Infinite Unknown

I have told you many times before that Gordon Brown, ‘THE SAVIOR’, is really just another elite puppet prime minister, that is destroying any future that the people of the UK might have had, hand in hand with the Bank of England, that is printing money like mad to destroy the pound.

The BoE calls it ‘Quantitative Easing’, which is creating money out of thin air = pure inflation, which is nothing more than a hidden tax.

Those criminals are looting the taxpayer until there is nothing left.

The same is happening in the US, with their elite puppet President Obama and the Fed.

UniCredit has alerted investors in a client note that Britain is at serious risk of a bond market and sterling debacle and faces even more intractable budget woes than Greece.

No turning back: Sterling is going to fall further over coming months, warns Unicredit

The Italian-German group, Europe’s second largest bank, said Britain’s tax structure will make it hard to raise fresh revenue quickly enough to restore confidence in UK public finances.

“I am becoming convinced that Great Britain is the next country that is going to be pummelled by investors,” said Kornelius Purps, Unicredit ’s fixed income director and a leading analyst in Germany.

Mr Purps said the UK had been cushioned at first by low debt levels but the pace of deterioration has been so extreme that the country can no longer count on market tolerance.

“Britain’s AAA-rating is highly at risk. The budget deficit is huge at 13pc of GDP and investors are not happy. The outgoing government is inactive due to the election. There will have to be absolute cuts in public salaries or pay, but nobody is talking about that,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“Sterling is going to fall further over coming months. I am not expecting a crash of the gilts market but we may see a further rise in spreads of 30 to 50 basis points.” Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of England, Bonds, Debt, Economy, Politics, pound, Quantitative Easing, Rating, U.K.

Quantitative easing (= creating money out of thin air = printing money = increasing the money supply = creating inflation.) works!

Inflation is a hidden tax on monetary assets.

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
- John Maynard Keynes

Rise in value-added tax had ’significant impact’ on CPI

LONDON (MarketWatch) — British consumer prices in January rose 3.5% compared to the same month last year, requiring Bank of England Governor Mervyn King to pen an explanatory letter to the Treasury.

The Office for National Statistics said a rise in the value-added tax back to 17.5% in January after the expiration of a temporary cut to 15% had a “significant impact” on the inflation rate.

The outcome was hardly a surprise. King, in a news conference last week following the release of the central bank’s latest quarterly inflation report, had once again highlighted expectations for a near-term surge in inflation driven in part by the expiration of the VAT break. Read about the BOE’s inflation expectations.

In an open letter released after the data, King wrote that that the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee expects the January rise in annual U.K. consumer inflation to be a “temporary deviation” from the 2% target. King said the situation was comparable to two previous occasions when he has had to pen letters to the chancellor explaining missed targets.

Weak spending has created a “substantial margin of spare capacity” in the economy that is expected to bear down on inflation over time. King said the MPC is committed to taking “whatever actions are necessary” to ensure the inflation outlook remains in line with the 2% target.

King is required to write a letter to Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling if inflation misses the 2% annual target by more than a full percentage point.

In a reply, Darling noted that the MPC’s remit allows it to “look through short-term movements in inflation” and said the committee’s long-term outlook for inflation is similar to the forecast set out in the Treasury’s December Pre-Budget Report. Read the letters.

The ONS said consumer prices fell 0.2% between December and January, the smallest decline on record.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast a 0.2% monthly rise and a 3.7% year-on-year increase.

The British pound rose 0.2% versus the U.S. dollar to change hands at $1.5693.

In last week’s inflation report, the BOE projected inflation would fall back below target in coming months after a temporary spike higher.

“While the inflation numbers look worrying at first glance, “we do buy the BOE view that the inflation rate will dip over the remainder of the year,” said Peter Dixon, U.K. economist at Commerzbank.

The VAT expiration was a one-time event, while the inflationary impact of a weaker pound was mainly an issue for 2009, Dixon said, with import prices stabilizing after a surge in late 2008.

