I think by now that we pretty much know where we stand regarding our finances, private & public, only this week we see an unprecedented move by the Bank of England to start “printing money” or quantitative easing as they like to put it – only an accountant could come up with a term like that. I must admit, its been quite amusing to see the presenters on TV & radio get their mouths around it (my spellchecker just kicked in as I had spelt it incorrectly too!)… Now this might sound like a trivial point, but this term, which I will now refer to as QE (thank goodness), is a symptom of the illness of the banking system in general – totally confusing & generally misunderstood by the average member of the public – if they are printing money, why not just say so? I expect it’s because they would hate for us to get the impression that they are running a counterfeit shop in Threadneedle Street?

The world of finance is indeed a mysterious one, so mysterious in fact, that those who run it don’t even understand how it works apparently, otherwise, would they not have foreseen the eventual results of lending to sub prime clients & inflating the credit market? I for one am worried that these are going to be lessons that will be learnt in the short term but quickly forgotten once greed starts to take a hold again & these institutions start running the same old money making rackets that they have in the past.

Can someone from HM Govt explain to me why we (the taxpayer) are bailing out these banks? The general opinion touted is that if they collapse, the whole banking system will collapse & bring down society with it…well, I’ve got a suggestion, why don’t our government set up their own bank? If they’ve managed to find billions of pounds to bail out the major banks, why couldn’t they use that money to fund their own bank instead?

Why can’t we have a new face in the High Street called “The Peoples Bank” – owned, operated & underwritten by HM Government & lending monies to us & taking deposits & savings from us? Ultimately, of course, this will mean that we (you & I the British taxpayer) will own the bank we use & as such will be stakeholders – I can’t think of a better incentive to make it work & more importantly to make it accountable.

There are certainly skills out there in the world of banking so why don’t the government recruit these people to use their expertise in the basics of banking & they could also employ the poor old branch staff so that they don’t end up losing their jobs – the difference is, the new bank could set up new contracts so that these people get paid a realistic wage & not the outrageous profiteering that has been going on by some individuals.

Total health care spending is estimated to be $8,300 per person in the country for 2009, according to a report issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to the U.S. Senate this week. The spending is estimated to amount to 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product. The report also advised that there will be an estimated 45 million uninsured Americans this year.

The report from the CBO also warned that if health care policies and health insurance remain unchanged, then by the year 2017, health care spending will grow to 20% of the gross domestic product, with as many as 54 million citizens uninsured in the country by 2019.

There is a problem and it needs to be addressed and quickly. The CBO suggests that a possible solution would be to convert from the current fee-for-service reimbursement system for doctors to a more preferable pay-for-performance system. Doctors and hospitals would receive premiums for excellent care and would lose payments for substandard performance.

The CBO has also suggested that one possible way to expand health insurance coverage would be to begin taxing employer-based group health insurance plans. The tax would theoretically give the consumer an incentive to look for lower cost health plans.

While the CBO report did offer solutions to a few health care reform problems, it did in fact, concede that any coverage expansion or health care cost reduction may not be apparent for at least another 10 years. Getting the plan implemented will not be a walk in the park, as it has been so stated.

Economic globalization has stealthily crept up on us over the last fifty or sixty years. The economy downturn has exploded suddenly by comparison in the last eighteen months (as at March 2009). This article will show you how the two are inextricably connected.

Economic globalization and the economy downturn are almost like two sides of the same coin. But most people are unable to see it that way. How many people can actually say they’ve been aware of a phenomenon that can be described as “globalization”? It exists in the public perception as only a hazy idea, even a good one, for is it not the reason why we can buy all those must-have gadgets in their eye-catching packaging for such low prices?

Here in the UK, and I know in most other western counties as well, we have in our shops and showrooms cars, TVs, electronic gadgets and household goods at prices well below what they once commanded, and this has been the case for many years now. It’s nothing to do with the reduced prices ushered in with the credit crunch as retailers try desperately to boost flagging sales.

No, these manufactured goods are cheap because the labour force that works long hours in far eastern factories is prepared to accept wages that we in the west could never live on. They’re happy to accept the equivalent of $50 or so a week, often less, and the Chinese government is happy to have a healthy trade surplus and comparatively full employment.

But the fact of the matter is that these cheap consumer goods come with a fatal side-effect. Anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together knows that we really should be making these products ourselves. After all, we in the west for the most part produced the technology and the genius that led to the invention and development of these electronic marvels in the first place. So why is it that we have to import them from the far east?

Another thing is this. How long can we go on doing so before we as a nation run out of money to pay for them?

Certainly in the case of the United Kingdom and the United States, we ran out of money long ago. Both are effectively bankrupt states, unable to repay their foreign loans if repayment were demanded. This is unlikely, perhaps, because if China, for example, being the leading creditor country of both the UK and the USA, demanded repayment of all the pounds and dollars owed to it, both countries would be forced to default.

What would happen next? Either the collapse of trade or a massive devaluation of the pound and the dollar to render them worth only a fraction of their previous value. And each of these outcomes would be disastrous to China, whose economy depends on the present charade continuing ad infinitum.

