Recovery

Shocking Numbers That Show The Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment In America

February 1, 2013 by Michael

Did you know that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has continually been falling since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Did you know that the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House was more than three times greater than the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during the entire decade of the 1980s? The mainstream media would have us believe that 157,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January. Based on that news, the Dow broke the 14,000 barrier for the first time since October 2007. But if you actually look at the “non-seasonally adjusted” numbers, the number of Americans with a job actually decreased by 1,446,000 between December and January. But nowhere in the mainstream media did you hear that the U.S. economy lost more than 1.4 million jobs between December and January. It is amazing the things that you can find out when you actually take the time to look at the hard numbers instead of just listening to the media spin. Back in 2007, more than 146 million Americans were employed. Today, only 141.6 million Americans are employed even though our population has grown steadily since then. When the government and the media tell you that we are in a “recovery” and that unemployment is lower than it was a couple of years ago, I encourage you to dig deeper. The truth is that even the government’s own numbers tell us that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed continues to fall and that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession. The Obama administration and the media have been lying to you about unemployment and about the true condition of our economy. After you see the numbers that I have compiled in this article, I think that you will agree with me.

First of all, let’s take a look at the percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years. These numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As you can see, this is a number that has been steadily falling since 2006…

2006: 63.1

2007: 63.0

2008: 62.2

2009: 59.3

2010: 58.5

2011: 58.4

In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.

Do the numbers above represent a positive trend or a negative trend?

Even a 2nd grader could answer that question.

So how in the world can the Obama administration and the mainstream media claim that the employment picture is getting better and that we are in a “recovery”?

But most Americans believe what they are told. It is almost as if we are in some kind of a “matrix” where reality is defined by the corporate-controlled propaganda that is relentlessly pumped into our brains.

The only way that the government has been able to show a declining unemployment rate is by dumping massive numbers of Americans into the “not in the labor force” category.

Just check out how the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years…

2006: 77,387,000

2007: 78,743,000

2008: 79,501,000

2009: 81,659,000

2010: 83,941,000

2011: 86,001,000

In January, there were supposedly 89,868,000 Americans that were at least 16 years of age that were not in the labor force.

That number has risen by more than 8 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House, and that is highly unusual, because the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only increased by 2,518,000 during the entire decade of the 1980s.

You sure can get the numbers to look more “favorable” if you pretend that millions upon millions of American workers simply “don’t want a job” any longer. The truth is that if the labor force participation rate was at the same level it was at when Barack Obama was first elected, the official unemployment rate would be well above 10 percent.

But that wouldn’t do at all, would it? 7.9 percent sounds so much nicer.

And of course even if you do have a job that does not mean that you are doing okay.

If you can believe it, in America today 41 percent of all workers make $20,000 a year or less.

To me, that is a mind blowing statistic. It would be incredibly challenging for anyone to live on $20,000 a year, much less try to support a family.

If you live in Washington D.C. or New York City and you have a “good job” working for the establishment, you may not realize it, but there are tens of millions of American families that are really hurting out there. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point, and most of those people actually do have jobs.

For much more on the “working poor” in the United States, please see my previous article entitled “35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind“.

If something is not done, the middle class will continue to disappear and poverty in America will continue to explode.

In a previous article, I noted that during Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.

How bad do things have to get before people realize that we are living through a nightmare?

Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system.

Most Americans are still convinced that our politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around.

Most Americans will gather around their television sets this weekend and watch the Super Bowl and laugh at all the funny commercials without even thinking about how America is literally falling apart all around them.

But there is one group of Americans that is acutely aware of how bad things have really gotten. Small businesses have traditionally been the primary engine of job growth in this country, but right now small business owners all over the nation are facing a tremendous crisis.

Millions of small businesses are on the verge of extinction, and yet our politicians just continue to pile on more taxes, more rules and more regulations.

A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of all small business owners in America are “worried about the potential cost of healthcare”, and that an astounding 30 percent of all small business owners in America are not hiring and fear that they will go out of business within the next 12 months.

In a previous article entitled “We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America“, I detailed how small businesses in America are being systematically wiped out. Small businesses are dying all around us, and the number of new small businesses continues to decline.

According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

Is that a good trend or a bad trend?

All of this is so simple that even the family pet should be able to figure it out, and yet most Americans seem oblivious to all of this. They just keep gobbling up the mainstream media propaganda and they just continue to go out and wildly spend money.

