Has anyone else noticed that the level of stress in this country appears to be extremely high right now? Today, it seems like our federal government, our state governments and most American families live in a constant state of crisis. Everywhere you look there are major problems. Right now everyone is stressed out because of the “debt ceiling deadline”. Earlier this year everyone was freaked out about the possibility of a “government shutdown”. If by some miracle Barack Obama and the Republicans are able to reach a deal in the next few days that will not help the national stress level for long. Another gut-wrenching “national crisis” will almost certainly come along very quickly. Meanwhile, average American families are feeling more stress than ever. There are millions of ordinary Americans that either cannot find jobs or are working as hard as they can and yet cannot seem to pay their mortgages and provide the basics for their families. We are a nation that is really stressed out right now, and as things continue to unravel the level of stress is only going to increase.
Compared to much of the rest of the world, we have an insanely high standard of living, and yet we appear to be some of the most unhappy people on the face of the earth.
Wherever you turn today, someone is popping a pill. The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world. Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than children in Europe are.
What in the world is wrong with us?
America is a country that desperately needs to chill out.
Washington D.C. sure is a stressful place right now. Most of our politicians seem to be focused on the 2012 elections rather than on trying to solve our problems.
Most of our leaders are prancing around trying to make themselves look good. Meanwhile, our national financial situation continues to go down the toilet.
One way or another this “debt ceiling crisis” will probably get solved. Our politicians will come up with some sort of a “deal” and it will almost certainly be a bad one.
The sad truth is that the U.S. national debt problem should have been addressed decades ago.
But it wasn’t.
So now we are sitting on a 14 trillion dollar timebomb.
Yes, the ultra-wealthy have become absolute masters at avoiding taxation, but even if some way to tap into their offshore wealth could be found, it still would only put a small dent in the problem.
The truth is that the U.S. government spends way too much money.
U.S. government spending is now above 25 percent of U.S. GDP. That is way above what has been normal during the post-World War II era.
But cutting government spending is not going to fix our system either.
The reality is that our debt-based financial system is designed to trap our federal government in a constantly expanding spiral of debt indefinitely.
The same poll found that 80 percent of Americans believe that it is “difficult” to find a job these days.
In the United States today, there are 14 million unemployed people. Tonight there are huge numbers of Americans that are sitting at home desperately hoping that someone will give them a job. A significant percentage of our population that should be productive is just sitting on the sidelines. Just check out the following quote from a recent CNN article….
Has anyone in Washington noticed that 20% of American men are not working? That’s right. One out of five men in this country are collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents. The equivalent number in 1970, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, was 7%.
With numbers like that, how in the world can anyone claim that our economy is healthy?
Sadly, it looks like things may get even worse. As I have written about previously, we are now starting to see another huge wave of layoffs all over the nation.
The employment crisis has a ripple effect throughout the rest of the economy as well.
Without good jobs, Americans cannot buy homes. The housing crash is not going to be fixed until there the employment situation gets fixed.
With lending standards tighter than ever, it takes someone with a good income and a solid employment history to be able to qualify for a home loan.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of people like that in the marketplace right now.
So, the housing industry continues to suffer.
Last year was the worst year for new home sales in modern U.S. history. So far, this year is even worse.
Ouch.
It would be really nice if we actually would have an economic recovery, but it just isn’t happening.
Prices are rising and incomes are not. American families are feeling more squeezed than ever.
A lot of Americans live in a constant state of stress because of debt.
According to one new poll, about 20 percent of American adults worry about debt “most or all of the time”.
If you have ever been there, then you know how financial stress can rob sleep from you night after night after night.
Today, total credit card debt in the U.S. is more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.
Some Americans can handle credit cards, but a lot of them can’t. A staggering 46 percent of Americans do not pay their credit card bills in full each month.
But credit card debt is only one form of debt that is causing stress for American families. The truth is that the total amount of student loan debt is even greater than the total amount of credit card debt. Medical debt is another huge problem. The vast majority of American families are dealing with a debt problem of one form or another. The decades of “easy credit” that we enjoyed are really starting to catch up with us.
Today, the average American household is carrying $75,600 in debt.
That is not a good thing. American consumers are tapped out and the economy is suffering.
As the economy crumbles, many hard working Americans are finding that their lives have radically changed. Just check out the following excerpt from an article posted on a local Connecticut news source….
For 28 years, Cathy Hartley of Glastonbury brought home a good paycheck from her job at Aetna.
But last Tuesday, she was in line with her two young granddaughters for free produce from Mobile Foodshare at the First Church of Christ Congregational on Main Street.
For Hartley, who said she was laid off from her job as a project manager about six years ago and then laid off from a subsequent job two years ago, every little bit helps. Her eligibility for unemployment ran out two months ago.
Could you imagine standing in line at a food bank?
Don’t laugh.
It just might happen to you.
Millions of Americans that have lost their jobs and their homes never thought that it would happen to them.
Wealth and possessions are here today and gone tomorrow. People that base their lives on the things that they own are always going to have a high level of stress. We didn’t bring any of these things into the world with us, and we can’t take any of them with us when we leave.
So try not to stress out too much. We should all learn to be content whether we have a lot or whether we have a little.
So what do all of you think about the stress level in America right now? Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
The crumbling U.S. economy is putting an extraordinary amount of financial stress on American families. For many Americans, “flat broke” has become a permanent condition. Today, over half of all American families live paycheck to paycheck. Unemployment is rampant and those that do actually have jobs are finding that their wages are rising much more slowly than prices are. The financial condition of average American families continues to decline and this is showing up in all of the recent surveys. For example, according to a new Gallup poll, “lack of money/low wages” is the number one financial concern for American families. To make ends meet, many American families are going into even more debt and more American families than ever are turning to government assistance. Right now, more Americans than at any other point since World War II are flat broke and have lost hope. Until this changes, the frustration level in this country is going to continue to grow.
The following are 10 facts about the financial condition of American families that will blow your mind…..
#1 Only 58 percent of Americans have a job right now.
#2 Only 56 percent of Americans are currently covered by employer-provided health insurance.
#3 The median yearly wage in the United States is $26,261.
#4 The average American household is carrying $75,600 in debt.
#5Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
#6 At this point, American families are approximately 7.7 trillion dollars poorer than they were back in early 2007.
#7 The poorest 50% of all Americans now own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
#10According to Newsweek, close to 20 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 54 do not have a job at the moment.
So what is causing all of this?
Where in the world did all of the good jobs go?
Well, the truth is that millions of them have been shipped overseas.
Our politicians promised us that merging our economy with the economies of other nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages to workers would not create more unemployment inside America.
They were dead wrong.
Now we are being told that we just need to accept a lower standard of living.
For example, billionaire Howard Marks says that it is time for all of us to just accept that the standard of living of American workers is inevitably going to decline to the level of the rest of the world….
“In addition to balancing the budget and growing the economy, I think we have to accept that the coming decades are likely to see U.S. standards of living decline relative to the rest of the world. Unless our goods offer a better cost/benefit bargain, there’s no reason why American workers should continue to enjoy the same lifestyle advantage over workers in other countries. I just don’t expect to hear many politicians own up to this reality on the stump.”
Are you willing to accept that?
Well, most Americans appear to be willing to accept this “new reality” because they keep sending most of the exact same bozos back to Washington D.C.
Meanwhile, the job losses continue to get worse. As I wrote about the other day, as the U.S. economy has started to slow down again we are starting to see another huge wave of layoffs all over America.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where all of our jobs are going. But unfortunately, most Americans don’t understand what is happening because neither the mainstream media nor our politicians are telling them the truth.
