June 2009

This is effectively bankruptcy. Bloomberg reports. California is poised to begin its new fiscal year tomorrow without a plan in place to close a $24 billion deficit as the state prepares to conserve cash by issuing IOUs to vendors who are…

This past weekend I saw the film Food Inc, which I recommend highly to anyone looking to see how deregulation has affected industries other than finance.  While the subject of Food Inc was how the industrialization of food policy in…

Apparently, the U.S. auto industry is working off a significant backlog of inventory because I have been hearing that pretty much everyone in North America is planning to ramp up production for the third quarter.  This is prima facie…

As If you didn’t know this already, the wall of money being funnelled through Chinese banks is creating a massive speculative bubble in shares.  The Telegraph reports: Under orders from the government, China's banks have flooded…

Moodys pone en perspectiva negativa cdulas hipotecarias de Bancaja y CAM - Finanzas Moodys is downgrading Spanish savings banks. There is still significant weakness in the financial sector in Spain. The Spanish desperately want a…

The S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices for April 2009 were released today.  The Composite-10 and Composite-20 indices showed a 18.0% and 18.1% decline respectively, making the data less bad than in the previous month.  Nevertheless,…

On the same day that the worst economic growth numbers in the U.K. in 51 years, we also get some news that the British economy may be stabilising. Well, at least house prices seem to be stabilising as Nationwide reported a 0.9% increase in…

Here is more from Dylan Ratigan’s new show on MSNBC.  Arianna Huffington and Eliot Spitzer were guests.  They all have noticed that Barack Obama has spent an inordinate amount of political capital and money on the financial…

Dylan Ratigan, a former host on both Bloomberg Television and CNBC has a new gig over at CNBC.  Ratigan has been especially harsh in criticizing the financial services industry and its role in the recent global meltdown.  Below,…

Late last year, I predicted that China, as a major exporter to the West, would feel a huge impact from the meltdown in the global economy, taking it’s growth rate down to 2% (See Top ten predictions for the 2009 global economy). Forgetting…