The national statistics office said the downward spiral accelerated in the second quarter as a barrage of wage and pension cuts plus tax rises sapped consumer demand.
Yet another month, yet another report on how our money was used to bail out foreign banks, while we go without retirement and jobs.
The Congressional Oversight Committee has released a new report, The Global Context and International Effects of the TARP.
Guess what?
It appears likely that America‟s financial rescue had a much greater impact internationally than other nations‟ programs had on the United States.
Gets better. Of course the U.S. didn't bother to ask other nations to help...
if the U.S. government had gathered more information about which countries‟ institutions would most benefit from some of its actions, it might have been able to ask those countries to share the pain of rescue. For example, banks in France and Germany were among the greatest beneficiaries of AIG‟s rescue, yet the U.S. government bore the entire $70 billion risk of the AIG capital injection program. The U.S. share of this single rescue exceeded the size of France‟s entire $35 billion capital injection program and was nearly half the size of Germany‟s $133 billion program.
And even better. Of course to this day the U.S. Treasury isn't collecting data on our taxpayer dollars flowing overseas.
Treasury gathered very little data on how TARP funds flowed overseas.
The June 2010 U.S. trade deficit increased from last month's $42 billion (revised) to $49.9 billion. That is a 14% U.S. trade deficit increase in one month. Even worse, U.S. exports decreased by $2.0 billion, to $152.4 billion, while imports increased $5.9 billion, to $200.3 billion.
The dollar is surging today, and its because of a critical decision in Europe.
(Dow Jones)--The bailout of Germany's banking sector may swell the country's public debt rate to 90% of gross domestic product, Die Zeit weekly newspaper reports Wednesday.
China's July exports of $145.5 billion represented a 38% increase over July 2009, down from June's 44% increase. But growth in imports — which hit $116.8 billion — slowed even more dramatically, leading to the bulging surplus.
Most interesting is how this is downplayed in the U.S. press, for the obvious, confront China on currency manipulation is seemingly only a topic for sound bytes.
Note the different percentage quotes between USA today (above) and the China English newspaper. Both percentages are true but the U.S. press downplays the never ending global imbalance for it means the U.S. must act on currency manipulation as well as other unfair trade practices by China.
Latest statistics show that China's monthly trade surplus trumped almost all forecasts to hit an 18-month high, up 170 percent from a year earlier to $28.7 billion.
In view of the fragile global recovery, most observers believed China could hardly run an even larger monthly trade surplus than what it posted in June, a whopping $20 billion.
By Numerian
The Federal Reserve, in announcing the results of this week's meeting of the Open Market Committee, surprised the market by revealing it will begin purchasing US Treasury notes and bonds with the principal income it receives from its vast holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage securities. This practice - wherein the Fed buys up US government securities and injects cash into the public market as payment for these securities - is a form of monetizing the debt.
The last time the Fed did this on a big scale was back in the 1960s when it attempted to mop up the excess Treasury securities that were flooding the market as a result of Lyndon Johnson's efforts to finance the Vietnam War. That Fed program was viewed at the time as a failure, since the cash the Fed put back into the economy in exchange for the securities was a big reason - perhaps the major reason - why price inflation accelerated from the late 1960s until a decade later, when Paul Volcker managed to squelch inflation once and for all with forbiddingly high interest rates.
On The Economic Populist you might have noticed the right column. We try to list other sites and blogs who have exceptional insight and writing on what is happening in the U.S. economy.
Sometimes though, one cannot say it better but miss those who did.
In a memo sent to the FCIC -- a government panel charged with investigating the roots of the financial crisis -- Wall Street's most profitable bank revealed that its derivatives operations generated $11.3-$15.9 billion of its $45.17 billion net revenue in 2009. This amounts to 25-35 percent of the bank's revenue.
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