But it is not just the globalization of the economy that is destroying our jobs.
The federal government bureaucracy has become so oppressive that it is amazing that anyone is still willing to hire workers in this day and age.
Hiring workers has become so complicated and so expensive that many small business owners want to avoid it at all cost.
For example, a small business owner identified as “007” recently left the following comment on one of my recent articles….
Speaking as a small employer, I would rather have a root canal than another employee. Let’s see. You first have to hire someone you trust without some labor lawyer suing you for some type of discrimination. Then you have OSHA to make sure your work place is safe. Then you have workmans compensation insurance, unemployment taxes, health insurance, liability insurance, now Obamacare. Oh be careful not to be deemed to have a “hostile work environment”. Then you have to negotiate the labor laws. The Department of Labor is constantly cranking out regulation.
Then you get the pleasure of paying payroll taxes both state and federal along with the required filing of a multitude of payroll forms. Miss filing or paying these taxes and you will be crushed with interest and penalties.
Of course, you are competing with businesses that can hire at a fraction of the cost of American Labor and with very little regulations. In this economy, no one in their right mind is hiring into this unstable and declining economy.
If business turns down all you have to worry about is laying off workers. Of course your unemployment insurance tax will go up 200% for years. Then you only have to then worry about a wrongful termination law suit.
The entire system is stacked against American workers.
If you are a blue collar worker, you should give up hope that things are going to get better. The system has failed you.
You can stop waiting for the “good jobs” to come back.
They aren’t coming back.
That is one reason why I try to encourage everyone to become more independent of the system.
As our economic system continues to degenerate, Americans are going to become increasingly desperate.
Sadly, desperate people do desperate things. Already we are starting to see signs that the fabric of American society is starting to be ripped to shreds.
So what is going to happen if the economy gets even worse?
There is a limit to how many people we can actually put in prison. The reality is that the number of Americans in prison has nearly tripled since 1987.
Our prisons are already dangerously overcrowded. As society falls apart, many communities will simply not be able to shove more people behind bars.
Even with our prisons stuffed to the gills, many of our largest cities continue to be transformed into absolute hellholes.
Well, they appear to be too busy fighting with each other and cheating on their wives to do much about our problems.
According to Politico, U.S. Representative David Wu is the latest member of Congress to be accused of a sex scandal….
Rep. David Wu has been accused of an “unwanted sexual encounter” with the teenage daughter of a longtime friend, the latest scandal to engulf the troubled Oregon Democrat.
This country is a complete and total mess. Tens of millions of American families are flat broke and are about to slip into poverty. Meanwhile, our politicians continue to prove that they are some of the most corrupt on the planet.
There are many out there that still believe that America has a bright future ahead.
It is getting really hard to see why anyone could possibly believe that.
The competition for jobs in the United States is absolutely brutal right now, and it is about to get worse. A new wave of layoffs is sweeping across America. During tough economic times, Wall Street favors companies that are able to cut costs, and the fastest way to “cut costs” is to eliminate employees. After a period of relative stability, the employment picture in the U.S. is starting to get bleaker again. New applications for unemployment benefits have now been above 400,000 for 15 straight weeks. Finding a good job is kind of like winning the lottery in this economy. Our federal government and the state governments have made it incredibly complicated and extremely expensive to have employees on the payroll. It is getting harder and harder to get a large enough return to justify the time and expense that hiring employees requires. So many firms now find themselves trying to do more with the employees that they already have. Other companies are turning to temp agencies as a way to reduce costs and increase workplace flexibility. A lot of the big corporations are sending as much work as they can overseas where the wages are far lower and where the regulatory environment is much simpler. All of this is really bad news for American workers that just want good jobs that will enable them to provide for their families.
When we first started seeing huge numbers of layoffs a few years ago, I encouraged people to look into government jobs because I thought that they would be a lot more stable in this economic environment.
But today that is no longer true. In fact, state and local governments all over the United States are responding to massive budget problems by slashing payrolls in an unprecedented fashion.
Sadly, the reality is that the number of “secure jobs” is rapidly declining in America. If you have a “job” (“just over broke”) right now, you might not have it for long. That is one reason why everyone should be trying to become more independent of the system.
Once upon a time the U.S. economy produced a seemingly endless supply of good jobs. This helped us develop the largest and most vibrant middle class in modern world history.
But now employees are regarded as “costly liabilities”, and businesses and governments alike are trying to reduce those “liabilities” as much as they can.
This summer the pace of layoffs seems to be accelerating all over the nation. Just check out what has been happening over the past few weeks….
-Lockheed Martin has made “voluntary layoff offers” to 6,500 employees.
-Detroit is losing even more jobs. American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings has told the remaining 300 workers at its manufacturing facility in Detroit that their jobs will be ending in early 2012.
-Layoff notices have been sent to 519 employees of Milwaukee Public Schools, and more than 400 open positions are going to go unfilled.
-The Gap has announced that up to 200 stores will be closed over the next two years.
-Cisco has announced plans to lay off 9 percent of their total workforce.
-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says that 625 city employees will be losing their jobs as a result of cutbacks.
-Pharmaceutical giant Merck recently dumped 51 workers from an office in Raleigh, North Carolina.
-Perkins has revealed that they will be closing 58 restaurants.
-This week, Goldman Sachs announced that they will be eliminating 1,000 jobs.
Sadly, there are hundreds of more examples of recent layoffs and job losses. One website that tracks these layoffs daily is Daily Job Cuts. It is pretty sad when there are entire websites that are devoted to chronicling how fast our economy is bleeding jobs.
What is worse is that it looks like the pace of layoffs is going to keep increasing.
One report that was recently released found that the number of job cuts being planned by U.S. employers increased by 11.6% in June.
That is not good news.
Things don’t look good for employees of state and local governments either.
State and local governments have eliminated approximately 142,000 jobs so far this year.
That is bad, but this is just the beginning.
UBS Investment Research is projecting that state and local governments in the U.S. will combine to slash a whopping 450,000 jobs by the end of next year.
Ouch.
Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke keep trying to tell us that the economy is improving, but that simply is not the case. Yes, some of the largest corporations have announced big earnings, but that is not translating into lots of jobs for American workers.
Today, most large corporations only want to have as many U.S. workers as absolutely necessary. In a world where labor has been globalized, it just doesn’t make sense for corporations to shell out massive amounts of money to American workers when they can legally get away with paying slave labor wages to workers on the other side of the globe.
So if it seems like it is far harder to get a good job in America today than it used to be, the truth is that you are not imagining things.
Our entire system discourages job creation inside the United States. Every single year, even more ridiculous job-killing regulations are being passed on the federal and state levels. It has become extremely expensive and ridiculously complicated to hire people.
So how are American families surviving? Those that still do have jobs are finding that wages are not going up but the cost of living rapidly is. Many American families are making up the difference by using their credit cards more.
In June, credit card purchases in the U.S. increased by 10.7 percent compared to the same month a year ago.
It looks like a whole lot of people have not learned their lessons about how bad credit card debt is.
Millions of other American families have fallen out of the middle class completely. Today, one out of every six Americans is enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program. The level of economic suffering in this country continues to soar.
In fact, the number of Americans that are now sleeping in their cars or living in tent cities remains at staggering levels.
What we are witnessing in this country is not just a “recession” or an “economic downturn”. What we are witnessing are fundamental economic changes.
Until there are fundamental policy changes in the United States, there will continue to be huge waves of layoffs and millions of jobs will continue to be shipped out of the country.
