Many States ready to shut down this week

Indiana is one of five states -- along with Arizona, California, Mississippi and Pennsylvania -- bracing for possible shutdowns this week as time runs out for lawmakers to close billion-dollar gaps in their fiscal 2010 budgets.

Of the 46 states whose fiscal year ends today, 32 did not have budgets passed and approved by their governors as of Monday afternoon, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although the majority of those are expected to pass eleventh-hour budgets, the fiscal futures of a handful remain uncertain, said Todd Haggerty, an NCSL research analyst.

"It's a lot of states that are coming down to the wire," Haggerty said. "It's far more than we've seen in the past, and it's because of the state of the economy."

Since 2002, only five states have been forced to shut down their governments. Some of the closures were brief: In 2007, Michigan's doors were closed for four hours before lawmakers passed emergency measures that bought them time to close a $1.75-billion deficit.

"What's different now is that the recession has eroded tax revenues across the country," Haggerty said. Collectively, he said, states are wrestling with budget deficits totaling $121 billion.

In California, state finance officials will begin issuing IOUs on Thursday if lawmakers and the governor cannot agree on a way to close a $24-billion shortfall. The IOUs would go to local governments, vendors, taxpayers and college students receiving state financial aid. California has issued such IOUs only one other time -- in 1992 -- since the Great Depression.
Link

DOW to 2000 and the S&P to 200? MASSIVE Collapse Coming!

The rules of technical analysis for this pattern are:

Pennants are continuation patterns - that is, whatever direction the market is moving when it comes in, it will move when it comes out.
The minimum target for the move is given by the length of the pole to which the pennant is attached.
In this case the pennant prognosticates a move downward of six hundred S&P 500 points from the break, which occurs at approximately 810.

That gives us a target on the S&P 500 of 210.

No, that's not a misprint.

I said two hundred and ten, and I meant two hundred and ten.

This puts the DOW at TWO THOUSAND.

Mr. President, Congress, and the rest of the fools in Washington DC, including TurboTax Timmie: You only get one shot at this and you better stop writing checks with your mouth that you cannot cash. This goes DOUBLE for Ben Bernanke.
There is no "market-friendly" solution to this mess folks. There are, however, disastrous decisions that can be taken, and continuing to hide losses - and the truth - will lead directly to that disaster.

We must deal with the bad debt by forcing it into the open. Transferring it from one pocket to another fixes nothing and if we're not careful we will wind up precipitating a bond market collapse coincident with the stock market melting down to a degree that is several times worse than what we saw in September and October.

Unless President Obama wants to be known as our second Herbert Hoover, he must not allow the game-playing to continue any longer.

Neither you or I want to see the S&P 500 collapse down into the 200s with 75% of the listed firms in this country going under. Nor do we want to see 20 or even 30% unemployment. I'm sure you're not interested in seeing not a 30 or 40% loss in your 401k as you had last year, but an 80% loss. And I'm very, very certain that having the government - both state and federal - unable to raise operating funds and being forced to cut off social services and entitlements is not on your "desirable" outcome list. Yet all of this can and will happen if the bond market dislocates and starts a cascade. The price action in the market over the last couple of weeks is a strong warning that "borrow and spend" will not work and the market is getting rather upset with papering over ever-expanding losses.

It would be nice if President Obama had several weeks or even months to coordinate a strategy. Unfortunately the market doesn't work this way, and it appears that he is being forced to either crap or get off the pot essentially now, lest the market decide for him.
LINK

Here is your List of FAILED BANKS!
LIST

Analyst predicts decline and breakup of U.S. COLLAPSE then DOLLAR REPLACED!

MOSCOW, November 24 (RIA Novosti) - A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily Izvestia published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."

The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events.

When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, Panarin said: "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator."

When asked who would replace the U.S. in regulating world markets, he said: "Two countries could assume this role: China, with its vast reserves, and Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia."

Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
On the fate of the U.S. dollar, he said: "In 2006 a secret agreement was reached between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit. This could signal preparations to replace the dollar. The one-hundred dollar bills that have flooded the world could be simply frozen. Under the pretext, let's say, that terrorists are forging them and they need to be checked."
FULL ARTICLE HERE

US owes 37 TRILLION! Financial COLLAPSE? CITIGROUP COLLAPSING?

