If you are shopping for a home right now, I really do feel sorry for you. Home prices in many areas of the country have officially crossed the line into “absurd” territory, and they just keep going higher. Thanks to wild spending by the federal government and the economic malpractice that has been happening at the Federal Reserve, we now have way too many dollars chasing way too few goods and services. Inflation is showing up in every sector of our economy, but it is not showing up equally in all sectors. One area where inflation threatens to spiral completely out of control is in home prices. Right now we are seeing the wildest bidding wars in U.S. history, and in many, many cases buyers end up paying way over listing price. (Read More...)
Many U.S. Cities Are Already Starting To Resemble Post-Apocalyptic Cesspools As America’s Collapse Accelerates
For a moment, I would like you to take an imaginary tour of a major U.S. city with me, and I would like for you to try to guess which city I am talking about. As you stroll along the sidewalks in the heart of this city, it seems like tents have been erected everywhere. Homelessness is completely and utterly out of control in this particular city, and even though city officials keep making more promises the crisis just continues to get worse. As you continue your tour, you notice multiple addicts doing drugs right in front of you. Drug needles, human waste and other trash are strewn all over the place, and you wonder why nobody from the city has cleaned up the mess. All of this filth has created a stench that is overpowering at times, and you try not to gag. As you travel deeper into the urban core of this city, you are shocked to see two men with guns carjack a woman a couple of blocks away. Not wanting to get involved, you abruptly change direction. You are startled when a couple of addicts that look like they were pulled straight out of a zombie movie start asking you for money, and you begin instinctively walking faster without even thinking about it. Unfortunately, you have stumbled into an alley that you should never have gone down, and you now find yourself completely surrounded by curious street people. You try to make a break for it, but it is too late. (Read More...)
9 Signs That Some Of America’s Long-Term Trends Are Starting To Become Very Serious Short-Term Problems
Ignoring long-term problems can work for a while, but eventually they catch up with you. Over the years, I have written many articles about alarming long-term trends in our society that desperately needed to be addressed. Of course the vast majority of those long-term trends never got much attention, because our political system tends to reward politicians that focus on short-term issues. As a result, many of the long-term trends that I have written about previously have now gotten to a point where they have started to become very serious short-term problems. In this article, I would like to share 9 examples of this with you. (Read More...)
Why Are Hordes Of Wealthy People Hitting The Escape Button And Heading To Montana?
Why have thousands upon thousands of very wealthy people suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to buy a home in Montana? At this moment, Montana is one of the hottest real estate markets in the entire country. When a desirable house is put on the market, it can often spark a wild bidding war. Of course the vast majority of the potential buyers involved in these bidding wars do not actually have any roots in Montana at all. Vast hordes of wealthy individuals from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other major cities are flooding into the state, and there is only a limited amount of housing to accommodate them. As a result, home prices are being pushed to absolutely absurd levels. (Read More...)
Inflation Is Starting To Get Really Crazy – And It Is Worse Than You Think
Inflation is making headlines all over the country, but the mainstream media is not being honest about the true severity of the crisis. We are being told that the official rate of inflation is still in single digits, but what we aren’t being told is that the way inflation is calculated has changed dramatically over the years. In fact, according to Forbes “the government has changed the way it calculates inflation more than 20 times” over the past 30 years. The rate of inflation directly affects so many other things in our system, and the government would like to keep that number as low as possible. So they tinkered and tinkered with the formula until they got it just where they wanted it. (Read More...)
Ranchers Sell Off Cattle And Farmers Idle Hundreds Of Thousands Of Acres As America’s Drought Emergency Escalates
In my entire lifetime, this is the worst that drought conditions have ever been in the western half of the country. During the past 20 years, the amount of territory in the West considered to be suffering from exceptional drought has never gone higher than 11 percent until now. Today, that number is sitting at 27 percent. The term “mega-drought” is being thrown around a lot these days to describe what is happening, but this isn’t just a drought. This is a true national emergency, and it is really starting to affect our food supply. (Read More...)
5 Signs That America’s Raging Inflation Crisis Is Accelerating
The pace at which conditions are changing is catching a lot of people off guard. Here in the United States, we have been in a low inflation environment for most of the past four decades, and so many Americans don’t even have a frame of reference for what a highly inflationary environment looks like. But now we are facing an inflation crisis that is unlike anything that we have seen since the Jimmy Carter era in the 1970s. In response to the COVID pandemic, governments around the world have been borrowing and spending colossal mountains of money, and global central banks have been absolutely flooding their respective financial systems with new cash. These measures were taken to stimulate the worldwide economy, but in the process a horrific inflation monster has been created, and it will not be tamed easily. In fact, national governments and global central banks continue to do the very same things that created the horrific inflation monster in the first place. (Read More...)
Outsourcing The Production Of Virtually Everything Has Brought Us To The Brink Of A Nightmare Scenario For The U.S. Economy
Many of the imbalances that are contributing to the nightmarish shortages that we are currently witnessing are not going to be solved any time soon. Ever since I started The Economic Collapse Blog, I have been warning that outsourcing the production of just about everything and running massive trade deficits year after year would eventually have very serious consequences down the road. Well, now we are officially “down the road”, and our incredibly foolish trade policies have put us in a very precarious position. During the “good times”, being extremely dependent on the rest of the world to make stuff for us wasn’t a problem, but now it is rapidly becoming a national security issue. (Read More...)