In the old days, one could go to college, get a good job with one company for 30 years and retire with a big, fat pension.
Now, that way of doing things is completely and totally dead.
Today, there is virtually no loyalty out there. It doesn’t matter how long you have been working at a particular job. When it becomes financially expedient to get rid of you, that is exactly what is going to happen.
It is a cold, cruel world out there right now. Don’t assume that you will always have a good job. The world is rapidly changing.
Don’t get caught in the trap of believing that the way that things were is the way that things are always going to be in the future.
Have you noticed that almost everyone seems really angry these days? Frustration with the government and with most of the other major institutions in our society seems to grow by the day. According to a brand new ABC News/Washington Post poll, 80 percent of Americans say that they are either dissatisfied or angry with the government. Americans are deeply divided about what the solutions to our problems are, but what almost everyone can agree on is that our problems are getting worse. Watching all of the madness that is going on in Washington D.C. and in our state capitals is almost enough to drive anyone absolutely crazy. Our nation is drowning in an ocean of debt, jobs are being shipped overseas at an alarming rate, thousands of stores are closing, poverty is exploding, greed has become a national pastime and corruption is seemingly everywhere. The American people are incredibly frustrated because the vast majority of our “leaders” appear to be too incompetent or too corrupt to deal with our problems.
If you visit just about any website on the Internet that deals with politics or the economy and spend some time reading the comments that people leave you will quickly see how angry people are becoming. A lot of times people have no other outlets for the intense frustration that they are feeling and so they just let it all come out online. Yes, Americans have always complained about the government, but the madness that we are seeing today is really unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Something has fundamentally changed.
The U.S. government and most of our other major societal institutions are rapidly losing the faith of the American people. But society cannot function without trust.
So what is going to happen once all of the trust is gone?
The following are 39 things that are driving ordinary Americans absolutely crazy right now….
#1According to Newsweek, close to one out of every five American men between the ages of 25 and 54 does not have a job at the moment. So why is the “greatest economy on earth” unable to provide jobs for nearly 20 percent of the men that are in their prime working years?
#2 Last year, over a million homes were repossessed by financial institutions. This year a similar number of repossessions is expected. Sometimes these evictions are absolutely heartbreaking. Just check out the following excerpt from a recent Newsweek article….
To understand American anger, that roiling storm sometimes dubbed our national “mood,” spend a day with Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. Since 2006 the unlikely lawman—a tea drinker who listens to Bobby Kennedy speeches on his way to work—has overseen all foreclosures and evictions in the Chicago area, one of the hardest hit nationwide. The process does not always go well. One evictee shot himself in the head, remained conscious, and calmly tried to raise the pistol again as deputies battered the front door.
#3 Companies like Netflix and Chipotle are significantly raising prices. Meanwhile, Ben Bernanke claims that there is hardly any inflation. He must not go grocery shopping much.
#4 The government keeps telling us that the economy is improving, and yet more stores keep closing. The Gap has announced that up to 200 stores will be closed over the next two years. Perkins has announced that they will be closing 58 restaurants. Borders has announced that they will be shutting down their remaining 399 stores and that 10,700 employees will lose their jobs. Yes, the economy is really buzzing right now.
#5 Government services all over the nation are being cut back. An atmosphere of austerity has descended on the entire country. For example, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says that we may soon have to say goodbye to Saturday mail delivery.
#6 Many broke public school systems are now charging parents lots of money for things that used to be free. The Wall Street Journal says that one family in Ohio has to shell out over $4,000 a year for basic school activities….
Budget shortfalls have prompted Medina Senior High to impose fees on students who enroll in many academic classes and extracurricular activities. The Dombis had to pay to register their children for basic courses such as Spanish I and Earth Sciences, to get them into graded electives such as band, and to allow them to run cross-country and track. The family’s total tab for a year of public education: $4,446.50.
#7 The Federal Reserve gets to give out tens of billions of dollars of nearly interest-free loans to their bankster friends while tens of millions of American families desperately try to survive an economic downturn that was caused by those same banksters.
#8 We have gotten ourselves into a position where we are in so much debt to China that we have to constantly be concerned about how they feel about our financial status. Earlier this week, one top Chinese official urged the U.S. government to do something to boost confidence in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt….
“We hope the U.S. government will take responsible policies and measures to boost global financial market confidence and respect and protect the interests of investors.”
#9 The national debt continues to spiral out of control and our politicians seem unwilling to do anything serious about it. If you combine all sources of income, it is estimated that LeBron James makes about 42 million dollars a year. If he continued to make money at that rate, it would take him 23,809 years to make a trillion dollars. Yet our politicians see no problem with running trillion dollar deficits year after year.
#10 Unless our politicians do something dramatic, the federal government is headed straight toward financial hell. It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will hit 344% of GDP by the year 2050 if we continue on our current course.
#11 It is not just the federal government that is broke. Right now, there are a lot of state and local governments that are teetering on the brink of financial disaster. Moody’s has announced that it will be reviewing, and possibly downgrading, the credit ratings of Maryland, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is such a financial mess that nobody really has any idea how to fix their problems.
#12 All over the United States, highways, water treatment plants, libraries, parking meters, airports and power plants are being sold off (much of the time to foreigners) in order to plug short-term holes in state and local budgets.
#13 The combination of federal government spending, state government spending and local government spending now accounts for a larger share of U.S. GDP than at any other time in our history.
#14 Police all over America have been shutting down lemonade stands run by little children. At least one police chief in Wisconsin was good enough to apologize when it happened in his area. It is too bad that there aren’t more police out there that have a little common sense.
#15 The U.S. housing crash shows no signs of abating. Real estate construction is absolutely dead. In fact, right now we are on track for the lowest number of total housing completions that the U.S. government has ever recorded in a single year.
#16 In June, sales of previously-owned homes in the United States declined to a seven month low. Without good jobs, the American people cannot afford to buy homes. Many of those that do have good incomes are being turned down by mortgage lenders.
#17 The supply of existing homes for sale continues to go up. That means that it is going to get even harder for average Americans to sell their homes.
#18 The value of U.S. homes has fallen by a total of approximately 6.6 trillion dollars since the peak of the housing market.
#19 It isn’t just banks that are kicking people out of their homes. All over the country, homeowners’ associations are aggressively using their powers to boot American families out on to the streets.
#20 Instead of being used by families, all over the country thousands of foreclosed homes are rapidly filling up with mold.
#21 Really bizarre thefts are being reported all over the United States right now. For example, it was just reported that some crooks in Pennsylvania ripped up and hauled away about 100,000 pounds of train track.
#22 Authorities continue to insist that violent crime is going down, and yet the number of police officers killed by gunfire is on pace to easily set another all-time record for the second year in a row.
#24 The health insurance companies keep jacking up rates on all of us, and yet they also continue to report record breaking profits.
#25 The Obama administration is now using “mystery shoppers” to spy on doctors. The following is from a report in the New York Times….
Alarmed by a shortage of primary care doctors, Obama administration officials are recruiting a team of “mystery shoppers” to pose as patients, call doctors’ offices and request appointments to see how difficult it is for people to get care when they need it.
#26 Corruption appears to be rampant on every level of American society today. For example, one NYU professor recently discovered that 20 percent of his students were blatantly cheating on assignments.
#27 Thanks to insane tax loopholes, a substantial percentage of the billions of dollars of income that hedge fund managers make is only taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent. Meanwhile, middle class American families are being absolutely hammered with taxes.
