Despite the US rating having already been downgraded to AA+ by S&P, Martin W Hennecke, associate director of Tyche Group Ltd, believes it is not enough and states the Asian estimations should be treated more carefully. "Chinese rating agency Dagon Global is far more reliable than the Western ones, and they've already downgraded the US to A with negative outlook," Hennecke said.

However the financial ratings are not the only indicator of the deep crisis in the global economy. Many people may not believe in the reliability of the S&P, Moody's and other agencies. But it is not only the rating agencies that are causing "this mess in Europe and the US," he added.

"Look at the total fiscal gap, the horrible short for the US finances. This number is US$211 trillion. That's not too far from Greece. That's why, I think, the AA+ rating for US is ridiculous, it should be far lower," Hennecke said.

Standard and Poor's credit rating agency knocking US debt to the less privileged AA+ credit rating has shifted the topic of debt burden from bankers' agenda to the government's protocols. This will not gain public approval in the US - and financial journalist Demetri Kofinas explains why to RT.

"The downgrade [by] S&P of the United States, whether it was warranted or not, speaks volumes about the shift of risk from the balance sheet of banks to the balance sheet of sovereign countries, which are effectively the backstops for the welfare state. So when that gets thrown into question, of course you're going to have mounting unrest," says the journalist. The US dollar being the international reserve currency only adds fuel to the fire in the global financial system, continues Kofinas.

"Because the system architecture is such with the banking system and the way sovereign countries have been effective backstops for the banking system, I think you are going to see more unrest, especially in the US, because it is an empire and it is the reserve currency of the world," he adds. "So when the system collapses it is going to be most felt in the US, because the empire sits on a nation state, within which it resides like a giant parasite. So when that crumbles, it is the final piece to go."

"The US investment banks and the rating agencies are now attacking these French banks. They know where the bodies are buried, and they are using the weapons they sold them to attack them," he said. "The rating will be downgraded again. This is part of a new era on Wall Street - they go after sovereign debt. Wall Street and rating agencies are working together to destabilize the sovereign debt of these countries," he added.

With the markets swinging back and forth, it looks like traders are panicking. And as Max Keiser believes, it does not look likely to settle any time soon. "The volatility was the goal; by downgrading the rating you create volatility," he explained. "The derivatives' volume this week is exploding higher than any week in history. That is making many people on Wall Street and in the City of London very rich. So they will continue to downgrade and to milk the system to extract wealth," Keiser stated.

"This is WW III, a new war using financial derivatives. The objective is to preserve the speculative rates given to the Wall Street bankers of zero per cent," he concluded.

The DHS report had followed only by weeks a report from the Missouri Information Analysis Center that linked conservative groups to domestic terrorism. The Missouri report warned law enforcement agencies to watch for suspicious individuals who may have bumper stickers for presidential candidates such as Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin. It further warned law enforcement to watch out for individuals with "radical" ideologies based on Christian views, such as opposing illegal immigration, abortion and federal taxes. "This new handout expands the absurdity by now also targeting customers of military surplus stores, and by specifically targeting the purchasing of very common, and very popular, preparedness items such as Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) as 'potential indicators of terrorist activities,'" said a statement from Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.

"Islamic terrorists are not known to hang out in local Army-Navy surplus stores, stocking up on MREs, high capacity magazines and bi-pods for their long range rifles," the statement said. "As Brandon Smith, over at Alt-market.com notes, 'These are very common purchases, not for terrorists, but for Preppers and Survivalists, who are obviously the targets of the FBI profile, not secret al-Qaida agents.' "Spot on," Rhodes wrote. "Obviously, the current crop of FBI 'leadership' considers anyone who wants to be self-sufficient and prepared to be a 'threat' that should be relentlessly tracked and reported."

One-time Colorado congressional candidate Rob McNealy pointed out to WND the irony that the government, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, specifically advises citizens to collect "ready-to-eat canned meats, fruits and vegetables" as well as "flashlight and extra batteries" and "matches in a waterproof container." Then the FBI asks store managers to report the "suspicious" activity of buying the same items. "It's almost like entrapment," McNealy said.

