December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.

The economists are ill qualified to analyse the current economic situation since they lack the overview of historians such as himself.

"There are economic professors in American universities who think they are masters of the universe, but they don't have any historical knowledge. I have never believed that markets are self correcting. No historian could."

At first glance it appeared there was a typo in the headlines. The national media reported that, in January, another 20,000 more jobs were lost. Somehow, the unemployment rate dropped, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. Nobody thought this paradox was worth explaining; instead, the media’s attitude was “more good news” about the economy.

But there was other evidence of an obliterated job market hiding behind the cheerful headlines. After revising the employment numbers in 2009, The New York Times reported, “…the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December, far more than the 85,000 initially reported.” Overall in 2009, the adjusted numbers showed an additional “…1.36 million fewer jobs…” (February 5, 2010).

Third, among the few sectors of the economy showing net employment growth over the past year is the federal government. The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs. In other words, what we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else.

Ohio's tax coffers are nearly $100 million lighter than officials had expected by this point in the fiscal year, largely due to a January income tax shortfall.

Maui's commercial real estate industry sure isn't as bad as on the Mainland, said veteran local leasing broker Ed Bello of Bello Realty Inc., who on a recent business trip to Colorado saw a bankrupt big-box store converted into a charter school and a former Blockbuster Video into a veterinary clinic.

If they had any tenants at all.

When he looks around at Maui's shopping centers, Bello said, rather than maybe one empty storefront, there may be four. Three more vacant spaces is a big shift for an island that just two years ago had a nearly 100 percent occupancy rate, he said.

Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its AAA debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast today whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

Political and public pressure is building to bring bingo bling to Alabama’s financially ailing school and general government revenue.

U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health.

In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug — debt.

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.

As we have been forecasting for the last two years, the second wave of mortgage defaults and foreclosures will hit the economy this year. Not only will we have failure in prime loans and option-arm loans, but we are faced with a new crop of subprime and ALT-A loans put into motion by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae and FHA. In addition, we find it of great interest that the FHA is changing the rules to purchase homes. That, of course, means less homes will be purchased.

The incidence of unemployment may be lessening, but it isn’t going away. Those of you who keep your ear to the ground know that real unemployment is 22.5% and in cities like Detroit it is somewhere near 45 to 50 percent. This is the result of free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing.

President Obama's repeated references to Friday's surprising decline in the unemployment rate epitomize his utter disregard toward the intellect of our citizenry. His citation of these numbers as evidence we are "climbing out of the hole we found ourselves in" reveals an assumption on his part that the folks are incapable of figuring things out for themselves. While Obama surely isn't the coldest beer in the fridge, he isn't stupid enough to actually believe Americans can't figure out this scam.

The Obama administration has apparently come up with a creative way to deal with the increasingly bleak news with regard to the
economic position of the United States in the world.  It proposes to eliminate the office in the Bureau of Labor Statistics that collects and publishes the comparative data on employment, unemployment, manufacturing productivity, and
labor costs, among other things.  You can find it right there on page 11 among the various programs that it has marked for termination. 

It is a challenge to say that things are getting better when every month that goes by more Americans are losing their jobs or needing to apply for food assistance. In the latest data for food assistance through SNAP we find that 200,000 more Americans were added to the program. That now brings the total number of Americans on food assistance to 38,183,000. 1 out of 10 Americans are receiving food assistance. For 2009 this cost the government $50 billion, up from $34 billion in 2008 and $30 billion in 2007. It should be no surprise then that average Americans are questioning the viability of a middle class in the upcoming decade.

A total of 134,142 people were declared insolvent in 2009 as the continued credit squeeze drove the figure above the previous record set in 2006

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND is about to announce losses of more than £7 billion for 2009 but will still hand out enormous bonuses to its investment bankers.

If the economy deteriorates in the L-shaped “hockey-stick” rut that many economists forecast, what political price will President Obama and the Democrats pay for having returned the financial keys to the Bush Republican appointees who gave away the store in the first place? Reappointing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may end up injuring not only the economy but also the Democratic Party for years to come. Recognizing this, Republicans made populist points by opposing his reappointment during the Senate confirmation hearings last Thursday, January 27 – the day after Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address.

Home loan delinquency rates in the United States have now surpassed 10 percent, Lender Processing Services (LPS) reported this week.

Delinquencies for commercial mortgage-backed securities rose in January, fueled by increases in five main property types for the fifth straight month, Fitch Ratings said Friday.

A BILL

TO AMEND THE CODE OF LAWS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 1976, BY ADDING ARTICLE 18 TO CHAPTER 1, TITLE 1 SO AS TO PROVIDE THAT SILVER AND GOLD COIN SHALL BE LEGAL TENDER IN PAYMENT OF CERTAIN DEBTS.

Hawaii, the third-most indebted U.S. state, had the outlook on $4.7 billion of general-obligation bonds lowered by Moody's Investors Service because it's depleting budget reserves as declining tourism reduces revenue.

THE world's top central bankers began arriving in Australia yesterday as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets.

Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at a secret location, the Herald Sun reports.

It's one of those numbers that's so unbelievable you have to actually think about it for a while... Within the next 12 months, the U.S. Treasury will have to refinance $2 trillion in short-term debt. And that's not counting any additional deficit spending, which is estimated to be around $1.5 trillion. Put the two numbers together. Then ask yourself, how in the world can the Treasury borrow $3.5 trillion in only one year? That's an amount equal to nearly 30% of our entire GDP. And we're the world's biggest economy. Where will the money come from?

How do fish get caught? They open their mouth. How do investors get ensnared or misled? They believe in non-existent phenomenons like a “jobless recovery.”