It is almost as if we didn’t learn any lessons from 2008.

Even while household spending in Europe has moderated, household spending in the United States continues to soar. Just check out the chart in this article.

And guess what? The infamous “no money down mortgages” are back. If we wait long enough, perhaps “interest only mortgages” will make a comeback as well.

Unfortunately, I am afraid that time is running out. we have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it is only a matter of time until it bursts.

2008 was just a “hiccup” compared to what is coming. Our politicians and the Federal Reserve were able to keep the house of cards from completely crashing down back then, but they are not going to be able to avert the economic horror show that is rapidly approaching.

I hope that you are getting prepared. Back in 2008, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs, and because many of them did not have any savings, many of them suddenly lost their homes. One of the most important things that you can do to prepare for the coming crisis is to build up an emergency fund. If things suddenly go bad, you don’t want to lose your house and everything that you have always worked for.

In addition, anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is failing. The years ahead are going to be much more chaotic than what we are experiencing right now, and when the next crisis strikes you will be very thankful for the time and the energy that you put into preparing.

So what are all of you seeing in your own areas?

Are businesses shutting down?

Are people having a hard time finding good jobs?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

15 Signs That You Better Get Prepared For The Obama Recession Of 2013

January 31, 2013 by Michael

You better get ready, because there are a whole host of signs that economic trouble is on the horizon. U.S. economic growth slipped into negative territory during the fourth quarter of 2012. That was the first time that has happened in more than three years. Several important measures of manufacturing activity have also contracted in recent weeks, and consumer confidence is way down. There is a tremendous amount of economic pessimism in the air right now, and Americans are pulling enormous amounts of money out of our banks and they are buying up precious metals at unprecedented rates. Meanwhile, our “leaders” seem very confused about what is happening. For example, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid continues to insist that we are “in a recovery“, and some other Democrats are calling the latest GDP numbers “the best-looking contraction in U.S. GDP you’ll ever see“. On the other hand, the Federal Reserve says that economic growth has “paused” in recent months, and therefore a continuation of their latest quantitative easing scheme is necessary. Well, no matter how hard any of them try to spin the numbers, there is no way that they are going to get them to look good. Despite four years of outrageous “stimulus” spending by the federal government, despite four years of record low interest rates, and despite four years of unprecedented money printing by the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy continues to perform miserably. Later this year the federal government will probably finally acknowledge that we have entered another recession, even though the truth is that if the federal government used honest numbers they would indicate that we are already in one. In any event, nobody should have ever expected that our debt-fueled prosperity would last forever. When the debt bubble that we have been living in completely bursts, a “recession” will be the least of our worries.

Hopefully this little stretch of false economic hope that we have been living in will last for a little while longer. I don’t think that too many people are very eager to repeat the horrible economic pain that we experienced back in 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately, we never fully recovered from that last downturn and now the incredibly foolish decisions that our “leaders” continue to make have made another major economic downturn inevitable.

Personally, I would very much prefer for 2013 to be a year of peace and prosperity for America. But at this point there appears to be a great deal of downward momentum for the economy.

The following are 15 signs that you better get prepared for the Obama recession of 2013…

#1 The mainstream media was absolutely shocked when it was announced that U.S. GDP actually contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent during the fourth quarter of 2012. This was the first contraction that the official numbers have shown in more than three years. But of course the truth is that the official numbers always make things appear better than they really are. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, U.S. GDP growth has actually been continuously negative all the way back to 2005 once you account “for distortions in government inflation usage and methodological changes that have resulted in a built-in upside bias to official reporting.”

#2 For the entire year of 2012, official U.S. GDP growth was only about 1.5%. According to Art Cashin, every time economic growth has fallen that low (below 2 percent annually) the U.S. economy has always ended up going into a recession.

#3 According to the Conference Board, consumer confidence in the United States has hit its lowest level in more than a year.

#4 For the week ending January 26th, initial claims for unemployment rose to 368,000. In future weeks, watch to see if it goes above 400,000. If we hit that level, that will be a sign of real trouble for the economy.

#5 During the first full week of January, an astounding $114 billion was pulled out of U.S. banks. That is the largest amount that we have seen moved out of U.S. banks in one week since 2001.

#6 The U.S. Mint was on pace to sell more silver eagles during the first month of 2013 than it did during the entire year of 2007. Why is so much silver being sold all of a sudden?

