In all reality, there's very little we can do physically to prepare for the days ahead. Our preparation must be spiritual, mental & emotional. If there was ever a time for prayer in Yeshua's (Jesus') name, this is it. Our forefather's did exactly this very thing, and they weren't concerned about political correctness. On July 27, 1775, they (our first Congress) held our first National Day of Prayer. They attended it at the old Christ Church in Philadelphia, PA. In attendance were John & Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock among others. They didn't have any qualms or question in re to whom they were praying, now did they? This is a historical & spiritual fact published in newspapers all over our young nation. Look it up yourself. I'll even send you the front page PDF myself.
I'm asking each & every one to do just this. Set aside a short time this Sunday, even if you've never done it before, and pray in Yeshua's (Jesus') name for our land. Pray it, mean it, believe it. No matter your persuasion, do it anyhow. If our forefathers considered it important enough to call a nation to prayer in Yeshua's name, how much more should we take heed now? Sadly, our present Congress wants nothing (in truth) to do with Yeshua, save for lip service. YHWH may not spare our land because of our backsliding away from Him, but He should be our first resort, not our last...
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US seeks $300Bln from Arab Gulf states
KUWAIT CITY (AFP) – The United States has asked four oil-rich Gulf states for close to 300 billion dollars to help it curb the global financial meltdown, Kuwait's daily Al-Seyassah reported Thursday.
Quoting "highly informed" sources, the daily said Washington has asked Saudi Arabia for 120 billion dollars, the United Arab Emirates for 70 billion dollars, Qatar for 60 billion dollars and was seeking 40 billion dollars from Kuwait.
Al-Seyassah said Washington sought the amount as "financial aid" to face the fallout of the financial crisis and help prevent its economy from sliding into a painful recession.
The daily said the United States plans to use the funds to help the ailing automobile industry , banks and other companies suffering from the global financial turmoil.
The four nations, all members of OPEC, produce together 14 million barrels of oil per day, around half of the cartel's production and about 17 percent of world supplies.
The four states are estimated to have amassed close to 1.5 trillion dollars in surplus in the past six years due to high oil prices that rocketed above 147 dollars in July before sliding to just above 50 dollars.
The daily also said that the United States has asked Kuwait to forgive its Iraqi debt estimated at around 16 billion dollars.
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If Bankruptcy Hits Detroit
Congress has given Detroit’s flailing automakers less than two weeks to come up with a restructuring plan that would justify giving them tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and ensure that they have a reasonable path back to profitability. We hope it is a good plan, because the lame-duck Congress does not have a choice.
Michigan’s three car manufacturers have said that they would go bankrupt this year without an infusion of taxpayers’ money. Failing to provide it would be a truly irresponsible act that could obliterate one or more companies, potentially causing other bankruptcies and costing many hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Unpalatable as it seems to underwrite the proven record of failure of Detroit’s automakers, Congress must provide sufficient money to shore them up until the Obama administration takes office. Then, the new president and new Congress can decide how to manage either a rescue package with tight strings attached or a bankruptcy process that ensures the fallen companies have a reasonable shot at picking up the pieces.
Bankruptcy proceedings are designed to allow ailing companies to be restructured into profitable businesses, but that is by no means guaranteed — and it requires infusions of credit.
In the current financial environment, where even the soundest companies are having trouble getting loans, the government would have to guarantee that financing is available so that any car company under bankruptcy protection could keep operating and paying its workers and suppliers while it is restructured.
A bankrupt carmaker would face another tricky problem: how to keep consumers from shunning its cars out of fear that it might not be around to honor its warranty. Any bankruptcy financing given to a car company should be enough to buy warranty insurance to cover its fleet.
None of this guarantees an orderly restructuring. A company in bankruptcy proceedings could try to avoid making tough choices and coast through on the government dime. Insuring warranties might create an incentive for the company and its workers to relax on quality control. But these concerns might be addressed by tying worker and executive incentives to car quality and establishing a ceiling for government bankruptcy credit.
