There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said late Thursday that they will temporarily suspend foreclosures on occupied homes while the companies work on a streamlined modification program expected out in December. Fannie and Freddie will not foreclose on occupied homes from Nov. 26 to Jan. 9. Fannie said it will reach out to 10,000 affected borrowers and Freddie will reach out to 6,000 affected borrowers

JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) is cutting 10 percent of its investment banking staff -- about 3,000 jobs -- as the economic slowdown starts to bite into its earnings, people familiar with the situation said on Thursday.

Despite an increasingly uncertain economy, thousands of homebuyers around San Francisco Bay kept snatching up foreclosed homes last month, dragging down the median home price by 41 percent from a year ago, a real estate tracking firm said Thursday.

The country's largest trade publisher, Random House Inc., has frozen the pensions of its current employees and eliminated them for future hires, the latest cuts in an industry hit by declining sales and anticipating, at best, a difficult 2009.

Demand for gold smashed the previous record in the three months between July and September as fearful investors switched funds from the stock market and savings into ingots and coins, often storing them at home as their trust in banks fell.

Flip-flopping sentiment about the prospects for U.S. automakers battered stocks again Thursday as hopes rose then fell that lawmakers would soon put together an aid package for the companies. Stocks declined after a brief advance that came on hopes that Washington would agree to help Detroit's Big Three.

Shares of Citigroup were locked in a downward spiral on Wall Street last night amid fears that the bank is set to lose many more billions of dollars in the months ahead as bad debts continue to pile up.

The Federal Reserve has slashed its benchmark rate to 1%, yet many people are getting hit with higher rates and fees on their credit cards.

Normally, when the Fed cuts rates, credit-card issuers follow suit, resulting in lower monthly payments for cardholders. Though average credit-card rates have fallen slightly as the Fed has cut interest rates, banks and retailers are trying to offset rising losses in their credit-card operations by raising rates and fees across a broader swath of their existing customers.

President-elect Barack Obama is right: America needs a real and meaningful middle-class tax cut. Unfortunately, despite the rhetoric, that is not what his proposals offer.

Shares of U.S. banks fell on Thursday. Highlights:

* Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) shares fall as much as 25.5 percent to $4.77

* Bank of America Corp (BAC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) shares fall as much as 10.6 percent to $11.68

* JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) shares fall as much as 18.5 percent to $23.21

* S&P financials index .GSPF falls as much as 8.5 percent

* Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) shares fall as much as 11.1 percent to $49.00

Many of the “foreign” cars Americans buy are actually built right here in the United States. And there are quite a few reasons that foreign car companies would most likely expand their production here if they grabbed more market share from the Big Three.

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose by 27,000 last week to their highest level in 16 years, according to the Labor Department.

Much of the job losses are comng from the fnancial sector, the high tech sector and, of course, Detroit's Big Three auto firms.

Senator James Inhofe has revealed that Henry Paulson was behind the threats of martial law and a new great depression prior to the passage of the bailout bill, having made such warnings during a conference call on September 19th, around two weeks before the legislation was eventually approved by both the Senate and Congress.

The United States has asked four oil-rich Gulf states for close to 300 billion dollars to help it curb the global financial meltdown, Kuwait's daily Al-Seyassah reported Thursday.

The money system is society's greatest dispenser of justice or injustice. A good one functions fairly, helping create values for life. A bad, unjust one obstructs the creation of values; gives special privileges to some and disadvantage to others causing unfair concentrations of wealth and power; leading to social strife and eventually warfare and a thousand unforeseen bad consequences - physical and spiritual. . .

Last week's post about corporate tap-dancing around the word layoff -- 'Synergy-related headcount restructuring' and other euphemisms for 'you're fired' -- hit uncomfortably close to home for a number of readers. Henry Farkas, a senior Unix administrator for a Connecticut-based health insurance behemoth, sends along these thoughts:

While the Haitian press, some French television channels and French-language Swiss television channels have covered hunger in Haiti, the English-language press has concentrated on the collapse of the La Promesse school in Petionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince. The deaths of 88 children and teachers (as of Nov. 9) in a building collapse provoked by the acts of the school owner are indeed a tragedy. The rapid response of U.S. rescue teams and French teams from Martinique showed these countries can act quickly.

Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt's glitzy coastal tourist resort, may seem an unlikely home for Bedouin squatters, but they too live off tourism, or rather the waste left in its wake.

European markets trim losses ahead of NY open; Asia slumps on day-earlier Wall Street plunge.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday sharply lowered its projection for economic activity this year and next, and signaled that additional interest rate reductions may be needed to help combat the worst financial crisis in more than a half-century.

A plan to give troubled U.S. automakers billions of dollars in government-backed loans is on life support, leaving the fate of hundreds of thousands of workers and Detroit's once-venerable car companies hanging in the balance.

Oil prices fell below $53 to almost a two-year low Thursday as investors, worried by plummeting stock markets, priced in lower crude demand as the global economic downturn shapes up to be the worst in decades.

NOW that people increasingly feel they cannot afford that new HD TV or hi-fi, will they be more likely to steal it?

Citigroup is getting hammered by credit default swaps. As Marketwatch writes:

CDS spreads on Citi were at 325 basis points over Treasury bonds during midday action, up from a 240 basis points yesterday, according to Phoenix Partners Group.

