Prosecutors on Monday said disgraced financier Bernard Madoff violated bail conditions by mailing about $1 million worth of jewelry and other assets to relatives and should be jailed without bail.

"The defendant's recent actions amount to obstruction of justice," Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt told a judge at a hearing in federal court in Manhattan.

U.S. District Magistrate Ronald Ellis asked the lawyers to submit written arguments and said he would rule later.

Two things are really striking here. First is the obsequiousness toward Alan Greenspan. To be fair, the 2005 Jackson Hole event was a sort of Greenspan celebration; still, it does come across as excessive — dangerously close to saying that if the Great Greenspan says something, it must be so. Second is the extreme condescension toward Rajan — a pretty serious guy — for having the temerity to suggest that maybe markets don’t always work to our advantage.

Jamie and Gladys Scott have been wrongfully convicted for armed robbery and received double life sentences each. No one was murdered or taken to the hospital during this robbery, no one was even injured. The transcripts state that 9, 10 or 11 dollars was stolen. They have been in prison now for 14 years.

This was taken from the TV show "Newstopia" (Season 2, Episode 3, aired 12 March 2008). I'm uploading this to celebrate the launch of the third season of the show. This is one of my favourite moments from the second season.

The worst financial crisis in more than a half century is going to get even worse, putting further pressure on U.S. home prices and driving the unemployment rate above 11 percent, according to two prominent academic economists.

Waterford Wedgwood PLC, the maker of classic china and crystal, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday after attempts to restructure the struggling business or find a buyer failed.

After a short rally in the stock markets, lasting somewhere on the order of 1 to 4 months after Obama is inaugurated as President, people will realize that Obama's stimulus plan isn't going to work.

Specifically, it will become obvious that we're in a Great Depression, and that nothing that Bushco or Obamaco did can get us out of it (it may take a while longer for people to realize that what both administrations did actually made the financial crisis much worse).
At that point, the stock market will crash like a waterfall. Mish thinks the crash will leave the S&P at 600. Robert McHugh thinks the crash will drive the S&P to 500 or lower (in McHugh's worst-case scenario, the S&P could end up at 50).

At around the time of the crash, the bubble in long-term treasuries will burst. Retirees and other people who have socked away their money in treasuries will get hit hard.

The government itself will start massively buying its own long-term treasuries.

Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was examined at least eight times in 16 years by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators, who often came armed with suspicions.

THE US Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued Bernard Madoff last month for allegedly directing a $US50 billion ($71 billion) fraud, is to withhold public access to a list of his assets filed on Wednesday.

A federal judge ordered Madoff to provide the commission with an account of all investments, loans, lines of credit, business interests, brokerage accounts and other holdings. The court

did not authorise its public disclosure, said a commission spokesman, Andrew Calamari, who confirmed receipt of the list.

"I think one of the fears here is that much of this money may be in offshore funds," said Professor John Coffee, of Columbia Law School, adding the commission wanted to keep the assets secret to protect them. "There is the danger that foreign regulators and foreign creditors may seek to seize that money if the names and sources are made public."

A local granite company went out of business but did not tell its customers who had already paid thousands of dollars to get their kitchen remodeled, police said.

The global financial system in 2008 experienced its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Major financial institutions went bust. Others were bought up on the cheap or survived only after major bailouts. Global stock markets fell by more than 50 percent from their 2007 peaks. Interest-rate spreads spiked. A severe liquidity and credit crunch appeared. Many emerging-market economies on the verge of a crisis had to ask for help from the International Monetary Fund.

The global financial system literally went into a cardiac arrest after the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapse and a meltdown was barely avoided through very aggressive policy responses. So what lies ahead in 2009? Is the worst behind us or ahead of us?

Here’s a parlor game, played best by the people who are in it: Which private-equity firm’s going bust first? Carlyle? Fortress? K.K.R.? Cerberus? Apollo? Could it even be mighty Blackstone, with its vast real-estate holdings? Which of these one-word-branded enterprises (the word should emphasize strength, opacity, and preferably be culled from mythology—though no one in private equity, rest assured, reads his Bulfinch’s) that make up what’s been called the world’s “shadow banking system” will collapse and, in the domino pattern of this financial crisis, take the other firms with it?