#7 The payroll tax hike that went into effect in January has reduced the paychecks of average American workers by about $100 a month.

#8 Several important measures of manufacturing activity along the east coast missed expectations by a huge margin in January. The following summary is from a recent Zero Hedge article…

So much for the latest “recovery.” While everyone continued to forget that in the New Normal markets do not reflect the underlying economy in the least, and that the all time highs in the Russell 2000 should indicate that the US economy has never been better, things in reality took a deep dive for the worse, at least according to the Empire State Fed, the Philly Fed, and now the Richmond Fed, all of which missed expectations by a huge margin, and are now deep in contraction territory. Moments ago, the Richmond Fed reported that the Manufacturing Index imploded from a 9 in November, 5 in December and missed expectations of a 5 print at -12: this was the biggest miss to expectations since September 2009.

#9 An astounding 33 percent of all “subprime student loans” are at least 90 days past due. Back in 2007, that number was only at 24 percent. Could this be evidence that the student loan debt bubble is beginning to burst?

#10 Time Inc. has just announced that it will be eliminating hundreds of jobs.

#11 Blockbuster recently announced that they are closing hundreds of stores and eliminating about 3,000 jobs.

#12 Toy maker Hasbro has announced that the size of their workforce will be reduced by about 10 percent.

#13 According to a new Pew Research study that was just released, one out of every seven adults in the United States is financially supporting their kids and their parents at the same time. Pew Research is calling it “the Sandwich Generation”.

#14 According to one recent Gallup poll, 65 percent of all Americans believe that 2013 will be a year of “economic difficulty“, and 50 percent of all Americans believe that the “best days” of America are now behind us.

#15 According to a different Gallup poll, Americans are now more pessimistic about where the U.S. economy will be five years from now than Gallup has ever recorded before.

So what is Barack Obama doing about all of this?

Not much.

Actually, he is shutting down his much ballyhooed “Council on Jobs and Competitiveness”. It last convened more than a year ago on Jan. 17th, 2012, and apparently Obama does not feel that it is needed any longer.

Of course we all know that it was just a political stunt to begin with.

Sadly, the truth is that both parties have been leading us down a road toward economic oblivion. The past four years under Obama have been absolutely nightmarish, and even though the Republicans have been in control of the House for the last couple of years they have done very little to even slow him down.

For much more on the decline of the economy over the past four years, please see this article: “37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy“.

Yes, I tend to criticize Obama’s economic policies a lot, and rightfully so, but neither political party is willing to tell the American people the truth.

40 years ago, the total amount of debt in the U.S. economic system was less than 2 trillion dollars.

Today, the total amount of debt in the U.S. economic system has grown to more than 55 trillion dollars.

It hasn’t mattered which party has occupied the White House or which party has been in control of Congress. The debt bubble that we have been living in has just continued to grow.

And all bubbles eventually pop.

The mainstream media is endlessly obsessed with the little fights that the Republicans and the Democrats are having, but they never talk about the bigger picture.

The prosperity that we are enjoying today is the result of the biggest debt binge in the history of the world.

We have stolen a giant mountain of money from our children and our grandchildren and we have destroyed their futures.

People can debate about whether the next “recession” has already started or not, but the truth is that what we are experiencing now is nothing compared to what is coming.

In the end, we will pay a great price for our decades of foolishness.

The U.S. economy is going to completely collapse, and the last few years have only been the very beginning of that process.

The Bad Jobs Report Is Just A Very Small Taste Of The Economic Nightmare That Is Coming

June 1, 2012 by Michael

Another month, another bad jobs report. For the month of May, the U.S. economy only added 69,000 jobs and the unemployment rate rose to 8.2%. Many are calling this a total “disaster” and are worried that the U.S. economy could be headed back into another recession. Economists had been expecting 150,000 payroll jobs would be added, so the 69,000 number really shocked a lot of people. The truth is that the economy needs to add approximately 125,000 new jobs every single month just to keep the unemployment rate steady. So yes, this bad jobs report is not welcome news at all – especially for the Obama administration. When Barack Obama first took office the unemployment rate was sitting at 7.6 percent and now it is sitting at 8.2 percent. Some “recovery”, eh? But the reality is that this jobs report was really not that “devastating” even though the stock market had its worst day of the year. Unemployment in America is still about at the same level as it was back at the beginning of 2012. The tough stretch that we are going through right now is only a very small taste of the economic nightmare that is on the horizon. If you think that things are a “disaster” right now, just wait until you see what is coming.