The US administration has made clear in a number of cases that it is concerned about conservatives as a potential danger and even has argued in court that it wants the authority to track American citizens in order to develop "probable cause" needed for search warrants. That argument is being made before the US Supreme Court in a dispute over whether police investigators and other authorities should be allowed to track American citizens who have not done anything that would have ordinarily prompted a judge to issue a search warrant.

The question resonated Saturday in San Francisco and beyond as details emerged of Bay Area Rapid Transit officials' decision to cut off underground cellphone service for a few hours at several stations Thursday. Commuters at stations from downtown to near the city's main airport were affected as BART officials sought to tactically thwart a planned protest over the recent fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man by transit police.

Two days later, the move had civil rights and legal experts questioning the agency's move, and drew backlash from one transit board member who was taken aback by the decision. "I'm just shocked that they didn't think about the implications of this. We really don't have the right to be this type of censor," said Lynette Sweet, who serves on BART's board of directors. "In my opinion, we've let the actions of a few people affect everybody. And that's not fair."

Similar questions of censorship have arisen in recent days as Britain's government put the idea of curbing social media services on the table in response to several nights of widespread looting and violence in London and other English cities. Police claim that young criminals used Twitter and Blackberry instant messages to coordinate looting sprees in riots.

University of Michigan law professor Len Niehoff, specializes in First Amendment and media law issues, said that the government does have the right to break up a demonstration if it forms in an area where protests are prohibited and poses a risk to public safety, Niehoff said. But it should not prohibit free speech to prevent the possibility of a protest happening. "The idea that we're going to keep people from talking about what they might or might not do, based on the idea that they might all agree to violate the law, is positively Orwellian," he said.

But the OECD's lagging indicator takes no account of the latest crisis, in which sovereign debt worries and fears that Europe and the US are headed back into recession sparked a rout in the markets. If things were bad before, brace yourself for even worse, seems to be the message in the financial markets. "What we need is a really strong steer from policymakers that they have got a strategy," said Karen Ward, senior global economist at HSBC bank.

"But there is a feeling that none of our policymakers seem to have control of the situation," she said. HSBC has yet to produce its next quarterly report on global growth, but there are plenty of signs of what it could contain. "It is pretty obvious that there is more pessimism around this quarter than there was last quarter. Data on the global economy is poor," she said.

Writing in the Financial Times, the economist Professor Nouriel Roubini, said: "There is a rising risk - approaching 50% now - of a double-dip recession in the US and most advanced economies." So what can be done? Pumping more money into economies through quantitative easing (QE) is increasingly being talked about as essential in both Europe and the US. It would certainly be a "small price to pay" to avoid the collapse of the euro or plunge in recession, says HSBC's chief economist Stephen King

The markets are telling policymakers "they want to see a more decisive move towards fiscal integration", said Jonathan Loynes, chief economist at Capital Economics. "The indebted economies are not returning to growth. They are not getting a grip on their finances." The markets are rapidly "losing faith" in policies that just "muddle through", he said.

Societe Generale has been the worst affected by the volatility, being forced on Wednesday to deny that its financial stability was at risk. In short-selling, traders profit from bets on the fall in a share price. The practice has been blamed for increasing recent market instability.

Short-sellers usually borrow shares or bonds, sell them, then buy them back when the stock falls - pocketing the difference. "Naked" short-selling is when a trader sells financial instruments he has not yet borrowed. All forms of short-selling are included in the ban. The announcement was made both by the European Union's markets supervisor, ESMA, and the four national markets authorities.

France's agency, the AMF, said it was banning short-selling on 11 banking and insurance stocks for 15 days, including France's three largest banks, Societe Generale, BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole. Spanish banks included in the ban are Santander, BBVA, Sabadell, Bankinter, Banco Popular, and Banca Civica. Greece banned short-selling on Monday.

Robert Peston, Business editor, BBC News noted:- "Precedent suggests a short-selling ban does not change the fundamentals"

Their wrath was matched by politicians, police and the public who made it clear that the anarchy and mindless criminality would not be tolerated. In Manchester, ransacked by a mob on Tuesday night, judge Alan Berg spoke for millions of law-abiding people when two looters were brought before him.

He said: 'You have all the benefits in this country which individuals in other countries would pray for, and you bring shame and disgrace upon this country as a whole, and upon yourselves and your families. You do nothing constructive. Everything you do is destructive. This was intolerable lawlessness and no civilised society should be expected to put up with it.'

