The Wilsons began by getting rid of their son's heated water bed, turning off power to computers and televisions when not in use, changing to energy-efficient light bulbs, hang-drying their laundry and, finally, investing $58,000 (€42,000 £37,000) in a solar panel system - until they reduced their electricity bill to zero.

Then they signed up on the MyEmissionsExchange. com site to have their energy savings calculated. They found that they had already saved one tonne of carbon, which earned them a carbon credit. The exchange sold the credit for $21.50 to Molten Metal Equipment Innovations of Ohio, taking a 20 per cent commission.

The unemployment rate last year for young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans hit 21.1 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, reflecting a tough obstacle combat veterans face as they make the transition home from war.

The number was well above the 16.6 percent jobless rate for non-veterans of the same ages, 18 to 24.

The government is on pace to set the record for annual budget deficits, with 2010 figuring to be $1.56 trillion. Last year, it was $1.4 trillion. Things probably won’t get better in 2011, which is expected to post at least a $1 trillion gap. If this happens, it will mark the first time in U.S. history that the country endured three straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits.

An updated chart highlighting the option ARM and exotic mortgage loans made during the height of the bubble still shows us that many loans will go bad in the next couple of years. We need to remember that the vast majority of troubled option ARMs were made from 2004 to 2007. While analysts claim that there will be no reset problems, courtesy of low interest rates, the real problem stems from the recast of the mortgage. Much of this is typically hidden until it explodes like a financial time bomb.

At least five state senators say they've piled up so much unpaid rent, sheepish landlords are asking them when the government plans to make good on its bills.

"He said, ‘Ira, I'm sorry,'" said Sen. Ira Silverstein, D-Chicago, recalling a visit from his landlord delivering an eviction notice. "And what am I going to do? I can't argue with the man."

As Theodore Frank at the Washington Examiner points out, here are the reported ages of all 24 of the fatal Toyota (TM) cases:

60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89

Could it be that Toyota's PR crisis is actually a crisis of older folks improperly slamming on the pedals, and not some mysterious manufacturing glitch?

Declining finances, rising health care costs threaten a generation

While the mainstream media puts on the recovery song and dance, the fundamental problems of the collapse remain the same, and in some cases are growing ever more precarious. Subsections of the public, unaware of the real issues at hand, are holding a misguided jubilee in the tranquil eye of a hurricane, wrongly assuming that the storm has passed.

'The Consummation of Empire' focuses us on Ferguson's core message: At the very peak of their power, affluence and glory, leaders arise, run amok with imperial visions and sabotage themselves, their people and their nation. They have it all.

But more-is-not enough as greed, arrogance and a thirst for power consume them. Back in the early days of the Iraq war, Kevin Phillips, political historian and former Nixon strategist, also captured this inevitable tendency in Wealth and Democracy:

The response to slumping gasoline use would probably mean higher prices for drivers.

A top British law firm helped stricken banking giant Lehman Brothers hide its debts in the run-up to the bank's collapse, a report said yesterday.

Linklaters, one of the City's 'magic circle' law practices, signed off questionable accounting techniques to disguise $50billion (£36billion) debts.

The current global financial and economic crisis once again confirms the fact that during economic upheavals the rich get richer and the poor become even more destitute.

On Thursday, Forbes Magazine carried an updated list of the world's wealthiest people.

As of late 2009, the number of billionaires soared from 793 to 1,011 and their total fortunes from $2.4 trillion to $3.6 trillion. The number of Russian billionaires almost doubled, from 32 to 62.

Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal.

The surplus credits have been amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries and holding on to their more expensive official EU allowances.

The housing market is facing swelling ranks of homeowners who are seriously delinquent but have yet to lose their homes, and this is threatening a new wave of foreclosures that could hit just as the real estate market has begun to stabilize.

Wall Street was supposed to become the capital of a global carbon trading market worth a trillion dollars a year but now many who thought green trading desks would be the next big thing are fearing the pink slip.