#28 The “too big to fail” banks now control 77 percent of all of the banking assets in the country.
#29 In 2010, the United States had the worst current account balance in the world. The U.S. had a current account balance of negative 561 billion dollars for 2010. No other nation had a negative current account balance that even exceeded 70 billion dollars. The amount of wealth leaving our country and being transferred to the rest of the world is absolutely mind blowing.
#30 One recent poll found that 72 percent of Americans believe that we are involved in too many wars. But the Obama administration seems to think that we should be “the police of the world” and they just keep getting the U.S. military involved in more conflicts.
#31 Startling revelations are starting to come out about a scandal so big that it could shake up Washington D.C. for years to come. Apparently, ATF agents were ordered to get thousands of guns into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels and they were also apparently ordered not to follow those guns to see where they ended up.
#32 The top 5 percent of all income earners in America account for almost as much consumer spending as the bottom 80 percent of all income earners.
#33 The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006. But instead of being treated with kindness, many communities are treating the growing ranks of the poor as “outcasts” or criminals.
#34 Despite the promises of our politicians, globalism is absolutely shredding the American economy. According to Forbes, the United States has been losing an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#35 There are no signs that our rampant unemployment problem is going to end any time soon. In fact, right now it takes the average unemployed worker about 40 weeks to find a new job.
#36 The vast majority of U.S. consumers are tapped out at this point. Just consider the following quote from the New York Times….
The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began.
#37 Right now in Congress there is a proposal to change the way that inflation is calculated. According to The Senior Citizens League, this change would cause the average retiree to lose out on $18,000 in Social Security benefits over a 25 year period.
#38 Our tax system is fundamentally unjust. Just look at the example of General Electric. G.E. is a favorite of the Obama administration and somehow they get away with not paying taxes year after year. Just check out what the New York Times claims G.E. got away with in 2010….
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
#39 The TSA continues to abuse U.S. travelers in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable. For example, one 95-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair that is dying from cancer was asked to remove her adult diaper so that TSA “officials” could feel her up properly. In what kind of a society does this type of thing go on?
No wonder the American people are losing faith. It is hard to keep believing when you see rampant corruption and decay everywhere you look.
But mostly, the American people want to be able to take care of their families.
The American people are not going to start feeling better about things until there are plenty of good jobs to go around. If people cannot pay their mortgages and provide for their families then they are not going to be content no matter what our politicians tell them.
Unfortunately, the “new normal” is going to be a lot different from what the “old normal” was. The United States is a declining power. Every month our nation is bleeding more jobs, more factories and more wealth. Every month our debt problems on the federal, state and local levels get even worse. We have been living far beyond our means for decades, and we are rapidly getting to the point where that simply will not be possible anymore.
The long-term trends that have gotten us to this point have taken decades to develop. There is no “quick fix” that some politician is going to bring in that is going to create some kind of miracle.
We are now starting to pay the price for decades of bad decisions. As the consequences of our decisions become more apparent, the American people are going to get angrier and angrier.
Unless something very dramatic happens, we are heading for a very ugly chapter in American history.
Let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.
Can you smell it? There is blood in the water. Global financial markets are in turmoil. Banking stocks are getting slaughtered right now. European bond yields are absolutely soaring. Major corporations are announcing huge layoffs. The entire global financial system appears to be racing toward another major crisis. So could we potentially see a repeat of 2008? Sadly, when the next big financial crisis happens it might be worse than 2008. Back in the middle of 2008, the U.S. national debt was less than 10 trillion dollars. Today it is over 14 trillion dollars. Back in 2008, none of the countries in the EU were on the verge of financial collapse. Today, several of them are. This time if the global financial system starts falling apart the big governments around the world are not going to be able to do nearly as much to support it. That is why what is happening right now is so alarming. As signs of weakness spread, the short sellers and the speculators are starting to circle. They can smell the money.
Back in 2008, bank stocks led the decline. Today, that appears to be happening again. The “too big to fail” banks are getting absolutely pummeled right now. Most people don’t have much sympathy for the banksters, but if we do see a repeat of 2008 they are going to be cutting off credit and begging for massive bailouts once again, and that would not be good news for the economy.
In Europe, the EU sovereign debt crisis just seems to get worse by the day. Bond yields for the PIIGS are going haywire. The higher the yields go, the worse the crisis is going to get.
Meanwhile, as I have written about previously, a bad mood has descended on world financial markets. Pessimism is everywhere and fear is spreading. The short sellers and the speculators are eager to jump on any sign of weakness. Investors all over the globe are extremely nervous right now.
So what happens next?
Well, nobody knows for sure.
But things certainly do not look good.
The following are 18 signs that global financial markets smell blood in the water….
#1 Banks stocks are absolutely getting hammered right now. Bank of America hit a 52 week low on Monday. Bank of America shares declined 4 percent to $9.61.
#2 So far this year, Bank of America stock is down about 27 percent.
#3 Bloomberg is reporting that Bank of America may be forced to increase its capital cushion by 50 billion dollars.
#7 Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are all either considering staff cuts or are already laying workers off.
#8 The deputy European director of the International Monetary Fund says that the Greek debt crisis is “on a knife’s edge“.
#10 The yield on 2 year Portuguese bonds is now over 20 percent, the yield on 2 year Irish bonds is now over 23 percent and the yield on 2 year Greek bonds is now over 35 percent.
#11 Shares of Italy’s largest bank dropped by a whopping 6.4% on Monday.
#12 On Monday, the yield on 10 year Italian bonds was the highest it has been since the euro was adopted.
#13 On Monday, the yield on 10 year Spanish bonds was also the highest it has been since the euro was adopted.
#14 Shares of Germany’s largest bank fell by a staggering 7% on Monday and are down a total of 22% so far this month.
“Nothing stands in the way of multiple sovereign defaults except the ECB: they are the only game in town, there is nothing else”
#16 Cisco has announced plans to axe 16 percent of its workers.
#17 Borders Group has announced that it will be liquidating all remaining assets. That means that 399 stores will be closed and 10,700 workers will lose their jobs.
#18 During times of great crisis, many investors seek safe havens for their money. On Monday, the price of gold shot past $1600 an ounce.
These are not normal financial times. The worldwide debt bubble is starting to burst and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next. Certainly we are going to continue to see financial authorities all over the world do their best to keep the system going. But as we saw in 2008, things can spiral out of control very quickly.
Just remember, back at the beginning of 2008 very few people would have ever imagined that the biggest financial institutions in America would be begging for hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts by the end of that year.
When confidence disappears, the game can change very quickly. To the vast majority of economists it would have been unimaginable that the yield on 2 year Greek bonds would be over 35 percent in mid-2011.
But here we are.
The entire global financial system is a house of cards built on a foundation of sand. It is more vulnerable today than it has been at any other time since World War II. When a couple of major dominoes fall, it is likely to set off a massive chain reaction.
The global financial system of today was not designed with safety and security in mind. It was designed for greedy people to be able to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. The banksters don’t care about the greater good of mankind. What they care about is making huge piles of cash.
There is way too much risk, way too much debt and way too much leverage in the global financial marketplace. You would have thought that 2008 should have been a major wake up call for financial authorities around the world, but very few significant changes have been made since that time.
The financial news is just going to keep getting worse. This financial system is simply unsustainable. It is fundamentally unsound. The reality is that financial bubbles cannot keep expanding forever. Eventually they must burst.
Over the next few weeks, keep a close eye on banking stocks and keep a close eye on European bond yields.
Hopefully things will stabilize.
