TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com | You can thank the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing for the incredible bull market that we have seen in recent months.  When the Federal Reserve does more "quantitative easing", it is the financial markets that benefit the most.  The Dow and the S&P 500 have both hit levels not seen since 2007 this month, and many analysts are projecting that 2013 will be a banner year for stocks.

Market Watch | The Treasury Department is resisting General Motors' push to for the government to sell off its stake in the auto maker, The Wall Street Journal reports. Following a $50 billion bailout in 2009, the U.S. taxpayers now own almost 27% of the company

New York Times | After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks.

Icenews.is | Experts continue to praise Iceland’s recovery success after the country’s bank bailouts of 2008. Unlike the US and several countries in the eurozone, Iceland allowed its banking system to fail in the global economic downturn and put the burden on the industry’s creditors rather than taxpayers.

TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com | What is the second half of 2012 going to bring?  Are things going to get even worse than they are right now?  Unfortunately, that appears more likely with each passing day.  I will admit that I am extremely concerned about the second half of 2012.  Historically, a financial crisis is much more likely to begin in the fall than during any other season of the year.  Just think about it.  The stock market crash of 1929 happened in the fall.  "Black Monday" happened on October 19th, 1987.

SovereignMan.com | After about an hour’s worth of air traffic congestion delays around JFK airport, I finally departed New York City yesterday evening en route for Vilnius, Lithuania… one of my favorite inconspicuous corners of Europe. The route took me through Helsinki, Finland for a brief connection, and I was on the ground long enough to witness something truly bizarre: a complete and utter lack of people.

Common Dreams |  More than $4 trillion in near zero-interest Federal Reserve loans and other financial assistance went to the banks and businesses of at least 18 current and former Federal Reserve regional bank directors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, according to Government Accountability Office records made public for the first time today by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Zerohedge.com | A week ago, Zero Hedge first presented the now viral presentation by Raoul Pal titled "The End Game." We dubbed the presentation scary because it was: in very frank terms it laid out the reality of the current absolutely unsustainable situation while pulling no punches. Yet some may have misread the underlying narrative: Pal did not predict armageddon. Far from it: he forecast the end of the current broken economic, monetary, and fiat system... which following its collapse will be replaced with something different, something stable. Which, incidentally, is why the presentation was called a big "reset", not the big "end."

TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com | Warren Buffett once said that derivatives are "financial weapons of mass destruction", and that statement is more true today than it ever has been before.  Recently, JP Morgan made national headlines when it announced that it was going to take a 2 billion dollar loss from derivatives trades gone bad.  Well, it turns out that JP Morgan did not tell us the whole truth.

Reuters | Greece handed 18 billion euros ($22.6 billion) to its four biggest banks on Monday, an official said, allowing the stricken lenders to regain access to European Central Bank funding. The long-awaited injection — via bonds from the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund — will boost the nearly depleted capital base of National Bank, Alpha, Eurobank and Piraeus Bank.

TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com | The Democrats, the Republicans and especially Barack Obama promised that something would be done about the too big to fail banks so that they would never again be a threat to destroy our financial system.  Well, those promises have not been kept and the too big to fail banks are now much bigger and much more powerful than ever.  The assets of the five biggest U.S. banks were equivalent to about 43 percent of U.S. GDP before the financial crisis.

Reuters | The Federal Reserve has moved closer to embarking on a new round of its controversial money-pumping after the central bank and its chairman Ben Bernanke highlighted a grim outlook for the U.S. economy. Bernanke on Wednesday opened the door a bit wider for the Fed to return to buying securities in the months ahead to buttress a weak recovery and keep inflation from slipping too far below its newly adopted 2-percent target.

ZeroHedge.com | As first reported here, two weeks ago European banks saw the amount of USD-loans from the Fed, via the ECB's revised swap line, surge to over $50 billion - a total first hit in the aftermath of the Bear Stearns failure prompting us to ask "When is Lehman coming?" However, according to little noted prepared remarks by Anthony Sanders in his Friday testimony to the Congress Oversight Committee, "What the Euro Crisis Means for Taxpayers and the U.S. Economy, Pt. 1", we may have been optimistic, because the end result will be not when is Lehman coming, but when are the next two Lehmans coming, as according to Sanders, the relaunch of the Fed's swaps program may "get to the $1 trillion level, or perhaps even higher."

Infowars.com | The road couldn’t be bumpier. As the G20 meet today in Cannes, you can bet that the embattled Greek PM George Papandreou will be getting ‘the hair-dryer treatment’ from Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Sarkozy. Back in Athens, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister and the PM’s likely successor – was hospitalised on Tuesday suffering from the mother of all stomach ulcers.

Stand Up America | The fact that the Federal Reserve is neither “Federal” nor a “Reserve,” and also not part of the official Federal Government is now clear to most of the world, and certainly to the concerned citizenry of the USA, finally. What is not known, but bandied about on the internet for quite some time is: Where did the money go?