Category: economy

Most investors know by now that the economic center of the world is in the process of shifting from West to East. Transfers of funds to pay for crude oil imports are a big part of this shift as far as America is concerned. You can not pay out over seven hundred billion dollars a year to oil exporting nations without creating a huge balance of payments problem.

The following list of “tallest, biggest, and largest” shows in a down to earth basic way the results of the global economy shifting its center. These interesting facts are from an author named Ferrez Zagawriteit. Just look at some of these. Some are trivial and some are important. However, all together they paint a pretty stark picture for Westerners staying on top of the economic heap in the 21st century :

The legendary investor, Jim Rogers, had more than a few hot words to say about the Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac rescue plan announced by Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke and Secretary of the Treasury Paul Paulson over the weekend.

“I don’t know where these guys get the audacity to take our money, taxpayer money, and buy stock in Fannie Mae,” said Jim Rogers from his new home in Singapore in a Bloomberg interview . “So we’re going to bail out everybody else in the world. And it ruins the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and it makes the dollar more vulnerable and it increases inflation.

These companies were going to go bankrupt if [the government agencies] hadn’t stepped in to do something, and they should’ve gone bankrupt with all of the mistakes they’ve made. What’s going to happen three years from now, when the situation’s much, much, much worse? They’re ruining what has been one of the greatest economies in the world. There are 300 million Americans that are going to have to pay for this.”

Hard times are on the way as evidenced by the collapse of IndyMac. In what will probably turn out to be the most expensive bank failure ever, troubled mortgage lender IndyMac Bank was taken over by federal regulators on Friday, July 11,2008.

All operations of the Pasadena, Calif.-based bank, once one of America’s largest home lenders, were shut down at 3 p.m. by the Office of Thrift Supervision and transferred to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp ( FDIC). It is estimated that with the takeover the FDIC will incur costs of up to $8 billion.

“It’s possible this will be the most costly bank failure in history, but it’s too soon to say,” FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said in a conference call Friday evening. She added that the IndyMac failure could also affect premiums paid by all banks for deposit insurance.