The Wake Up Project

Struggling financial firms Citi, BofA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are dominating late summer Wall Street trading. Uh-oh. Who says speculation is dead? (CNNMoney.com) -- They say you can't trust the government. Don't tell that to Wall Street traders. A bizarre trend has emerged during these hazy, lazy days of late summer. Overall market volume is unsurprisingly wafer-thin, but a big chunk of trading has been in just four financial companies that have received a healthy dose of support from Washington in order to make it through the credit crisis. For the past few days, Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) (which taxpayers now own a third of), mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500) and Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) (which were placed under government conservatorship last September) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) (which has needed $45 billion in bailout funds) have been far and away the most actively traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, these four wounded h...

The Federal Reserve argued yesterday that identifying the financial institutions that benefited from its emergency loans would harm the companies and render the central bank’s planned appeal of a court ruling moot. The Fed’s board of governors asked Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska to delay enforcement of her Aug. 24 decision that the identities of borrowers in 11 lending programs must be made public by Aug. 31. The central bank wants Preska to stay her order until the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York can hear the case. “The immediate release of these documents will destroy the board’s claims of exemption and right of appellate review,” the motion said. “The institutions whose names and information would be disclosed will also suffer irreparable harm.” The Fed’s “ability to effectively manage the current, and any future, financial crisis” would be impaired, according to the motion. It said “significant harms” could befall the U.S. economy as well. The central bank di...

The newsletter Growth Stock Wire says recent gains in the stock market are just temporary. Growth Stock Wire says the pickup in leading economic indicators and the stock market's gains are the result of the government’s throwing trillions of dollars into the system. Home sales today are higher this month than last, but way lower than this time last year. Auto sales have picked up due to the "cash for clunkers" program. And the pickup in nearly every other consumer durable product is due mostly to restocking depleted inventories. The newsletter says a better way to gauge the strength of economic activity is to look at the Baltic Dry Index, which tracks the price it costs to ship commodities overseas. This Index is still 60% below where it was a year ago. If the economy were truly in "recovery" mode, the Baltic Dry Index would be moving consistently higher and it's not. The stock market has gotten way ahead of itself. Investors are banking on a booming economy...

The first INTERNATIONAL Swine Flu Conference finished August 21st. As Jesse Woodrow states in this video, THERE HAS NOT BEEN ANY MENTION OF THIS ON ANY NEWS NETWORK. Go to Google news and type in "Swine Flu Conference" You would think it would be the top news article. IT ISN'T EVEN MENTIONED !! WHY NOT? This is the pdf Jesse referring to in the video- http://www.new-fields.com/isfc/brochure.pdf Also here: http://www.cesa.net/DOCS/08192009.PDF

by Bill Sardi America is just a few days away from a possible day of reckoning. I again call attention to this day, August 25, when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issues its 2nd Quarter report for 2009 on the state of health of American banks. It has not particularly alarmed Americans that its growth and prosperity have been built upon debt. The American public is a bit desensitized, particularly since the Y2K threat fizzled. We must wait and see how Americans respond to the upcoming FDIC report. The following charts tell the story. There are roughly 8400 American banks that set aside a small portion of their profits to aggregately insure bank depositors should their local bank fail. A plethora of bank failures has depleted the FDIC reserve fund from $52.8 billion in 2008 to $13 billion in the 1st Quarter of 2009. (See chart below) Alison Vekshin, writing for Bloomberg, indicates "The failure of 77 banks this year is draining the fund, prompting the agency in May to...

Israeli media reports that visiting National Security Adviser General Jim Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have told the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop complaining about Iran because the US is preparing to take action "in eight weeks" demonstrate that even when everything changes in Washington, nothing changes. President Barack Obama has claimed that a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a high priority but the Israelis and their allies in congress and the media have been able to stonewall the issue. Israel has made no concessions on its settlement policy, which is rightly seen as the single biggest obstacle to eventual creation of a Palestinian state, and has instead pushed ahead with new building and confiscations of Arab homes. Obama has protested both Israeli actions but done nothing else, meaning that Israel has determined that the new US president’s policies are toothless, giving it a free hand to deal with t...

BAGHDAD — Iraqi and American troops seized a rocket launcher loaded with about a dozen Iranian-made rockets aimed at an American base in the southern city of Basra, Iraqi officials said Tuesday. The United States military said in a statement that Iraqi and American forces conducted a search operation on Basra’s outskirts after hearing explosions near the base Monday night. The American statement said that Iraqi security forces confiscated 16 rockets and arrested three in connection with the operation without giving further details. No casualties were reported. A spokesman for the Basra police force, which took part in the operation, said that a rocket launcher loaded with 13 Grad rockets, positioned on the back of a pickup truck, was found in the Shatt al Arab district northeast of Basra. There was no explanation for the discrepancy in the number of rockets. “They came from a neighboring country,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Rafie al-Jawad, but he refused to specify which one. An Iraq...

BBC Interviewer calls claim that Arctic ice would disappear by 2030 “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism” Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold has been forced to admit that his organization issued misleading and exaggerated information when it claimed that Arctic ice would disappear completely by 2030, in a crushing blow for the man-made global warming movement. In an interview with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Leipold initially attempted to evade the question but was ultimately forced to admit that Greenpeace had made a “mistake” when it said Arctic ice would disappear completely in 20 years. The claim stems from a July 15 Greenpeace press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” in which it is stated that global warming will lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2030. Sackur accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing “misleading information” based on “exaggeration and alarmism,” pointing out that it was “preposterous” to cl...

In Washington these days, the only topics of discussion seem to be how many trillions to throw at health care and the recession, and whom on Wall Street to pillory next. But watch out. Lurking just below the surface is a bailout candidate that may soon emerge like the great white shark in Jaws: Social Security. Perhaps as early as this year, Social Security, at $680 billion the nation's biggest social program, will be transformed from an operation that's helped finance the rest of the government for 25 years into a cash drain that will need money from the Treasury. In other words, a bailout. I've been writing about Social Security's problems for more than a decade, arguing that having the government borrow several trillion dollars to bail out Social Security so that it can pay its promised benefits would impose an intolerable burden on our public finances. However, I've changed my mind about what "intolerable" means. With the government spending...

Wall Street's mantra is that markets move randomly and reflect the collective wisdom of investors. The truth is quite opposite. The government's visible hand and insiders control markets and manipulate them up or down for profit - all of them, including stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. It's financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls "pump and dump," defined as "artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price," then profit more on the downside by short-selling. "This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common," and in today's volatile markets likely ongoing daily. Why? Because the profits are enormous, in good and bad times, and when carried to extremes like now, Fitts calls it "pump(ing) and dump(ing) of the entire American economy," duping...

Credit is not flowing. In fact, credit is contracting. That means things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. When credit contracts in a consumer-driven economy, bad things happen. Business investment drops, unemployment soars, earnings plunge, and GDP shrinks. The Fed has spent more than a trillion dollars trying to get consumers to start borrowing again, but without success. The country's credit engines are grinding to a halt. Bernanke has increased excess reserves in the banking system by $800 billion, but lending is still slow. The banks are hoarding capital in order to deal with the losses from toxic assets, non performing loans, and a $3.5 trillion commercial real estate bubble that's following housing into the toilet. That's why the rate of bank failures is accelerating. 2010 will be even worse; the list is growing. It's a bloodbath. The standards for conventional loans have gotten tougher while the pool of qualified credit-worthy borrowers has s...