http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7351839.stm



Conditions in the US economy have worsened noticeably in the past six weeks, the Federal Reserve said in its closely-followed Beige Book report.

The central bank's regular snapshot of business activity across the US described "weaker" conditions and "softening" consumer spending.

The report also described the troubled housing market as "anaemic".

The IMF recently warned that the US economy could be set for a "mild recession" this year.

Some commentators believe the economy may already been in recession, although figures published on Tuesday showed that industrial output actually rose slightly in March.

In a speech on Tuesday, one of the bank's senior officials said that the economy had "all but stalled" and may contract in the first half of the year.

"I am not ruling out a recession," said Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Reserve Bank.

A Euro is now $1.591- http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/currencies/fxc.html - continuing the trend of falling. A new record low yesterday did not even make the Bloomberg headlines. WTI crude is $114.85 and rising. Now how is an oil dependent economy with a car commuting work force not going to feel a pinch?

I eat oatmeal most days for breakfast and it jumped from $1.47 to $1.67 or 14% about two weeks ago. The price hikes on food combined with that $3.50 gas did more to get people pissed off than all the tyranny, theft of the treasury, and military aggresions ever did. Maybe people will wake up to the fact that they are being ruled instead of governed.

The only thing oil futures lack is a coinage easily convertible, and they
would displace the dollar in a hot second as the principal currency.

I'm suprised that people are not liberalizing that market... maybe free markets
will inadvertently save us from the dollar - ha ha!! funny... ;)

I've dithered and lost money by not getting it in euro's sooner. The pound is
taking the bath with the dollar - 2 empires justly punished by world investors
for being naughty - The problem is very deep. The system can't be propped up
from within its federal reserve or other bubble mechanisms... they've tried every
bubble they can dream up, one housing bubble to another, one giant lending scam
to another - (one must read this book: "when genius failed": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Long-Term_Capital_Management

to see how corrupted the system has become. Whole streets in manhattan are sided
with towers of people who do no economically valuable activities at all. They make
shit up in a global propaganda hegemony scam, and punt it out to the masses in a fer-
shure push-marketing scam called "the brokers". That giant casino will continue to
mint chips, but everyone on the planet has caught on to the scam, and would rather
invest their chips in the local casino - the odds are inevitably better.

These fools discount the knowledge explosion since the internet big bang. Now every
person with the curiosity can be as informed as the world's national intelligence
agencies. The world has too many seriously informed persons in it - more than ever
before in time, and this is against the odds of the casino ever being able to punt
its old games again.

So the next president takes office with a really bankrupt economy; and an intellectually
fraudulent set of economic theories taken as fact throughout the world's business empires.
Those economic theories rationalize naiomi klein's shock doctrine.

If you think about it, of course its a fraud. Do you actually believe that the
USD/JPY (Dollar/yen) crossrate is a real measure of the relative value of a person
in japan to your own time at labour? Its a fraud to apply a value to a human
person's time given that creativity is nonlinear. So its a brute fraud. And the
entire culture and its history is packed in to today's spot USD?JPY. But a single
number is not a fat enough fact to balance a true market.

The failure, economically, has been to narrow-band the real economic relationships
between cultures based on paradigms of imperial control, rather than empowering
each sovereign person to a global plural sustainable economy where dumping
currencies is not done to impoverish. All these institutions like the world bank,
imf, you name it- they all sycophant to the narrow market being themselves grossly
ignorant of any possibilities given the advances in modern computing.

Aye, with us today are all the tools to make a wealthy world of equality without fear. But welding will involve cutting i'm afraid.