Getting Hosed...

Obama Pledges $275 Billion to Stem U.S. Foreclosures

The Federal Reserve warned Wednesday that the nation's crippled economy is even worse than thought and predicted it would deteriorate throughout 2009, with no sign that the housing market will stabilize...The Fed's latest forecast says the unemployment rate will climb to between 8.5 and 8.8 percent this year. The old prediction, issued in mid-November, estimated that the jobless rate would rise to between 7.1 and 7.6 percent. Many private economists believe the current 7.6 percent jobless rate -- the highest in more than 16 years -- will hit at least 9 percent by early next year even with the $787 billion stimulus package signed into law Tuesday by Obama. The Fed also believes the economy will contract this year between 0.5 and 1.3 percent. The old forecast said the economy could shrink by 0.2 percent or expand by 1.1 percent....BUT, The Fed forecast calls for the jobless rate to dip to between 8 and 8.3 percent next year, and to between 7.5 and 6.7 percent in 2011......Under the Fed's new projections, the economy should grow between 2.5 and 3.3 percent next year and by as much as 5 percent in 2011, which would be considered robust."
And these folks are running the biggest bank in the world...

To tap it all off,
With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California's latest drought, the nation's biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
And my students thought that only India had water shortages...