To get America’s carmakers back on their feet, difficult choices will have to be made — including cutting labor costs and the cost of health insurance. That is likely to mean selling off some product lines, laying off workers and closing the least productive plants. It could mean renegotiating the deal with the auto workers’ union to pay billions into a fund to cover retiree medical costs.
Taxpayers will end up with a big liability even if the company turns around and is able to repay its debt to the government. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is required to cover a substantial portion of the underfunded pension liabilities of any bankrupt company.
Economists Luigi Zingales and Joshua Rauh of the University of Chicago estimated that if General Motors were to collapse, underfunded pension liabilities would cost taxpayers roughly $23 billion.
It would still be our choice that the restructuring of blundering auto companies occur in an orderly way and be combined with a national strategy to deliver more fuel-efficient cars. Congress, so far, has failed in its duty to help make that happen. What must be avoided at all costs is for a big car company to spiral into liquidation.My Reply: Everyone of you "bailout" proponents miss the "BIG PICTURE" in all this mess. For the sake of short term expediency, you're all willing to undermine the very principles our nation was founded upon. Sadly enough, we've done a great job of destroying these foundations these last forty years, with the Reagan years perhaps being a slight exception.
We've gotten in the bad habit of looking to Washington as our "Heavenly" father to fix all our ills. It isn't working and hasn't ever worked in the long run. Privatizing the wealth & socializing the debt is bad for everyone, regardless of the perceived need. We (our gov't) should not have done it at all, ever. I do feel for Detroit, same as I feel for all of us in these times. I'm suffering as well as many small business owners here, but Uncle Sam isn't bringing me any billion dollar check. I wouldn't take it anyhow, because the debtor is slave to the lender. Yet, we're already there...
Long term, we've embarked down the path of no return with the prevailing philosophy of toying in socialism, no matter how you want to veil it. In reality, it's not socialism, but an oligarchy masquerading as such. The inevitable outcome is higher taxation, loss of liberty, more gov't oppression & social dependence, with even greater poverty. All these increasing ills spell America's demise as a world power, bookmarking us in the pages of history as how moral deterioration & spiritual cancer led to another empire's downfall. The "handwriting" is on the wall, you're just in fatal denial.
The bankruptcies will & have come anyway, not just in Detroit, but everywhere. Truth be told, our nation is already bankrupt. Just wait until our foreign creditors call in their markers. Can't happen? Don't hold your breath...
The "tremors" across our nation over the last 100+ years weren't merely "natural" or cyclical calamities. Economists and the like would deem it so, based on past events, yet the words, "unprecedented", "once in a century", "uncharted territory" are now their bylines. The "tremors" have become more intense & more frequent, and this one's a major shocker. But, the really "BIG ONE" is still yet to come...
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Citigroup on the Ropes
Less than two months ago, Citigroup emerged from the wreckage of the financial crisis as one of the last titans left standing on Wall Street.
Now, in a stunning turnabout, the banking giant has sunk to its knees after a series of blows that have driven its stock price to a mere $3.77 on Friday — and left it running short on time and options.
In the decade since Citigroup was born from the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group, it weathered many storms that threatened to pull it apart. But the current turmoil can be traced back to the last weekend of September, when it sought to reassert itself by swallowing Wachovia, the stricken bank based in Charlotte, N.C., whose vast deposit base would have turned Citi into one of America’s dominant lenders.
As the global financial crisis drove Wachovia toward collapse, the government frantically engineered their marriage. At a bargain price of $1 a share, Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, was happy to oblige: The deal would have greatly enhanced Citi’s retail banking presence and added more stable consumer deposits to a balance sheet staggered by billions in write-downs on bad mortgage loans and related securities.
But like so many other things for Citigroup over the last several years, it fell apart. Less than a week later, Wells Fargo, the powerful San Francisco-based bank, swooped in with a higher offer. Citi was left in the lurch, without a business that was vital to its future.