At the moment, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 are either unemployed or underemployed, and there are more than 100 million working age Americans that do not currently have jobs.

But this is only just the beginning.

During the next major economic downturn, the unemployment rate in the United States is going to soar well up into the double digits.

Many Americans will look back on 2010, 2011 and 2012 as “the good old days”.

Right now, there are only small pockets of the country that are total economic hellholes.

For example, Yuma, Arizona has an unemployment rate of 26 percent, and El Centro, California has an unemployment rate of 26.2 percent.

In the future, those kinds of numbers are going to become the norm all over the nation.

Sadly, most Americans have no idea what is coming.

Today, I wanted to share with you all a couple of chilling economic forecasts that I have been made aware of recently.

The first is from Raoul Pal. According to Zero Hedge, Raoul Pal “previously co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund in London for GLG Partners, one of the largest hedge fund groups in the world. Raoul came to GLG from Goldman Sachs where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in Equities and Equity Derivatives in Europe… Raoul Pal retired from managing client money in 2004 at the age of 36 and now lives on the Valencian coast of Spain, from where he writes.”

The following is from a Zero Hedge summary of a recent presentation by Raoul Pal….

We don’t know exactly what is to come, but we can all join the very few dots from where we are now, to the collapse of the first major bank…

With very limited room for government bailouts, we can very easily join the next dots from the first bank closure to the collapse of the whole European banking system, and then to the bankruptcy of the governments themselves.

There are almost no brakes in the system to stop this, and almost no one realises the seriousness of the situation.

The problem is not Government debt per se. The real problem is that the $70 trillion in G10 debt is the collateral for $700 trillion in derivatives…

Yes, that equates to 1200% of Global GDP and it rests on very, very weak foundations

From an EU crisis, we only have to join one dot for a UK crisis of equal magnitude.

And then do you think Japan and China would not be next?

And then do you think the US would survive unscathed?

That is the end of the fractional reserve banking system and of fiat money.

It is the big RESET.

It continues:

Bonds will be stuck at 1% in the US, Germany, UK and Japan (for this phase).

The whole bond market will be dead.

Short selling on bonds – banned

Short selling stocks – banned

CDS – banned

Short futures – banned

Put options – banned

All that is left is the Dollar and Gold

It only gets better. We use the term loosely:

We have around 6 months left of trading in Western markets to protect ourselves or make enough money to offset future losses.

Spend your time looking at the risks of custody, safekeeping, counterparty etc. Assume that no one and nothing is safe.

After that…we put on our tin helmets and hide until the new system emerges

So how soon does Raoul Pal think all of this is going to happen?….

From a timing perspective, I think 2012 and 2013 will usher in the end.

You can find his entire presentation entitled “The End Game” right here.

What Raoul Pal is saying lines up very well with what Steve Quayle’s anonymous international banking source is telling him….

There is no stopping this…We are still on track as I have been predicting for a while now for a fall/winter collapse of the Eurozone and naked exposure of all derivative markets the world over. Europeans will go through a major reset, after time they will recover as Europeans do not carry the type of personal debt that Americans do. It is for America that I worry. Look for these signs next:

1- JPM will be bailed out again but it will not stop the coming market crash. More details will emerge about their derivative swap failure $150 billion and counting.

2-BOA (BAC Bank of America) will fold and be absorbed into JPM as a way to prop up the bleeding Giant. JPM will get the best picking of this deal just like they got with Bear Stearns.

3- Massive layoffs at Citigroup and Wells Fargo

4- Goldman Sachs finally pays the piper, look for massive cuts there as well as BIG Losses

5- Bond market bust which leads to freeze of all bond sales

6- Derivative bust the next one will be BOA followed by Citigroup

7- All CDS shorts and swaps will freeze.

8- Total Meltdown

You can read the rest of what that source is saying right here.

As I have been saying all along, there are two keys that you need to be watching right now….

#1 Europe

#2 Derivatives

Sadly, the articles that I write about Europe tend to get far less of a response than my other articles get. Most Americans simply do not understand that what is happening in Europe right now is going to significantly affect their daily lives.

And most Americans have very little understanding of derivatives. But as you just read, there are some in the financial community that are warning that we could see the derivatives bubble burst very soon.

Time is running out. This period of relative stability that we are currently experiencing will not last forever.

You better get ready.

Economic Recovery?