Hopefully the next wave of the financial collapse is not about to hit us.
Hopefully the entire global financial system is not on the verge of a major implosion.
Back during the financial crisis of 2008, the American people were told that the largest banks in the United States were “too big to fail” and that was why it was necessary for the federal government to step in and bail them out. The idea was that if several of our biggest banks collapsed at the same time the financial system would not be strong enough to keep things going and economic activity all across America would simply come to a standstill. Congress was told that if the “too big to fail” banks did not receive bailouts that there would be chaos in the streets and this country would plunge into another Great Depression. Since that time, however, essentially no efforts have been made to decentralize the U.S. banking system. Instead, the “too big to fail” banks just keep getting larger and larger and larger. Back in 2002, the top 10 banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Unfortunately, these giant banks are also colossal mountains of risk, debt and leverage. They are incredibly unstable and they could start coming apart again at any time. None of the major problems that caused the crash of 2008 have been fixed. In fact, the U.S. banking system is more centralized and more vulnerable today than it ever has been before.
It really is difficult for ordinary Americans to get a handle on just how large these financial institutions are. For example, the “big six” U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now possess assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America’s gross national product.
These huge banks are giant financial vacuum cleaners. Over the past couple of decades we have witnessed a financial consolidation in this country that is absolutely unprecedented.
This trend accelerated during the recent financial crisis. While the big boys were receiving massive bailouts, the hundreds of small banks that were failing were either allowed to collapse or they were told that they should find a big bank that was willing to buy them.
As a group, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo held approximately 22 percent of all banking deposits in FDIC-insured institutions back in 2000.
Sadly, smaller banks continue to fail in large numbers and the big banks just keep growing and getting more power.
Today, there are more than 1,000 U.S. banks that are on the “unofficial list” of problem banking institutions.
In the absence of fundamental changes, the consolidation of the banking industry is going to continue.
Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” banks are flush with cash and they are getting serious about expanding. The Federal Reserve has been extremely good to the big boys and they are eager to grow.
Citigroup has been hiring dozens of investment bankers, dialing up advertising and drawing up plans to add several hundred branches worldwide, including more than 200 in major cities across the United States.
Hopefully the big banks will start lending again. The whole idea behind the bailouts and all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve did was to get money into the hands of the big banks so that they would lend it out to ordinary Americans and get the economy rolling again.
Well, a funny thing happened. The big banks just sat on a lot of that money.
In particular, what they did was they deposited much of it at the Fed and drew interest on it.
Since 2008, excess reserves parked at the Fed have grown by nearly 1.7 trillion dollars. Just check out the chart posted below….
The American people were promised that TARP and all of the other bailouts would enable the big banks to lend out lots of money which would help get the economy going for ordinary Americans again.
Well, it turns out that in 2009 (the first full year after Congress passed the bailout legislation) U.S. banks posted their sharpest decline in lending since 1942.
Lending has never fully recovered since the crash of 2008. The big financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase have been able to get all the cash that they need, but they have not passed that generosity along to ordinary Americans.
In fact, the biggest U.S. banks have actually reduced small business lending by about 50 percent since the crash of 2008.
That doesn’t sound like what we were promised.
These “too big to fail” banks have been able to borrow gigantic amounts of money from the Fed for next to nothing and yet they still refuse to let credit flow to local communities. Instead, the big banks have found other purposes for all of the super cheap money that they have been getting from the Fed as Ellen Brown recently explained….
It can be very profitable indeed for the big Wall Street banks, but the purpose of the near-zero interest rates was supposed to be to get banks to lend again. Instead, they are, indeed, paying “outrageous bonuses to their top executives;” using the money to engage in the same sort of unregulated speculation that nearly brought down the economy in 2008; buying up smaller banks; or investing this virtually interest-free money in risk-free government bonds, on which taxpayers are paying 2.5 percent interest (more for longer-term securities).
What makes things even worse is that these big banks often pay next to nothing in taxes.
For example, between 2008 and 2010, Wells Fargo made a total profit of 49.37 billion dollars.
Over that same time period, their tax bill was negative 681 million dollars.
Do you understand what that means? Over that 3 year time period, Wells Fargo actually got 681 million dollars back from the U.S. government.
Isn’t that just peachy?
Meanwhile, the big financial giants have not learned their lessons and they continue to do business pretty much as they did it prior to 2008.
The big banks continue to roll up massive amounts of risk, debt and leverage.
Today, Wall Street has become one giant financial casino. More money is made on Wall Street by making side bets (commonly referred to as “derivatives“) than on the investments themselves.
If the bets pay off for the big financial institutions, mind blowing profits can be made. But if the bets go against the big financial institutions (as we saw in 2008), firms can collapse almost overnight.
In fact, it was derivatives that almost brought down AIG. The biggest insurance company in the world almost folded in 2008 because of a whole bunch of really bad bets.
The danger from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”. It has been estimated that the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market is somewhere in the neighborhood of a quadrillion dollars.
The largest banks have tens of trillions of dollars of exposure to derivatives. When the next great financial collapse happens, derivatives will almost certainly be at the center of it once again. These side bets do not create anything real for the economy – they just make and lose huge amounts of money. We never know when the next great derivatives crisis will strike. Derivatives are essentially like a “sword of Damocles” that perpetually hangs over the U.S. financial system.
When I start talking about derivatives I get a lot of people in the financial community mad at me. On Wall Street today you can bet on just about anything you can imagine. Almost everyone in the financial world has gotten so used to making wild bets that they couldn’t even imagine a world without them. If anyone even tried to put significant limits on futures, options and swaps it would cause Wall Street to throw a hissy fit.
But someday the dominoes are going to start to fall and the house of cards is going to come crashing down. It is an open secret that our financial system is fundamentally unsound. Even a lot of people working on Wall Street will admit that. It is just that people are so busy making such big piles of money that nobody wants the party to stop.
It is only a matter of time until some of these big banks get into a huge amount of trouble again. When that happens, we might really find out whether they are “too big to fail” or whether we could get along just fine without them.
All over America, restlessness and frustration are growing. It has now been almost three years since the great financial crash of 2008, and yet the U.S. economy is still a complete and total mess. In fact, there are all sorts of signs that things are about to get even worse, and the American people are just about fed up. Virtually every major poll, survey and measure of consumer confidence shows that the American people are becoming more pessimistic about the economy. Millions of hard working Americans that worked their fingers to the bone for their employers and that did everything “right” are sitting at home on their couches tonight staring blankly at the television. Many of them still have a hard time believing that they were laid off and that there is nobody out there that wants to give them a good job. There are millions of other Americans that won’t get much sleep tonight because they will spend much of the night rolling around in bed wondering how they are possibly going to be able to pay the mortgage. We have never faced such an extended economic downturn in modern U.S. history, and a lot of people are starting to freak out about the condition of the economy. As Gerald Celente likes to say: “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose – they lose it.”
Every single month, the number of good jobs continues to go down. Wall Street actually rewards companies that have a good “outsourcing strategy”. As I have written about previously, a growing percentage of the jobs that are being “created” these days are very low paying jobs. But you can’t support a family, pay a mortgage or even afford decent health insurance on what you would make stocking shelves at Target or passing out buckets of chicken for KFC.
The American people keep waiting for “hope” and “change” to show up, but all they get instead are more helpings of “despair” and “frustration”.
Sadly, most Americans still cling to the hope that if the “next election” will just turn out the right way that things will be okay. But the truth is that things seem to stay on pretty much the same course no matter who we put into office.
