The WSJ has a cool toy for comparing Obama's speech to past ones and even other Presidents, so I won't get into much of the content here (highlight video).
As was expected, the President said he will use executive power to implement his economic agenda to help address the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in America, announcing a dozen proposals, including raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for Federal contract workers, presumably setting an example for private enterprise to follow.
The reality is, there's not all that much Obama can do without Congress and it's the Democrats' objective to make that clear to the people between now and November, when the bottom 99% get to decide who will be in that Congress for the last two years of Obama's term.
"President Obama has this fantasy that he can just use his pen to write laws," said Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. "We don't have a monarchy in this country—there's an executive branch and the legislative branch, and the president has to work with Congress to get things done."
Sorry, that quote should have gone with a musical queue.
It was Turkey who goosed the markets last night, with a SHOCKING rate hike on one-week Interbank Rates, from 4.5% all the way to 10% as that country attempts to get it's plummeting currency and runaway inflation under control. That boosted the overnight rate from 8% to 12%!
So far, the Fed and the ECB have been fairly successful in exporting all the inflation – mainly to third-world countries but now the BRICs are feeling the pressure as well as G20 fringe economies like Turkey and Indonesia and their Central Banks are hiking rates in an attempt to keep things under control while our own Central Banksters keep screwing over the bottom 90% by pretending inflation doesn't exist.
"In the last quarter my sales have dropped by a third, while the costs have
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