Hasbro has unveiled the design of the new 75th anniversary edition of their classic board game, Monopoly, set to hit stores in fall of 2010. "Monopoly: Revolution Edition" is slick and round instead of dull and square, with debit cards and an ATM instead of paper money and a banker, clear plastic representations of the classic tokens (bye-bye, little boot!), and clips of popular songs (like Rihanna’s "Umbrella," Daniel Powter’s "Bad Day," and Beyonce's "Crazy in Love") that play after certain actions.

The Greek debt crisis has spread to Spain and Portugal in a dangerous escalation as global markets test whether Europe is willing to shore up monetary union with muscle rather than mere words.

The Obama Administration is seeking billions of dollars in additional terror funding for assorted anti-terror operations, including increased military aid in Pakistan and funding to confront militants across the world.

Pentagon officials declined to speculate exactly how much additional funding was being requested, and many of the requests are hidden in classified budget requests. The cost of the ever-growing CIA drone strikes against Pakistan in particular remains a closely guarded secret.

A Greek belt-tightening package ran into trouble Thursday as the country's top trade union announced a giant strike amid fears that the eurozone crisis could deepen with Spain and Portugal's rising debt.

It's good to see that US officials and former officials continue acting to par, God forbid they actually shock us and change their stripes. The latest tripe out of the mouths of the mega corrupted and their hand picked puppets is Henry Paulson's tripe about Russia trying to collapse the US economic bubble and that being the reason that the US is now down on its luck.

When the government releases Friday's employment report, nearly a million jobs could be erased. The change won't show up in the monthly report Rather, the expected drop will show up in the government's revised job losses from April 2008 to March 2009, showing the labor market was in much worse shape than we knew at the time.

U.S. commercial real estate prices fell 4.9 percent in the fourth quarter, setting a new low for the current downturn, according to a leading property index released on Friday.

THE Greek debt crisis has spread to Spain and Portugal in a dangerous escalation as global markets test whether Europe is willing to shore up monetary union with muscle rather than mere words.

Julian Callow from Barclays Capital said the European Union might need to invoke emergency treaty powers to halt the contagion by issuing an EU guarantee for Greek debt. "If not contained, this could result in a 'Lehman-style' tsunami spreading across much of the EU," he said.

Credit default swaps measuring bankruptcy risk on Portuguese debt surged 28 basis points on Thursday to a record 222 on reports that Jose Socrates was about to resign as prime minister after failing to secure enough votes in parliament to carry out austerity measures.

The so-called fear gauge jumped nearly 20% as stocks took a tumble and looked ready to close at their lowest point of the year.

After closing Wednesday at 21.6, the Chicago Board Options Exchange's volatility index, or VIX, spiked to an intraday high of 25.49.

More Chicago-area homeowners defaulted on their mortgages during the final three months of 2009 than in any other quarter since the housing crisis began in 2006.

A Beijing-based company will soon open a Chinese-style mega shopping mall in the most unlikely of places: Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

"The cost of doing business there is very low," said Wu Li, president of Toward Group. "The people are friendly, the environment is peaceful and the pace of living is slow. It is a good place for Chinese enterprises to go abroad."

TrimTabs’ Estimates 255,000 Jobs Lost in November, While BLS Reports a Decline of Only 11,000

BLS Revises September and October Results Down a Whopping 45%

Something’s Not Right in Kansas!

TrimTabs Investment Research estimated today that the take-home pay of all taxpayers in 2009 plunged $800 billion, or 12%, to $5.8 trillion. Meanwhile, the market value of all U.S. stocks rose $3.5 trillion, or 27%, to $16 trillion.

"Flooding the market with newly printed money generated huge profits for Wall Street firms and some investors," said Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs. "But the money printing did little to restart the country's growth engine and bring prosperity to average Americans."

The number of planned cuts announced in the month rose to the highest level in seven years, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. And ADP's National Employment Report found that private-sector employers cut 522,000 positions.

The U.S. economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, but the unemployment rate fell to 9.7%, according to a government report released Friday.

A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are demanding a solution. What they don't realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything.

When the Labor Department released its employment figures for January 2009, it subtracted an astounding 356,000 jobs from the overall count because it felt that small companies were quietly going out of business.

It couldn't prove this was really happening.

But the department's computers made that adjustment anyway -- and much more optimistic ones over the 11 other months of 2009 -- because something called the birth/death model instructed them to do so.

The model is a guess -- and a bad one, it turns out -- at how many companies too small to be reached in the official monthly survey are creating jobs (the "birth" part) or eliminating them ("death").

What have I been saying ever sine the recession began, the Bureau of Labor Statistics use of the "birth/death" model is flawed. To adjust the monthly jobs data by a number which is computed from a ‘model' of how many businesses were created and how many closed up during any given month is simply asking for trouble in maintaining any sense of accuracy.

New York state officials have sued Bank of America and its former top executives, alleging fraud and deception to obtain billions in taxpayer bail-out funds to acquire Merrill Lynch.

Andrew Cuomo, the New York state attorney general, announced the lawsuit against the bank, former chief executive Kenneth Lewis and former chief financial officer Joseph Price.

Tomorrow, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is going to publish its employment situation report for January and it will show job losses exceeding 2 million (and quite possibly over 3 million jobs lost). They (the BLS) are going to gloss over this with their seasonal adjustment, which may not only hide these losses, but show a potential gain in jobs for January. Do not be fooled, the seasonal adjustment is just an internal BLS code for fudging the numbers.

The number of newly laid-off workers filing initial claims for jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week, evidence that layoffs are continuing and jobs remain scarce.

The rise is the fourth in the past five weeks. Most economists hoped that claims would resume a downward trend that was evident in the fall and early winter.

The Labor Department says that new claims for unemployment insurance rose by 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 480,000. Wall Street economists had expected a drop to 460,000.