“The real story of the Bernie Madoff rip-off is being kept under official U.S. lock and key since it has become very evident that most of the stolen funds were sequestered in Israeli banks and with the active connivance of top Israeli government officials. Of the 50 billions, give or take, that this scumbag made off with, about 40 are still safe in Israel and will remain secret under current Israeli laws. Because of Madoff’s Jewish political and social connections in the United States, the two SEC “investigations” into allegations of improprieties in his business methodology, were deliberately sequestered.

The role of America's federally regulated banks in the $50 billion Bernard Madoff investment scandal has come into question after it emerged that a number of victims of his alleged Ponzi scheme thought they had invested their money with an ordinary bank.

Two law firms in Florida, which are gathering claims from Madoff victims, are both representing a couple who say that they believed that they had invested about $1 million (£688,000) with the Westport National Bank, a regulated savings bank in Connecticut, rather than with Mr Madoff.

44 States face massive funding problems. These problems are estimated to persist until 2011. Where will they get the revenue to continue operating?

For those in Pennsylvania who have lost the contents of their safe deposit boxes I would recommend checking auctions from the seller pastatetreasury on EBay.

Delaware appears to be exceptionally proud of their increased revenues.

UNEMPLOYMENT is at its highest level in 15 years. Housing prices won't stop falling. The stock market has suffered its most punishing collapse since 1931, and shareholders have lost $7 trillion in wealth. Millions of workers have lost their jobs; millions more are worried about losing theirs. IRAs and 401k accounts have been decimated, and companies are halting their contributions to retirement plans. Retail sales are dragging, the credit markets have seized up, and worse is expected in 2009. The government has gone to unprecedented lengths to improve the economy, yet the economy keeps getting worse. The federal budget deficit is headed for a trillion dollars, and the national debt is well over $10 trillion and climbing. The number of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track is at or near its all-time high; consumer confidence is at its all-time low.

So what do you do now?

Well, if you're a member of Congress, you give yourself a raise.

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians. So here, too, George Bush has let us down. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He is smaller than life.

It may be mostly schadenfreude, but Russian economist Igor Panarin is convinced that the current economic crisis has a political component which will eventually break the United States apart into as many as six separate nations. He's not alone in this belief. It has long been a staple belief of racist extremist groups and is now being predicted by some on the religious right who are ready with plans for how to rearrange the nation in the face of the Obama presidency. Conspiracy monger Alex Jones even got in on the act on his radio show this weekend, suggesting that there is an active globalist plot to weaken America by breaking it into several smaller nations.

Retailers across the country are reporting a rise in shoplifting and officials are attributing a portion of the increase to cash-strapped amateurs.

"There is a small group of consumers that are making the wrong decisions when they are faced with these financial difficulties," said Casey Chroust, senior vice president of retail operations for the Retail Leaders Industry Association.

Lawyers representing the victims of Bernard Madoff's alleged $50bn fraud are calling on the US government to bail them out with billions of taxpayers' dollars.

CORPORATE BRITAIN is facing a refinancing timebomb this year as more than £50 billion of bank debt expires during the biggest credit crunch in global history.

The soaring cost of capital and the paucity of available debt financing will squeeze even blue-chip companies which need to renew or restructure existing loan facilities.

At the docks here, the stacks of shipping containers that used to loom above the highway overpass are gone. Logistics managers say they negotiate deeper discounts every week on ships that are leaving half empty.

In nearby Guangdong Province, so many factories are closing without paying employees that some workers are resigning pre-emptively and demanding immediate pay before their employers go bankrupt.

Motorists are driving less and buying less gasoline, which means fuel taxes aren't raising enough money to keep pace with the cost of road, bridge and transit programs.

A federal commission created by Congress to find a way to make up the growing revenue shortfall in the program that funds highway repairs and construction is talking about increasing federal gas and diesel taxes.

The Federal Reserve has embarked on a campaign of unsupervised industrial policy to end the country's financial crisis, a move that could undermine its independence, a former top U.S. official said on Saturday.

John Taylor, who was under secretary of treasury for international affairs from 2001 to 2005, said the explosive growth of the Fed's balance sheet since September was "unbelievable."

"This doesn't really seem like quantitative easing in the sense of finding a growth rate in the money supply," he told a panel discussion during the annual meeting of the American Economics Association.