June 28, 2011June 28, 2011 by Michael

If this is supposed to be an “economic recovery” it sure is pathetic. In fact, as you will read below, the numbers tell us that this is the worst economic recovery that the American economy has ever seen. If what we had experienced was a “normal” recession and a “normal” recovery, then jobs, economic growth and home values would have come roaring back by now. But they haven’t. The Federal Reserve injected unprecedented amounts of new money into the system and the federal government went into unprecedented amounts of new debt, but all of that effort has not accomplished much. It did buy us a little bit of time and a period of relative economic stability, but now there are all kinds of signs that we are about to go into another recession (or something even worse). So is it really honest for Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama to be using the term “economic recovery” to describe what is happening?

The truth is that what is really taking place is that the long-term economic decline of the United States is beginning to accelerate.

But most Americans simply don’t understand what is going on.

The mainstream media teaches us to blame our politicians for the economy. One recent survey found that 44 percent of the American people believe that the U.S. economy is “worse than when Obama was inaugurated”.

Yes, Barack Obama is a horrible president. But the economic downfall of this nation is not all his fault. George W. Bush was a horrible president too. So was Bill Clinton. Congress has been corrupt and incompetent for decades.

Of course the institution that is most responsible for our economic problems is the Federal Reserve. Thankfully, more Americans than ever are starting to realize this.

But if you listen to Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama, you would think that a great “economic recovery” has begun. They would have us believe that they know exactly what our problems are and that they know exactly how to get us out of this mess.

Unfortunately, what we have experienced is not much of an “economic recovery” at all. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is the worst “recovery” from a recession that the U.S. economy has ever seen….

On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions.

So what is really going on?

Sadly, what we are experiencing right now is a brief period of stability in the middle of a downward spiral toward economic oblivion.

The CEO of Pimco, Mohamed El-Erian, says that it should now be obvious to everyone that all of the efforts of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy simply have not been enough to solve the structural economic challenges that we are facing….

“It’s clear that the stimulus-induced recovery hasn’t overcome the structural challenges to large-scale job creation.”

The U.S. economy is not producing enough jobs. Today, there are 25 million Americans that are either unemployed or underemployed.

But the inability to create jobs is not a new phenomenon for the U.S. economy. The truth is that between 2000 and 2007, the U.S. economy had its poorest stretch of job creation since the Great Depression.

However, since 2007 the employment situation in this country has gotten a lot worse. Take a minute and watch the stunning video posted below. It shows how rampant unemployment swept across this country between 2007 and 2011….

Our politicians promised us that globalization would be great for the U.S. economy.

Well, it was great for the big corporations to be able to pay slave labor wages to workers on the other side of the globe, but things have not worked out so well for workers in this country.

Millions of our jobs have been lost. Millions more jobs are being lost. Yet our politicians do nothing to stop the bleeding.

Things have gotten so bad that even the top of the food chain is shipping jobs overseas.

Just consider this recent headline which appeared in Business Insider: “Goldman Sachs Is Firing Employees In The US So It Can Hire 1,000 In Singapore”

If even jobs at Goldman Sachs are being sent out of the country, are any of our jobs safe?

Many Americans would love to start a business instead of having to work for someone else, but the economic environment has become incredibly toxic for small businesses in the United States.

The rate of new business creation in the United States has been declining steadily since the 1980s. Our politicians are literally choking the entrepreneurial spirit to death in this country.

Today, more Americans than ever are dependent on the government. In fact, it has gotten to the point where the U.S. economy itself is highly dependent on the government.

So what is going to happen when the government is not handing out so many goodies?

The era of rampant spending in Washington D.C. seems to be coming to an end, at least for now. The U.S. national debt has become so outrageous that many members of Congress are finally determined to start making some cuts.

While it is true that cutting government spending is long overdue, most Americans don’t realize that cutting government spending will also mean that “the economic sugar high” that we have been experiencing will start to wear off.

If we try to live within our means, that is going to cause a lot of economic pain, and the American people are not too good about making sacrifices these days.

Look, whoever is elected in 2012 is going to be in for a rough ride. Some very difficult economic times are ahead, and whoever is elected in 2012 is going to get blamed. By 2016, the president is probably going to be the most hated person in America.

But the truth is that these economic problems have been building for decades.

We didn’t get here by accident, and our economic problems are not going to be solved overnight.

In fact, many financial analysts are warning that they are about to get a lot worse.

