US Action News

The number of home repossessions is likely to rise about 25 percent from the more than 804,000 properties seized last year as lenders resume foreclosure actions, Daren Blomquist, a spokesman for RealtyTrac. – Bloomberg.com

There is so much happening so rapidly that the average American has no idea of the state of the country. Few understand that the situation is hopeless, regardless of what government does. Defaults, both private and sovereigns are coming. The laws of mathematics say there is no solution.

The Greek economy is now totally and completely dysfunctional. The government has resorted to price controls on goods to contain costs. However, price controls do nothing but cause shortages. – Mish Shedlock

Are they related? Two different surveys show one third of Americans fear an Obama reelection and two thirds fear an economic collapse.

Even with trillions squandered on “stimulus” and housing schemes there is no recovery in sight for housing.

After 40 years of unending fiat money expansion, the world suffers from excess levels of debt. A lot of this debt will never be repaid. My expectation is that the market will increasingly question the ability and the willingness of most states – and that, crucially, includes the big states – to control their spending and to shed their addiction to debt financing.

For a while, large numbers of Americans still believed that the right politician would bring them “hope” and “change”, but now crushing despair is giving way to absolute desperation for millions of people. Desperate people do desperate things, and as our major cities continue to decay they are going to become very dangerous places to be.

Last September the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, announced it was suing the nation’s 17 largest banks—some of which the government had recently bailed out—for selling risky mortgages to the two GSEs. Yet just two months before, the Department of Justice “requested” that a number of banks lower lending standards for minorities with poor credit ratings, threatening them with discrimination charges if they failed to comply. – The Freeman

“[T]he reality is that the economy is currently struggling along at a very anemic pace. Without employment growing fast enough to offset the labor pool overhang, we are unlikely to reduce the real unemployment problem that persists in the U.S.” – Steettalklive.com

[T]here is a Fed-financed bailout of European banks in progress. The Fed is implementing it through currency swaps because swaps obscure the nature of the transaction, which is in reality a loan. (The Greek government used currency swaps to hide the size of its fiscal deficits.)