In his October newsletter to clients of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), founder Bill Gross summarized the coming disaster that faces the country, and noted that “only gold and real assets would thrive…”

Gross manages the world’s largest bond fund along with CEO Mohamed El-Erian, with nearly $2 trillion of assets under management. His clients include individual retirees, pension plans, educational institutions, foundations, and endowments, each seeking safety of principal along with reasonable returns. Accordingly he must temper his words not to frighten away the very people he serves. But he’s courageous enough to tell the truth.

The passing of the former publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger, at age 86 on September 29 was noted by editors and publishers in the mainstream media in the most favorable terms.

Waiting for the economy to improve before turning off the printing presses is likely to take a very long time. The August numbers on the economy were disheartening for those waiting for such an improvement: U.S. durable goods production fell for the third month in a row, astonishing economists who had predicted much better numbers. GDP continues to slow, and companies such as Caterpillar, the world’s biggest construction and mining equipment manufacturer, cut its earnings outlook because of the continuing slowdown in the world economy.

With the announcement that the U.S. Postal Service will be unable to make a $5.6 billion payment to its employees’ health benefit plan due on September 30th, calls for privatization of the archaic service are mounting.

Media Research Center celebrates 25 years of exposing mainstream media bias on Monday, October 1, having grown into a powerhouse media exposure empire that has changed the public's perception of media credibility.

When the Senate unanimously passed SB 1956 early Saturday morning, September 22, Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) called it “rather extraordinary.” But she didn’t mean that as a good thing. It meant, instead, that the Senate wanted nothing to do with the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EUETS) that would have burdened U.S. airlines with $3 billion in additional costs over the next decade, attacking the country’s national sovereignty along the way.

This would mean instead, according to Petsonk, if the House passed a similar measure that is pending there, that the EDF’s efforts to implement worldwide regulation of airlines’ emissions would have to be directed through an international UN-sanctioned group instead. In other words, the Senate bill was just a speed bump on the way to European Union control of all airlines.

One of the prime unintended consequences of the new unlimited QE3 announced by the Fed is that it is difficult to know when to reverse course without sending the economy into another, deeper recession?

Every September 11 the people of Catalonia, an independent region in northeast Spain, celebrate their “national day” — Diada — by taking the day off and parading through the streets of Barcelona. In past years the celebration was a festival used by some citizens as an excuse to get some fresh air, make some noise, and have some fun. This year, nearly one-quarter of the region’s seven million citizens used the celebration as an excuse to swarm into Barcelona to protest Spain’s austerity measures, which have raised unemployment in Catalonia — referred to locally as Catalan — to nearly 25 percent.

A preview of the upcoming Census Bureau's upbeat analysis of the economy was met with little enthusiasm and contrasted sharply with reports from FedEx and elsewhere.

When the Federal Reserve announced last week its plan to buy more treasury securities, only a few read the fine print. Many observers envisioned sugar plums dancing in their heads as the Fed’s plan would lead, no doubt, to more economic growth, more jobs, more profits, and more stocks to sell on Wall Street. But in fact, unemployment not only hasn’t fallen significantly since the start of the Fed’s rollouts of Quantitative Easings, but it has remained higher longer than any time since the early 1980s.

If the Fed decides to extend its Operation Twist program beyond the end of the year and into the year 2015, then the math is irrefutable: 40 months of purchases totaling $85 billion a month is $3.4 trillion. The Fed’s balance sheet is currently at $2.7 trillion. That brings the Fed’s balance sheet, if nothing changes, to a mind-bending $6.1 trillion.