Archive for the 'Collapse' Category
U.S. Unemployment Statistics Hiding the Dismal Truth
February 3rd, 2009Via: Market Oracle: All told, 2.6 million people lost their jobs in 2008. And, to underscore the accelerating nature of the problem, more than half of those job losses occurred in the final four months of the year. In December, a total of 11.1 million were unemployed. An additional 8 million people were working part […]
JAPAN: “THERE HAS NEVER BEEN DATA THIS BAD FOR ANY MAJOR ECONOMY — EVEN IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION”; “WE ARE LITERALLY LOOKING AT THE UNIMAGINABLE”
February 3rd, 2009Via: Naked Capitalism: I have been writing about an Asian black hole for almost two months now. I have been crying from the rooftops about an emerging depression in Japan. It has been as though a neutron bomb had gone off in the world. There was no one who seemed to notice, no one who […]
State Budget Troubles Worsen: At Least 46 States Faced or Are Facing Budget Shortfalls for This and/or Next Year
February 3rd, 2009Via: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: States are facing a great fiscal crisis. At least 46 states faced or are facing shortfalls in their budgets for this and/or next year, and severe fiscal problems are highly likely to continue into the following year as well. Combined budget gaps for the remainder of this fiscal […]
Australia: Rate Cut to Record Low Amid “Unfolding National and International Economic Emergency”
February 3rd, 2009Via: AFP: Australia launched a 42 billion dollar (26 billion US) stimulus package Tuesday and slashed interest rates to a 45-year low in a bid to battle the global economic crisis, which has choked growth. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the massive stimulus package was aimed at nation building and supporting up to 90,000 jobs […]
Personal Bankruptcies Soar 33%
February 2nd, 2009Via: MSN: Personal bankruptcies surged to more than 1 million filings in the United States in 2008 — the most since a rewrite of bankruptcy laws went into effect in 2005. Filings of Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcies rose 33% in 2008 as the economy worsened, according to data from U.S. bankruptcy courts and […]
Folding Dealers Shock Car Buyers with Unpaid Liens
February 2nd, 2009Via: AP: The national wave of auto dealership closures has come crashing down on thousands of people who are on the hook for used-car loans that dealers were supposed to absolve. When a car buyer still owes money on a vehicle he is trading in, the dealer promises to pay off the outstanding loan, then […]
Violent Unrest Rocks China as Financial Crisis Hits
February 2nd, 2009Via: Times Online: Bankruptcies, unemployment and social unrest are spreading more widely in China than officially reported, according to independent research that paints an ominous picture for the world economy. The research was conducted for The Sunday Times over the last two months in three provinces vital to Chinese trade – Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. […]
FDIC Friday: Three More Down
February 1st, 2009I stopped posting FDIC Friday stories because the amounts of money involved with most of them make for noise level events in the scheme of things. I picked an arbitrary threshold of $1 billion or more in total deposits for a bank failure to warrant a mention here. But this week, we have three failures. […]
Here Comes The BARF
February 1st, 2009Via: Forbes: Why creating a Bad Asset Repository Fund for Wall Street’s toxic assets could make banking even sicker. First there was TARP. Get ready for BARF. They haven’t named it that yet, but calling a federal “bad bank” to soak up toxic assets the Bad Asset Repository Fund would be truth in advertising at […]
The End: Michael Lewis Revisits Wall Street Swindling
February 1st, 2009This piece makes a great epilogue for my 2006 Wall Street Chop Shop essay. Via: Portfolio: Now 36, Daniel grew up a lower-middle-class kid in Queens. One of his first jobs, as a junior accountant at Arthur Andersen, was to audit Salomon Brothers’ books. “It was shocking,” he says. “No one could explain to me […]
