It is not dollars, treasuries, bonds and debt that is being sold by your government.

It is you.

It’s as if last year’s meltdown—causing a $16 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of America’s unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008—had never taken place. Two of the five biggest investment banks, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, have bitten the dust, but the survivors intend to party on, federal dollars in hand.

Five banks failed late Friday, bringing the 2009 tally to 120.

The biggest to fall was United Commercial Bank of San Francisco, which had 63 U.S. branches as well as operations in Hong Kong and Shanghai. The bank held deposits totaling $7.5 billion.

"Let's face it," Warren said, "This is sort of how we went about the rescue -- we rescued at the top and we left the bottom to kind of fend for itself -- and that's showing up in the unemployment numbers."

Warren went on to explain that the report is really about the guarantees the Government made to protect banks' assets while leaving the public out to dry.

Greg Gordon, McClatchy News Investigative reporter, reveals how Goldman Sachs didn't tell buyers of 40 Billion in toxic Mortgage securities that it was secretly betting the other way ~ standard fare for a Wall Street crime syndicate that is about to become exposed:

As I have said for some time, it's an Oligarchy, folks ~ the tyranny of the elites with government and Wall Street ruled by the powerful few ~ and the Obama administration is part of it.

In other words, Wall Street is the only game in town and it's crooked ! Ben Bernanke is a stooge for the Oligarchy along with former NY Fed chief and present Sec of the Treasury ~ Tim Geithner. http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2009/09/21.html

“Why is it we have finite resources for health care but unlimited money for war?

“The inequities in our economy are piling up: trillions for war, trillions for Wall Street and tens of billions for the insurance companies. Banks and other corporations are sitting on piles of cash of taxpayer’s money while firing workers, cutting pay and denying small businesses money to survive.

“People are losing their homes, their jobs, their health, their investments, their retirement security; yet there is unlimited money for war, Wall Street and insurance companies, but very little money for jobs on Main Street.

“Unlimited money to blow up things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relatively little money to build things in the US.

Bailed out insurance giant AIG on Friday announced a profit of 455 million dollars in the third quarter, a massive turnaround from a 24.4 billion dollar loss in the same period last year.

America is bankrupt, and it’s growing worse by the day. The U.S. government was technically dissolved by the “Emergency Banking Act” of March 9, 1933. THAT’S A FACT.

If you have any doubt, just look around. Foreclosures and unemployment run rampant. The dollar is dropping so low it could fit under a closed door with a top hat on, yet every day the mainstream media is trying to convince us that the recession is over. Who’s kidding whom? If you take Social Security and Medicare out of our economy, it’s a full-blown depression—a total belly-up depression.

It is clear that interest bearing debt to a bank as money is a vicious hoax, but strangely enough, few have been developing a viable alternative.

In response to an "epidemic" amount of mortgage fraud in Florida, federal agents and prosecutors have spent the last nine months building cases against Realtors, brokers and other industry professionals.

The results of their intense efforts were announced by the U.S. Attorney's Office on Wednesday: So far, more than 100 people face charges in the 18-county federal district that includes Orlando.

Bailed out insurance giant AIG on Friday announced a profit of 455 million dollars in the third quarter, a massive turnaround from a 24.4 billion dollar loss in the same period last year.

Not that we can believe the reported number of jobs created, but let's assume for the sake of argument that the figures provided by the administration are correct.

Gold futures barreled to a new record high above $1,100 an ounce on Friday, as news that the U.S. unemployment rate topped 10.2% in October boosted expectations the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero well into next year, pressuring the dollar.

The state-controlled Fannie Mae reported a net loss of $US18.9 billion ($A20.74 billion) in the third quarter on Thursday, 35 per cent smaller than a year ago but sharply higher than its $US14.8 billion ($A16.24 billion) loss in the second quarter.

The only change the Fed did signal? That it’ll buy up to $175 billion in so-called “agency” debt, slightly below its previous target of $200 billion. But it’s still going to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities.

And it’s not buying fewer bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because it suddenly realized the folly of “monetizing” U.S. debt obligations …

… it’s because of the “limited availability of agency debt” to buy. In other words, the Fed is afraid it’s cornering and distorting the market … which it is!

All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year are about to experience the change they haven't been waiting for: the return of income tax bracket creep. Buried in Nancy Pelosi's health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren't real.

It’s kind of amazing that with all the uproar over the Galleon business, nobody is making much hay over the recent revelations about the AIG bailouts, which make former Goldman chief and former New York Fed chairman Stephen Friedman look every bit as guilty of insider machinations as Raj Rajaratnam of the Galleon fund.

Lawyers are paid to keep secrets. But like anyone else, the more valuable the information they're sitting on, the more likely they are to welsh on their promise of confidentiality and sell privileged information to the highest bidder.