That collapse began a steady decline in Citigroup shares that snowballed this week as speculation grew that the bank might require a government bailout, a forced merger that would crush common equity holders, or an ouster of Mr. Pandit.
In the last five days alone, more than half of Citigroup’s market value was vaporized, and investors and analysts intensified calls for the bank to find ways to lift its stock price, including splitting the company, selling pieces or selling itself outright.
“They don’t have the sovereign wealth funds or other big investors to turn to anymore,” said William Fitzpatrick, an equity analyst for Optique Capital Management. “There are two remaining options: a federally forced merger or nationalization.”
The bank has fought back vigorously with assertions that its capital position is strong. It announced plans Monday to cut costs and slash 52,000 jobs. On Thursday, Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal, Citi’s biggest individual shareholder, said he would increase his stake in the bank to 5 percent from 4 percent.
But none of that has appeased investors, some of whom believe Citigroup must raise $20 billion or more in new capital to offset expected losses — and may have trouble doing so.
To some extent, Citigroup’s fortunes have declined as the storm in the broader financial industry has grown angrier.
Many analysts argue that the globe-spanning conglomerate, largely built by Sanford I. Weill, had never really worked as a cohesive unit. Different divisions have consistently battled, and promised synergies between units have rarely emerged.
“They never spent the time, the money or the energy to integrate all of the businesses,” said Meredith Whitney, analyst at Oppenheimer. “And so the credit card business speaks Mandarin while the mortgage business speaks Cantonese. It’s not a functional family. And because it’s not a functional family, it’s extraordinarily expensive to operate all the separate businesses, and you don’t get any of the advantages.”
Many of these problems were masked during the credit boom this decade. But with the financial crisis in full swing, the bank’s failure to unite its empire has become more exposed than ever.
“A lot of the issues facing Citigroup are not new issues, they have simply grown greater in severity,” said Michael Mayo, an analyst at Deutsche Bank.
These strains intensified significantly in recent days, when a near three-week grace period in financial markets came to an abrupt halt. Credit markets had begun to thaw as a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry took effect, and the United States presidential elections breathed a temporary euphoria into markets worldwide.
But financial stocks came under renewed assault last week after Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said the agency was abandoning its plan to buy troubled assets from banks — including the likes of Citigroup. While the program was not a panacea for the banking industry’s ills, investors had been expecting the government to absorb vast amounts of troubled assets from bank balance sheets, putting the companies on the path toward financial health.
The price of these securities had seen a nascent recovery in late October and early November as investors awaited more details about the plan. Policy makers had suggested the government would have paid higher prices for the securities than they could fetch on the open market, something that would have helped reduce the financial pressure on Citigroup.
Allen L. Sinai, president of Decision Economics in New York, said that while the original plan to buy assets was poorly conceived, the decision to scrap it severely damaged banks like Citigroup that were holding billions of dollars of mortgage-related assets.
Now “those balance sheets will continue to contract as long as housing prices continue to go down,” said Mr. Sinai. “What the flip-flopping has done is put another nail in some of our financial institutions.”
Investors pounded financial shares further as continued dire news about consumers and unemployment made clear that banks will face larger losses on consumer loans, as well as the prospect of billions more in mortgage-related write-downs. While financial shares fell across the board, Citigroup, with its large costs and troubled holdings, quickly became viewed as the most vulnerable, spurring huge sell-offs that worsened as hedge funds bet on a decline in its stock.
Then, on Tuesday, a report about imminent defaults on two large commercial mortgages sent the price of bonds backed by those loans tumbling. The first $209 million loan was backed by two Westin hotels in Arizona and Hilton Head, S.C., and the second was a $125 million loan backed a shopping complex in Southern California.
These problems renewed fears that a vast wave of damaged commercial loans would course through banks — including Citigroup — already hit by a tsunami of toxic mortgage products.
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