Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi on the FED's Free Handout to Billionaire Banker's wives

Matt Taibbi- Rolling Stone

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Andrew Jackson's Defeat of the Second Bank of the United States- Spark Notes Version

Spark Notes- The Bank

As his term continued, Jackson truly grew a desire to crush the Second Bank of the United States. Over time he had decided that it could not continue as it was, and that it did not warrant reform. It must be destroyed. Jackson's reason for this conclusion was an amalgamation of his past financial problems, his views on states' rights, and his Tennessee roots. The Second Bank centralized financial might, jeopardizing economic stability; it served as a monopoly on fiscal policy, but it did not answer to anyone within the government. Above any principled concerns, however, the Bank became a political battle.

The US Dollar is Collapsing

McDonalds Corp. Hires 55,000+ New Employees as Global Economic Crack-up-Boom Accelerates

Yahoo-Finance

McDonald's Corp. will hold its first national hiring day April 19 to fill 50,000 openings at its restaurants nationwide. The company, based in Oak Brook, Ill., says it is making a concerted effort to add staff as its business improves and as more of its restaurants stay open 24 hours a day.

McDonald's is hiring restaurant crew and management for full-time and part-time positions. The company's hiring goal translates to between three and four new hires per restaurant.

Turnover slowed in the past few years because of the weak economy, the company says. McDonald's sees this event an opportunity to attract employees in a tough job market.

It is also trying to shed the negative connotation of employment at the fast-food chain, once dubbed "McJobs." About half of its franchisees and more than 75 percent of its managers started as store workers.

Marc Faber: End of QE 2. Global Economic Analysis

Marc Faber is an investment analyst and entrepreneur. Faber has a reputation for being a contrarian investor and has been called "Doctor Doom" for a number of years. Amongst his many correct economic predictions, most recently ,on March 9, 2009, Faber correctly predicted a U.S. stock market bottom

Federal Reserve Bloomberg's FOIA Release- Discount Window (Downloadable)

ZeroHedge-Tyler Durden

Tired of poring through thousands of PDF files from the Fed's Bloomberg FOIA release? Curious why Ron Paul said that he "was surprised and deeply disturbed ... to learn the staggering amount of money that went to foreign banks" and is planning to hold a hearing over emergency loans to the branches of non-U.S. banks? Then here is the excel file for you: the following publicly shared google docs spreadsheet contains the complete Discount Window loan origination data from March 14, 2008 through March 16, 2009. We offer it so that anyone who wishes to perform their own analysis on the primary data can do so (and needless to say banks noted as FORI in the markstat entity type are foreign borrowers). 

 Excel- Spreadsheet downloadable