As a case in point, two of the 14 defendants arrested in the government's latest Galleon Group-related insider trading bust are New York lawyers who allegedly accepted cash to funnel information on three 2007 corporate acquisitions to a one-time employee of the hedge fund.

If people were pissed off about AIG's temporary decline and permanent bonuses, CIT's bankruptcy ought to enrage them.

The giant lender to businesses is heading for a quick in-and-out in bankruptcy court, and when it emerges, taxpayers will be the ones who have gotten the ol' in-out: CIT won't have to repay its $2.33 billion TARP bailout.

We've been trying to figure out what, if any, preparations Wall Street has been taking to guard against H1N1.

For the most part, the banks have been coy about their activities.

But as noted on The Today Show this morning, several banks have been among the early recipients of H1N1 vaccine, allowing them to get ahead of hospitals in some instances.

The number of Americans receiving food stamp assistance soared above 36 million for the first time in August, the eighth month in a row that enrollment set a record, the U.S. Agriculture Department said on Wednesday.

Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus

The elections today should send a simple message to the Obama administration and congressional Democrats: You lost the middle class, and you won’t get them back until you fundamentally change your legislative agenda.

The Goldman 10-Q is out, providing numerous interesting datapoints for those willing to scour through them. The key one: Goldman lost money on just one trading day in Q3, making money on all the other 64. As a reminder, even in Q2 Goldman lost money on two trading days. The statistical probability distribution of 1 out of 65 is something that not the SEC, but Richard Feynman should be looking into, as Goldman Sachs, after rewriting the lass of risk/return, is now set to redefine normal distributions and other Statistics 101 concepts.

Craig Drimal, who according to court documents worked at Manhattan-based Galleon, wasn’t an employee of the firm. Also arrested were Zvi Goffer, Arthur Cutillo, Jason Goldfarb, Emanuel Goffer, David Plate and Michael Kimelman. Charges against the men include conspiracy and fraud, according to documents filed in New York federal court. Names of the other seven defendants weren’t immediately available.

Delinquencies in commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) accelerated in October, according to a report from Barclays Capital (BarCap). The 30-plus day delinquency rate jumped 41bps to 5.5% in October as current loans deteriorated and transferred to special servicers.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) in Washington, DC monitors and calculates the gap between the fifty states' tax revenues and expenditures. The following recent CBPP chart compares the total state budget shortfalls in both the last recession and the current one. Today's record shortfalls measure how many billions states will need to raise in additional taxes or cut their expenditures (or combinations of both) in this and coming years.

The value of gold and silver are on the rise, but this spells trouble for the declining dollar index which could push as low as 66 points, according to Chris Zwermann, strategist from Zwermann Financial.

Companies in the United States cut an estimated 203,000 jobs in October, according to a private report based on payroll data.

The drop compares with a revised 227,000 decline the prior month, data from ADP Employer Services showed on Wednesday. The figures were forecast to show a decline of 198,000 jobs, according to the median estimate of 34 economists in a Bloomberg survey.

Bank of Ireland has announced losses of almost 1bn euros (£895m) for the six months to the end of September.

The bank has said that the total value of loans that it thinks might not be repaid will be 6.9bn euros (£6.1bn) for the period to April 2011.

SECRET plans to seize more than £4billion a year from Britain and make its citizens pay taxes direct to Europe emerged last night.

The leaked proposals, seen by the Daily Express, state that Britain should lose the billions of pounds in rebate that was agreed by Margaret Thatcher 25 years ago.

The plans – with a foreword by European Union Commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso – would cost every British family at least £155 a year.

A Fort Lauderdale attorney who surrounded himself with beach-front mansions and a fleet of Lamborghinis and Ferraris was stripped Tuesday of all power he had over the law firm he created and amid accusations he put it at the center of a Ponzi scheme that funded his lavish lifestyle.

Scott Rothstein may have lined his pocked with as much as $500 million by swindling investors and raiding his law firm's trust accounts, attorneys with knowledge of the situation told The Palm Beach Post.

Best-selling author Daniel Estulin states that the key issue to be discussed this week at the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting, being held in St. Andrews, Scotland, is how to bring down the present world financial system through dumping the US dollar.

In the world outside the Senate, time is money; inside it, time is everything. Senate Republicans are taking full advantage of that reality, using every parliamentary device at their disposal to slow down an extension of unemployment insurance benefits -- even after Democrats added billions for big business to sweeten the pot.

The saga is a cast study both in the difficulty of passing even popular legislation in the Senate and the lengths to which the GOP is going to slow down the process.

The IMF announcement yesterday that it had sold virtually half of its planned 403.3 tonnes of gold, destined to increase its resources for lending to low-income countries, to India came as something of a surprise to the market. Not perhaps that a Central Bank had made the purchase, but the hard money had been on China to do so, not India.

