With the media finally waking up to the risk of recurring "systemic threats", aka Goldman not paying $20 billion in bonuses, courtesy of finding out just how much shit is really held by the Fed's discount window, everyone is suddenly interested in hearing it direct from the man at Ground Zero - Ron Paul... Even Steve Liesman, who no matter how hard he tries to spin "Audit the Fed" into "Control the Fed" will fail miserably every time he is not stuck in a patented blathering, factless monologue mode.

All those who have spent late hours playing SimCity 3000 and never understood why the damn thing would never get any people to move into it, will derive a deranged pleasure from the following clip. In China, where 8% GDP is guaranteed and has to be "goal seeked" by any and every increasingly more deranged economic project, the authorities have taken the game of SimCity and applied it to real life. Alas, they started out on "difficult" level

Read the whole article over here at Zero Hedge

The credit crunch is getting worse on Main Street, despite a Wall Street bailout that is now in the trillions of dollars. The Federal Reserve’s charts show that “base money” is rapidly expanding – meaning coins, paper money, and commercial banks’ reserves with the central bank. But the money isn’t making it to where it needs to go to stimulate economic growth: into the bank accounts of American businesses and consumers. The Fed has been pumping out money to the banks, and their reserves have been growing at unprecedented rates; but the money supply in the real economy has been declining.

The mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust, Nouriel Roubini says on CNBC Squawk Box.

jobs housing commercial real estate retail recovery labor market asset bubble carry trade dollar usdx Fed treasuries bonds interest rates Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke Roubini on Carry Trade unemployment numbers job losses dollar collapse yen gold commodities oil inside commodities conference WSJ Wall Street Journal

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk. Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

Interview with Marc Faber (Bloomberg News)

Interview with Marc Faber (Bloomberg News)

Interview with Marc Faber (Bloomberg News)

While Zero Hedge has been accused of disagreeing with President Obama's statements, ideas, and policies before, we would like to state on the record that we wholeheartedly agree with the President 

on this one occasion, with the caveat that it was uttered at a time when i) he was not a president, and ii) he presumably actually did in fact care about "our children and grandchildren" instead of simply indulging in an onanistic splurge of spending, bailing out beta chasing bankers and hedge fund managers, and, through his appointee Ben Bernanke, reducing the national currency of the United States to a smoking hulk of burnt toast. Superimposing Obama from 2006 with his current incarnation, threatens a schizoid break no less than would dropping Bono's two alter egos (Macphisto and The Fly) in the same room without a limitless supply of Thorazine.

Read more at Zero Hedge

Peter Schiff: Deflation vs. Inflation Argument

While the U.S. spends trillions of dollars to bail out its banking system, leaving its economy to languish, China is being called a “miracle economy” that has decoupled from the rest of the world. As the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s, China has maintained a phenomenal 8% annual growth rate. Those are the reports, but commentators are dubious. They ask how that growth is possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums. Economist Richard Wolff skeptically observes:

The backward revision economic data train continues, this time in 

GDP, which came in at a "better" than expected 1% while the prior quarterly data was adjusted significantly downward from -5.5% to -6.4%. Additionally, per a brand new revision to the way GDP data is presented, the GDP decline demonstrated over the past year is now the largest since World War II. Current quarter jiggering aside, downward revisions to prior quarters have left the decline in real GDP at -3.9% in the year through Q2. And to demonstrate, the severity of this downturn, the Q2 data concluded the first three-quarter consecutive period of falling GDP since 1953-1954

Read more at zerohedge.com  

Kucinich: the Federal Reserve is paying banks NOT to make loans to struggling Americans!