Some members of Congress made risky bets with their own money that U.S. stocks or bonds would fall during the financial crisis, a Wall Street Journal analysis of congressional disclosures shows. Senators have criticized Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS – News) for profiting from the housing collapse. And Congress is considering legislation to curb Wall Street risk-taking, including the use... 

The world’s top central bankers began arriving in Australia for high-level talks as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets. Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities, including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at an undisclosed location. Organised by the Bank for International... 

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... 

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, swept to power by a public seeking an end to economic and political stagnation, is failing to arrest the nation’s decline. Japanese gross domestic product shrank to an annualized 471 trillion yen ($5 trillion) in the third quarter, without accounting for changes in prices, the lowest level since 1991. The tumble is unprecedented... 

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...