STWR - Share The World's Resources

"Whether personal or planetary, a tornado of foreclosures, bankruptcies, missing money-now arriving on the world stage as a housing bubble, soon devolving into a credit bubble-is ripping through the United States economy and world markets and will ultimately shatter, splinter, and shred, not only the fiscal fabric of America but is likely to catapult the global economy itself into massive meltdown."

6th March 07 - Fred E. Foldvary, The Progress Report

On Tuesday, February 27, 2007, Mr. Market had a big fall, following a big drop of nine percent in the Chinese stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial average fell 533 points for the week, more than four percent, wiping out the year’s gains. The NASDAQ average fell by 6 percent, and the S&P 500 dropped by 4.4 percent. Stock markets all over the world also slid south.

The US stock market had been rising for the past few years, after the big drop in the recession of 2001. Investors are now wondering, it is this the end of the bull market, or just a correction. A “correction” means that stocks have risen too fast, to levels beyond that warranted by fundamentals such as profits, and so they fall back after a speculative rise. Stocks then resume a normal rise due to increasingly better fundamentals such as growing sales.

1st March, Dean Baker, Institute for Public Accuracy

Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Baker said today: "A lower stock market is good for a lot of people. If corn prices fell 30 percent, that would be bad for you if you're a corn farmer, but good for you if you weren't and ate a lot of corn. Stock ownership is highly concentrated; 75 percent of the population holds little or no stock (including retirement accounts), so if stocks go down and you don't own any, you're better off.

"When stocks plunge in value, it's similar to a situation where there are trillions of dollars in counterfeit currency, held by a small group of people, and the police seize and burn it. This is good news for the rest of us because the trillions of dollars of counterfeit money will not be bidding up the prices of things like houses and cars. Any honest economist would have to concede this point -- it's elementary economics, but many economists tend to cheer the stock market, in effect favoring the wealthy at everyone else's expense."

Baker's most recent book is "Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer."

He added: "Greenspan, as head of the Federal Reserve in 1987 intervened to bail out the stock market. The federal government takes as a goal higher stock prices -- they don't have higher wages as a policy. In retrospect, this intervention set the stage for the stock bubble of the 1990s. The U.S. government in effect subsidizes stock owners, who tend to be wealthier." More Information

DOUG HENWOOD
Henwood is editor of Left Business Observer and author of the book Wall Street. He said today: "We won't know for a few weeks whether yesterday's 416-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average was just one of those seizures that financial markets experience now and then -- and so of concern to just a handful of speculators -- or something of broader economic significance.

"But the market did seem worried about some real things, a departure from about five years of profound complacency. There's the possibility of a meaningful slowdown in both the U.S. and Chinese economies, which have become so tied together that trouble in one means trouble in the other; the bursting of a speculative bubble in Chinese stocks; and the chance that troubles in the U.S. housing market, which Wall Street has declared to be largely over, are actually getting seriously worse."

CONTACT: Institute for Public Accuracy
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020;
or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

7th Feb 07 - Mike Whitney, Information Clearing House

The dollar rests on the crumbling foundation of consumerism and oil. Our gluttonous appetite for spending has kept the greenback flying high for decades. The endless lust for electronic gadgetry, the latest fashions, and useless knick-knacks.

Economists call our profligate spending “the engine for global growth”. No other country in the world is nearly as addicted to binge-spending as the USAs long as he can beg, borrow or steal his way into the shopping mall the orgy of spending is bound to continue. But there are signs that the US consumer is beginning to buckle from the weight of personal debt. consumer. 

15th Jan 07 - Ralph Nader, Common Dreams

The boiling, surging, churning and corporatizing economy of the United States is racing far ahead of its being understood by political economists, economists, politicians and the polis itself. Tidbits from the past week add up to this view, to wit:

--The giant, shut-down Bethlehem steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania will soon become a $600 million casino and hotel complex. With tens of millions of Americans lacking the adequate necessities of food, fuel, shelter, health care and a sustaining job, this project is part of a 25 year trend by the economy, moving away from necessities and over to wants and whims. Among the fastest growing businesses for three decades in America are theme parks, gambling casinos and prisons.

--Our Constitution launched "we the people" to "establish justice, .promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves." We're losing ground year after year on all three accounts. Yet to what does Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. devote his /entire/ annual report on the federal judiciary this January 1, 2007? He called for a pay raise for judges, calling the current pay ranging from $165,200 to $212,000 (with a great retirement plan) a "constitutional crisis."