monthly numbers such as retail sales and unemployment.  So, a recovery looks like it is taking place when a deeper analysis into the government numbers shows it is not.  Williams says in his latest report, “Generally, the economy continues to sink or bottom-bounce; no recovery is in place.”    A perfect example of a false positive is the seasonally-adjusted retail sales data from last year compared to now.  In November 2008, we were in the middle of a financial meltdown.  When you simply compare this November to last November, it looks like there are improving sales.  But if you compare November 2009 to normal years when we were not in a meltdown, such as 2006 and 2007, then retail sales have fallen slightly.   (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com   

Alex,a friend of mine, sent me an email with just one sentence.  It said, “Did you read this?”   It was an article published this week by NYU Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini titled, “Roubini: Here’s Five Reasons The “Barbarous Relic” Gold Is Going To Tank.”  Alex and I like and respect Roubini because he was one of the few economists to call the coming financial crisis well before the meltdown.  Alex knew I would be taken aback, like he was, at the bearish call on gold.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by the Obama Administration as a so-called “Pay Czar” after public outrage over big compensation packages at firms that were bailed out by the government.  Feinberg has been on the job as pay cop for a little over 6 months.  He is attempting to cut the salaries of top executives by limiting the cash portion of pay to just $500,000.  The rest of the compensation can be in stock but must be held for 3 years before cashing it in according to Feinberg’s new rules.  Also, fringe benefits such as using the private jet are capped at $25,000.  What happens after that?  Will executives be forced to spend some of their half million dollar salaries to fly first class?    (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

This week nationally syndicated columnist George Will wrote a piece called “Playing Politics with the Fed.”  Mr. Will is squarely against Congressional legislation called the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009.  This bill will force the Federal Reserve to open its books for an audit.   The bill, also known as “Audit the Fed,” has 317 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives alone, a more than two-thirds majority.  There are 137 Democrats and 180 Republicans backing an audit, so it is very serious bi-partisan legislation.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

President Obama’s “Jobs” speech this week hinted, once again, that he is well aware the U.S. Government has a ballooning deficit problem.  In remarks made to the Brookings Institute, the President said, “There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other. But this is a false choice. (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

The FDIC just shut down another 6 banks last Friday.  There is no end in sight for the bank failures coming.  To make matters worse, the FDIC is way more than $8 billion in the hole as far as insurance funds to close insolvent banks.  That is pretty scary if you ask me.  Many people have been asking how they should protect themselves?     (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke was in front of the Senate Banking Committee trying to hold on to his job.  Some Senators were complimentary on Bernanke’s job.  Republican Senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire gave the Fed Chairman a warm welcome.  Judd said, “If you hadn’t been there, and hadn’t been willing to take extraordinary action last fall, last winter, and even early spring … it’s very likely we would be experiencing a depression…”   I look at Bernanke’s performance during the financial crisis the same way I would look at a drunken bus driver who crashes and then stumbles around pulling a few children out of the wreckage.  In my eyes, Bernanke is hardly a hero.  (more…)

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

I watched the President last night address the nation on why he needed to send 30 thousand more troops to Afghanistan.  He said it would cost an additional $30 billion for this escalation.  That works out to 1 million bucks per soldier.  There are 68 thousand troops already there.  That means there will be 98 thousand troops on the ground in Afghanistan in 2010.  Using the President’s math, 98 thousand troops will cost $98 billion dollars a year!

I do not envy the President.  Sending people to battle is not easy.  I think the President has genuine concerns about the destabilization of Afghanistan.  It’s a place Mr. Obama called the “epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda.”  Afghanistan is also the home of the Taliban, and they too are trying to overthrow the government.  I think the President’s big fear is across the border in Pakistan.  If Pakistani nukes fall into the hands of terrorists, America would certainly be a top target.  In September, I named Pakistan as one of “The 2 Biggest Geopolitical Wild Cards in the World.”     

I am not here to make a case for or against the President’s actions.  No one is questioning there is a real problem for America in that part of the world.  What I would like to know is why there is no debate on how the U.S. is going to pay for this?  Afghanistan will become a $98 billion per year expenditure!   I have said in the past, the only people suffering in these wars are soldiers and their families.  If this is vitally important to U.S. security and interests, then why are we not asking Americans to pay for this?  CNN reported that Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, soundly dismissed any talk of a war tax to pay for the Afghanistan operation.  So I ask, how are we going to pay for this?

The answer is simple.  I say, “Add it to the tab!”  We will take care of this by adding to the debt ceiling and printing more money.  You think I am kidding?  Back in September of this year, the President asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling to $13 trillion dollars from $12.1 trillion.  Presto! New money, just like that!!  (Click here for the complete story)   

People are living a dream if they think this will not cost them because the tab from all the bailouts of Fannie, Freddie, GM, Chrysler, AIG, the banks, stimulus packages and so on is getting pretty heavy.  Expert investor Porter Stansberry summed it up in an article last week titled “The Bankruptcy of the United States is Now Certain.”  His opening paragraph was a real eye opener.  Stansberry wrote, “It’s one of those numbers that’s so unbelievable you have to actually think about it for a while… Within the next 12 months, the U.S. Treasury will have to refinance $2 trillion in short-term debt. And that’s not counting any additional deficit spending, which is estimated to be around $1.5 trillion. Put the two numbers together. Then ask yourself, how in the world can the Treasury borrow $3.5 trillion in only one year? That’s an amount equal to nearly 30% of our entire GDP. And we’re the world’s biggest economy. Where will the money come from?”  (Click here for the complete post)   

Yes, where will the money come from?  That’s $3.5 trillion ($3,500 billion) to finance in a single year!  That means the government will have to borrow (or print) $67 billion each and every week!  That’s $268 billion a month!  The entire budget deficit in the last year of the Bush Administration was only $482 billion!   It looks like we will just keep on “adding it to the tab”… until we can’t.  Vice President Cheney once said, “Deficits don’t matter.”  He’s right!  Deficits do not matter, right up to the moment they cannot be financed any more, and then all hell breaks loose!