The Sovereign Debt Bubble Will Continue To Expand Until – BANG – The System Implodes

The Sovereign Debt Bubble Will Continue To Expand Until - BANG - The System Implodes - Photo by Jeff KubinaWhy are so many politicians around the world declaring that the debt crisis is “over” when debt to GDP ratios all over the planet continue to skyrocket?  The global economy has never seen anything like the sovereign debt bubble that we are experiencing today.  The United States, Japan, and nearly every major nation in Europe are absolutely drowning in debt.  We have heard a lot about “austerity” over in Europe in recent years, but debt to GDP ratios continue to rise in Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal.  In general, most economists consider a debt to GDP ratio of 100% to be a “danger level”, and most of the economies of the western world have either already surpassed that level or are rapidly approaching it.  Of course the biggest debt offender of all in many ways is the United States.  The U.S. debt to GDP ratio has risen from 66.6 percent to 103 percent since 2007, and the U.S. government accumulated more new debt during Barack Obama’s first term than it did under the first 42 U.S. presidents combined.  This insane sovereign debt bubble will continue to expand until a day of reckoning arrives and the system implodes.  Nobody knows exactly when that moment will be reached, but without a doubt it is coming. (Read More...)

Do You Want To Scare A Baby Boomer?

Do You Want To Scare A Baby Boomer?If you want to frighten Baby Boomers, just show them the list of statistics in this article.  The United States is headed for a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude, and we are woefully unprepared for it.  At this point, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are reaching the age of 65 every single day, and this will continue to happen for almost the next 20 years.  The number of senior citizens in America is projected to more than double during the first half of this century, and some absolutely enormous financial promises have been made to them.  So will we be able to keep those promises to the hordes of American workers that are rapidly approaching retirement?  Of course not.  State and local governments are facing trillions in unfunded pension liabilities.  Medicare is facing a 38 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.  The Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.  Meanwhile, nearly half of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.  The truth is that I was being incredibly kind when I said earlier that we are “woefully unprepared” for what is coming.  The biggest retirement crisis in history is rapidly approaching, and a lot of the promises that were made to the Baby Boomers are going to get broken. (Read More...)

50 Shocking Questions That You Should Ask To Anyone That Is Not A Prepper Yet

50 Shocking Questions That You Should Ask To Anyone That Is Not A Prepper Yet - Photo by GiggyShare this list of shocking questions with everyone you know that needs to wake up.  Sometimes asking good questions is the best way to get someone that you care about to understand something.  When I attended law school, I became very familiar with something called “the Socratic method”.  It is a method that has been traditionally used in law schools all over the United States.  Law professors will bombard their students with questions, and the goal is to stimulate critical thinking and allow students to discover the answers for themselves.  Many times those of us that can see what is happening to this country get frustrated when we try to get others to see what is so apparent to us.  But instead of preaching to them, perhaps asking questions would be more helpful.  When you ask someone a question, they are almost forced to think about what you just said and come up with a response.  And without a doubt, the fact that America is in decline is undeniable.  Those that would choose to blindly have faith in the system are foolish, because it is glaringly obvious that the system is failing.  Our economy is heading for collapse and the world around us is becoming more unstable with each passing day.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the number of preppers in the United States is absolutely exploding.  Some estimates put the number of preppers in the U.S. as high as 3 million, and the movement continues to explode. (Read More...)

35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind

35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your MindIn America tonight, tens of millions of men and women will struggle to get to sleep because they are stressed out about not making enough money even though they are working as hard as they possibly can.  They are called “the working poor”, and their numbers are absolutely exploding.  As a recent Gallup poll showed, Americans are more concerned about the economy than they are about anything else.  But why are Americans so stressed out about our economic situation if things are supposedly getting better?  Well, the truth is that unemployment is not actually going down, and the real unemployment numbers are actually much worse than what is officially being reported by the government.  But unemployment is only part of the story.  Most American workers are still able to find jobs, but an increasing proportion of them are not able to make ends meet at the end of the month.  Our economy continues to bleed good paying middle class jobs, and to a large degree those jobs are being replaced by low income jobs.  Approximately one-fourth of all American workers make 10 dollars an hour or less at this point, and we see them all around us every day.  They flip our burgers, they cut our hair and they take our money at the supermarket.  In many homes, both parents are working multiple jobs, and yet when a child gets sick or a car breaks down they find that they don’t have enough money to pay the bill.  Many of these families have gone into tremendous amounts of debt in order to try to stay afloat, but once you get caught in a cycle of debt it can be incredibly difficult to break out of that. (Read More...)