For many years the status quo seemed to be okay for most people, but now we are starting to reap the results of the economic seeds that we have sown.
Now our economic decline is starting to accelerate and people are starting to panic. Most Americans may not know why all of this is happening, but what many of them do know is that something in their gut is telling them that things have gone terribly, terribly wrong somehow.
The following are 10 signs that the American people are starting to freak out about the condition of the economy….
#1 Things have already gotten so bad that Americans will literally trample one another just to get on a waiting list for rental assistance vouchers. Just check out the following excerpt from a local news report about a recent incident in Texas….
At least eight people were hurt Thursday morning while scrambling to line up for a limited number of Dallas County rental vouchers — after waiting for hours in their cars.
People lined up Thursday morning to apply for Dallas County Section 8 housing vouchers. Dallas County sheriff’s spokesman Kim Leach estimated the crowd at about 5,000.
Video of this incident is posted below. One of the people that was trampled was a pregnant woman….
#2 Almost every measurement of consumer confidence is going down. For example, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell from 61.7 in May to 58.5 in June.
#3 The Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index has fallen to 63.8 after being at 71.5 in June. It is now the lowest that it has been since the last recession “ended”.
#4 The Rasmussen Consumer Index is down 9 points from a month ago.
#5 A recent poll taken by Rasmussen found that 68 percent of Americans believe that we are actually in a recession right now.
#6 According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans that lack confidence in U.S. banks is now at an all-time high of 36%.
#7 In many areas of the United States this summer, just about anything that is not bolted down is being stolen by people that are desperate for money.
#8 According to one recent poll, 39 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy has now entered a “permanent decline”.
#9 Another recent survey found that 48 percent of Americans believe that it is likely that another great Depression will begin within the next 12 months.
#10 According to a brand new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track. That figure is three percent higher than it was last month.
One of the only things preventing chaos from breaking out in the streets of our cities from coast to coast is government handouts.
Today, almost 20 percent of all personal income in the United States comes from benefits provided by the federal government.
You don’t believe this? Just check out what the New York Times recently had to say….
Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics.
There are tens of millions of Americans that are living “on the edge”, but at least the massive government handout programs are enabling most of them to survive.
So what happens when the checks from the government stop coming?
Look, I am not advocating that the “welfare society” that we have become is a good thing. Today, Americans receive more in direct government benefits than they pay in taxes. That is not even close to sustainable.
What I am pointing out is that tens of millions of Americans that are deeply suffering are currently being pacified by these government handouts. Once the handouts are cut significantly or taken away completely it is going to unleash a lot of anger and frustration.
Of course what the American people really need are good jobs that will give them dignity and allow them to provide for their families, but millions of those keep getting shipped out of the country.
So the only thing that millions of Americans still have to hang on to are their government benefits. Once that changes a whole lot of people are going to throw a fit.
In fact, we are already seeing some really bizarre behavior across the United States. In many areas of the country we are literally watching society crumble right in front of our very eyes.
If you doubt this, just check out these two articles….
But not all Americans will resort to lawless behavior. In fact, there are a lot of really good, hard working people out there that this economy has left behind.
There are some people that have put in decades of hard work only to see their dreams shrivel up over the past few years.
Some of the stories people send me are absolutely heartbreaking. I have looked at each and every comment that has been left on The Economic Collapse over the past couple of years. Needless to say, it has taken a huge investment of my time to go through more than 20,000 comments. But in the process I have gotten a very good idea of what people are going through across the nation.
So how badly are people hurting? Well, a reader identified as “Anna44″ recently shared with us what some of her family members have been going through in this economy….
My B-I-L was a dealership owner/manager who worked long hours over 38 years and had to close his doors when Saturn was dissolved. When his dealership went under, 72 others lost their job. That’s 72 families who took a hit. He lost his home, everything. A few of his former employees lost their homes as well eventually. They were not lazy or WORTHLESS. It took him a year and a half to finally find something, but now he lives in a hotel unable to qualify for a house or apartment. This is an educated man who competed nationwide for top dog and got it more then once. His biggest fault? He’s almost 60, young enough to need the work, but too old to be hired.
As for my husband- 26 years AF officer, handling millions & billions on International & National levels has just entered his 7th month of unemployment. Two tours abroad- lazy he is NOT. He doesn’t qualify for unemployment, nor is he counted because he gets a retirement check. He wants and needs to work- yet there is little out there. If he doesn’t find something soon, we too will lose the home we sunk every cent into after 20 years of saving for it!
All across America tonight there are similar stories. People have done everything “right” all of their lives and they are frustrated that now they have been pushed to the edge of poverty by this economy.
For decades, the U.S. government has had a AAA rating. On the scales used by the big three credit rating agencies, that is the highest credit rating that a government can get. Moody’s scale actually uses lettering that is a little different from the other two big agencies (“Aaa” instead of “AAA”), but you get the point. Right now, the U.S. government is closer than ever to losing its AAA rating. The threat of a rating downgrade is going to continue to grow regardless of how the political theater that we are watching unfold in Washington D.C. plays out. The truth is that the federal government has accumulated a debt that is so vast that it will never be paid back. In fact, we are rapidly approaching the point when this debt will no longer be serviceable. If the credit rating of the U.S. government is not slashed right now, it will be soon enough. In fact, the truth is that the U.S. government is such a financial mess that it should have been done long ago. But whenever the United States does lose its AAA rating, we could potentially see financial hell unleashed because it will also mean that there will almost certainly be a wave of credit rating downgrades from coast to coast.
As I have written about previously, government debt becomes more painful the higher that interest rates go. When the big credit agencies downgrade the credit rating of a government, that is a signal to investors that they should ask for higher interest rates on debt issued by that government.
This does not always play out in practice (just look at Japan), but nations such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland sure are going through financial hell right now as they deal with reduced credit ratings and soaring interest rates.
Right now, the U.S. government is able to borrow gigantic quantities of money at ridiculously low interest rates. This is the primary reason why the debt disaster predicted by so many in the past has not arrived yet.
If the credit rating of the U.S. government is downgraded, it could finally get investors all over the world to realize that the game is over and that they should be demanding much higher returns on debt issued by the U.S. government. The truth, as U.S. Representative Ron Paul put it recently, is that the U.S. government is already “insolvent” and at some point we are all going to have to face reality….
“Ultimately, the fundamentals show this country is bankrupt.”
So whether or not it happens right now, the truth is that at some point the credit rating of the U.S. government is going to go down and interest rates are going to go up.
Unfortunately, it appears that this might happen sooner rather than later.
Earlier this week, Moody’s Investors Service publicly announced that it would be reviewing our Aaa bond rating for a possible downgrade.
On Thursday, S&P actually went so far as to announce that there is a “50 percent chance” that it will downgrade the credit rating of the U.S. government within the next three months.
S&P has been warning of trouble for some time now. Back on April 18th, Standard & Poor’s altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and warned that a downgrade was likely at some point soon if nothing changed.
If the credit rating of the U.S. government gets slashed and if that results in higher interest costs on the national debt, that is going to make it much harder to balance the budget.
The U.S. government will take in somewhere around 2.2 or 2.3 trillion dollars this year. It will spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 or 3.6 trillion dollars this year.
Included in that spending is about 400 billion dollars that goes for interest on the national debt.
As I explained in a previous article, if our interest costs double or triple it is going to make it basically impossible to balance the budget under our current system.
If interest rates on U.S. government debt were to rise to moderate levels, we could soon be easily paying a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.
If interest rates on U.S. government debt were to rise to the levels that Greece, Portugal and Ireland are now facing, it would be beyond catastrophic.