As William K. Black said a year ago, the government's entire strategy now - as in the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts").

Paul Krugman and others pointed out that Geithner has been trying to artificially prop up asset prices, but that such a strategy cannot succeed.

As I've pointed out numerous times, the stress tests were a total sham, with a pre-ordained passing grade for the banks.

As I've noted repeatedly over the last couple of years, the government has allowed the giant banks to hide their liabilities and maintain dizzying amounts of leverage by using off-balance-sheet gimmicks:

Reports that Lehman was effectively ‘cooking its books’ prior to its ultimate demise are not a surprise.

Reports that Dick Fuld, then CEO of Lehman, was not aware of the nature of this cooking are both ridiculous and pathetic.

The lifeblood of every financial institution on Wall Street is access to financing for its operations. That financing very often comes in the form of repurchase agreements (repo financing), in which the institution borrows funds while pledging assets. These short term loans, often overnight loans, are unwound at a preset date and preset prices. The rates borrowers have to pay for funds borrowed depend on the credit quality of the borrower itself and the quality of the assets pledged.

Idaho may see more budget cuts next year.

At the state of the state address back in January, Governor Otter announced the state faced an 83 million dollar budget shortfall.

Residents eager to get their state tax refunds may have a long wait this year: The recession has tied up cash and caused officials in half a dozen states to consider freezing refunds, in one case for as long as five months.

States from New York to Hawaii that have been hard-hit by the economic downturn say they have either delayed refunds or are considering doing so because of budget shortfalls.

The state announced Thursday that year-to-date revenues are being revised to 12.7 percent below fiscal year 2009 as collections continue to fall below projections.

Retail sales rose last month by 0.3%, the Commerce Department said Friday. With the Super Bowl early in the month, electronic store sales soared.

Recently, the German television station ProSieben ran a news story covering W. C. Heraeus in Hanau, Germany, the world’s largest privately owned refinery. In the story, Wilfried Hörner, the head of the gold foundry, shows a 500 gram bar (16.0755 troy ounces) received from an unidentified bank. The bar had the right physical dimensions to be an authentic gold bar, but one of the Heraeus employees suspected something funny. After the bar was cut in half, you can see that the inside is tungsten, with only a coating of gold on the outside.

An obscure news item originally published in the N.Y. Post [written by Jennifer Anderson] in late Jan. 04 perhaps makes sense now.

DA investigating NYMEX executive ,Manhattan, New York, –Feb. 2, 2004.

The Trustees of Social Security Fund, in their annual report, have implied that the trust fund will turn cash flow negative around the year 2017. This doesn't mean they will be bankrupt and out of assets in 2017, just that they will start to pay out more in benefits than money they take in.

Well, scratch that 2017 date. The fund is now cash flow negative.

A real estate research firm is reporting there were 972 foreclosure filings in Hawaii in February.

Philadelphia officials have recovered more than $3 million in wage taxes that should have been deposited in the city treasury in 2005 — but never were.

Company officials expect to complete projects with the U.S. Navy and U.S. Customs and Border Protection in mid-June, according to a company news release.

For both federal agencies, Hagerstown-area workers do maintenance and modification to P3s, which are surveillance aircrafts, Smith said.

The department will be forced to close a staggering 62 fire companies and lay off more than 1,000 firefighters if the bad-news state budget becomes reality, Commissioner Salvatore Cassano told the City Council Wednesday.

You may love your hometown, but get ready to be nickel and dimed by it. Cities all over the country, strapped for cash, are coming up with some novel ideas for raising money, bit by bit.

These range from new charges for responding to 911 calls to taxes and fees on sodas, bottled water, groceries and grocery bags. One budget officer compares the annoyance factor of these niche taxes to having to pay baggage fees and other airline charges.