Goldman Sachs And The Big Hedge Funds Are Pushing Leverage To Ridiculous Extremes

Goldman Sachs And The Big Hedge Funds Are Pushing Leverage To Ridiculous Extremes - Photo by bfishadow on FlickrAs stocks have risen in recent years, the big hedge funds and the “too big to fail” banks have used borrowed money to make absolutely enormous profits.  But when you use debt to potentially multiply your profits, you also create the possibility that your losses will be multiplied if the markets turn against you.  When the next stock market crash happens, and the gigantic pyramid of risk, debt and leverage on Wall Street comes tumbling down, will highly leveraged banks such as Goldman Sachs ask the federal government to bail them out?  The use of leverage is one of the greatest threats to our financial system, and yet most Americans do not even really understand what it is.  The following is a basic definition of leverage from Investopedia: “The use of various financial instruments or borrowed capital, such as margin, to increase the potential return of an investment.”  Leverage allows firms to make much larger bets in the financial markets than they otherwise would be able to, and at this point Goldman Sachs and the big hedge funds are pushing leverage to ridiculous extremes.  When the financial markets go up and they win on those bets, they can win very big.  For example, revenues at Goldman Sachs increased by about 30 percent in 2012 and Goldman stock has soared by more than 40 percent over the past 12 months.  Those are eye-popping numbers.  But leverage is a double-edged sword.  When the markets turn, Goldman Sachs and many of these large hedge funds could be facing astronomical losses. (Read More...)

The Federal Reserve Shows Barack Obama Who The Real Boss Is

The Federal Reserve Shows Barack Obama Who The Real Boss IsBarack Obama has greatly expanded the powers of the presidency during his time in the White House, but there is one institution that he simply will not mess with.  There is one organization that is considered to be so sacred in Washington D.C. that Obama will not dare utter a single negative word against it.  That organization is the Federal Reserve.  Even though he has shown that he is unafraid to pick a fight with just about everyone else in Washington, Obama flat out refuses to criticize the Fed and he even reappointed Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chairman even though Bernanke has a track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.  Perhaps Obama is aware of what has happened to other presidents that have chosen to tangle with the Fed.  In any event, it has become clear that Obama submits to anything that the Fed says without question, and the controversy over the “trillion dollar coin” is another perfect example of this.  For weeks, there has been much speculation in the mainstream media about the possibility that the Obama administration may print up a one trillion dollar coin that it would use to keep paying the bills of the federal government if an agreement to raise the debt ceiling is not reached.  But on Saturday the Federal Reserve killed that idea, and we shouldn’t be surprised by that because under no circumstances will the Fed ever accept a threat to their monopoly over money creation in the United States.  If the Federal Reserve had allowed Obama to print up a debt-free trillion dollar coin, that would have set a very dangerous precedent for the Fed.  The American people would have realized that the federal government can actually create debt-free money whenever it wants and that it does not actually have to borrow money from anyone.  That is something that the Fed probably would have moved heaven and earth to keep from happening.  But now we won’t ever know how far the Fed would really be willing to go to keep their monopoly over money creation, because Obama has no plans to challenge this latest ruling from “the real boss” of our financial system. (Read More...)

The Federal Government Hands Out Money To 128 Million Americans Every Month

The Federal Government Hands Out Money To 128 Million Americans Every MonthThe number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 to over 128 million today.  A shocking new research paper by Patrick Tyrrell and William W. Beach contains that statistic and a whole bunch of other very revealing numbers.  According to their research, the federal government hands out money to 41.3 percent of the entire population of the United States each month.  Overall, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to what they call “dependence-creating programs”.  It is the most massive wealth redistribution scheme in the history of the world, and it continues to grow at a very rapid pace with each passing month.  But can we really afford this?  Of course we never want to see a single person go without food to eat or a roof to sleep under, but can the federal government really afford to support 128 million Americans every month?  If millions more Americans keep jumping on to the “safety net” each year, how long will it be before it breaks and it is not there for anyone?  The federal government is already drowning in debt.  This year the U.S. national debt will easily blow past the 17 trillion dollar mark and we are rapidly heading toward financial oblivion.  We are stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day with no end in sight.  If we don’t get our finances in order as a nation, what will the end result be? (Read More...)

Can America Survive If Americans No Longer Agree On A Core Set Of Shared Values?

Can America Survive If Americans No Longer Agree On A Core Set Of Shared Values? - Photo by DrRandomFactorWhat does America stand for?  That question is a lot more complicated than you might think.  Our Founding Fathers established a Republic that was based on a set of shared values that were embodied in the text of the U.S. Constitution.  But today, many of our politicians openly disregard the Constitution whenever they want and it has become fashionable to mock the U.S. Constitution.  For example, the New York Times recently published a piece by Georgetown University Professor Louis Michael Seidman entitled “Let’s Give Up On The Constitution” in which he publicly called the Constitution “archaic” and “downright evil”.  This is a man that has been teaching constitutional law to the next generation of lawyers at one of the top universities in the nation for nearly 40 years.  Unfortunately, Seidman is not an aberration.  The truth is that law schools all over America are absolutely packed with professors that teach that we should consider the U.S. Constitution a “living, breathing document” that must “evolve” as society evolves.  They also teach that when we find something in the Constitution that does not work for us today that we should just ignore it.  In fact, in his New York Times article Seidman insisted that “constitutional disobedience” is “as old as the Republic”.  But if we can just ignore the U.S. Constitution whenever we want, where does that leave us?  Should we be able to ignore all laws when they are not convenient for us? (Read More...)