For example, David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff says that there is a 99 percent chance that the U.S. will fall into another recession by the end of 2012.

As the economy continues to crumble, U.S. cities will become increasingly hostile places in which to live.

According to a recent Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, 41 percent of Americans say that crime has increased where they live over the past year and only 6 percent of Americans say that crime has decreased where they live over the past year.

But just wait until the economy really collapses – that is when all hell will break loose.

In a recent article entitled “Is The Economy Improving?“, I quoted statistic after statistic that showed that the U.S. economy is actually continuing to decline.

The American people are starting to lose patience. In fact, people all over the country are starting to get more than a little crazy. For example, there is a now a national “epidemic” of people robbing pharmacies in order to get a hold of painkillers.

Pharmacists all over the country are being robbed at gunpoint. Some prescription painkillers will reportedly sell for as much as 80 dollars a pill on the street. As a recent article in the Washington Post noted, things are getting really dangerous out there for pharmacists….

“It’s an epidemic,” said Michael Fox, a pharmacist on New York’s Staten Island who has been stuck up twice in the last year. “These people are depraved. They’ll kill you.”

Armed robberies at pharmacies rose 81 percent between 2006 and 2010, from 380 to 686, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says. The number of pills stolen went from 706,000 to 1.3 million. Thieves are overwhelmingly taking oxycodone painkillers like OxyContin or Roxicodone, or hydrocodone-based painkillers like Vicodin and Norco. Both narcotics are highly addictive.

But this is what our country is turning into.

We are a nation of addicts.

Our national addiction to debt and our national addiction to greed have brought us to the brink of economic disaster.

If you are waiting for an “economic recovery”, you should stop waiting.

This is about as good as things are going to get.

From here on out, things are just going to keep going downhill.

Most Americans are going to be absolutely blindsided by the economic collapse that is coming.

But that doesn’t have to be you.

You still have some time to get prepared.

Is The Economy Improving?

June 23, 2011 by Michael

Is the U.S. economy improving? That is what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would have us believe. Bernanke declared today that the “recovery appears to be proceeding at a moderate pace” and that everything is going pretty much as planned. Sadly, the mainstream media and most of the American people still seem to have faith in the economic pronouncements of Helicopter Ben. They seem to have forgotten all of the Bernanke quotes from before the financial crisis. Bernanke pledged that there would not be a housing crash and that there would not be a recession. It is amazing that anyone still believes that Bernanke has any credibility left.

Of course “economic recovery” is one of Barack Obama’s favorite new terms. He loves to talk about all of the signs that the economy is improving. To Obama, all of the recent bad economic news is no big deal. He says that what we are experiencing right now are simply “bumps on the road to recovery“.

Well, whether you want to call them “bumps” or “potholes” or “massive gaping wounds that are gushing blood all over the place”, the truth is that the U.S. economy is not improving at all. In fact, it is rapidly getting worse.

Let’s take a look at just a few areas of the economy….

Federal Government Finances

As I wrote about yesterday, the national debt is completely and totally out of control. Since Barack Obama took office, the U.S. national debt has increased by nearly 4 trillion dollars.

Keep in mind that from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government accumulated only 1 trillion dollars in debt.

Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

Now the Democrats and the Republicans are busy negotiating over some modest reductions in spending.

But unprecedented federal spending is one of the only things propping the economy up right now.

If the U.S. economy is performing so poorly after being flooded with “stimulus money” from the federal government, what is going to happen once the federal government cuts back?

State And Local Government Finances

All over the United States, there are large numbers of state and local governments that are on the verge of bankruptcy.

For the moment, let’s just focus on the state of Illinois.

Did you know that things have gotten so bad in Illinois at this point that the Illinois state government is letting bills go unpaid for long periods of time on a regular basis?

It’s true.

Right now they have billions in unpaid bills and they are facing a financial future that is so bleak that it is almost indescribable.

In one recent article, author Stephen Lendman described the horrific financial crisis that Illinois is facing right now….

With spending exceeding revenues, and obligations not postponed, unpaid bills are growing “at a frightening rate. For instance, IGPA’s Fiscal Futures Model indicates (they) could reach $40 billion by July 1, 2013, with an associated delay in paying those bills of more than five years.”

Besides its $13 billion deficit and $6 billion in unpaid bills, its pension fund is about $130 billion in the red – a red flag that state workers may lose out altogether, wiping out their promised retirement savings.