He jailed a man for six months who was caught heading for the scene of the riots carrying a balaclava and an empty bin bag. Jordan Kelly, 20, said he went to 'gather' trainers and other goods lying in the street the day after shops were looted.

Yesterday Judge Berg told him: 'Decent members of society are sick and tired of people taking advantage of a situation like there has been in Manchester over the last days. I need to make an example of you.' The judge told Daniel Bell, who was caught leaving a looted electrical store with a Macmillan Cancer charity box containing £50: 'Your crime is probably the most despicable and contemptible I have had to deal with all day. It is breathtakingly wicked.'

In Nottingham another district judge, Tim Devas, asked one criminal who obstructed police from making arrests: 'Don't you feel ashamed that you are now counted among the hundreds of yobbos arrested and now considered as scum by the public?' On breakfast television yesterday morning, a senior Metropolitan Police officer, deputy assistant commissioner Stephen Kavanagh, said officers were worried that some rioters were getting soft sentences.

But as the day went on, a string of cases revealed how judges and magistrates were giving short shrift to the excuses of looters. Dental nurse Shereece Ashley, 20, who left her baby at home when she went to loot a Tesco store, was jailed for three months at Camberwell Green magistrates' court. Engineering student Nicolas Robinson, 23, who stole six bottles of water worth £3.50, was sentenced to six months. Across the country around 1,400 people have been arrested over the riots.

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week's dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them. I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the "north-south divide", which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How To Spend It is a bible. I'd guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates. The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.

This is the song of the "gold bugs" - the fervent fans of the precious metal who have clung to its investment value for three generations and now glow in the reflected luster of a record price approaching $2,000 for just one ounce. Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the United States' abandonment of the gold standard. But gold bugs kept the faith - even when prices stayed under $500 for nearly 25 years after their 1981 peak.

Their passion derided, dismissed as hopelessly out dated doomsayers, their love for the metal seemed irrational. Fast forward and the financial crisis of 2008 has made gold the darling of investors from hedge funds to taxi drivers, and sparked a near-doubling of prices.

"Gold has been rising against all national currencies, and that's significant," James Turk, founder of bullion dealer Goldmoney, said. "When there are problems with a national currency... people begin to worry about the value of their money, whether they're going to lose purchasing power because of inflation or other problems. As a consequence, they look for safe havens." He was speaking as a true gold bug - not in the dark days after Lehman Brothers' demise in 2008, nor in the depths of last year's euro zone debt crisis, nor after Standard & Poor's recent downgrade of the United States' top-notch credit rating.

Turk's view came in a BusinessWeek interview he gave in 2005, well in advance of the current financial crisis. "My long-standing forecast, made in a Barron's interview in October 2003, is that $8,000 per ounce will be reached sometime between 2013-2015," he told Reuters this week. "I've stayed with that forecast over the years and see no reason to change it."

The world's current financial woes are only going to get worse if current policies continue, he believes, meaning the rally in gold prices is unlikely to stop here. "Politicians and central bankers are making decisions that debase national currencies, and the resulting bad monetary policies they are following are causing the gold price to rise," he said.

The announcement came as financial markets were again in turmoil on concerns that the US and eurozone debt crisis may spark a new recession and after rumours of a France credit rating downgrade and fears over Greek debt exposure. Markets are wondering whether France and Germany - the eurozone's two biggest economies - can continue to underwrite other states' debts without losing their top credit ratings and falling victim to the crisis themselves.

The crisis started in Greece and is now fuelled by fears that Spain or Italy might default on their debt and possibly spark a break-up of the currency shared by 17 countries. Italy promised Thursday to meet many of the demands made by European Central Bank for major economic reforms in return for help in shielding the country from the debt crisis.

"We need to have very strong austerity measures in 2012 and 2013," Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti told lawmakers, who had been called back from summer holidays to debate the moves. Italy must speed up austerity measures - with the aim of achieving budget balance by 2013 instead of 2014 as previously planned - "because of the intensification of the crisis and indications from Europe," Tremonti said.

