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43% Have Less Than $10000 in Savings, 27% Less Than $1000

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday.

75% Are Angry At Government’s Current Policies

63% Say Better for Country If Most of Congress Not Reelected

 Housing expert Robert Shiller talked on CNBC yesterday about the double dip risks to the economy ahead. The bottom line is that governments are not magicians who can solve over-capacity problems with a flick of their fiscal wand; they can elongate the problems, but they cannot "fix" them. I think 2010 will be the year when the world wakes up to this realization.

The US banking system will lose 30 percent more than consensus estimates as shrinking loan portfolios squeeze profits, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC.

While increased governmental regulations will restrict the industry somewhat, Whitney said that the decline of up to 20 percent in lending portfolios will enact far more damage on bank balance sheets.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/commercial-loan-losses-could-threaten-system-cop-2010-02-11

 Marc Faber discusses America's unsustainable debt load in this interview with Margaret Brennan on Bloomberg TV. An amusing observation: the GDP growth from each $1 of new total debt has dropped from $0.25 to -$0.60. Also some much deserved Bernanke and Krugman bashing. Why it is so difficult to realize that the only way out of the crisis is to cut corporate and sovereign debt, we don't understand. Ah yes, because for that to happen, equity values across virtually all of the US economy would be wiped out... And that would destroy the myth that there is any real equity.

from Yahoo! Finance 'Tech Ticker' by Henry Blodget

Click the link above for additional commentary (video).

The Commerce Department reports housing vacancies remain near record levels.

21% of housing units built since 2000 sit empty.

George Soros  is  arguably the most famous hedge fund manager in history. In this Bloomberg interview he warns that with interest rates low around the world, policymakers were risking generating new bubbles which could cause crashes in the future. He says "When interest rates are low we have conditions for asset bubbles to develop, and they are developing at the moment. The ultimate asset bubble is gold."

As predicted first in the pages of the TREND Letter and TREND Technical Trader, 

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dollar-gains-ahead-of-us-gdp-data-2010-01-29

By Deborah Levine & Polya Lesova, MarketWatch