Soros Predicts Worst Recession in 50 Years

The First Post
January 22, 2008

Amid collapsing stock prices worldwide, the billionaire investor George Soros has told an Austrian daily, the Standard, that the United States is threatened with recession and the world is facing the worst financial crisis in half a century. “The situation is much more serious than any other financial crisis since the end of World War II,” Soros was quoted as saying.

He said over the past few years politics had been guided by some basic misunderstandings stemming from something that he called “market fundamentalism” - the belief that financial markets tended to act as a balance. “This is the wrong idea,” he said. “We really do have a serious financial crisis now.”

He added he was surprised how little it was understood that a US recession was also a threat to Europe. European shares duly fell nearly six per cent on Monday, their biggest one-day slide since 9/11.

Meanwhile in Mumbai, some market analysts are suggesting Soros shorted the Indian markets last week. Over 15 years after he shorted the British pound in September 1992 and earned one billion dollars, local market sources say one of Soros’s funds may have shorted the Nifty last week.

World's Largest Bond Insurers Collapsing!

Martin D. Weiss Ph.D.
Money And Markets
Wednesday January 23, 2008

Martin here with an urgent update on the rapidly unfolding credit crack-up:

Ambac and MBIA, the two largest bond insurers in the world, are careening toward collapse.

Barring a miraculous rescue, their demise could promptly deliver a massive blow to the U.S. bond market ... severely damage America's already shaken big banks ... and largely trash the net worth of millions of investors.

Yet, strangely, except for investors who owned Ambac and MBIA shares themselves — and who have now driven those shares into the gutter — few are paying attention.

And fewer still are taking appropriate defensive action.

Look. If this crisis were just a theoretical possibility, like it was when I first wrote about the fatal fallacy of bond insurance years ago, I might understand the stubborn complacency of most investors.

But now it's here, staring them in the face: Just this past Friday, soon after the closing bell in New York, the watershed event happened: Ambac lost its triple-A rating!

Fitch slashed Ambac's rating by two notches to AA, downgraded the long-term rating of Ambac's parent company by three notches, and said more cuts could be on the way.

Since the ratings of insured bonds are tied directly to the ratings of the insurer, Fitch was also forced to take action on the 137,000 bonds that are covered by Ambac, setting off a veritable ratings massacre in the market for municipal and mortgage-backed bonds.

Similarly ...

If I were still one of the only ones talking about the collapse of bond insurance, I could also understand the complacency of most investors.

But now, based on the current market price of credit swaps (bets on future defaults), Wall Street itself believes that the chance Ambac and MBIA will avoid bankruptcy is less than one in three.

And still most investors aren't paying attention!

Next, Brace Yourself for the Other
Shoes That Could Soon Be Falling

First, the other two leading rating agencies — Moody's and S&P — are likely to follow Fitch's lead and also downgrade Ambac. In fact, on Thursday, Moody's already warned it could do so very soon.

Second, the other major bond insurers, such as MBIA and FGIC, will get smacked with downgrades.

Third, the ratings massacre now taking place in Ambac-insured bonds will spread to $2.3 trillion worth of municipal bonds, mortgage-backed bonds, plus asset-backed bonds packed with credit card and auto loans.

Full article here.

US Stock Markets Decline : THE DOLLAR HOLOCAUST

Youtube
Wednesday January 23, 2008

The stock Market is about to crash and the Dollar is about to collapse and Ron Paul has been warning people since more than 30 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GzRWS...
and he even predicted the 1987 recession just like he predicted one happenning with in 2008 or 2009

US Stock Markets Decline : THE DOLLAR HOLOCAUST

Youtube
Wednesday January 23, 2008

The stock Market is about to crash and the Dollar is about to collapse and Ron Paul has been warning people since more than 30 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GzRWS...
and he even predicted the 1987 recession just like he predicted one happenning with in 2008 or 2009

(Article continues below)

If you want to have socialized free health care this will not happen and whoever is promising you is a liar!

if you want to continue the war in Iraq there is no money, and if you want to get out will you depend on a liar and a flip-flopper or will you look at the MOST CONSISTENT HONEST man in congress who is known as Dr. No!

He is Congressman Ron Paul who is a Doctor and an Economist who is the only man for the job plz research Ron Paul at
http://www.ronpaul2008.com
and research his stances on issues at
http://www.RonPaulstances.com
and research his SOLID consistent congressional record.

CIA document talks of need to "remove" Martin Luther King from leadership of "Negro movement"

Wayne Madsen Report
Wednesday January 23, 2008

On the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and amid attempts by the Hillary Clinton campaign to "revise" the history of the civil rights leader in a blatant attempt to tarnish the candidacy of her rival, Senator Barack Obama, it is noteworthy to point out that Dr. King was assassinated as part of a U.S. government plan, documented in a CIA memo, to replace the Nobel Peace Prize winner as the leader of the "Negro movement."

The May 11, 1965, memo for the record, given to this editor by a member of the King family, recounts a conversation between an individual whose name was redacted and the CIA's Morse Allen, the CIA's research director who was responsible for Project Artichoke and MK-ULTRA, two of the CIA's behavior modification programs that, in part, sought to create willing assassins.

The memo bemoaned the anti-Vietnam war activities of civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and King. It also warns of the attempt by the "Communist left" to infiltrate the "Negro movement." The mindset of the CIA is interesting. They saw the civil rights movement not as a broad based attempt by a number of Americans to secure equal rights for African Americans, but as a "Negro movement" that was seen as a potential Fifth Column for the Communists.