William L. Watts is a reporter for MarketWatch in London.

Feb. 16, 2010, 6:33 a.m. EST
By William L. Watts, MarketWatch

Source: MarketWatch

Tags: Bank of England, Economy, Inflation, Quantitative Easing

See also:

- How to invest for a global-debt-bomb explosion; Prepare for an apocalyptic anarchy (Market Watch)

- Marc Faber on CNBC: All Governments Will Default On Their Debt, Including The US

- Cynthia McKinney at Munich Germany NATO Peace Rally: ‘My Country Has Been Hijacked By A Criminal Cabal’

Having the Bernanke puppet in place, the elite can now continue to collapse the system.

Ben Bernanke

By Albert Edwards, Societe Generale

Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”? The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ’steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?

Ben Bernanke?s recent speech at the American Economic Association made me feel sick. Like Alan Greenspan, he is still in denial. The pigmies that populate the political and monetary elites prefer to genuflect to the court of public opinion in a pathetic attempt to deflect blame from their own gross and unforgivable incompetence.

The US and UK have seen a huge rise in inequality over the last two decades, as growth in national income has been diverted almost exclusively to the top income earners (see chart below). The middle classes have seen median real incomes stagnate over that period and, as a consequence, corporate margins and profits have boomed.

Some recent reading has got me thinking as to whether the US and UK central banks were actively complicit in an aggressive re-distributive policy benefiting the very rich. Indeed, it has been amazing how little political backlash there has been against the stagnation of ordinary people?s earnings in the US and UK. Did central banks, in creating housing bubbles, help distract middle class attention from this re-distributive policy by allowing them to keep consuming via equity extraction? The emergence of extreme inequality might never otherwise have been tolerated by the electorate (see chart below). And now the bubbles have burst, along with central banks? credibility, what now?

(Click on images to enlarge.)

After reading Ben Bernanke?s speech, once again denying culpability for the bubble, I really didn?t know whether to laugh or cry (remember that Ben Bernanke, like Tim Geithner, was a key member of the Greenspan Fed). I feel like Peter Finch in the film Network, sticking my head out of the window and shouting “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Although criticism of the Fed (and the Bank of England) has now become louder and more widespread, I feel my longstanding derision for their actions during the so-called ?good years? puts me in a stronger position than some to offer further comment.

Opening my 2002-2005 file of old weeklies I did not have to go any further than the first paragraph of the top copy (end of December 2005). “As far as Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed is concerned, we have spared few words of derision. We have made plain our views that the supposed US prosperity that has accompanied his tenure has been based on a grotesque mountain of debt. We have likened the economy to a Ponzi scheme which will ultimately collapse. He has allowed the funding of strong economic activity by mortgaging the US’s future against one bubble (equity) and then another (housing), which is now beginning to implode“. These are almost consensus thoughts now, but not then.

The pigmies that populate the political and monetary elites prefer to genuflect to the court of public opinion. Blaming the banks is simply a pathetic attempt to deflect the public fury from their own gross and unforgivable incompetence. We have stated before that banks are not the primary cause of the bust. Just as in Japan, a decade earlier, bank problems are a symptom of the bust. It is the monetary and regulatory authorities that are responsible for this mess. And it is not just obvious in retrospect. It was perfectly obvious from the beginning.

I was shocked by a recent survey of Wall Street and business economists, published in the Wall Street Journal (see Bernanke View Doubted 14 Jan? link). Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the proposition ‘excessively easy Fed policy in the first half of the decade helped cause a bubble in house prices’, some 42, or 74% agreed with the proposition. So unbelievably there are still 12 economists surveyed who did not agree! Even more incredible, a majority of academic economists did not agree with the proposition. Maybe they have sympathy for a fellow academic or maybe they actually believe the preposterous proposition that the western central banks were not in control of the bubbles which were primarily due to tidal waves of surplus savings washing across from Asia.

