McGraw-Hill, the parent company of Standard & Poor’s, announced that Deven Sharma will resign on September 12.
Sharma is the president of S&P’s. The announcement did not mention if the resignation is related to the recent downgrade of the United States.
Sharma will be replaced by Citibank’s (evil) chief operating officer Douglas Peterson.
In Asian markets, gold went over $1,900 per ounce. The U.S. dollar continues to fall against most Asian money.
Even in Burma the U.S. dollar hit a ten year low. Nobody wants the worthless money: “Despite the falling price, most of the customers are selling their dollars.”-a foreign exchange dealer in Tamwe Township in Rangoon.
The reason for the exploding gold prices, and crashing U.S. dollar, is because many international market players believe the Federal Reserve Bank will try to stimulate the U.S. economy, by making credit easy, and printing more worthless dollars.
Here’s a little lesson in the concept of value: The more there is of something, the less it’s worth. So, if a country prints off money like there’s no tomorrow, and that money is already worthless, how do you think the world is going to react?
They’re going to react like they already are; buying gold and dumping U.S. dollars.
The Japanese central banks are trying to stop their yen from rising in value (which hurts their export economy), so they’ve been flooding their markets with cash. But the U.S. dollar is so worthless that it continues to fall against the yen, which pushes up the value of the yen.
Even the Australian and New Zealand dollars are now worth more than the U.S. dollar.
U.S. citizen Hunter Levan, 29, came to China in 2009. Initially it was to learn Chinese: “I realized if I ever wanted to learn Chinese, I would have to move here and ‘do as the Romans do’.”
But after learning the language, Levan realized it was a good place to find a job: “I sent out e-mails and resumes in Chinese, and got feedback in less than five days.” He now works as a consultant for Spring Airlines in Shanghai.
Alison Watts, 28, knew little about China: “But all my friends who have been here said it was incredibly fantastic, so I decided to take the big step forward.”
Watts’ experiences with journalism got her a job hosting an English-language TV show in Shanghai. She says “…amazing opportunities keep popping up.”
Ted Hornbein, a U.S. businessman, has worked in China since the early 1990s. Now he’s a board member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. He says a lot has changed since the 1990s: “Today you have local and Western restaurants and your whole family here with you…I have seen a 180-degree shift from my first July 4 party in China.”
In January 2011, CNN asked the U.S. Department of State how many U.S. citizens were leaving for jobs in China. The official response was that it was difficult to know because U.S. citizens are not required to tell the state department about living and working in China.
However, international employment agencies say they’ve seen a big jump in U.S. workers going to China for jobs, ever since 2007.
The Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University, says Shanghai and Beijing are the big hot spots for U.S. workers, but in the past couple of years other regions of China are opening up.
Seems like China is doing more to find jobs for U.S. citizens, than the U.S. government is doing here in the United States!
According to AARP, for the Baby Boomers that are still in the workforce, 40% of them plan to work “until they drop.”
A recent survey of U.S. workers, that included all age groups, found that 54% plan to keep working when they hit retirement age, and 39% plan to either work past age 70, or never retire at all.
A CESI Debt Solutions survey found that 56% of U.S. retirees still had outstanding debts when they retired.
The University of Michigan found that people 55 years of age, or older, now account for 20% of all bankruptcies in the United States. In 2001, they accounted for only 12% of all bankruptcies.
Between 1991 and 2007 the number of people between the ages of 65 and 74, that filed for bankruptcy rose by 178%!!!
The American Journal of Medicine reports that medical bills are a major factor in more than 60% of personal bankruptcies in the United States. Approximately 75% percent of the people who file bankruptcy due to medical bills have health insurance!
More than 30% of all U.S. investors, currently in their sixties, have more than 80% of their 401k retirement plans invested in the volatile stock markets.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system paid out more in benefits than it received in payroll taxes in 2010. That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016.
The University of Chicago, and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, calculated the combined pension liability for all 50 U.S. states. They found that all 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they have only $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds. That means, collectively, the state governments are short $3.2 trillion.
The U.S. government now says Medicare will run out of money five years sooner than they were projecting just last year.
Iranian oil official, Mohammad Ali Khatibi, has just stated that OPEC will not allow oil prices to fall much further.
Iran currently holds the presidency of OPEC. Khatibi says Iran will call an emergency OPEC meeting if oil prices fall too much.
Iran blames the United States, and Europe, for creating highly unstable markets, that do not reflect the true value of resources.
When orders were finally given to evacuate areas around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, government officials led people to believe it would only be a few months.
It’s more than five months, and now the government realizes the level of contamination is so bad that it will be “…a long, long time…” before some city and towns can be considered safe for people to live in.
A meeting is being arraigned with local officials to explain the severity of the situation, and to better explain to evacuees why they might never be able to return home.
“It is much worse than a recession, in fact it is even worse than a depression… The White House has told us we have been on a recovery…which is a complete lie.”-Edward Spannaus, Executive Intelligence Review
“…there will be no recovery…until we take steps to deal with the Wall Street gambling casino, the speculators, which is what is really killing our economy.”
“…shutting down the big speculator banks. And the way to do that is by restoring Franklin Roosevelt’s law, the Glass Steagall law, which would shut down the gambling casino, wipe out the phoney debts, and that would enable us to get around to rebuilding our economy…”
“I question even the term ‘investors’ these days, because an investor is someone who invests for the long term. And what you see today in these markets, is very short term speculation.”
“As long as these banks are sitting on huge piles of money, from bailouts, from the Federal Reserve giving them free money, and they’re just speculating with this, they’re not investing, not lending to businesses, they’re not doing anything to create jobs.”
“The State of America’s Children is absolutely horrific and what’s worst of all is that very few people in America know about this…added to this we’re going through what I call a Main Street Depression, it is worse than the 1930s…”-Stephen Lendman, commentator Chicago
The Annie E. Casey Foundation, a non-profit child advocacy group, revealed that 31 million children live in families that are one or two paychecks away from economic catastrophe.
The Casey Foundation’s study also found that between 2007 and 2009, 5.3 million children had to leave their homes due to foreclosure.
The Children’s Defense Fund echo’s the Casey Foundation’s report. The CDF says the bad economy is driving up the number of children involved with dropping out of school, hunger, crime, etc, to record levels.
Many other organizations are coming up with corresponding data.
For the past couple of weeks Berlin has been plagued with car fires. At first police thought it was the usual anti-elitists targeting the cars of wealthy people, but many cars were not owned by the rich.
Now, hundreds of Germans are rioting in Hamburg. It started during a street festival. People began attacking and burning banks.
2,500 police are on the streets, using water cannons. Police don’t relate this to the increasing number of poor people in Germany. Police say these Hamburg riots happen every year.
According to The Metro, recently the NYPD “Disorder Control Unit” held a massive civil unrest exercise involving 180 cops.
One New York City cop arrogantly dismissed recent riots in England: “The London response wasn’t that great, they were outnumbered and taken by surprise.”-Mike Codella, retired NYPD detective
Part of the training involves teaching the cops how to “troll” social media sites. The trolling skills are now mandatory for a newly created juvenile justice unit