Obama addresses the nation hours before midnight

President Barack Obama today announced that a deal to avert billions of dollars of tax increases that will kick in at midnight is 'within sight, but it's not done yet.'
He lamented that he and Congress were unable to reach a 'grand deal' to tackle the debt and reform the tax code - but said he would settle for a plan to stop taxes from going up on all but the richest Americans.
'Our most immediate priority is to prevent taxes from going up on middle class families tomorrow. I think that is a modest goal we can accomplish,' he said.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255396/Obama-blames-GOP-opposition-tax-hikes-rich-blocking-fiscal-cliff-deal.html#ixzz2GexrCwnO

The "fiscal cliff" is another hoax designed to shift the attention of public

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 – by Paul Craig Roberts

The "fiscal cliff" is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones.
The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action itself to cut spending and to raise taxes. In other words, the "fiscal cliff" is going to happen either way.
The problem from the standpoint of conventional economics with the fiscal cliff is that it amounts to a double-barrel dose of austerity delivered to a faltering and recessionary economy. Ever since John Maynard Keynes, most economists have understood that austerity is not the answer to recession or depression.
Regardless, the fiscal cliff is about small numbers compared to the Derivatives Tsunami or to bond market and dollar market bubbles.The fiscal cliff requires that the federal government cut spending by $1.3 trillion over ten years. TheGuardian reports that means the federal deficit has to be reduced about $109 billion per year or 3 percent of the current budget. More simply, just divide $1.3 trillion by ten and it comes to $130 billion per year. This can be done by simply taking a three month vacation each year from Washington's wars.

Silver Price Rising 30% in ’13

Silver Bullion Pte, one of Singapore’s largest suppliers of coins and bars to retail investors, says sales tripled since October, part of a global surge in demand that drove holdings to a record. 

“Our clients are worried that a major currency crisis or mass bankruptcies would occur,” said Gregor Gregersen, the 36- year-old founder of Silver Bullion, whose sales now average about S$6 million ($4.9 million) a month. “It all has to do with falling confidence in the heavily indebted Western governments and financial institutions.”

Global investment through silver-backed exchange-traded products reached a record 18,854 metric tons in November, or more than nine months of mine output, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Holdings are now valued at about $19.2 billion. Prices will rise as much as 29 percent to $40.25 an ounce next year, based on the median of 49 analyst, trader and investor estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-12-19/silver-vaults-stuffed-mean-prices-rising-29-percent-in-13-commodities

Bank of America blocks employees from reading Zero Hedge

'Bank of America blocks users from accessing websites that present certain risks to the bank,'" wrote one Zero Hedge editor, Tuesday, quoting a "This Web site is blocked" page that shows up when employees try to access zerohedge.com via BofA servers.

Source:http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass_roundup/2012/12/bank-of-america-blocks-zero-hedge.html

Gold bull Jim Rogers is turning cautious

Initially, gold was way down because of no progress on fiscal-cliff negotiations, potentially causing austerity measures to kick in and curb government spending.

Now, gold is way down because of hope that a fiscal-cliff deal will be reached, enabling government spending to continue and improve economic growth.

Jim rogers apparently hedged his long gold position.
Source:http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/commodities/even-gold-bull-jim-rogers-is-turning-cautious_797539.html

This will be bad for the dollar

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States. As 3 billion Asians become prosperous, interest fades in the prospective contribution of 300
Post-US world born in Phnom Penh
By Spengler

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Read more at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global.../NK27Dj02.html

American Households Hit 43-Year Low In Net Worth

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The median net worth of American households has dropped to a 43-year low as the lower and middle classes appear poorer and less stable than they have been since 1969.

According to a recent study by New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff, median net worth is at the decades-low figure of $57,000 (in 2010 dollars). And as the numbers in his study reflect, the situation only appears worse when all the statistics are taken as a whole.

According to Wolff, between 1983 and 2010, the percentage of households with less than $10,000 in assets (using constant 1995 dollars) rose from 29.7 percent to 37.1 percent. The “less than $10,000″ figure includes the numerous households that have no assets at all, or “negative assets,” which is otherwise known as “debt.”

Over that same period of time, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households increased their average wealth by 71 percent.

As noted by Daily Finance, from 1983 to 2010 the share of total wealth held by the richest 10 percent of American households increased from 68.2 percent to 76.7 percent. Meanwhile, all the rest of Americans lost financial ground.

An August Pew Research Center study found that many in the middle-class are divided on how they believe his gap widened.

Source: http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/...-in-net-worth/

Canadian dollar as a reserve currency.

The International Monetary Fund said it’s considering classifying the Australian and the Canadian dollars as reserve currencies.

The two “are to be considered for inclusion” separately in the IMF’s “Currency Composition of Official Foreign-Exchange Reserves” data, the Washington-based lender said in a report published on Nov. 14. They’ve previously been included in an “other currencies” category in the COFER reports.

The IMF plan comes as Australia and Canada have shown more signs of stability in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis than the world’s biggest developed economies. While the U.S., to the U.K. to Japan have been coping with increasing debt loads, deficits in Canada and Australia are forecast to be below 5 percent of gross domestic product in 2012 and are expected to shrink.

“It really helps to cement the stability of these currencies,” Ravi Bharadwaj, a market analyst in Washington at Western Union Business Solutions, a unit of Western Union Co. (WU), said in a telephone interview. “The Australian and Canadian economies have been much more stable than the top economies in the post-financial-crisis era.”

The Australian budget is forecast to show a surplus that is 0.1 percent relative to GDP next year, after a 3 percent deficit in 2012, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Canada’s may shrink to a 0.6 percent deficit from 1.2 percent. The U.S. shortfall relative to GDP is forecast to contract to 5.7 percent from 7 percent.

Source:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-19/imf-may-classify-aussie-canadian-dollars-as-reserve-currencies.html