John Taylor shows this to be nonsense. There was no global savings glut (see chart below) Continue reading »

Tags: Alan Greenspan, Bank of England, Ben Bernanke, Bubble, Central Bank, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, GDP, Global News, Government, Middle Class, Politics, Ponzi schemes, Timothy Geithner, U.K., U.S., Wall Street

The Bank of England and the government have created this mess:

Quantitative easing is creating money out of thin air or “printing money.”

Quantitative easing increases the money supply, creates inflation and devalues the currency.

Inflation is a hidden tax. Quantitative easing is nothing more than stealing from the people.

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.“
- John Maynard Keynes

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
- Alan Greenspan

See also:

- Bank of England extends quantitative easing to £200 billion (Guardian)

- Bank of England calls unprecedented emergency meeting of economists (Telegraph)

- Pound Falls to Five Month Low as Bank of England Says Declines ‘Helpful’ (Bloomberg)

- Bank of England: Recession will be the worst in modern history (Telegraph)

- Bank of England to print extra 50 billion pounds (Reuters)

- Beware Bank of England’s monetary con trick (Financial Times):

Economists have another term to describe the monetization of government debt (=Quantitative easing). The history of “seigniorage” goes back to the debasement of the coinage under the Roman emperors. Seigniorage is really a tax on holders of money and government debt which is paid via inflation. When carried to excess, it leads to hyperinflation.

- The dangers of printing money: four lessons from history (Times Business)

- Bank of England wants to print more money (Telegraph)

- Bank of England sees slowdown deepening, prepares to deploy quantative easing (Financial Times):

Quantitative easing is aimed at increasing the money supply, getting banks to lend more, lowering interest rates and raising the level of inflation. (…and destroying the pound.)

And the UK has Gordon Brown, the savior, also known as debt creator, who will make sure that the UK will default on its debt and/or has to go through a currency crisis:

“A weak currency arises from a weak economy, which in turn is the result of a weak government.” - Gordon Brown

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” - John Adams

- Britain Faces New Souvereign Debt Crisis As PIMCO Pulls Out

- Fitch warns: Britain and France risk losing their AAA rating

- Moody’s warns of ’social unrest’ as sovereign debt spirals … because of bankster bailouts

- UK taxpayers face £2 trillion unfunded pensions liability, more than £80,000 for every household

- Moody’s: Top US And UK Debt Ratings May ‘Test The Aaa Boundaries’

- Treasury Pre-Budget Report Warning: UK ‘Faces Decades of Debt’

- Morgan Stanley: Britain risks sovereign debt crisis in 2010

- OECD warning: Britain risks ‘debt spiral’

Prepare for the worst, because it’s coming!

Remember? Jim Rogers: ‘Sell any sterling you might have; It’s finished’

Update:

- For sheer gall, Brown posing as saviour of the middle classes takes the mouldy biscuit (Daily Mail):

There’s been nothing like it since the wolf dressed up as grandma in order to turn Little Red Riding Hood into pot-roast.

Gordon Brown now claims to be a champion of the middle classes. Apparently, only he can be trusted to look after their interests.

And there were millions of us thinking that he was, in fact, the unreconstructed arch-enemy of the middle classes and of everything they hold dear.

This is what the UK government and the BoE are doing:

“When a country embarks on deficit financing and inflationism you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
- Ron Paul

“Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.”
- Ron Paul

UK inflation jumped the most on record in December, fuelling fears that interest rates will have to rise sooner rather than later to keep prices in check.

Steve Bell, The Guardian

The sharp rise in the annual rate of consumer price inflation from 1.9pc to 2.9pc was driven by exceptional events in December 2008, as the VAT cut and high street discounting at that point were not repeated last month.

An increase in the price of petrol and new cars also drove the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) up last month, the Office for National Statistics said. Economists had expected a smaller rise in CPI to 2.6pc.

Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight described the data as “a very nasty shock”.

It was the first time since May that inflation has risen above the Bank of England’s 2pc target, and economists predict inflation will rise above 3pc this month, reflecting the reversal of the VAT cut on January 1.