But a reduced credit rating and higher interest rates would not just hurt the finances of the U.S. government.
Any financial institution that is linked to the U.S. government in any way would also probably be downgraded.
This fact was noted in the announcement put out by Moody’s this week….
In conjunction with this action, Moody’s has placed on review for possible downgrade the Aaa ratings of financial institutions directly linked to the government: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the Federal Farm Credit Banks.
We have also placed on review for possible downgrade securities either guaranteed by, backed by collateral securities issued by, or otherwise directly linked to the government or the affected financial institutions.
Just think of the financial carnage that would cause.
Also, check out what one Bloomberg article had to say about the potential cascading effects of a credit rating downgrade for the U.S. government….
At least 7,000 top-rated municipal credits would have their ratings cut if the U.S. government loses its Aaa grade, Moody’s Investors Service said.
An “automatic” downgrade affecting $130 billion in municipal debt directly linked to the U.S. would occur if the federal level is reduced, Moody’s said yesterday in a report. Additionally, top-rated securities with no direct links to the national government will be reviewed for similar action.
But the nightmare would not end there. The truth is that the credit ratings of large numbers of state and local governments from coast to coast would likely be reviewed and downgraded as well. Right now, many state and local governments are scratching and clawing in a desperate attempt to survive financially, and a significant rise in interest costs would be enough to wipe many of them out.
The ripple effects of a U.S. government credit downgrade would be endless.
A lot of people argue that if the federal government ran a balanced budget from now on none of this would matter.
Unfortunately, that is not true.
At this point, a very high percentage of U.S. government debt is short-term debt. That means that gigantic amounts of debt must be “rolled over” each year in addition to any new debt that we take on. So even if interest rates rise significantly on just the existing debt that we have it is going to be a total nightmare.
And make no mistake, whether it happens now or later a collapse of U.S. government finances is coming.
“It’s inevitable that the U.S. will default—it’s essentially an empire which is overextended and in decline—and that its financial system will go with it”
Right now it is being projected that the U.S. national debt will hit 344% of GDP by the year 2050 if we continue on our current course. We are on a runaway train that is heading straight for a brick wall.
Europe is also a complete financial wreck. The sovereign debt crisis over in the EU continues to grow worse by the day and there is no end in sight.
If the U.S. collapses, Europe is not strong enough to save it. If Europe collapses, the U.S. is not strong enough to save it.
We really are entering an unprecedented time in world history. We are on the verge of the first truly global financial disaster.
It is going to be interesting to see which major currency crashes and burns first. Some think that it will be the euro. Others think that it will be the dollar.
In any event, the reality is that the current global financial system is not sustainable. The folks that are in charge can try to keep things together for as long as possible, but at some point the dominoes are going to start to fall and the house of cards is going to crash.
We have entered a time when there is going to be financial crisis after financial crisis. Even if the EU and the U.S. government can somehow fix things for the moment, more problems are going to be just around the corner.
The world has become incredibly unstable and the entire globe is going to be shaken. Most people cannot even conceive of the kind of financial hell that is coming our way as a nation.
Yes, it can be a bit sad to think about what is happening, but it is much better to be armed with the truth than to be totally clueless and totally unprepared.
More Americans than ever are desperate for money and many of them will do just about anything to get it. The crumbling U.S. economy has pushed millions of ordinary Americans to the brink of utter desperation. When it comes time to choose between being able to survive or breaking the law, many people are choosing to break the law. These days it seems like Americans will do just about anything for money. All over the country, there are areas where just about anything that is not bolted down is being stolen. A lot of people have resorted to making money however they can – selling drugs, selling their bodies, shoplifting, invading homes, taking bribes, running credit card scams and even stealing from their own family members. You will have a hard time believing some of the things that you are about to read below. When people have their backs pushed up against the wall, often they find that they are willing to do things that they never imagined that they would do. Things are getting crazy out there on the streets of America, and as the economy continues to decline things are going to get a lot crazier.
The following are 15 examples that show many Americans have become so desperate that they will do just about anything for money….
#1 In Utah, one unemployed 28 year old man is offering to be “human prey” for hunters for the bargain price of $10,000. For an additional $2,000, he will let people hunt him down while he is running around naked.
Across the country, in states like Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Florida, there have been reports of thieves stealing unsecured air conditioning units weighing as much as 125 pounds.
#4 Even police officers are committing desperate acts these days. Just check out what one police officer in Chicago is charged with doing….
A Chicago Police officer stole $50,000 from his ailing elderly father to pay off his bills and gambling debts and unsuccessfully attempted to swipe his dad’s retirement savings by impersonating him
#6 In another area of Atlanta, thieves have been breaking down walls and busting bathroom fixtures with sledgehammers in order to get their hands on copper, brass and steel….
Kids in two Atlanta communities won’t have their neighborhood pools to help beat the summer heat, at least for now. Thieves used what is believed to be sledge hammers to bust walls and break fixtures in bathrooms at Adams and South Bend parks to steal copper, brass and steel.
#7 One grandmother in Florida has been accused of trying to sell her newborn grandson for $75,000.
#8 In Antioch, California a total of approximately 300 power poles were recently knocked down by thieves and stripped of their copper wiring.
#9 In Minnesota recently, a mob of teen girls brutally pummeled a mother and her two daughters until they were black and blue. Apparently the mob of teen girls was enraged over a pair of missing sunglasses.
#10 In Asheville, North Carolina thieves recently took off with 4 metal tables and 16 metal chairs that were sitting outside a pizzeria.
#12 In Oregon, thieves recently broke into a Salvation Army community center and stole 3 large air conditioning units. Now all the people that come to that facility for help and for community programs this summer will be absolutely sweltering.
#13 In the Cleveland area, two young boys that had set up a lemonade stand were robbed in broad daylight. The crooks got away with approximately 12 dollars.
#15 A 59 year old man from North Carolina named Richard James Verone was so desperate for money that he actually robbed a bank and got caught on purpose so that he could be put in prison and be given free health care.
One day Verone walked into an RBC Bank in North Carolina, handed a clerk a note demanding exactly one dollar and sat down and waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.
Verone has a growth on his chest and two ruptured disks but he does not have any health insurance. He is hoping that in prison he will get the medical treatment that he needs.
As society continues to unravel, prison is going to look like an appealing option for more and more people.
At least in prison you get fed, you have a roof over your head and they will take care of your medical needs.
For a whole lot of Americans, that would be a major step up.
Have you noticed that the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear?
America is becoming a cold, cruel place and lawlessness is everywhere.
For many more signs that our society is starting to crumble, please see these two articles….
For ages, Americans have looked down on the crime and the depravity that goes on in other areas of the world.
Well, now America has all of the crime and depravity it can handle and it is going to get a lot worse as millions of formerly middle class Americans descend into poverty.
A regular commenter on my website who identifies himself as “El Pollo de Oro” recently described the kind of chaos that he believes is coming to the streets of America….
I live in Philadelphia, a city that used to have a ton of blue-collar manufacturing jobs as well as a great deal of white-collar employment, but the blue-collar manufacturing jobs have disappeared–and on the white-collar side, a college degree isn’t necessarily the ticket to prosperity it once was. Philly has its share of nasty, dangerous ghetto areas as well as ritzy, upscale areas like Rittenhouse Square. But then, there are parts of Mexico City that look like Beverly Hills except that the signs are en español. A minority of Chilangos are filthy rich, which is what you expect in a Third World country: an uber-rich minority and a poor majority. And when The Banana Republic of America (formerly the USA) signed on for globalism and ignored Ross Perot’s warning, it opted to become a Third World country—which means that you can kiss the American middle class goodbye.
