by Bob Chapman

2012 is going to be a difficult year, but not as dreadful as anticipated. The neutralization process, as usual, we covered over by the availability of money and credit. We have already seen that via Fed $1 trillion loans to the ECB and the admission by the Fed that QE 3 is on the way. In Europe banks have borrowed $3.2 trillion and they find they will need $1 trillion more. These borrowings are more than troubling and indicate that there are 523 banks in Europe in serious trouble.

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Against whom is the European Union’s so-called “oil embargo on Iran” really aimed at?

This is an important geo-strategic question. Aside from rejecting the new E.U. measures against Iran as counter-productive, Tehran has warned the member states of the European Union that the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will hurt them and their economies far more than Iran.

Tehran has thus warned the leaders of the E.U. countries that the new sanctions are foolish and against their national and bloc interests. But is this correct? At the end of the day, who will benefit from the chain of events that are being set into motion?

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.

Good news, right?

Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at www.shadowstats.com.

What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold.

by Bob Chapman

We announced our belief a few weeks ago that the Fed loan to the ECB could with fractional banking be $10 trillion. This past week we found that Credit Suisse shares our ideas as well. We believe that what this move by the Fed and the ECB is telling us that this is probably it. We also ask again how can the banks in the LTRP repay the funds in a timely manner? No plan has been presented before or since, there is no plan. Again, just throw money at the problem. The only player really capable of saving Europe is Germany and they would destroy themselves in the process. Everyone should have seen this coming but no one did except a handful of insiders. The resultant use of funds since the ECB distribution is hardly even mentioned in the media. It is a big dark secret.

by Dan Levy

Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) — Banks may seize more than 1 million U.S. homes this year after legal scrutiny of their foreclosure practices slowed actions against delinquent property owners in 2011, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

About 1.89 million properties received notices of default, auction or repossession last year, down 34 percent from 2010 and the lowest number since 2007, the Irvine, California-based data seller said today in a statement. One in 69 U.S. households received a filing.

by Ellen Brown

Neither rain nor sleet nor snow may have stopped the Pony Express, but the nation’s oldest and second largest employer is now under attack. Claiming the Postal Service is bankrupt, critics are pushing legislation that would defuse the postal crisis by breaking the backs of the postal workers’ unions and mandating widespread layoffs. But the “crisis” is an artificial one, created by Congress itself.

by Paul Craig Roberts

The following report is based on the work of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com.

Today’s (Friday, January 6) payroll jobs report of 200,000 new jobs in December is overstated by at least 82,000 jobs. As approximately 130,000 new jobs are needed each month to stay even with population growth, the December job figures actually indicate that the US economy fell another 12,000 jobs behind.

Forty-two thousand of the reported jobs are the result of a glitch in the BLS seasonal adjustment model that produces a false jump in December “couriers and messengers” jobs.

by Dr. Eric Toussaint

In 2007, the capitalist sky started to darken: the biggest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s had erupted. The different crises that ensued were interconnected: the banking and financial crisis, real estate crisis, and economic crisis in the most industrialized countries, and the food crises in the Southern countries, particularly in Africa and certain Asian countries (Latin America was less significantly affected), which mainly resulted from the economic policies practiced in the most industrialized countries, in particular: 1. the shift away from real estate speculation (when the housing bubble broke) towards the grains futures markets; 2. support for biofuel production. In 2008, the food crisis caused hunger riots in more than 15 countries, as the number of starving people increased from 850 million to more than one billion . The economic health of China, which is the workshop of the world, led to workers’ strikes in the former Middle Kingdom that resulted in wage increases (which were at that point very low).

by Barry Grey

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report Monday forecasting a further slowdown in the world’s largest economies. The Paris-based group comprises 34 countries, nearly all the major industrialized countries, but excluding China, Brazil and India.

The OECD’s survey of composite leading indicators (CLIs) for September, which predicts economic trends some six months in advance, shows economic activity slowing in North America, Europe, major parts of South America and most of Asia, including China.

by Tom Burghardt

In a further blow to online privacy rights and press freedom, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. ordered the microblogging site Twitter to hand over account information on three activists under investigation by the Justice Department for their links to the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks.

Under “transparency president” Barack Obama, the U.S. government initiated a criminal probe of the organization after the site began releasing a virtual tsunami of confidential military and State Department files.

In the last two years alone, WikiLeaks revealed that the United States had committed grave war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and other global hot-spots of interest to America’s resource-grabbing corporate masters.