"What you are looking at now is really being determined by other considerations. How much should we buy of mortgage-backed securities? How much should we loan to foreign central banks? This is really more like an industrial policy," he said.

There are limits, however, to the amount of support even the government’s deep pocket can provide. In the past two decades, the bankers’ lending scheme has been kept going by an even more speculative scheme known as “derivatives.” This is a complex subject that has been explored in other articles, but the bottom line is that more dollars are now owed in the derivatives casino than exist on the planet. (See Ellen Brown, “It’s the Derivatives, Stupid!” and “Credit Default Swaps: Derivative Disaster Du Jour,” www.webofdebt.com/articles.)

Baltimore police and fire employees lost about $3.5 million in pension money invested in a fund with ties to disgraced money manager Bernard L. Madoff.

Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme has dented public funds and nonprofits across the country, with new victims discovered daily.

Factories in China and India joined much of Europe in slashing output and jobs at a record pace in December, another sign the biggest emerging markets were wilting under the recession gripping industrialized nations.

One investor said it was as if someone had thrown a switch, as the global credit crunch slammed a city that was, in effect, the world's biggest construction site

With President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats considering a massive spending package aimed at pulling the nation out of recession, the national debt is projected to jump by as much as $2 trillion this year, an unprecedented increase that could test the world's appetite for financing U.S. government spending.

With President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats considering a massive spending package aimed at pulling the nation out of recession, the national debt is projected to jump by as much as $2 trillion this year, an unprecedented increase that could test the world's appetite for financing U.S. government spending.

General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, bailed out by $13.4 billion in federal loans last month, probably led a decline in December U.S. auto sales that capped the industry’s worst year since 1992.

Governors of five U.S. states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country's 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

Austria is taking control of Bank Medici after the small, private bank was hit by the Bernard Madoff scandal.

A seven-member group of investors has agreed to buy the remnants of failed lender IndyMac, a symbol of the US housing boom and bust, for $13.9bn (£9.5bn), federal regulators said last night.

"The original £1 food-menu pub," says a sign outside the Four Crosses Inn near Cannock, Staffordshire. The claim may be a contentious one, as more and more pubs offer incredibly cheap meals to stave off closure, but the owner, Tony Rabbitts, insists that he was the first to show it could be done.

Alistair Darling has been forced to consider a second bailout for banks as the lending drought worsens.

The Chancellor will decide within weeks whether to pump billions more into the economy as evidence mounts that the £37 billion part-nationalisation last year has failed to keep credit flowing. Options include cash injections, offering banks cheaper state guarantees to raise money privately or buying up “toxic assets”, The Times has learnt.

Put another way, the U.S. financial system became saturated trying to absorb all the excess savings from the export-model and oil exporting countries.

THE US steel industry is reportedly in collapse and looking for a massive government investment program of up to $US1 trillion ($1.42 trillion) to stimulate demand.

The Treasury Department inspector general's examination of funding for the 'bank to the stars' reflects growing concern in Washington about whether the banking rescue is working.

The report by the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Institute, said that a defense community paralyzed by conventional thinking could be unprepared to help the United States cope with a series of unexpected crises that would rival the Al Qaida strikes in 2001, termed a "strategic shock."

Motorists are driving less and buying less gasoline, which means fuel taxes aren't raising enough money to keep pace with the cost of road, bridge and transit programs.

That has the federal commission that oversees financing for transportation talking about increasing the federal fuel tax.

...

"Instead of calling it a gas tax, call it a carbon tax," Whittington said.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which has overseen the closure of 25 U.S. banks this year, almost doubled its annual budget to $2.2 billion for 2009 to add staff and manage the expected closure of more lenders.

Consider the following and my simple explanation:

1. financial engineering: new ways of gambling

2. Investors: gamblers

3. Stock & Futures Markets: casinos

4. Financial Analysts: casinos’ salesmen / women

5. Bonds: I.O.Us.

6. Banks: Dishonest Money-lenders (actual money-lenders licensed not as banks, but as money-lenders, cannot create “money out of thin air”. They have to use their own capital – 100% to lend)

7. Currencies / fiat money toilet papers

8. Derivative markets: ponzi scheme

So many people have difficulty accepting my explanations as the simple reality. This is even after the recent exposé of the US$50 Billion fraud by Bernard Madoff, the former chairman of NASDAQ. He declared to the FBI, that his scheme was essentially a Ponzi scheme (i.e. using one set of “investors’ money” to pay off an earlier set of “investors”).

