This is effectively bankruptcy. Bloomberg reports.
California is poised to begin its new fiscal year tomorrow without a plan in place to close a $24 billion deficit as the state prepares to conserve cash by issuing IOUs to vendors who are owed money.
Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrats who control both chambers of the Legislature are [...]

This past weekend I saw the film Food Inc, which I recommend highly to anyone looking to see how deregulation has affected industries other than finance.  While the subject of Food Inc was how the industrialization of food policy in the U.S. has had unintended negative consequences, I couldn’t help but draw connections to the [...]

Apparently, the U.S. auto industry is working off a significant backlog of inventory because I have been hearing that pretty much everyone in North America is planning to ramp up production for the third quarter.  This is prima facie evidence of the huge inventory-based production changes which I have said will make Q3 and Q4 [...]

As If you didn’t know this already, the wall of money being funnelled through Chinese banks is creating a massive speculative bubble in shares.  The Telegraph reports:
Under orders from the government, China’s banks have flooded the economy with new credit this year, advancing more money in the first six months than the total for 2008. [...]

Moodys pone en perspectiva negativa cdulas hipotecarias de Bancaja y CAM – Finanzas
Moodys is downgrading Spanish savings banks. There is still significant weakness in the financial sector in Spain. The Spanish desperately want a housing market bottoming like the one which could be developing in the UK.

Output rises 5.9% for third straight monthly increase | [...]

The S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices for April 2009 were released today.  The Composite-10 and Composite-20 indices showed a 18.0% and 18.1% decline respectively, making the data less bad than in the previous month.  Nevertheless, there is still considerable weakness, particularly in former bubble cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Miami.  There, prices have been [...]

On the same day that the worst economic growth numbers in the U.K. in 51 years, we also get some news that the British economy may be stabilising. Well, at least house prices seem to be stabilising as Nationwide reported a 0.9% increase in house prices in UK June.  That is the third rise in [...]

Here is more from Dylan Ratigan’s new show on MSNBC.  Arianna Huffington and Eliot Spitzer were guests.  They all have noticed that Barack Obama has spent an inordinate amount of political capital and money on the financial services sector without showing any stomach for serious all-encompassing reform.  Why is still unclear, but Huffington suspects capture [...]

Dylan Ratigan, a former host on both Bloomberg Television and CNBC has a new gig over at CNBC.  Ratigan has been especially harsh in criticizing the financial services industry and its role in the recent global meltdown. 
Below, is a video of Ratigan in his role as moderator of his new show on MSNBC.  And [...]

Late last year, I predicted that China, as a major exporter to the West, would feel a huge impact from the meltdown in the global economy, taking it’s growth rate down to 2% (See Top ten predictions for the 2009 global economy). Forgetting about the fact that data are highly suspect in China, I see [...]