After a year of negotiations and false starts, Senate Democrats won Joe Manchin’s agreement to a plan to spend $385 billion to speed the U.S. transition toward cleaner fuels and $100 billion to expand subsidies for Medicare drug coverage and for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” for three years. The proposed...
Tag: aug 2 2022
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U.S. APPROVES ANOTHER $550 MILLION IN WEAPONS SHIPMENTS TO UKRAINE
The White House announced on Monday that it will send another $550 million in weapons to Kyiv that will mostly include ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). The latest round of weapons brings the U.S.’s total military support to more than $8 billion. The U.S. has also sent roughly $54 billion in...
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MORTGAGE RATES FALL AFTER FED HIKES RATES
U.S. mortgage rates fell last week after the U.S. Federal Reserve added three-quarters of a point to its key interest rate. The interest on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage dropped from 5.54 percent on Wednesday, the day the Fed raised its rate, to 5.22 on Thursday. It slumped to 5.13 percent on Friday and closed Monday,...
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GAMBLERS ON THE STREET SEE RATE CUTS NEXT YEAR
Speculators playing the market in interest rate futures are betting that the U.S. Federal Reserve will continue raising interest rates aggressively through this year, then begin to cut them in the second half of 2023. The underlying assumption is that the Fed will drive the economy into a recession, which it then will seek to...
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BIG DEAL? FED LIFTED INTEREST RATES
Members of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee voted unanimously on 27 July to add three-quarters of a point to the key federal funds interest rate. The hike followed the same-size increase the committee made in June, making the successive increases the Fed’s most aggressive policy tightening in 40 years. The rate will now...
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CHINA CONTINUES ITS ‘ZERO-COVID STRATEGY,’ LOCKS DOWN MUCH OF WUHAN AGAIN
China has been one of the last remaining “Zero-COVID” holdouts and announced last week that sections in the city of Wuhan—the city where many believe the disease originated—has been placed under lockdown due to four asymptomatic cases. Two of these cases were discovered during normal testing and the other two through contact tracing, the BBC reported. The Trends...
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SOME 60 PERCENT OF AMERICANS WORRY THEY ARE GOING BROKE
While America has sent over $60 billion to keep bloodying the killing fields of Ukraine and enriching the military industrial complex, a poll released last week by the American Staffing Association found that about 60 percent of American workers said their paycheck will not be enough to provide for their families as the country deals...
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ISRAELI TO DEMOLISH PALESTINIAN HOMELAND FOR MILITARY FIRING ZONE
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the military to evict some 1,200 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to make way for a firing zone for the Israeli defense forces. The Palestinians live in the Masafer Yatta region, which consists of small, poor villages, according to the Financial Times. The legal battle over...
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DEADLY PROTESTS BREAK OUT IN CONGO, UN MISSION TARGETED
Did you read the headline news about a family of three dying from Russian attack in Ukraine? But barely reported in the mainstream media is the deadly protests that broke out in Congo which killed 15 people, including three law enforcement officials working with the UN. The violence broke out in the mineral-rich eastern region...
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U.S. OKs $8.4B WEAPONS DEAL FOR GERMANY, MAKING WAR-MACHINE VERY HAPPY
The U.S. State Department last week approved an $8.4 billion arms deal for Germany that will include the sale of Lockheed Martin F-35 aircraft for Berlin to use during nuclear deterrence missions. Defense News reported that the 35 F-35s will replace the PA-200 Tornado aircraft by 2030 and will be used during nuclear weapons missions. The...