"The homeless in America have Goldman Sachs to thank for their homelessness and starvation right now. They took the money from their pockets, they put it in their bonuses for this year. . . . That's a financial terrorist crime."

-- Former stock trader Max Keiser in...

On October 21, 2009, Dave Camp, the GOP Ranking Member on the House Ways and Means Committee, issued a disturbing report on the status of new job creation since President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan went into effect in February. According to the report, the nation has actually lost...

The credit crunch is getting worse on Main Street, despite a Wall Street bailout that now measures in the trillions of dollars. The Federal Reserve's charts show that "base money" is rapidly expanding -- meaning coins, paper money and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank. But the money...

"A year ago," said law professor Ross Buckley on Australia's ABC News last week, "nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it's the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries."

The IMF may have catapulted to a...

A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right...

A year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, questions still swirl around its collapse. Lawrence MacDonald, whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense came out in July 2009, maintains that the bank was not in substantially worse shape than other major Wall Street banks. He...

The government seems to be speaking out of both sides of its mouth, as the President preaches one thing and the FDA does another. If we are going to have "smarter medicine that really works," we need to get politics, lobbies and cronyism out of science.

President...

"I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." -- Deng Xiaoping, who opened China to foreign investment after 1978

President Obama has repeated his call for a public option in health care, in order to create some competition for the insurance companies and keep them honest. We the people need to call for a public option in banking, in order to create some competition for the private banks and...

California has over $17 billion on deposit in banks that have refused to honor its IOUs, forcing legislators to accept crippling budget cuts. These austerity measures are unnecessary. If the state were to deposit its money in its own state-owned bank, it could have enough credit to solve its budget...

Since Wall Street has failed to provide a functioning credit system, California would be totally justified in providing its own. The other choice is to accept debt peonage.

In the latest twist to the California budget saga, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase (which each got $25...

"As goes California," says the adage, "so goes the nation." All eyes are therefore on the Golden State as it attempts to solve its $26 billion budget deficit. The world's eighth largest economy is not going quietly into that pit of debt and devastation that has devoured Third World countries...

"Our wallet is empty, our bank is closed and our credit is dried up."

- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, June 2, 2009

California State Controller John Chiang has warned that without a balanced budget in place by July 1, he will begin using IOUs to pay most of the state's...

You must be a pirate for the Pirate's Code to apply and you're not, and the code is more of what you call guidelines than actual rules.

-- The evil Captain Barbossa who stole the Black Pearl, in Pirates of the Caribbean

Buried on...

While contrarians are screaming "hyperinflation!", the money supply is actually shrinking. This is because most money today comes into existence as bank loans, and lending has shrunk substantially. That means the Fed needs to "monetize" debt just to fill the breach.

On June 3, 2009, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke...

"I understand that these cuts are very painful and they affect real lives. This is the harsh reality and the reality that we face. Sacramento is not Washington -- we cannot print our own money. We can only spend what we have."

- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in...