"Cities and states are going mostly after these kinds of sin taxes," says Justin H. Higginbottom, an analyst with the Tax Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington. "They'll target a politically unpopular industry and go after them to raise revenue. It's much easier to do that than to raise rates on sales taxes."

Americans are recovering their shrunken wealth — gradually. Household net worth rose last quarter, mainly because the healing economy boosted stock portfolios.

82% of the American public wants tougher regulation of Wall Street.

Most top independent financial experts say that we need to break up the big banks and otherwise rein in the financial giants in order to save the economy.

But Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and Congress like things just the way they are

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is doing what he was elected to do, govern. And that means playing hardball with union termites who refuse to give an inch to help the state out of budget problems primarily caused by untenable union promises, union wages, and union pensions.

When unions refused to cooperate, Christie decided to take the next logical step, to privatize jobs. Please consider New Jersey plans to privatize state jobs

Pratt’s sales tax revenues for January fell a whopping 29.9 percent over the same period in 2009 from $209,260 to $146,645, according to the Kansas Department of Revenue.

State spending cuts significantly have worsened the effects of the global economic downturn in the Islands, according to several Hawai'i economists who spoke to more than 150 advocates, lawmakers and others at the state Capitol yesterday.

Evidence seems to be mounting that we are headed towards some sort of implosion in the paper Gold market, and perhaps the currency/bond markets in general. Let’s take a look:

Perhaps it is only satire that is able to capture so eloquently and succinctly the insanity and truth of our current banking crisis. This for me, from the Daily Mash, is one of the best:

“Banks to Lend You Your Own Money”

THE government is to invest £500bn of your money in British banks so they can lend it back to you with interest.

I estimate that as much as 50,000 tonnes of gold have been sold that do not exist. That is equivalent of all the gold reserves in the world that are yet to be mined -- or, put another way, 25 years of gold production.

That is the granddaddy of all short positions.

The fractional reserve operation of the LBMA is likely to be the next Madoff scandal, except multiplied by 100 -- a $5 trillion fraud as opposed to a $50 billion fraud.

As the government has pledged more and more money to cover the companies' losses, it has assured the public that planning was underway for overhauling the firms so the bailouts would end. As recently as December, the Obama administration said it expected to release a preliminary report on how to remake Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac around Feb. 1.

But no plan was produced, and in response to questions from lawmakers, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner clarified last month that it would be another year before the government proposes how to restructure the firms.

Social Security benefits are off–limits to creditors, such as credit–card companies and banks. But the U.S. can collect debts to federal agencies by "offsetting," or withholding Social Security and disability payments.

The year is 2010 and to anyone not in denial, the industrialized nations have entered the greatest calamity the world has ever known:

* 35 Million Americans on Food Stamps: 12 Percent of U.S. Population on Food Stamps Highest Since Records Kept in 1969, and that’s before the Obama administration announced a planned three-year budget freeze on government discretionary spending. (My Budget 360)
* 18 Million empty houses in the United States and 39 million Americans who are no longer working or looking for work, and that’s before Federal Reserve finishes rewriting the rules of American “capitalism” as US Housing, the Automobile Industry and the American Dream are dismantled. (The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M., David E. Sanger)

New watchdog report says the Treasury Department sank billions into auto finance giant GMAC without an exit strategy or proof the company was viable - a decision that could cost taxpayers $6.3 billion.

The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February, keeping the flood of red ink on track to top last year's record for the full year.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the February deficit totaled $220.9 billion, 14 percent higher than the previous record set in February of last year.

The Canadian dollar, or loonie as it is affectionately called here, is likely to soar above parity with the US greenback this year, experts at a Canadian bank said Wednesday.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada (CIBC) chief economist Avery Shenfeld said the Canadian dollar had already gained several cents in recent weeks as the market firms up expectations of an interest rate hike in July.

If as expected, the central bank "is out in front of the US Federal Reserve by a couple of quarters" in raising interest rates, the Canadian dollar could reach 1.02 dollars versus the US dollar by September, before dipping back to 0.97 dollars by year end," Shenfeld said.

