President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession. In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to do more to make sure more Americans can enjoy the benefits of the housing recovery, but critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.

“If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

To give some background on the issue, when Benjamin Franklin went to London in 1764, this is what he observed:

When he arrived, he was surprised to find rampant unemployment and poverty among the British working classes… Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied: “We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.”

In 1764, the Bank of England used its influence on Parliament to get a Currency Act passed that made it illegal for any of the colonies to print their own money. The colonists were forced to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold. Anyone lacking in those precious metals had to borrow them at interest from the banks.

Only a year later, Franklin said, the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed beggars, just as they were in England. The money supply had suddenly been reduced by half, leaving insufficient funds to pay for the goods and services these workers could have provided. He maintained that it was “the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and… the Revolutionary War.”

This, he said, was the real reason for the Revolution: “the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction.”

Eric Holder, America's supine Attorney General says he's scared to death to prosecute bank crime. Hank Paulson got away with stealing $750 billion during the TARP charade. Moral Hazard has become the new normal. Stealing is the biggest business in the world right now. I think that the possibility of the economy growing at a sufficient rate to generate enough taxable income to pay off their debts is zero.

I think the bigger question is; will the confiscation of money by the IMF and Germany from depositors in Cyprus end up being the trigger for military conflict? We've seen coups and revolutions started for less, not to mention World War 1. If a ground war does start - and replaces the 'Currency War' - then I think we can safely say the first shot fired was the robbery of bank deposits in Cyprus.

Throughout this crisis, risk has constantly been transferred away from private creditors on to the balance sheet of taxpayer-backed institutions. After two bailouts, Greece’s public debt is now around 70 per cent owned by eurozone taxpayers, with investors and banks largely let off the hook.

This is particularly hard to swallow in Germany as it comes down to broken promises. In the 1990s when the single currency was forged, German taxpayers were given two cast-iron guarantees: you will never have to bail out another eurozone country, and the European Central Bank will never enter the realm of politics by propping up insolvent governments.

Some 15 years and several bailouts later, German exposure through various loans and liabilities to weaker eurozone countries — including via the ECB’s government bond-buying programme - tops a nerve-rattling €1 trillion.

With Cyprus, the German government finally drew a line in the sand.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, therefore, that this month saw the launch of Germany’s first anti-euro party, Alternative für Deutschland. According to a recent opinion poll, about 26 per cent of Germans say they “could imagine” voting for such a party — with a disproportionally high share amongst first-time voters.

Here we identify the largest earthquake potentially related to injection, an Mw 5.7 earthquake in November 2011 in Oklahoma. The earthquake was felt in at least 17 states and caused damage in the epicentral region. It occurred in a sequence, with 2 earthquakes of Mw 5.0 and a prolific sequence of aftershocks. We use the aftershocks to illuminate the faults that ruptured in the sequence, and show that the tip of the initial rupture plane is within ∼200 m of active injection wells and within ∼1 km of the surface; 30% of early aftershocks occur within the sedimentary section.

Subsurface data indicate that fluid was injected into effectively sealed compartments, and we interpret that a net fluid volume increase after 18 years of injection lowered effective stress on reservoir-bounding faults.

Significantly, this case indicates that decades-long lags between the commencement of fluid injection and the onset of induced earthquakes are possible, and modifies our common criteria for fluid-induced events. The progressive rupture of three fault planes in this sequence suggests that stress changes from the initial rupture triggered the successive earthquakes, including one larger than the first.

ZeroHedge points out today that Australia, the world's 12th-ranked economy, has now joined a growing list of nations that have agreed to bypass the dollar in bilateral trade with China. China, ranked 2nd behind the US, also has similar agreements with Japan (3rd), Brazil (6th), India (9th), and Russia (10th).

Although unilateral agreements have been in place for some time between China and the countries listed above, last week the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) agreed to set up a development bank to compete with the IMF, indicating it's gearing up to compete in a post-dollar world.

In a sign of the prime minister's growing isolation in Europe after his decision to promise a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, Paris and Berlin have decided jointly to boycott the British "balance of competences" review. The decision by France and Germany is a particular setback to Cameron, who said in his long-awaited speech on the EU in January that nothing should be off the table in the review, which will examine every area of EU lawmaking.

But France and Germany, who form the EU's "big three" with the UK, have decided to steer clear of the review because they see it as driven by British politics. A French diplomat said: "This is a British domestic political exercise. We have therefore decided we would not participate."

Berlin's decision to ignore the British "balance of competences" review follows a clear private warning from Merkel that, if re-elected in September, she would grant little of substance to Cameron in his demands for a renegotiation of the terms of Britain's EU membership before the UK's referendum, which the prime minister has said would be held by 2017 at the latest. Hollande has been publicly dismissive of Cameron's speech.

Among the questions he asked was about US exports and wages, but the question itself was not nearly as important as the response he received from this senior administration official. In fact, this single, seven word response clarifies everything, explains everything, and leaves little else to discuss: “We’re just going to kill the dollar.”

