World-News

Salon
by John R. Talbot

05/01/10

Commercial banks, by law, have to hold a certain percentage of their deposits as cash at the Federal Reserve. From January 1959 until August 2008, the total of these reserves held by the commercial banks at the Fed grew from $11.1 billion to $46.2 billion. At no time during this almost 50-year period did the total bank reserves held at the Fed exceed the minimum required by law by more than $2 billion. But since August 2008, these bank reserves held at the Fed have exploded to more than $1.2 trillion (as of March 2010), even though only $65.6 billion was required to be deposited by law. … What is going on here? Why would commercial banks hold $1 trillion more than they legally had to in reserves at the Fed, earning only 0.25 percent interest per year, and why would the Fed buy more than $1 trillion of mortgage securities of undisclosed quality in the marketplace?

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2010/05/the-trillion-dollar-fraud---bank-reform-news-obama-bank-reform-bill---saloncom.html



US deficit spending and why governments CAN go broke

Freedom's Phoenix
by Bill Bonner

04/30/10

The private sector is de-leveraging … as near as we can tell. Private businesses cut their payrolls. They trimmed expenses. They protected their profit margins — generally. But the public sector figures it has a different role to play … a countercyclical role. While the private sector eases off, the public sector puts the pedal to the metal. That’s been the story for the last year and a half. The government pays more. Hires more. And floats deeper in the water. Walter Wriston once commented that the ‘government can’t go broke.’ But that just shows you why the banking sector is in such trouble; Wriston ran Citibank …

http://tinyurl.com/2az2my9



The Tea Party and big spending on war

AntiWar.Com
by Charles V. Pena

04/30/10

[E]ven though the various Tea Party groups pay lip service to ‘Constitutionally limited government’ and copies of the Constitution are often handed out at Tea Party rallies, they seem to have forgotten (or never read) Article 1, Section 8 that gives Congress the power to declare war. Otherwise, they would at least bother to point out that both Afghanistan and Iraq are unconstitutional (as has been every U.S. military intervention overseas since World War 2). Constitutionality aside, the cost of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly trivial. The National Priorities Project’s Cost of War counter is currently (as this is written) at $987 billion-plus for both wars (remember when former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey opined that the Iraq conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion and then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate ‘baloney?’)

http://tinyurl.com/2uqlw89


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



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