At that point Mervyn King, the Bank’s Governor, would be required to write a letter to the Chancellor, explaining why inflation was more than a percentage point above the target.

It comes at a difficult time for Britain’s consumers, who face the prospect of rising taxes, rising interest rates, and spending cuts as a fragile economic gets underway following the worst post-war recession.

The retail prices index (RPI) - which includes housing costs - rose even more sharply, to 2.4pc from 0.3pc in November.

Inflation in Britain has remained consistently higher than other countries during the recession, which economists partly attribute to the pound’s weakness, which has driven up the cost of foreign goods. Continue reading »

Tags: Alistair Darling, Bank of England, Economy, Gordon Brown, Government, Inflation, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.K.

On Thursday I had posted Bloomberg’s summary on the monthly investment outlook by PIMCO’s Bill Gross:

- PIMCO’s Bill Gross warns on risks of US deficit: ‘Our government doesn’t work anymore, or perhaps more accurately, when it does, it works for special interests and not the American people.’

But that summary missed a lot of important points.

Here is just one excerpt as a starter:

“Here’s the problem that the U.S. Fed’s “exit” poses in simple English: Our fiscal 2009 deficit totaled nearly 12% of GDP and required over $1.5 trillion of new debt to finance it. The Chinese bought a little ($100 billion) of that, other sovereign wealth funds bought some more, but as shown in Chart 2, foreign investors as a group bought only 20% of the total - perhaps $300 billion or so. The balance over the past 12 months was substantially purchased by the Federal Reserve. …”

If that doesn’t bother you, then I do not know what will. The Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air like there is no tomorrow and the bad news is that that is exactly what the elite that controls the US government and the Federal Reserve has planned for America:

In the next two years (or just a little more than that) we will see hyperinflation in the US, people in America will become desperately poor and the Greatest Depression will turn the US into a Third World country.

(In 2009 Bill Gross was named the world’s 32nd most powerful man by Forbes.)

Now here is the full article by Bill Gross, ‘The King of Bonds’ (Must-Read!):

Let’s Get Fisical

Quixotic journeys often make for great literature, but by definition are rarely productive. I am, after all, referring to windmills here - not their 21st century creation, but their 17th century chasing. Futility, not productivity, was the ultimate fate of Cervantes’ man from La Mancha. So it is with hesitation, although quixotic obsession, that I plunge headlong into a discussion of American politics, healthcare legislation, resultant budget deficits and - finally - their potential effect on financial markets. There will be windmills aplenty in the next few pages and not much good can come of these opinions or my tilting in their direction. Still, I mount my steed, lance in hand, and ride forward.

Question: What has become of the American nation? Conceived with the vision of liberty and justice for all, we have descended in the clutches of corporate and other special interests to a second world state defined by K Street instead of Independence Square. Our government doesn’t work anymore, or perhaps more accurately, when it does, it works for special interests and not the American people. Washington consistently stoops to legislate 10,000-page perversions of healthcare, regulatory reform, defense, and budgetary mandates overflowing with earmarks that serve a monied minority as opposed to an all-too-silent majority. You don’t have to be Don Quixote to believe that legislators - and Presidents - often do not work for the benefit of their constituents: A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported that over 65% of Americans trust their government to do the right thing “only some of the time” and a stunning 19% said “never.” What most politicians apparently are working for is to perpetuate their power - first via district gerrymandering, and then second by around-the-clock campaigning financed by special interest groups. If, by chance, they’re ever voted out of office, they have a home just down the street - at K Street - with six-figure incomes as a starting wage.

