But the pension fund was just sitting there

Salon interviewed author Ellen E. Schultz, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, on her new book, “Retirement Heist,” which details the mechanisms that big companies have used to loot their own employee’s pensions and earned benefits. See: The Theft of the American Pension : Salon – Economics

From the looks of this interview, the book doesn’t go far enough. The theft of retirement savings is bigger than this, as the entire credit and mortgage scheme that collapsed the global economy was about siphoning pensions and global savings from their protected pools through fraudulently overrated and priced investments. Now politicians want to sell the idea that Social Security earned benefits are just another promise that must be broken. Don’t believe it!

Signs of the Times : Fed opens up a fire-hose of cash

Here’s a great graph found on the website of the 2008 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It reflects a part of the response to the ongoing financial crisis. Think the threat to the economy has been overstated? Take a look at the size of the response, reflected in this graph of the Total Borrowings of Depository Institutions from the Federal Reserve. The rules for borrowings have been changed, allowing the dollars borrowed to soar far above anything ever seen in the past.