Allen was concerned that Communists would take advantage of a break by the civil rights movement with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and a resulting "violent disruption of the Negro [emphasis added] Civil Rights Movement. Allen was also concerned that King might be assassinated "before his exposure" and that would make him a martyr. During the time the memo was written, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was trying to "expose" King. Hoover ordered the FBI to bug King's hotel rooms and tape record his alleged trysts. Hoover mailed one of the recordings to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, with a note urging Dr. King to commit suicide.

The most revealing part of the CIA memo is the following: "It is [redacted]'s belief that somehow or other Martin Luther KING must be removed from the leadership of the Negro movement, and is removal must come from within and not from without. [Redacted] feels that somewhere in the Negro movement, at the top, there must be a Negro leader who is 'clean' who could step into the vacuum and chaos if Martin Luther KING were either exposed or assassinated."

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis. The King family never accepted the full guilt of the accused assassin, James Earl Ray.

King was succeeded as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1980, Abernathy endorsed the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush over President Jimmy Carter. Abernathy founded the American Freedom Coalition along with Christian Right leader, Dr. Robert Grant. The organization received funding from Sun Myung Moon's quasi-fascist Unification Church.

The CIA memo stating that King should be replaced by someone "clean." Abernathy fit the bill.

Hillary Clinton, who is close to the right-wing Christian Fellowship Foundation cult leader David Coe and was a "Goldwater Girl" during the time the right-wing plot was being hatched against King in the mid-1960s, has played the "race card" in her campaign against Obama.

Hillary Clinton's father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and a Republican until his death in 1993. Hillary later worked for the Nelson Rockefeller campaign in 1968 and attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. Bill Clinton reportedly cringed at Hugh E. Rodham's use of the "N word," which lasted up until the time Clinton was sworn in as president. Clinton's father-in-law died at the age of 82 in April 1993, a few months after Clinton was inaugurated.

This anniversary of the birth of Dr. King should, above all, remind us of the racist and covert operations by the United States government to assassinate King and destroy the civil rights movement. It is no time for a one-time Republican and Barry Goldwater supporter -- Goldwater only won his own state of Arizona and the segregationist states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in 1964 --to raise the race issue. And it is no time for someone who grew up in suburban Chicago and who must have heard her father constantly ranting about the "niggers" to be using the race card against an opponent who is fulfilling Dr. King's dream of a color blind nation.

Hillary Rodham in 1964 was joined in her support for Goldwater by someone else who was irritated by the civil rights movement -- a young Houston businessman and CIA agent who was running for the US Senate against progressive Democrat Ralph Yarborough. George H. W. Bush lost that Senate race and was unable to join his father and Goldwater supporter, Prescott Bush, in the U.S. Senate as a father and son team. However, George H. W. Bush would later become the head of the CIA and receive the endorsement in 1980 of Dr. King's government-sanctioned "replacement."

Considering the racist nature of the Republican Party from 1964 to the present day, a transformation that was engineered by Hillary Clinton's one-time hero Barry Goldwater, Dr. King's name should not be used by either the leading Democratic candidate -- Clinton -- or her possible Republican opponent, John McCain, the Arizona senator who describes himself as the political heir of Goldwater.

FISA 2.0 Called 'Atrocious' Privacy Violation

Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com
Wednesday January 23, 2008

With Congress working on legislation to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the sunset provision in the Protect America Act expires on Feb. 1, privacy advocates say the proposal being offered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is "atrocious."

In August, Congress passed and the president signed the Protect America Act, which allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) to "authorize the acquisition of foreign intelligence information" without the approval of the special court established by FISA.

According to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is likely to bring an amendment to the floor this week written by the Intelligence Committee.

"We're back pretty much where we were in August," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, during a conference call with reporters.

"Sen. Reid is about to move a bill to the floor that looks an awful lot like the Protect America Act, except with one additional very bad provision, and that's the provision that provides immunity to those telecommunications carriers that - in violation of the law -turned over their customer data to the NSA," she said. (NSA is the National Security Agency and Central Security Service of the U.S. government.)

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, CEO of the Mellman Group, noted that according to a survey he conducted last week, "Americans surely want to protect the country from terrorism, but they also insist on protecting our constitutional rights."

"To that end, Americans vigorously oppose warrant-less wiretaps. They strongly support the notion that the government should have to get a warrant before wiretapping the conversations that U.S. citizens have with people abroad by 63 to 33 percent - almost a two-to-one margin," he said, noting that the numbers cut across party lines and ideology.

Fifty-seven percent of voters also rejected immunity for phone companies that may have violated the law by selling customers' private information to the government, preferring to let courts decide the outcome of any cases.

Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, however, said, "I don't think Americans want to punish companies for good faith actions to help the federal government in capturing and investigating terrorists."

Darling added that "the Protect America Act restored the capability of our intelligence gathering federal officials to collect communications intelligence about al Qaeda by using cutting edge technology that enables us to collect data on terrorists."

"The Bush administration has asserted that this law has helped the United States develop a greater understanding al Qaeda networks," he told Cybercast News Service. "Al Qaeda continues to be a national security threat, and any effort to restrict the Protect America Act may have some unintended consequences that will slow the intelligence-gathering aspect of the global war on terror."

P.J. Crowley, director of homeland security at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), added that, while FISA is outdated, how it is updated matters.

Full article here.

Osama, al-Qaeda no longer Musharraf's priority

CNN/IBN
Wednesday January 23, 2008

New Delhi: Osama bin Laden is not Pakistan's priority any more says President Musharraf.

At a conference in Paris, which is the second leg of his European tour, Musharraf described the Taliban as the main threat to his regime.

He said close to 1 lakh Pakistani troops had been drafted to check the Taliban advance and related terror strikes by their affiliated groups.

As part of a multi-pronged strategy select areas of the Afghan border were being fenced and nearly 1000 checkpoints were being set up to monitor movement across the border.

Musharraf added that there was no way radical extremists like al Qaeda and the Taliban could gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.