What amazes me most of all is that politicians can be bought so cheaply. Public records show that combined labor, insurance, big pharma and related corporate interests spent just under $500 million last year on healthcare lobbying (not much of which went to politicians) for what is likely to be a $50-100 billion annual return. The fact is that American citizens have never been as divorced from their representatives - and if that description fits the Democratic Congress now in control - then it applies to Republicans as well - past and present. So you watch Fox, or is it MSNBC? O’Reilly or Olbermann? It doesn’t matter. You’re just being conned into rooting for a team that basically runs the same plays called by lookalike coaches on different sidelines. A “ballot box” pox on all their houses - Senators, Representatives and Presidents alike. There has been no change, there will be no change, until we the American people decide to publicly finance all national and local elections and ban the writing of even a $1 check for our favorite candidates. Undemocratic? Hardly. Get on the internet, use Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter to campaign for your choice. That’s the new democracy. When special interests, even singular citizens write a check, it represents a perversion of democracy not the exercise of the First Amendment. Any chance that any of this will happen? Not one ghost of a chance. Forward Don Quixote, the windmills are in sight.

Distressed as I am about the state of American democracy, a rational money manager cannot afford to get mad or “just get even” when it comes to investing clients’ money. Still, like pilots politely advertise at the end of most flights, “We know you have a choice of airlines and we thank you for flying ‘United’.” Global investment managers likewise have a choice of sovereign credits and risk assets where stable inflation and fiscal conservatism are available. If 2008 was the year of financial crisis and 2009 the year of healing via monetary and fiscal stimulus packages, then 2010 appears likely to be the year of “exit strategies,” during which investors should consider economic fundamentals and asset markets that will soon be priced in a world less dominated by the government sector. If, in 2009, PIMCO recommended shaking hands with the government, we now ponder “which” government, and caution that the days of carefree check writing leading to debt issuance without limit or interest rate consequences may be numbered for all countries.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of England, Barack Obama, Bill Gross, Bonds, Central Bank, China, Congress, Corporations, Debt, Depression, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Freedom, G7, GDP, Global News, Government, Great Depression, Healthcare, Keynesianism, Obama administration, PIMCO, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Society, Stock Market, U.K., U.S.

Quantitative easing is creating money out of thin air or “printing money.”
Quantitative easing increases the money supply, creates inflation and devalues the currency.
Inflation is a hidden tax. Quantitative easing is absolute stealing from the people.

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.“
- John Maynard Keynes

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
- Alan Greenspan

BoE warned that UK banks are still failing to provide enough credit to businesses and households as it held interest rates at 0.5%

Steve Bell, The Guardian, Friday 6 November 2009

The Bank of England will expand its programme of money creation by £25bn over the next three months to boost Britain’s recession-hit economy, Threadneedle Street announced today as it left interest rates unchanged again.

Warning that UK banks are still failing to provide enough credit to businesses and households, the Bank said it would increase the size of quantitative easing (QE) to £200bn.

The Bank’s nine-strong monetary policy committee also pegged bank rate at its record low level of 0.5%, where it has been since March. It said cheap borrowing and QE were needed to prevent inflation falling below its 2% target.

In a statement, the Bank said: “On balance, the committee believes that the prospect is for slow recovery in the level of economic activity, so that a substantial margin of under-utilised resources persists.”

Although the Bank said there were signs of recovery in the world economy, it added that output in the UK had dropped by 6% since the start of a recession that has now lasted for six quarters, the longest period of decline since records began in 1955. “Households have reduced their spending substantially and businesses investment has fallen especially sharply,” the statement said.

Offiicial data released today showed that manufacturing output improved in September, and the MPC said that there were signs a “a pick-up in economic activity may soon be evident”.

Under the QE programme, the Bank of England buys bonds from the commercial banks, thereby providing lenders with extra cash to lend. It received permission from the chancellor, Alistair Darling, to extend the scheme.

Continue reading »

Tags: Alistair Darling, Bank of England, Economy, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.K.

Quantitative Easing is ‘printing money’ (creating money out of thin air).

The Bank of England and the government are destroying the pound.
The Fed and the US government are destroying the dollar.
The UK and the US are broke.
The US is in an even worse position than the UK.