(Reuters) - The U.S. financial system still needs at least $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion of tangible common equity to restore confidence and improve liquidity in the credit markets, Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Paul Miller said.

Eight financial companies -- Citigroup Inc, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Wells Fargo & Co, JPMorgan Chase & Co, American International Group Inc, Bank of America Corp and GE Financial -- are in greatest need of capital, he said.

"Debt or TARP capital is not true capital. Long-term debt financing is not the solution. Only injections of true tangible common equity will solve the current crisis," he said in a note dated November 19.

Currently, the U.S. financial system has $37 trillion of debt outstanding, he noted.

Combined, these eight companies have roughly $12.2 trillion of assets and only $406 billion of tangible common capital, or just 3.4 percent, the analyst said in his note to clients.

"Citigroup Inc faced a crisis of confidence on Wednesday as investors questioned the survival prospects of the U.S. banking giant, and its shares tumbled 23 percent to a 13-year low."
BOSTON GLOBE:
Citigroup, once the world's biggest bank, saw more than $9bn (£6bn) wiped off its value

Washington Post TODAY ( snippet):
"And Federal Reserve leaders released projections indicating they expect the economy to worsen significantly in the coming year. The most pessimistic of 17 Fed officials expects joblessness to rise to 8 percent at the end of 2009, which would be the highest in a quarter-century".

Complete COLLAPSE of the Banking SYSTEM?Millions UNEMPLOYED!

HEADLINES:CITIBANK LAYING OF 53,000 more to follow? READ IT HERE


From the British TELEGRAPH: (snippets)
But this week, I saw a picture in a newspaper which really did tell the story.

It was an aerial shot of Hong Kong harbour. Rank upon rank of merchant ships stretched away across the water. Normally such scenes are displays of might, but this was one of impotence. The ships were idle. They could not load up because the cargoes on the dockside lacked the necessary letters of credit. You could see world trade coming to a standstill.
Today, we are in a financial crisis, and we cannot produce the medicine because we still do not know the source or spread of the disease. People who, 18 months ago, seemed to be the strongest men the world had ever seen, now turn out to be sick unto death.

And because banking, like the circulation of the blood, affects the whole system, you can expect almost anyone to come down with the plague. Construction, shipping, restaurants, cars, telecoms, even, I confidently predict, lawyers - any trade might succumb at any time.
The consequences are already bad enough. They could be truly terrible. There could be a complete collapse of the banking system, many millions unemployed, a return to barter, "self-sufficiency" (a Green word meaning poverty), extremist riots, looting. It seems an odd thing to say to our joke-free Prime Minister, but please, Mr Brown, get serious. READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

US Depression is widening!

Steel industry shutting down 17 of 29 U.S. blast furnaces.

Published: October 25, 2008

The steel mills, big suppliers to many sectors of the economy, are shutting 17 of the nation’s 29 blast furnaces — a startling indicator of how quickly output is declining as corporate America struggles to adjust to the spreading crisis.

“We have seen a softening order book in the most dramatic ways in the last week,” said Tom Conway, a vice president of the United Steelworkers of America, adding that layoffs in the industry “are just starting now.”

Should you make a MAJOR withdraw from YOUR BANK?

According to this report we are in the midst of a financial PANIC! Should you be doing a major withdraw? I think so!


Roubini Says `Panic' May Force Market Shutdown, Fund Failures

By Alexis Xydias and Camilla Hall

Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Hundreds of hedge funds will fail and policy makers may need to shut financial markets for a week or more as the crisis forces investors to dump assets, New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini said.

``We've reached a situation of sheer panic,'' Roubini, who predicted the financial crisis in 2006, said at a conference in London today. ``There will be massive dumping of assets,'' and ``hundreds of hedge funds are going to go bust,'' he said.
Systemic risk has become bigger and bigger,'' Roubini said at the Hedge 2008 conference. ``We're seeing the beginning of a run on a big chunk of the hedge funds,'' and ``don't be surprised if policy makers need to close down markets for a week or two in coming days,'' he said.
`This is the worst financial crisis in the U.S., Europe and now emerging markets that we've seen in a long time,'' Roubini said. ``Things will get much worse before they get better. I fear the worst is ahead of us.''