Weren't you listening before? Now you're joining my band. Hope you can play guitar.

LONDON: The UK Pound declined against the dollar today after the market digested Moody’s warning about a possible downgrade of the country’s credit rating. “Britain and the U.S. had ‘resilient’ AAA ratings, as opposed to the ‘resistant’ top ratings on Canada, Germany and France, Moody’s said in a report today,” according to Bloomberg.

Credit-rating agency Moody’s Investor Services on Tuesday warned that the United States and Great Britain may test the limits of their AAA sovereign ratings due to deteriorating public finances.

“These are the AAA countries whose public finances are deteriorating considerably and may therefore test the AAA boundaries,” wrote Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of Moody’s sovereign risk group… Read more…

WASHINGTON: When it comes to public policy we thought these guys were supposed to be smart, veritable Einsteins as it were. The economy is still broken, apparently. First it was TARP. Then the Fed prints money like it is going out of style. (It IS going out of style.) Then the interim budget. Then the new budget. Then the Stimulus, with tons of earmarks. Followed by massive deficit spending. Surprise, nothing has  fixed the economy!

So President Obama today revealed his new jobs policy. Guess what? We as nation must continue to “spend our way out of this recession.” So what didn’t work before we will now do more of. Whatever happened to Einstein’s famous quotations:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

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WASHINGTON: George Soros is positioning himself to set a new record in profits, thanks to the Obama administration. Due to the profligate spending of congress the US is well on its way to defaulting on its current obligations, possibly within the next 12 months. How is that possible, you say? Let’s take a look at it.

For example, let’s say you are running a household burdened by credit card debt, and that your monthly income is not adequate to pay your bills. Your next course of action? Bankruptcy. Same thing with countries, only it is called default. We saw that just last week in Dubai:

Dubai shook investor confidence across the Persian Gulf after its proposal to delay debt payments risked triggering the biggest sovereign default since Argentina in 2001. November 26, 2009. Bloomberg News

How can that happen to a country? By not having sufficient reserves to cover its short term obligations. Read more…

Zimbawe 100 Trillion Dollar Note

WASHINGTON: The US Debt has just topped 12 trillion dollars and is still climbing. If anything, the rate of acceleration is increasing, so we can look for more rampant spending to come. Our counter in the right column shows a running total so you don’t miss a minute of the action. USDebtClock.org gives a great snapshot of the whole picture. The US Department of the Treasury updates their website once per day, found here.

$12 trillion in debt cannot be paid off without draconian measures. Our federal reserve is printing currency like it is going out of style. (It IS going out of style.) This policy devalues our currency and will ultimately lead to runaway inflation. History has shown over and over again the fallacy of this approach. Countries like Zimbawe who try it end up destroying their currency,  their economy, and their country. In January 2009 the Zimbawe 100 trillion dollar note on the left was worth about $300. It quickly fell to zero. Our creditors know the danger the US is in. That is why Moody’s has warned the US about an impending credit downgrade. Read more…

WASHINGTON: Get us some oxygen. Staffers at the NIP passed out when they saw the “revised” job stimulus numbers last Friday. Early in the AM Recovery.gov was still reporting 30,383 jobs created or “saved” by the stimulus. (Read our coverage of those numbers here.) When the AP had examined those numbers they found 1 in 6 were bogus. We thought it odd that Robert Gibbs retorted at the time that the AP had found “only 5000″ phony jobs.

Sometime later on Friday the “revised” numbers were posted. That was when we needed the oxygen. Not in our wildest dreams did we think the WH would “revise” the claim upwards to 640,000, dropping the percentage of bogus jobs from 16.7% to .8%. Pretty audacious.
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