(AP) -- The federal budget deficit soared to a record for May of $189.7 billion, pushing the tide of red ink close to $1 trillion with four months left in the budget year.
Tax revenue is down 18% from last year while spending is up an equal amount. This problem is being noticed in the treasury market, where an auction today failed to attract the buyers it normally pulls in, and the 10-year reached 4% for the first time since October.
“There are an awful lot of Treasuries being auctioned and there’s going to be more and more and more and more,” said Jay Mueller, who manages about $3 billion of bonds at Wells Fargo Capital Management in Milwaukee.
The shear amount of information uncovered is staggering. Hopefully it will keep your interest.
Let me warm up here with a couple of interesting quotes.
"Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium." Murray N. Rothbard
Why Gold and Why Now?
"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a beautiful pine tree, worth about $4,000 - $5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp and then paper, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?" Kenneth J. Gerbino
Ever wonder why banks and governments like a paper currency system? Why they fully embraced the Keynesian theory of deficit spending?
Unemployment is a malleable thing. The official unemployment rate released by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) excludes those individuals who have not looked for work in the last month and those forced to work part time for economic reasons. In short the official rate (U-3) tends to vastly understate the unemployment rate, creating the impression that things are better than they actually are. For many, years the BLS has released what it calls alternative measures of labor underutilization that provide details of the percentage of workers who would like to work (but haven't actively sought it in the last month) and those working part time for economic reasons at the national level.
However, until very recently, the BLS has not released this data at the state level. That has changed. When we look at this broader unemployment rate at the state level, the picture isn't pretty.
This isn't a conspiracy. The problem is small sample size. The BLS uses surveys with a very large number of participants to drive down the marign of error. So the number that we get at the national level is basically the same that you'd get if you called everyone in the US. But, when you go to the states, the number of participants shrink, and when you include a large number of categories, the margin of error goes up. It's still quite low, just not the gold standard that the BLS has set for national unemployment figures.
It's a farce, it stinks of politics and big special interests. - Dewey Swank of Kalispell's Swank Enterprises.
Swank is referring to the way Obama's Stimulus Bill is squeezing out national, local and regional businesses in favor of special interest and very large multinational corporations for Stimulus dollars.
Remember how the Stimulus was supposed to create local jobs?
Montana's Billings Gazette has one plain talking, calling it as it is report on Stimulus funds being given to special interests and large multinational corporations. Literally local and smaller firms are squeezed out. They cannot even get in to bid. No wonder our taxpayer money is going offshore to create jobs in.....India and China.
Ever wonder when one sees pretty much the same headline on every single news site, blog and aggregator without much detail, how that happens?
(me too).
So what's behind this latest headline buzz of 10 banks paying back $68.3 Billion in TARP funds?
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley were among 10 lenders that won U.S. Treasury approval to buy back $68 billion of government shares, freeing them from added oversight that curbed lending practices, hiring and pay.
Now wait a minute. That is buying back shares, not necessarily repaying the real amount. Is that market value for these shares? Is that the price which the Government paid for them?
Since last November the U.S. has sold $4.2 billion of so-called Carter bonds in West Germany in order to raise marks for the dollar defense. Plans have been worked out to issue more such bonds.
Carter Bonds were treasury bonds denominated in other currencies in order to protect foreign investors from currency fluctuations.
For those of us here, I imagine that this will come as no great surprise:
At a time when it's more competitive than ever to get into the University of Illinois, some students with subpar academic records are being admitted after interference from state lawmakers and university trustees, a Tribune investigation has revealed.
Hundreds of applicants received special consideration in the last five years, according to documents obtained by the Tribune under the state's Freedom of Information Act. The records chronicle a shadow admissions system in which some students won spots at the state's most prestigious public university over the protests of admissions officers, while others had their rejections reversed during an unadvertised appeal process.
Representative George Miller is waging a lonely war against powerful enemies. He's trying to reform the 401(k) system, a system that most on Wall Street don't want reformed.
The key to Miller's plan is to force 401(k) providers to disclose their fees in plain English. If you don't think this is important, consider that those fees can eat up 75% of your potential retirement savings.
If you look at the system, basically what you have is working families making the conscious decision every month to try to save some money for retirement. Then along comes people managing those funds for them and they start dipping into those funds for fees that are really not in the best interest of those savers. So, you have elite financial managers getting rich off the back of middle-class working people. The last thing they really want is transparency.
"The 401(k) system today in the United States has been an acknowledged failure."
- Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College's Carroll School of Management.
Obama has rejected the idea of establishing a single government insurance program, however, saying the U.S. tradition of providing health care through employers would make such a shift politically and practically impossible.
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