Related articles:
- Pound Falls to Five Month Low as Bank of England Says Declines ‘Helpful’
- Beware Bank of England’s monetary con trick
- The dangers of printing money: four lessons from history

The Bank of England has summoned the City’s leading economists to an unprecedented meeting in Threadneedle Street, as the pound plunges amid growing confusion over its radical Quantitative Easing (QE) policy.

The Bank will host a seminar of all London’s major economists next Tuesday – the first time it has invited them in en masse in recent memory – in what has been construed as a sign that it fears market participants are starting to lose faith in its efforts to pump cash into the economy. The move has also sparked speculation that it is poised to announce a major change to the monetary policy framework, although insiders dismissed such suggestions.

It came after the minutes from the Bank’s latest Monetary Policy Committee meeting revealed that the idea of cutting the interest rate banks are paid on the reserves they hold there was not discussed this month. The pound has lurched lower in recent weeks, thanks in part to speculation that the Bank will impose charges on banks for holding excessive amounts of cash in reserve at its vaults. Under QE, it is pumping £175bn into the economy, but much of this cash is sitting in banks’ reserve accounts rather than being recycled and flowing around the broader economy.

The suspicion that the Bank will soon take action to mitigate this has pushed down market interest rates sharply and contributed to an almost 5pc fall in the pound against other leading currencies. It has caused gilt prices and short-term interest rates to fluctuate wildly in recent weeks.

The Bank’s seminar, chaired by deputy Governor Charlie Bean, alongside chief economist Spencer Dale and markets director Paul Fisher, is intended to clear up this confusion. It sparked anticipation in the City not merely because the Bank has a reputation for extreme secrecy, but because some suspect it may come alongside an announcement over the Bank’s reserves policy. Others suspect the Bank is concerned that many think either that QE amounts to printing money, much as Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany did, or that it simply is not working.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of England, Economy, Quantitative Easing, U.K.

The UK is broke and the pound is - thanks to the government and the Bank of England - worthless paper.

“A weak currency arises from a weak economy, which in turn is the result of a weak government.” - Gordon Brown

Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) — The pound fell, weakening to 91 pence per euro for the first time in more than five months, on speculation the Bank of England favors currency declines to boost the economy.

The pound also dropped the most since April against the dollar on renewed investor expectations that the central bank will cut the rate it pays financial institutions on deposits. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said the weakening pound is “helpful” in rebalancing the economy, the Newcastle Journal cited him as saying in an interview. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters in New York today he welcomes “all the factors that make for a stable economy.”

“A currency, which the country’s own central bank likes to see weak, obviously is not an attractive investment,” Commerzbank analysts including Lutz Karpowitz in Frankfurt wrote in a research note today. “If King keeps digging then he is clearly signaling that he does not care about this loss of trust.”

Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of England, Economy, Gordon Brown, Politics, U.K.

- Ben Bernanke: This financial crisis may be worse than the Great Depression

Britain is facing the steepest recession in modern history, Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, declared as it laid bare the full extent of the damage wrought by the financial crisis.

The economy will take longer to recover from this recession than it did in previous economic slumps and it will take “several years” before banks are lending normally to households and businesses, Mr King said.

The downbeat message came as the Bank disclosed that it was likely to keep interest rates low for far longer than experts had predicted as Britain shakes off the effects of the downturn.

The Bank said that it expected the economy to contract by an annual rate of 5.5 per cent at its lowest point this year – an even deeper dive than experienced in the 1930s – let alone any of the other postwar recessions.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of England, Economy, Financial Crisis, Great Depression, Recession

A must see!

Max Keiser:
“They are literally stealing a hundred million dollars a day. Goldman Sachs is stealing every day on the floor of the exchange. They should be in the Hague, they should be taken on financial terrorism charges. They should all be thrown in jail”

Tags: Bailout, Bank of England, Banks, Ben Bernanke, BIS, China, Dollar, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Gold, Government, Henry Paulson, Human Rights, IMF, Max Keiser, Obama administration, Politics, Stock Market, Taxpayers, Timothy Geithner, U.S., Wall Street