Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services downgraded California, noting the state’s severe fiscal imbalance and the impending recurrence of a cash shortage if revenue and spending trajectories continue. California lawmakers and analysts have already challenged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal for the year starting July 1. The plan relies on billions of dollars in emergency... 

In late 2009, former Merrill Lynch economist, now with the Canadian firm, Gluskin Sheff, said the following:   “The credit collapse and the accompanying deflation and overcapacity are going to drive the economy and financial markets in 2010. We have said this repeatedly that this recession is really a depression because the (post-WW II) recessions were merely small backward steps in an inventory... 

While iconic American automakers General Motors and Chrysler were saved from the brink of disaster in 2009, others were not so lucky, succumbing to the fate of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.   American businesses, struggling with lower consumer demands and hard-to-get credit, attempted to cut costs in a myriad of ways last year – slashing jobs, cutting back hours, freezing... 

Fears of a double-dip recession in the world’s biggest economy were heightened today when Washington announced that the US shed 85,000 jobs last month. Dashing hopes that America was pulling smoothly out of its toughest postwar economic setback, the commerce department revealed that the expected pre-Christmas hiring spree had failed to materialise. Wall Street had been expecting fresh evidence... 

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The unusual circumstances that led the U.S. market to rally powerfully in 2009 might be explained by secret government moves to buy stocks, according to Charles Biderman, the founder and chief executive of TrimTabs, a research firm that tracks liquidity flows in the market. NGE: But why this analysis came just now or is it too caused by PPT? “We cannot identify... 

by Jim Willie, CB. Editor, Hat Trick Letter | January 6, 2010 The year 2008 bore my mark as the year the system broke. A public article addressed the issues, laid out before the breakdown occurred in September of that year. The consequences for the many failures, the desperate nationalizations, the hasty scrambles to put financial sewage under USGovt ownership, the realization of TARP as a vast slush... 

by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. 01-04-10 If you think 2010 is going to bring investors a carefree, nonstop ride to glory, think again! Profit opportunities abound, and we intend to be among the first to lead you to them. But we’re also here to give you advance warnings of threats that can sneak up from behind and catch you by surprise. Case in point: The danger that Treasury bonds will fall sharply in... 

it may crush the existing structure of Fannie and Freddy and drag the economy further down, no matter how many dollars the fed throws at it here are the events: each individual event will have no visible effect, but combined will crash the economy: these are all pending events, many listed on MW as individual events, but no one looks at them all together – but that is how we will feel them in... 

Massive mortgage resets for 2010 & 2011 are near! Okay, 2008’s biggest month of mortgage resets were in Sept 2008; $64 billion in mortgages reset that month, and the monthly average was $40 billion for 2008. For 2010, August is the biggest month with $97 billion in mortgage resets, and the 2010 monthly reset average is $83 billion – DOUBLE THE AMOUNT OF MORTGAGE RESETS FOR 2008!!! FRIGHTENING... 

  I point out to people that this is a Service Sector Economy, considerably different from the industrial economy of ages past. Manufacturing makes up about ten percent of the US economy. If Manufacturing goes up two percent it has a net effect on the overall economy of 0.2 percent. In the past few months, we have seen the New York sector collapse in manufacturing and the Chicago sector increase...