"My reading of current conditions is that bank lending is constrained more now by the supply of creditworthy borrowers than by the supply of bank capital," he commented.

Microsoft Corp. is no longer interested in buying all of Yahoo Inc., CEO Steve Ballmer said Wednesday, though he told shareholders that the company would still be "very open" to a collaboration on Internet search. His comments sent Yahoo shares diving by 19 percent.

Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

In abandoning the core idea behind the $700 billion bailout that would purchase defaulted mortgage-related debt and securities from banks and financial institutions, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, with the assuring nod from President Bush, made clear his intention that the government will not attempt to extinguish the foreclosure fire burning in all parts of our country's economy.

Freight shipping prices for transporting dry raw materials collapsed in November, slammed by the global financial crisis, slowing economic growth and falling commodity prices, industry experts said.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson told unhappy congressional Democrats on Tuesday that, barring a new catastrophe, the Bush administration intended to stand pat on its existing effort to stabilize financial markets -- and leave the next stage of economic recovery to the new administration.

Having committed about half of the existing $700-billion rescue fund to ease Wall Street's credit crunch, Paulson said he had no plans to spend the rest, even on the root cause of the crisis -- soaring mortgage foreclosures.

Japanese economists, increasingly concerned that the United States might seek to pay its enormous and growing debt obligations in a weakened US dollar, are looking to the possibility of US Treasuries being issued in yen.

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist has sent a letter and formal application to the Treasury Department requesting $700 billion from the TARP Capital Purchase Program to fund the following tax cuts:

* Cut the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 15% (estimated cost: $170 billion)
* Eliminate the capital gains and dividends tax (estimated cost: $35 billion)
* Cut the top personal income tax rate from 35% to a flat 15% (estimated cost: $235 billion)
* Kill the death tax (estimated cost: $24 billion)

The world's biggest chemical company, BASF, said on Wednesday it would cut its production worldwide and suspend operations at 80 plants, affecting 20,000 workers.

"BASF is taking measures to avoid the creation of overcapacities as a result of a massive decline in demand," the company said in a statement.

China surpassed Japan in September to become the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, as foreign investors sought the relative safety of government debt as stocks plunged 9.1 percent that month.

Spain is likely to slip into recession in the fourth quarter and stay there into 2009, Bank of Spain head Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez has said.

THERE'S a worldwide run on gold coins.

Even as the price of the precious metal itself comes under pressure along with commodities like oil and copper, people around the world are demanding so many of the valuable coins that government mints are having difficulty filling orders.

A spokesperson for the US Mint tells me that gold coins in this country, for the past month, "are being allocated because of an increased demand."

And the price that the government charges coin dealers has recently been increased by as much as 10 percent for a 10-ounce coin.

The General Motors Corporation (GM) has decided to invest 1 billion U.S. dollars in Brazil to expand business there, local media reported Tuesday.

As the president-elect faces a once-in-a-century opportunity to remake the regulatory apparatus governing Wall Street, some of Obama's fellow Democrats and investor groups are urging him to bring sweeping changes to banks, hedge funds and executive pay. His closest economic advisers, men like Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker, may recommend otherwise: go slow. If Obama takes their counsel, the 44th president, who succeeds Bush on Jan. 20, may not clamp down all that hard on a financial industry whose excesses have pushed the nation -- and much of the world -- into a recession.

The senior Republican on the Banking Committee said Wednesday he doesn't believe there will be a turnaround in the troubled U.S. auto industry until its top management is ousted and its manufacturing operations are revamped.

Commodities experts are in agreement that the price of gold and silver is being manipulated by bankers and government officials in order to halt a mass abandonment of paper currencies and the debt based economy.

"Slush fund" ... "banana republic" ... "Keystone Kops."

That's how some observers are describing the government's effort to stabilize the financial system, including its centerpiece rescue mechanism, known as the TARP.

Hatched hastily about two months ago, the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was conceived to stabilize financial markets and restore investor confidence. But now it is looking so amorphous and vulnerable to political trade winds, that it is has become almost a constant of uncertainty.

The U.S. Treasury Secretary and members of Congress locked horns on Tuesday over a $700 billion financial bailout fund, with lawmakers demanding money to stem foreclosures and Henry Paulson arguing it was meant for investing in financial companies.

At the beginning of a House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing where he faced a grilling over his handling of the program, Paulson insisted that injecting capital into banks was the most effective way to restore confidence and stabilize the financial system.

Now that Citigroup has announced massive costs cuts and been bailed out by taxpayers, the worst is over, right?

The engineers of the economic collapse aren’t finished with you yet. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to scare you into agreeing to more outright theft of your sovereignty, freedom and wealth.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is warning the public about a scam targeting families facing foreclosure. Local banks and homeowners have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to investigators. The FBI began tracking the schemes aimed mainly at Native Hawaiians, on Oahu, Maui and the Big Island a few months ago.

"They have been approached in person. They've been approached by storefront signs. They've been approached on the internet and they've been approached through friends of friends," said FBI spokesman Brandon Simpson.

U.S. producer prices posted a record drop last month, sliding for a third straight month as raw material and energy prices tumbled.

Eighty-five companies worldwide defaulted on their debt in the year through November 11, impacting a total of $284 billion, up sha