Unemployment rates worsened in 30 states in January:
In other words, unemployment increased in the majority of states.

However, CNN is seeing the glass as half full, noting in a report entitled "State unemployment picture brightens":

The Senate health-care bill would raise effective marginal tax rates on lower and middle-income singles and families up to 41%.

An Icelandic savings bank, Icesave, had attracted billions in deposits from hundreds of thousands of British and Dutch citizens, due to the phenomenally high interest rates it offered. Icesave collapsed in 2008, for much the same reason Lehman Brothers, WaMu, and hundreds of local savings banks did: its bankers used their cash to make complicated, bad, leveraged investments, mostly on real estate.

The level of debts written off because defaulting borrowers will never repay them shot up in 2009, Bank of England figures have shown.

In a letter to the CFTC's Chairman, Gary Gensler, GATA Chairman William Murphy shares the following bombshell:

"GATA has evidence that there are enormous physical short positions in the gold and silver markets that cannot be covered."

Even as the CFTC is meeting later this month to establish position limits in the gold, silver, and other precious metals' markets, it could be none other than the CFTC's core banks, and Mr. Gensler's former Goldman bosses, that form the very core of the biggest market manipulation collusion syndicate in the history of the commodity markets.

But after years of winks and nods, there's no doubt that Fannie and Freddie now enjoy an explicit guarantee, according to most observers. The U.S. government placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in conservatorship in September 2008: "This means that the U.S. Taxpayer now stands behind $5 trillion of GSE debt," according to the Congressional Research Service.

The problem is that $5 trillion of so-called agency paper is not treated as if it is a debt of Uncle Sam for accounting purposes, says Richard Suttmeier, chief market strategist at Niagara International Capital and ValueEngine.com.

Bank of America has apologized to a Pittsburgh-area woman after one of its contractors allegedly trashed her house and took her parrot while wrongly repossessing her home.

Forty-six-year-old Angela Iannelli sued the bank Monday. She claims her mortgage was up-to-date when one of the banking giant's contractors damaged furniture, took her pet parrot, Luke, and padlocked her Allison Park door in October.

The city receives its checks from the state about two months after they’re collected at cash registers. For November sales, January's receipts were 3.53 percent below the year before. City staff hoped February's increase of 1.35 percent from the previous year was a sign that they'd turn the corner. However, March numbers came in 17.9 percent below March 2009.

Efforts to modify loans and delay foreclosures may have helped hold down the stock of foreclosures for sale in the second half of 2009, fostering home-price stabilization. But that cure could require different medicine: an elevated level of foreclosures for sale over the next three years.

Tax collections continued to drop last month, led by another decline in sales tax receipts, falling $47.1 million short of estimates.

Another big employer is hanging out the "Not Hiring" sign.

State and local governments are collectively the nation's biggest source of jobs, together employing almost 15 times as many Americans as Wal-Mart.

The state of California has a $20 billion problem. But if the League of California Cities has its way, the state will have to look elsewhere when it comes to rummage through local governments' pockets and sofa cushions looking for loose change.

This continues to be a stagnant U-shaped versus V-shaped recession which rebounds after reaching rock bottom.

City and municipal officials from around the state came here today to urge the Legislature to grant them new revenue-raising options to pay for municipal services, such as reimbursing them for tax-exempt property within their borders.

"We are not asking for a handout," said Reading Mayor Tom McMahon, whose city, like 18 others in the state, including Pittsburgh, is now under Act 47 protection from the state because of its financial problems.

Tennessee’s budget hole just keeps getting deeper.

There are at least 6 theories about why the stock market has rallied some 70% off its lows a year ago, even though nothing has been done to actually address the root causes of the financial crisis.

Tulsa's sales-tax revenue this month dropped 11.6 percent or about $2 million from March 2009, capping off 12 straight months of negative numbers.

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