The Economic Collapse

Have we finally reached the end of the road?  When it comes to the economy, most of us focus on short-term cycles.  In recent years there have been times when the economy has been growing and there have been times when the economy has been shrinking, but all of those short-term fluctuations have happened in the context of a long-term trend of debt-fueled “growth”.  We have been relentlessly stealing from the future in order to make the present more pleasant, and most of us pretend that the piper will never have to be paid.  But of course the truth is that a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and that day of reckoning is going to be immensely painful. (Read More...)

Things have taken a turn for the worse.  In recent months, economic activity has been dropping all over the nation, and that decline appears to be accelerating.  We just learned that gross domestic income has now fallen for two quarters in a row, and the Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has now been plummeting for 13 consecutive months.  Unfortunately, when economic conditions deteriorate it is the people at the low end of the economic pyramid that get hit the hardest. (Read More...)

If we don’t fix this, will the retail industry be able to survive?  There has always been shoplifting, but in the old days it was at a level that made it only a minor nuisance to the big box retailers.  Unfortunately, now everything has changed.  Highly organized gangs have developed extremely sophisticated plans for how to rapidly loot our major retailers, and the best ones can be in and out in just minutes.  Those goods are then resold online or in the streets, and the amounts that we are talking about are absolutely staggering.  In fact, as you will see below, theft is now costing retailers in this country about 100 billion dollars a year. (Read More...)

If you wanted to destroy the middle class, one way that you could accomplish that goal would be to flood the system with money.  Of course that is precisely what we have witnessed over the past few years.  Our leaders have pumped trillions of new dollars into the system, and the wealthy have gotten much, much wealthier.  But meanwhile, the rest of us have seen the cost of living rise much faster than our paychecks have.  As a result, we are getting poorer and the middle class is shrinking. (Read More...)

If they are actually telling us that a recession is coming this time around, how bad is it going to be?  In 2008, officials kept assuring us over and over again that there wouldn’t be a recession, and then we plunged into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  But here in 2023, what is coming is so obvious that nobody can deny what is happening.  The economy is already starting to come apart at the seams all around us, and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve openly acknowledge that they are making things even worse by hiking interest rates.  Pretty much everyone agrees that rougher times are ahead of us, and “a probability model from the New York Federal Reserve” is now projecting that there is a 68.2 percent chance that there will be a recession within the next 12 months… (Read More...)

We are being warned that there could be some real serious economic doom at the beginning of next month if the Democrats and the Republicans cannot agree on a deal to raise the debt ceiling.  Experts are telling us that the stock market will crash, the economy will immediately plunge into a recession, and tens of millions of Americans will not get their Social Security payments.  Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says that a U.S. debt default would begin somewhere around June 1st.  She can’t nail down the date precisely, because there is some uncertainty regarding how much tax money will come in over the next few weeks.  But what is exceedingly clear is that time is very short, and there are only four days when the House and the Senate are both scheduled to be in session before June 1st.  So the clock is ticking, and right now both sides are still far apart on any sort of a deal. (Read More...)

How would you feel if a million Americans lost their jobs?  Would you consider that to be a pretty catastrophic event for the economy?  Well, as you will see below, even the Federal Reserve is projecting that more than a million Americans could lose their jobs in the months ahead.  Needless to say, Fed projections are usually wildly optimistic.  So what will the real number be?  Ultimately, I think that things are going to be far worse than most of the experts would dare to imagine right now.  According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of layoffs during the first three months of this year was 396 percent higher than the number of layoffs during the same period in 2022.  A tremendous amount of negative momentum has been building up, and there is a whole lot of fear out there. (Read More...)

If you could go back and live in 1973, would you do it?  To me, that is not an easy question to answer.  I think that for many of us it would be a real challenge to adjust to a world without the Internet and so many of the other technologies that we enjoy today.  But I also think that if we were suddenly transported back to that time we would be absolutely shocked by how freely people lived.  In 2023, there are literally millions of different laws, rules, regulations and ordinances that constrain how we behave down to the smallest detail.  A lot of us still think that we are “free”, but that hasn’t actually been true for a very long time.  In addition, the values of our society are completely different from what they were in 1973.  Over the past 50 years our culture has been completely turned upside down, and we can see the nightmarish consequences of this cultural revolution all around us. (Read More...)