There it is, the entire agenda in one short sentence. It explains everything we have been seeing domestically and globally. That one statement makes every other question irrelevant, or otherwise answers all economic questions and explains everything. Nothing else matters. I urge you to ponder that statement and all that it implies. Doing so will provide you with the clarity to understand not only what is taking place today, but what is yet to come.

The ultimate objective is to implement an international currency in tandem with a system of global governance. The problem is that most people are not thinking large enough, nor do they understand the magnitude of the lie.

America has become a captured operation - captured from within. Think of the Vichy French, internal collaboration with the enemy, or softening the ground for a full takeover from within. The takeover of America has already happened, the collaborators have already been installed, and we are now on a path to complete subjugation of a larger global system of governance. If you continue to doubt this, how else would you explain the numerous examples of our dual-party governmental acquiescence of self destruction?

To catch up to all that technology, the FBI is working with other members of the intelligence community to propose new legal snooping rules by the end of the year, Weissman said at the National Press Club in Washington last week. Weissman mentioned not just the ability to watch Gchat in real-time, but also the chat function in online games like Scrabble, as well as online voice chat programs like Skype and cloud storage services like DropBox (a noted favorite of former CIA spymaster David Petraeus.)

It's a broad goal, and it's likely criminals will adapt faster than the FBI can catch them. Such is the history of crime.

Easter is the most important festival in the Christian calendar and pilgrims have attended church across the world. But our correspondent says that, after Easter, the Pope will have to begin tackling the key issues facing the Catholic Church, such as reforming a Vatican bureaucracy riven by infighting and allegations of corruption, and tackling the issue of clerical sexual abuse.

Vatican watchers will also be keeping a keen eye on new appointments to key positions.

In his Easter homily, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, invited the Pope to visit. The patriarch, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, also urged the international community to take "concrete and effective decisions to find a balanced and just solution for the Palestinian cause, which lies at the heart of all the Middle East's troubles".

Launched earlier this month following public donations of €6,000, www.rechtesland.de is the latest attempt to stem what is seen by some as growing far-right activity in Germany. Last year 900 armed police stormed 150 neo-Nazi premises in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the country has been rocked by allegations that a neo-Nazi cell in the eastern city of Zwickau called the National Socialist Underground committed 10 murders between 2000 and 2007. According to a study last year by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German political foundation associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, 9% of all Germans hold far-right views, up from 8.2% two years earlier.

The map, which shows the locations of extreme-right groups, their associations, murders, attacks and current projects, was the idea of data journalist Lorenz Matzat, although the raw information comes from a collaboration with Apabiz, a Berlin-based nonprofit organisation that runs one of the country's most extensive archives on neo-Nazi activity.

In the first two days of operation, Rechtes Land was visited by 48,000 users.

Soon to be augmented with Wikipedia-style detail, the online map will include historical information from the second world war, memorial sites and everything people want to know, past and present, about extremism where they live. The data already shows 120 marches by fascist organisations in Germany in 2012 alone, says Matzat. "I decided we should use the web to show how much fascism is still alive in Germany," he says from his office in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. "The problem is shifting and not to talk about it doesn't make it go away."

The bank's chief financial officer said after the earnings were released on Thursday that it was "quick in recovering ground in March" on the lost deposits in February. The figures highlight the scale of the problems at Italy's third-biggest lender, which received a 4 billion euro ($5.1 billion) state bailout last month, according to Reuters. The news of Monte dei Paschi comes as a deal to rescue Cyprus banks from financial collapse has renewed fears about Europe’s shaky financial system.

Many banks across Europe have been struggling for more than three years as losses on government bonds and bad loans piled up. Some governments, meanwhile, have taken on more debt trying to prop up their lenders to the point where they have needed bailing out themselves.

In Cyprus's case, its banking sector became much bigger than the country's government could afford to rescue — seven times the size of the country's economy. When the banks were hit by large losses and Cyprus could not afford to bail it out on its own, the country turned to the other 16 European Union countries that use the euro.

Rather than making Europe's taxpayers foot the entire bill for bad banking, Cyprus and the other eurozone countries agreed to make the banks' bondholders and big depositors contribute to the rescue. One bank, Laiki, is to be split up, with its nonperforming loans and toxic assets going into a "bad bank." The healthy side will be absorbed into the Bank of Cyprus. Savers with more 100,000 euros in both Bank of Cyprus and Laiki will face big losses — possibly as much as 80 cents on the euro.

"Underwater" is a good description of the crisis in a country where large parts of the territory are below sea level. Ironically, the Netherlands, once a model economy, now faces the kind of real estate crisis that has only affected the United States and Spain until now. Banks in the Netherlands have also pumped billions upon billions in loans into the private and commercial real estate market since the 1990s, without ensuring that borrowers had sufficient collateral.

Consumer debt amounts to about 250 percent of available income. By comparison, in 2011 even the Spaniards only reached a debt ratio of 125 percent. The Netherlands is still one of the most competitive countries in the European Union, but now that the real estate bubble has burst, it threatens to take down the entire economy with it. Unemployment is on the rise, consumption is down and growth has come to a standstill.