Zale Corporation reported they incurred a net loss of $189.5 million for the fiscal year ended July 31st, compared to a net loss from continuing operations of $6.5 million in fiscal year 2008.

Revenues were $1.78 billion in 2009 compared to $2.14 billion for 2008, a decrease of 16.8%.

David Friehling, the former accountant to convicted Ponzi-scheme operator Bernard Madoff, pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges Tuesday in connection with his auditing work for Madoff's firm.

Best-selling author Daniel Estulin states that the key issue to be discussed this week at the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting, being held in St. Andrews, Scotland, is how to bring down the present world financial system through dumping the US dollar. Estulin first reported on this initiative as being deliberated at the most recent Bilderberg meeting held in Greece in May 2009. Estulin says that the success or failure of this callous plan hinges on the ability of the US and UK representatives to convince the Russian, the Chinese and other national governments to go along with their scheme.

Here's Richard Marcello of Unisys extolling one of what he sees as the virtues of cloud computing yesterday at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara:

"We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India."

Those actually U.S.-based jobs presumably were held by actual Americans trying to feed actual U.S.-based families.

It is a sobering fact that in 2009, there will be as many people filing for bankruptcy as those filing for a divorce. We are on track to seeing an average of nearly 5,900 bankruptcy filings a day for 2009.

In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

The White House is quietly working to undercut a key post-Enron reform, significantly weakening protection for everyday investors and threatening the administration's image as a champion for financial regulatory reform.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democratic members of the House Financial Services Committee that he supports amending the Investor Protection Act of 2009 -- a bill designed to beef up protection for investors -- in order to exempt small businesses from a requirement in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that mandates audits of internal controls. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002 in the wake of accounting scandals at Enron and Worldcom that rocked investors and damaged confidence in the markets.

The number of UK homes standing empty has hit one million, the highest ever level, a charity has revealed. The Empty Homes Agency reported that more than one in 20 properties have been unoccupied for six months or more, a figure described as "shocking" by homelessness charities.

"They" are a small sliver of the American population, the get-rich-quick crowd from the East Side of Manhattan and similar places. The last twenty years witnessed a great shift of money upwards, to a smaller and smaller pack of greedy beasts. While the majority of Americans lost the ability to send their children to universities, these fat cats bought themselves villas in Florida and houses in Tel Aviv. Worse, they spent their billions buying up the media in order to subvert American democracy and send American soldiers to fight wars in far-away places. A big part of the stolen money was siphoned off to Israel, where apartment prices went through the roof and are still rising.

...

Jonathan May formerly worked for the International Monetary Fund in England. In the early 1980s he came to America with a plan to release Americans from debt to the banking system by employing the same "credit creating" system used by international banking. The law governing this system is the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). May was initially successful. Eventually, however, he was targeted and imprisoned by the banking system.

You would think that an industry that almost completely missed an $8 trillion housing bubble would be trying to do a better job in reporting on the housing market: But that does not appear to be the case. The Census Bureau reported that the number of vacant units hit a new record high yesterday and it appears that no one noticed.

In all, Goldman sold more than $57 billion in risky mortgage-backed securities during a 14-month period in 2006 and 2007, including nearly $39 billion issued from mortgages it purchased. Meanwhile, the firm peddled billions of dollars in complex deals, many of them tied to subprime mortgages, in the Caymans and other offshore locations.

Many of those securities later soured, but the sales allowed Goldman to become the only major U.S. investment bank to escape the brunt of the subprime meltdown.

After school, they don't play sports or dance with the cheerleading squad. Instead, they head to the emergency shelter at the Salvation Army with their mother.

"I don't really like staying here, because you have to bring all your stuff and it's humiliating," Stoudemire said as she sat with other children. "And it's hard at school too, because people don't really know what you are going through."

The sisters are among the 15 children who stay at the shelter on Fifth Street at night and attend classes in the school district during the day.

As the recession continues to take a toll on families, area school districts are seeing growing numbers of homeless students.

When everyone is on the same side of the boat, it always inevitably capsizes.

A related concept is that - if your waitress or cabbie is telling you to buy something - that probably means that the market is overbought, and you might want to consider selling.

An arrest warrant was issued for a Jewish South African businessman who is alleged to have duped investors in a Ponzi scheme.

Barry Tannenbaum is alleged to have defrauded investors out of $1.61 billion.

I have been covering the option ARM fiasco for a very long time now and as I have highlighted before, this is very much a California problem. Apparently I’m not the only one that has realized that option ARMs are a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.

Thousands of small and medium-sized businesses in the US face financial difficulties and could go out of business after lender CIT Group filed for bankruptcy protection last night.

The collapse is also bad news for US taxpayers, who stand to lose the $2.3bn provided last year to prop up the troubled lender.