Banks worldwide have collapsed!

Why?

America’s GDP may have fallen by an annualised 6% in the fourth quarter of 2008, but most economists dismiss the likelihood of a 1930s-style depression or a repeat of Japan in the 1990s, because policymakers are unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the past. In the Great Depression, the Fed let hundreds of banks fail and the money supply shrink by one-third, while the government tried to balance its budget by cutting spending and raising taxes. America’s monetary and fiscal easing this time has been more aggressive than Japan’s in the 1990s.

Daniel DiMicco, chairman and chief executive of Nucor Corp, a giant steel maker, told the paper the industry was asking the incoming administration to "deal with the worst economic slowdown in our lifetime through a recovery program that has in every provision a 'buy America' clause."

The problem with an M1 multiplier below one is that the effect of printing money is of course multiplied by the velocity. That is, if you print up $10 into the economy the impact it has on economic activity depends on how many times that $10 circulates in a given amount of time. The more it circulates the higher the impact and the more your efforts do for the economy.

The bad news is that when the multiplier is less than one the more money you spew into the economy the worse the impact, as you get less for each additional dollar.

A board shakeup by GMAC's new biggest shareholder, the Treasury Dept., is likely to dislodge Merkin from the top spot.

The disappearance of trillions in notional and actual dollars has so dazzled the public, some seem to have forgotten about the Trillion Dollar War on Terror. That's the figure Time magazine places on George Bush's military adventures since 9/11. Others put the figure much higher. Former Clinton economic advisor Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes' best-selling book calls Iraq a "Three Trillion Dollar War," when all costs are factored in.

The forecast comes as Morgan, the French fashion chain, becomes the latest victim of the crisis on the high street, collapsing into administration. It joins a lengthening list of shop groups to have failed this week alone, including clothing store USC, Adams childrenswear group and Olan Mills the photography studio.

Experian, a data company which analyses the sector, predicts that a total of 440 retail businesses will go into administration in the first four months of 2009, equating to nearly 26 every week. This would be the worst period for shopkeepers since the depths of the winter of discontent thirty years ago.

Very few shops will escape completely unscathed, Experian predicts, with major chains – with branches on most high streets – as well as small, individual retailers all being hit by the severe consumer downturn.

To rescue General Motors, the Treasury has now ponied up $6bn to prop up its finance affiliate, GMAC. But for GMAC to crank up its lending, the Fed may have to take a liberal view of its capital levels. There are other disquieting signs the Treasury and Fed are not totally in accord, which may further damage their credibility.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued Bernard Madoff last month for allegedly directing a $50 billion fraud, won’t make public a list of his assets filed yesterday, the regulator said.

Kevin Bacon and wife Kyra Sedgwick are among the many victims of the massive Ponzi scheme run by the disgraced New York money manager. Bacon's publicist, Allen Eichhorn, confirmed Tuesday that the couple had investments with Madoff. He wouldn't say how much money Bacon, whose most recent film is "Frost/Nixon," and "The Closer" star Sedgwick might have lost.

Hollywood actor Kevin Bacon and his wife are the latest people to have lost money on investments connected to accused swindler Bernard Madoff, according to media reports.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc's emergency bankruptcy filing wiped out as much as $75 billion of potential value for creditors, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing an analysis by the bank's restructuring advisers.

US consumer confidence has unexpectedly dropped to a record low in December, in the face of the US economic slowdown and continuing job cuts.

The Treasury has already allocated all the $350 billion that Congress authorized for the first half of its bailout program, NYT reports. They have no money left. So how exactly is the Treasury going to fund its latest bailout, $ 6 billion to GMAC?

So which is it? The obviousness of the theft or the severity of the crisis?

My guess . . . both.

Looks like another victim of the Bernard Madoff mess -- albeit a very minor one -- is the US taxpayer.

In September, as part of its bailout effort, the Treasury Department made an $85 billion loan to insurance giant AIG, and got a 79.9 percent stake in the company.

And AIG appears to be exposed to Madoff's alleged fraud. As part of its homeowners coverage, the company offers a "fraud safeguard" policy, which would seem to cover some Madoff investors.