The US Federal Debt Is Unpayable
Around 1918, the UK went into decline. By the mid 1970’s, it was bankrupt. Starting in 1979, it experienced a bounce-back rally of sorts – thanks to their oil fields in the North Sea. Most people give Maggie Thatcher credit for their comeback, but the real white knight for the UK was the North Sea oil discovery,” he said.
You give me the largest oil field in the world, and I’ll show you a good time too. But the US would need four or five North Sea oil fields to save the current situation...because the Federal debt is unpayable. - www.minyanville.com
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(Reuters) - Scores of Indonesian men rallied on Friday to publicly vow their readiness to sacrifice their lives to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden, in a sign of the al Qaeda leader's popularity among hard-core Islamists in the most populous Muslim country.
The group, calling itself Al Kaida Solo, said it would focus attacks on the United States -- but there was no indication that it had the capacity to do so, or whether it was just bluster.
Several police kept watch on the rally in the city of Solo in central Java, but no one was detained.
"One hundred youths from Solo are ready to die to take revenge on the death of Osama," declared Choirul, a cleric in Al Kaida Solo and also a member of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) which has a history of violence including attacks on bars, nightclubs and the offices of Indonesia's Playboy magazine.
"His fight will not be ending," Choirul told the assembled group of around 60 men dressed in white Muslim robes with their faces covered to hide their identity.
Several other Indonesian Islamists have hailed bin Laden as a martyr this week, showing the continued militancy of some Southeast Asian groups, one of which predicted a major reprisal attack.
Security experts said the risk of attacks had risen.
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Jim Rogers:
Ben Bernanke Doesn’t Know About Currency Movements, He Doesn’t Know About Anything
All he said was that he didn’t know much about anything. When he was asked about currency movements I nearly fell off my chair.
What does he know about? He doesn’t know about currency movements, he doesn’t know about anything but he does know about printing money, he built his entire intellectual career around printing money and the government has given him control of the printing presses.
Jim Rogers is an author, financial commentator and successful international investor. He has been frequently featured in Time, The New York Times, Barron’s, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and is a regular guest on Bloomberg and CNBC.
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Twelve people were killed Saturday when Muslims attacked a church in Cairo, in the second incident of its kind since March. The attack set off violent clashes that ended in hundreds of injuries and almost 200 arrests.
The incident began when a Muslim mob attacked the St. Menas church after hearing rumors that a Christian woman married to a Muslim man had been kidnapped and was being held in the church. There does not appear to have been truth to the rumors.
The mob threw firebombs at the church, chanting, “With our blood and our souls we will defend you, Islam.” The crowds attacked nearby homes and shops with firebombs as well.
Many in the mob carried knives and machetes, and witnesses said they heard gunfire, which apparently came from rooftops.
Clashes broke out as Christians attempted to defend the church. In total, at least six Muslims and three Christians were killed, and more than 230 people were injured, 11 of them critically.
Police attempted to quell the violence, but fighting continued. Later at night a Muslim mob set fire to the nearby Virgin Mary church. On Sunday morning the mob continued the attack, setting fire to a six-story residential building over rumors that Christians had fired on Muslims from its windows.
Many Muslims living near the two churches expressed anger at the Muslim mob, and several Islamic clerics denounced the violence as well.
Similar clashes took place in March. The earlier clashes were also sparked by a rumor of Muslim-Christian love; in that case, Muslims stormed a church and set it on fire after hearing that a Muslim woman was romantically involved with a Christian man, a relationship prohibited by Islamic law, which allows Muslim women to marry only Muslim men.
On New Year's Day a church in Alexandria was bombed, killing 23 people
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Marc Faber “The more things will go bad, the worse things become, the more the money printer at the Fed, Mr. Bernanke, will print,” “He will print endlessly. Even if things go bad economically, you could have no revenues at companies and no earnings and stocks will go up because of money printing.”
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It's official.
Home prices have double dipped nationwide, now lower than their March 2009 trough, according to a new report from Clear Capital.
It was inevitable, and it was predicted (by me for sure) that a surge in sales of foreclosed properties and a big push by banks to facilitate short sales would force home prices down dramatically.
Sales of bank-owned (REO) properties hit 34.5 percent of the market, according to the survey, resulting in a national price drop of 4.9 percent quarterly and 5 percent year-over-year. National home prices have fallen 11.5 percent in the past nine months, a rate not seen since 2008. Add short sales, where the bank allows the borrower to sell for less than the value of the mortgage, and prices have nowhere to go but down.
"With more than one-third of national home sales being REO (bank owned), market prices are being weighed down as many markets have not regained enough footing to withstand the strain of the high proportion of REO sales," says Clear Capital's Alex Villacorta.
You don't have to tell Los Angeles Realtor Bill Kerbox any of this. LA prices had been improving, and LA is still one of the nation's best performing metro markets right now. Recently, however, prices took a turn, now down 2.4 percent quarter to quarter thanks to 34 percent REO saturation.
"We have definitely seen a number of both short sales and foreclosed properties along the West Side here, and they have definitely taken a hit," bemoans Kerbox. "It hurts to have a very low comp pop up next to your beautiful new home."
While the usual subprime mortgage suspects, like California, Arizona, Florida and Nevada used to rule the foreclosure roost and still have high volumes of distressed properties, the mid-west is seeing a surge in REOs now, thanks to the plain old recession. 40 percent of the Chicago market is foreclosures, 43 percent in Cleveland and 51 percent in Minneapolis. Home prices fell 8.7 percent in the Mid-West during the past three months compared to the previous quarter.
While the foreclosure crisis is abating on the front end, with fewer loans going newly delinquent, the pipeline of seriously delinquent loans is enormous. Banks are now ramping up the foreclosure process after the "robo-signing" paperwork scandal, but at their current pace it would take about four years to process all the bad loans through foreclosure and even longer to sell those homes out on the open market.
CNBC
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Iranian power struggle between president and supreme leader sees arrests and claims of undue influence of chief of staff
Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).
Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".
The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached.
On Sunday, Ahmadinejad returned to his office after an 11-day walkout in an apparent protest over Khamenei's reinstatement of the intelligence minister, who the president had initiallyasked to resign.
Ahmadinejad's unprecedented disobedience prompted harsh criticism from conservatives who warned that he might face the fate of Abdulhassan Banisadr, Iran's first post-revolution president who was impeached and exiled for allegedly attempting to undermine clerical power.
Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a hardline cleric close to Khamenei, warned that disobeying the supreme leader – who has the ultimate power in Iran – is equivalent to "apostasy from God".
Ahmadinejad has so far declined to officially back Khamenei's ruling over Heydar Moslehi, the minister at the centre of the row. In the first cabinet meeting since the president returned, Moslehi was absent.
Khamenei's supporters believe that the top-level confrontation stems from the increasing influence of Mashaei, an opponent of greater involvement of clerics in politics, who is being groomed by Ahmadinejad as a possible successor.
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Guardian
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