The Wake Up Project

Falling pensions, cuts and the banking crisis will impoverish many families, says Edmund Conway. By Edmund Conway Published: 9:05AM BST 01 Jul 2010 You don't usually expect radical neo-Marxism from the International Monetary Fund – the last great bastion of capitalism, spreading the gospel about the free market to the furthest reaches of the world. And yet, hidden away in an obscure IMF report a few years back is a short sentence that explains precisely the problems that Britain, and the rest of the Western world, have been sleepwalking towards for years. The claim made by the IMF's Financial Stability Report in 2005, in a seemingly throwaway remark, was that households had become the financial system's "shock absorber of last resort". In other words, whereas in previous eras, much of the pain of recession and financial crisis was borne by businesses or governments, with families afforded some degree of protection by the pensions system or welfare state, it was no...

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 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...