EU leaders are trying to implement a July agreement aimed at beefing up the euro's defences. But many of the measures need national parliamentary approval and that process could drag on to the end of the year in some cases. Leaders agreed at the summit on the conditions of a second bailout for Greece as well as an increase in the eurozone's rescue fund, the 440 billion euro ($625-billion) European Financial Stability Facility.

"We got that letter," said Jonathon Szykowny, owner and director of Szykowny Funeral Home. "I'm extremely upset by it... I would be very concerned that during extreme economic times that some families can't provide the necessary funds to bury their loved ones. Sometimes God doesn't call during the best economic times and families can't afford to pay for a funeral and need help"

In the past, the state has reserved about $13 million to help pay for an estimated 12,000 funerals for individuals who relied on public aid. Participating funeral homes were alloted $1,100 for funerals and $552 for the burial. The 2011 budget, however, accounts for just $1.9 million.

The Illinois Department of Human Services letter said it can only guarantee payments for pauper funerals through August 15. Funeral directors have been advised to look for money from city or county governments, and to advise families in morgues until funding can be secured. "Now the only viable option - I don't mean to make light of it - is to leave the body at the medical examiner's office," Szykowny said. "After 60 to 90 days they'll take the body to what's called a potter's field and bury it in a numbered grave."

The Corn Belt states of South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana saw drought develop quickly as the important corn-growing region got only spotty rainfall amid the high heat, according to the weekly US Drought Monitor, produced by a consortium of national climate experts. Abnormal dryness intensified to moderate drought over the last week, according to the report.

Texas remained the epicenter of unprecedented drought, with climate data showing the state suffering its driest 10 months ever in over a century of data. Levels of "extreme" and "exceptional" drought grew to 94.27 percent of the state from 91.73 percent over the last week, Drought Monitor reported. "This is unprecedented territory, as the precipitation deficits mount, and triple-digit temperatures continue to increase water demand," it said.

Since January, Texas has received only 40 percent of its normal rainfall, according to the National Weather Service. Oklahoma also saw conditions worsen, with extreme and exceptional drought now spread through 92.88 percent of the state, up from 88.10 percent. The deadly drought and triple-digit temperatures have broken numerous records and left the southern Plains and Mississippi Valley struggling to meet demand for power and water, while causing billions of dollars in damage to crops and livestock.

Broadwater Farm estate is again at the centre of the unrest in London. Mark Duggan, whose death last week sparked London's riots, was brought up here, and sent one of his sons to Stirling's football classes. On Wednesday, Stirling was making arrangements for his wake.

Struggling to make sense of the violence that has turned buildings on Tottenham High Road into smouldering piles of rubble, Stirling wondered whether weakened parental authority might have something to do with it. A chorus of establishment voices responded to pictures of school-age children looting late at night by reaching to blame the parents. MPs were urging them to make sure they knew where their children were, David Cameron was talking again about a broken Britain, and London's mayor said adults and teachers needed to be given back the right to impose authority.

Stirling's analysis is more nuanced - citing poverty, unemployment, failings of the education system, police harassment, among other triggers - but he believes parents have become afraid to discipline their own children, and warns this is at least part of the problem that has erupted across cities this week. "Bad behaviour and criminality has been glamorised on the streets. Teachers are scared to punish children. The modern child isn't frightened of their parents. They don't care if the police lock them up," he said.

"We envisage that banks operating on a more EU-wide basis, alongside an ECB with appropriate powers, would be an important part of a sustainable euro project," said Tony Silverman, a financial analyst at S&P. "This may mean peripheral countries should not necessarily expect to have their own domestic banks," he added.

Mr Silverman points out that about 50 per cent of eurozone deposits lent through the European Central Bank and the interbank market are to banks that have loans in excess of their deposits, adding there is a "conspicuous" absence of banks that are net lenders to the market. "We would question whether this is sustainable and indeed to what extent such funding can meaningfully be regarded as temporary," said Mr Silverman.

Banks in countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland have become dependent on ECB funds to remain in business and loans originally seen as short-term have become an integral part of their funding. The eurozone crisis has put a focus on these issues and there are now doubts as to whether many of these lenders remain viable as independent entities in the longer term. "Eurozone countries have as much right to their own banks as Northumberland," said Mr Silverman. However, Mr Silverman's analysis suggests that even these larger institutions will remain unsustainable in the long-term due to their domestic focus.