Already the recession has impacted this arrangement. Spiraling unemployment in the west has led to a collapse in demand for consumer goods, and this in turn has led to a sharp rise in unemployment in the far east including China.

Economic globalization, long held dear by establishment economists and ignorant politicians, is proving to be a disaster for every country. It’s the modern-day equivalent of “free trade”, which caused so much suffering to the working classes of western countries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It embraces the “free movement of labour” and the “free movement of capital” that are policies enshrined in the treaties of international bodies such as the corrupt, so-called “EuropeanUnion”.

What these fine-sounding slogans really mean is that huge, international manufacturing corporations responsible for producing everything from cars and computers to essential medical and technical equipment, and everything in between, are free to slash their labour costs by moving production to the far east (“free movement of capital”) and if the poor, wretched working people of the west find they are subsequently out of work, why, they can move around the globe until they find a job (“free movement of labour”), provided they will accept the lowest wages being paid anywhere.

It is no secret that we are in the midst of an economic meltdown that can only be compared to one or two similar cycles of economic turmoil, however in those previous economic downturns the Government did not spend Trillions of U.S. taxpayer money to bail out foreign banks and domestic corporations. The Government is printing Trillions of dollars in an attempt to fix the current economic crisis, which in the long run will lead to the devaluation of the dollar against world currencies making the situation worse.

In the modern era the US dollar is not backed by the gold standard as it was for the first two hundred years of this countries existence. In today’s market, the dollar is just a piece of paper and the value of it is decided by traders day after day. What makes our current situation so frightening is that our current Government is printing and spending Trillions of dollars to bail out foreign banks and financial institutions.

The company American International Group (AIG) is a perfect example to illustrate why the United States is heading down a very slippery slope in bailing out foreign banks. If you didn’t already know, the United States Government has given AIG $173 billion dollars in bailout money. AIG reported the largest quarterly loss in United States history last quarter at $61 billion. They were just given another $30 billion by the United States Government last week. The most frightening thing is that no one knows where all the $173 Billion ended up. Recently, the Wall Street Journal compiled a list of various banks, foreign and domestic who have received at least $50 billion of the $173 billion given to AIG by the United States Government. It is unconscionable that in today’s economic climate with foreclosures at a record level that the United States Government would hand out such large amounts without precise accounting to see that every penny is being properly utilized.

The Downfall of AIG: AIG was heavily exposed to toxic assets, seen as the root cause of the credit crisis through its London-based financial products unit, which guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars worth of credit instruments. “They wrote a lot of insurance cover on default swaps for financial institutions all over the world,” one market source told Reuters on Friday. So in essence, the United States Government is bailing out foreign banks who contracted with AIG to insure the toxic assets on their books. In plain meaning you and I are paying for their mistakes.

Back when the times were good and these FAT CAT BANKERS were paying themselves multi-million dollar bonuses everything was rosy. Now that their ponzi scheme has come tumbling down, the United States Taxpayers are left holding the bag by bailing out these foreign banks.

At least two dozen American and European banks benefited from the bailout of AIG, with approximately $50 billion paid out to them since the Federal Reserve first gave aid to the insurance giant, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Here is a list of the banks, domestic and foreign who have received huge sums of money from United States Taxpayers to bail out foreign banks through AIG:

Goldman Sachs- Received $6 Billion
Deutsche Bank- Received $6 Billion
Socit Gnrale – Received $4.8 Billion
Calyon – Received $1.8 Billion
Barclays – Undisclosed
Rabobank -Undisclosed
Danske – Undisclosed
HSBC – Undisclosed
Royal Bank of Scotland- Undisclosed
Banco Santander -Undisclosed
Morgan Stanley-Undisclosed
Wachovia-Undisclosed
Bank of America- Undisclosed
Lloyds Banking Group- Undisclosed

I find it interesting that Goldman Sachs was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the money given to AIG by US taxpayers to bail out foreign banks. Our current treasury secretary Henry Paulson the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, has a net worth of over $700 million dollars and without a doubt still has millions of shares of Goldman Sachs stock. Did he oversee a personal bailout for himself at the expense of the United States taxpayer money that was supposed to be used to bail out foreign banks? The rest of the foreign banks will not disclose the amount received from AIG that came from US taxpayers, but with political pressure mounting that door will blow open any day and we will all get a glimpse of how the FAT CAT BANKERS have taken the world hostage when the “secrecy” is shattered.

For the most part the banks listed in this article have put the world’s economy in its current major meltdown mode. They did it knowingly by issuing guidelines for loans that were risky, toxic, and in most cases they knew would go bad. They expected real estate prices to keep escalating so the borrower could just keep refinancing out of these toxic loans into other loans which would keep lining their FAT CAT BANKER pockets.

If you are in a tough situation with your current loan, or you have a loan that you feel was deceptive there is hope. There are Federal and State Statutes on the books to protect American Consumers from Deceptive Lending Practices. The penalties for violating these laws are very severe and can result in your mortgage payment being lowered by hundreds of dollars per month, you can get the principal amount of your loan reduced by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if the violations are severe enough you can even be awarded monetary damages for violations of these Federal and State Statutes.