Wall Street and Gas Prices

Les Leopold of AlterNet has written an excellent article titled How Wall Street Drives Up Gas Prices -- Ripping Us Off and Killing Jobs.


Excerpt:


Next time you fill up your tank, remember that $10 to $25 is going right from your pocket to the financial sector.

Gasoline prices have been falling in recent weeks, but they're still close to their five-year high after climbing steeply for three years. For every penny increase at the pump, $1.4 billion per year leaves our collective pockets, creating a drag on the sluggish “recovery.” Where does it go and what caused the price explosion at the pump?

It's a common belief that oil prices are set on the world market by supply and demand. Less supply and/or more demand causes prices to rise. Oil is getting harder to find; OPEC is holding back supply; China and India are guzzling it up; Iran is threatening to blow it up. And regulations are getting in the way of drill, baby, drill -- end of story.

But this fixation on blind market forces ignores the fact that Wall Street is financializing the commodities markets – especially oil – as it seeks new ways to pick our pockets. The same greedy swindlers who puffed up the housing bubble and then milked it dry are now hard at work doing the same with gasoline.

What is financialization and why is it coming to the oil industry?

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ENTRY.

Put Equality First

Vanessa Baird wrote this fantastic article in the latest issue of New Internationlist which everybody should try to read.


PLEASE CLICK THIS LINK TO READ Put Equality First by Vanessa Baird.

We May Need to Print More Money?

One of the Bank of England’s leading economists has warned it may need to print even more money to bolster the sickly economy.

In a sign of growing fears over a double-dip recession, Dr Martin Weale signalled that it will step up its money-printing scheme if growth does not pick up soon.

The warning came before the Bank has even begun distributing the extra £75billion it set aside for its quantitative easing (QE) programme just days ago.

Today two new reports on Britain’s economic prospects make grim reading for ministers - predicting that growth could go into reverse next year as confidence levels in plunged to two-year lows.

In addition, Dr Weale’s comments came as the country braces itself for the worst labour market figures since the depths of the recession of the early 1990s.

Economists predict official data released on Wednesday will show unemployment rose by 90,000 to 2.54 million in the three months to August, pushing the jobless rate up to eight per cent. That is the worst figure for 17 years.

But Dr Weale, a member of the rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee, yesterday admitted there was ‘quite a lot of scope’ for QE to be expanded.

CLICK HERE to read the rest of the article written by Simon Duke.

Another Depression Ahead?

Europe is in disarray, stock markets are plunging, the banking crisis is back in full swing, gold is at record levels, and both the UK and US are self-evidently slipping back towards recession – not since the autumn of 2008 have things looked quite so ominous.

We appear to be at another pivotal moment, with Western economies once more staring into the abyss. At a conference in Frankfurt this week, Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, compared events to the Lehman Brothers catastrophe of 2008 and warned that many banks in Europe are essentially bust. His opposite number at KfW went further still and said that the present cocktail of negatives was “much more dramatic than 2008”.

Back then, governments and central banks still had the financial firepower and the will to attack the problem with massive injections of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

Today, the fiscal armoury is exhausted, while it is not clear that further monetary easing through the printing presses of “quantitative easing” would have any effect beyond adding to inflation.

Indeed, the parallels look alarmingly closer to the banking collapses of 1931, which plunged the world into prolonged depression, than the storms around the Lehman collapse.

CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THE ENTRY.

How to Survive a Nuclear Fallout

We are certainly living in dangerous times. The winds of change are blowing and they may blow radioactive particles our way depending on wind conditions. To be prepared for a nuclear fallout, please visit THIS LINK which must be read by as many.

Pass it on to your friends and loved ones. Take care and God bless all of us!

What you might not know about America

I came across this link which MIGHT tell you something that you may not be aware of.

CHECK IT OUT HERE.