But there will be some growth industries in The Banana Republic of America: kidnapping, drug smuggling, murder for hire, carjacking, armed robbery. And if you want a taste of what life will be like in American cities in the future, just spend a few weeks in Guatemala City, Johannesburg or Caracas—all of which have the type of horrible crime rates that BRA cities can look forward to in the future. Desperate people do desperate things, and hardcore desperation will be in the norm in the BRA. It won’t be fun (unless, of course, being robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight is one’s idea of a good time).
Welcome to life in a rotting, decaying Third World hellhole. Welcome to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Welcome to life in The Banana Republic of America, formerly the USA.
America is changing. The safe, secure environment that we all used to take for granted is dying. The number of truly desperate people rises by the day, and many of those desperate people are willing to do just about anything for money.
The United States used to have a thriving middle class, but our economic system has been so manipulated over the decades that now almost all of the economic rewards go to the very top of the food chain.
25 years ago, the wealthiest 12 percent of all Americans controlled 33 percent of all the wealth. Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans control 40 percent of all the wealth.
In the United States today, we are actually witnessing the death of the middle class. Our jobs have been shipped overseas, the banks have enslaved us to debt, the government keeps finding more ways to tax us and the Federal Reserve keeps debasing our currency.
Everywhere you go, despair is in the air. According to a brand new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track.
Fortunately, many Americans are responding to these signs of trouble by preparing.
One local Oklahoma newspaper recently did an article that profiled a few of the growing number of Americans that are preparing for hard times….
Rod and Lauretta Smith estimate they could survive a year without going to the grocery store.
A large garden on their 5-acre property in south Tulsa produces hundreds of quarts of canned and frozen beans, tomatoes and other vegetables. Chickens provide eggs.
The Smiths are among a small but growing number of people stocking up on food to become more self-reliant in a time marked by natural disasters and economic uncertainty.
The truth is that all of us should try to become less dependent on the system. The Democrats, the Republicans, the Federal Reserve and the big corporations are not there to help you. They are not going to come riding to the rescue if you lose your job and your home.
We all need to do what we can to become more independent and to prepare ourselves and our families for the incredibly difficult economic times that are inevitably coming. Those that have faith that their jobs will always be there or that the government will always take care of them will be deeply disappointed.
The system is dying and society is coming apart.
The only rational thing to do is to prepare for what is coming.
The crumbling U.S. economy is putting an extraordinary amount of financial stress on American families. For many Americans, “flat broke” has become a permanent condition. Today, over half of all American families live paycheck to paycheck. Unemployment is rampant and those that do actually have jobs are finding that their wages are rising much more slowly than prices are. The financial condition of average American families continues to decline and this is showing up in all of the recent surveys. For example, according to a new Gallup poll, “lack of money/low wages” is the number one financial concern for American families. To make ends meet, many American families are going into even more debt and more American families than ever are turning to government assistance. Right now, more Americans than at any other point since World War II are flat broke and have lost hope. Until this changes, the frustration level in this country is going to continue to grow.
Stress!
Compared to much of the rest of the world, we have an insanely high standard of living, and yet we appear to be some of the most unhappy people on the face of the earth.
Wherever you turn today, someone is popping a pill. The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world. Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than children in Europe are.
What in the world is wrong with us?
America is a country that desperately needs to chill out.
Washington D.C. sure is a stressful place right now. Most of our politicians seem to be focused on the 2012 elections rather than on trying to solve our problems.
Most of our leaders are prancing around trying to make themselves look good. Meanwhile, our national financial situation continues to go down the toilet.
One way or another this “debt ceiling crisis” will probably get solved. Our politicians will come up with some sort of a “deal” and it will almost certainly be a bad one.
The sad truth is that the U.S. national debt problem should have been addressed decades ago.
But it wasn’t.
So now we are sitting on a 14 trillion dollar timebomb.
Yes, the ultra-wealthy have become absolute masters at avoiding taxation, but even if some way to tap into their offshore wealth could be found, it still would only put a small dent in the problem.
The truth is that the U.S. government spends way too much money.
U.S. government spending is now above 25 percent of U.S. GDP. That is way above what has been normal during the post-World War II era.
But cutting government spending is not going to fix our system either.
The reality is that our debt-based financial system is designed to trap our federal government in a constantly expanding spiral of debt indefinitely.
As I have written about previously, the U.S. government debt problem will never be fixed as long as the Federal Reserve is running our financial system.
Under our current system, the debt is going to continue to grow no matter who we elect.
As our debt grows, our economy will suffer and the national stress level will continue to rise.
But for most American households, government debt is not the thing causing the most stress these days.
Most Americans are much more concerned about their own personal financial situations.
Most people just want to work hard, pay the bills and raise their families. But that is becoming extremely difficult to to.
According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 90 percent of Americans believe that the economy is performing poorly.
The same poll found that 80 percent of Americans believe that it is “difficult” to find a job these days.
In the United States today, there are 14 million unemployed people. Tonight there are huge numbers of Americans that are sitting at home desperately hoping that someone will give them a job. A significant percentage of our population that should be productive is just sitting on the sidelines. Just check out the following quote from a recent CNN article….
With numbers like that, how in the world can anyone claim that our economy is healthy?
Sadly, it looks like things may get even worse. As I have written about previously, we are now starting to see another huge wave of layoffs all over the nation.
The employment crisis has a ripple effect throughout the rest of the economy as well.
Without good jobs, Americans cannot buy homes. The housing crash is not going to be fixed until there the employment situation gets fixed.
With lending standards tighter than ever, it takes someone with a good income and a solid employment history to be able to qualify for a home loan.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of people like that in the marketplace right now.
So, the housing industry continues to suffer.
Last year was the worst year for new home sales in modern U.S. history. So far, this year is even worse.
Ouch.
It would be really nice if we actually would have an economic recovery, but it just isn’t happening.
Prices are rising and incomes are not. American families are feeling more squeezed than ever.
A lot of Americans live in a constant state of stress because of debt.
According to one new poll, about 20 percent of American adults worry about debt “most or all of the time”.
If you have ever been there, then you know how financial stress can rob sleep from you night after night after night.
Today, total credit card debt in the U.S. is more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.
Some Americans can handle credit cards, but a lot of them can’t. A staggering 46 percent of Americans do not pay their credit card bills in full each month.
But credit card debt is only one form of debt that is causing stress for American families. The truth is that the total amount of student loan debt is even greater than the total amount of credit card debt. Medical debt is another huge problem. The vast majority of American families are dealing with a debt problem of one form or another. The decades of “easy credit” that we enjoyed are really starting to catch up with us.
Today, the average American household is carrying $75,600 in debt.
That is not a good thing. American consumers are tapped out and the economy is suffering.
As the economy crumbles, many hard working Americans are finding that their lives have radically changed. Just check out the following excerpt from an article posted on a local Connecticut news source….
Could you imagine standing in line at a food bank?
Don’t laugh.
It just might happen to you.
Millions of Americans that have lost their jobs and their homes never thought that it would happen to them.
Wealth and possessions are here today and gone tomorrow. People that base their lives on the things that they own are always going to have a high level of stress. We didn’t bring any of these things into the world with us, and we can’t take any of them with us when we leave.
So try not to stress out too much. We should all learn to be content whether we have a lot or whether we have a little.
So what do all of you think about the stress level in America right now? Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….