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Avery Goodman submits: In the first Great Depression, the government tried, for several years, between 1929 and 1933, to maintain a fiction that the U.S. dollar was still convertible and as “good as gold”, in spite of having irresponsibly printed more dollars than they had gold to back them. Back in the 1920s, just like during the last 22 years, the Federal Reserve had run its printing press overtime, and, as a result, it couldn’t deliver. The U.S. Treasury eventually ran out of the gold, in the face of overwhelming public demand, resulting in the infamous gold confiscation order, by President Franklin Roosevelt, in 1933. History may be repeating itself, except that the government no longer makes any pretension to maintaining a gold standard, or any standards at all. Instead, nowadays, the futures exchanges offer to trade gold for a floating number of dollars, and, it appears, they have printed more paper contracts than they can redeem, at least when it comes to 1 k

Further range trading and consolidation was the main theme once again for the Asian session, aside from USD-JPY which came under pressure from Japanese...

Months of covert negotiations could see imminent release of five Britons after two years in captivityThe kidnappers of five Britons held in Iraq claim to have agreed to trade one of their hostages for 10 detained militants as part of a deal that could soon see all five men freed after two years in captivity.In a statement released yesterday, a spokesman for the hostage-takers said an agreement had been reached with Britain and the US to free the Britons gradually in return for the group of Sadrist militants, which includes a former spokesman for the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and a Lebanese Hezbollah leader captured in Iraq in 2007.The deal, outlined by a Shia-aligned group called Leagues of the Righteous, sheds light on almost two years of covert negotiations between the British government and the hostage-takers.It also confirms suspicions that the hostages have been pawns in a power struggle that draws in Shia militant interests across Iraq, Lebanon and Iran.Efforts to finalise the

Brazil and Argentina will be pushing at the G20 summit in London next week for developed countries to make strong commitments not to adopt protectionism in response to the global economic crisis

It may have gone unnoticed by many casual observers of the stock market, but it has made a remarkable rebound in just a little over two weeks of trading.The Dow...

The bear market has left many companies trading at a discount to the assets in their balance sheets. Shares have not been this cheap for a long time.