But it isn’t just the state government that is having problems. According to Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, the average household in Chicago would owe a whopping $63,525 if all local government debt was divided up equally among all of the households.

The truth is that even if the finances of the federal government could somehow be fixed, there would still be dozens and dozens of very significant “government debt problems” all across America.

With so many state and local governments drowning in debt, jobs are being slashed at an alarming rate. 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.

So would the U.S. government step in and start bailing out state and local governments?

Not likely.

U.S. Representative Paul Ryan has said the following about the prospect of bailing out the states….

“If we bail out one state, then all of the debt of all of the states are almost explicitly on the books of the federal government.”

So for now, state and local governments are on their own.

Commercial Real Estate

Commercial real estate continues to decline all across America.

Moody’s/REAL All Property Type Aggregate Index fell 3.7% in April and is now the lowest it has been in over 10 years.

Overall, commercial real estate is down by over 40 percent since the peak back in 2007.

Residential Real Estate

The United States is dealing with a housing crash that never seems to end.

According to the National Association of Realtors, existing home sales in the United States fell another 3.8% in May.

During this housing crash home values have declined more than they did during the Great Depression and there does not appear to be any hope in sight.

New home sales are in even worse shape. During the first three months of this year, less new homes were sold in the U.S. than in any three month period ever recorded.

Unemployment

As 2009 began, the official U.S. unemployment rate was 7.6 percent. Today it is 9.1 percent.

The American people keep waiting for a “jobs recovery”, but it has not shown up.

Sadly, all of this is part of a long-term trend.

Over the past decade, U.S. multinational corporations have been laying off millions of workers in the U.S. and hiring millions of workers overseas to take their place.

The labor of American workers is rapidly losing value in a globalized economy. Big corporations have a tough time justifying paying ten times more to a worker in the United States when they are allowed to hire people for slave labor wages overseas.

The share of the national income taken in by U.S. workers continues to decline. Just consider what Mortimer Zuckerman had to say in a recent article for usnews.com….

Labor’s share of national income has fallen to the lowest level in modern history, down to 57.5 percent in the first quarter as compared to 59.8 percent when the so-called recovery began. This reflects not only the 7 million fewer workers but the fact that wages for part-time workers now average $19,000—less than half the median income.

In the United States today, there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. The number of “middle class jobs” has fallen by about 10 percent over the last decade.

Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

We are seeing the rise of a whole class of people that are chronically unemployed. At the beginning of 2009, the number of “long-term unemployed” in the United States was approximately 2.6 million. Today, that number is up to 6.2 million.

So in light of these employment statistics, can anyone really say that the economy is improving?

Economic Anxiety

The economy is the number one issue on the minds of the American people. There is an extraordinary about of economic pain out there today, and Americans are becoming impatient.

According to CNBC, the Money Anxiety Index is at its highest level in 30 years….

The latest indicator to ring up trouble is the Money Anxiety Index, which uses traditional economic metrics as well as other factors to gauge the level of consumers’ worry regarding their personal financial conditions.

According to the May figures, the MAI is not only at its highest level in 30 years at 91.9 but also two months away from indicating another dip into recession. In the past, five straight months of increases in the index often signaled recession.

Most recent polls show that the American people are rapidly becoming more pessimistic about the direction the U.S. economy is headed.

According to a recent CNN poll, 48 percent of Americans believe that “another Great Depression” is likely within the next 12 months.

When you really stop and think about that number, it is really frightening.

Inflation

Ben Bernanke may not admit it, but the truth is that the price of just about everything is soaring.

For example, when Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States was $1.83. Today it is about $3.74.

So what are our politicians doing about it?

Not much.

They just want to pretend that it isn’t happening.

In fact, members of Congress are actually tinkering with the idea of changing the way that inflation is calculated once again.

By making inflation appear lower, it would be easier for Congress to deny cost of living increases to those on Social Security and other social programs.

How sad is that?

Economic Suffering

As American families find it increasingly difficult to pay the mortgage and put food on the table, many of them find themselves forced to put off other expenses. According to one recent survey, 26 percent of Americans have put off doctor visits because of the economy.

Other Americans can’t make it at all without government assistance. As 2007 began, there were only 26 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than 44 million Americans on food stamps, which is an all-time record.

It is not good to have so many Americans on food stamps, but it is probably better than the alternative.

If there were tens of millions of Americans that could not feed themselves we would probably already have economic riots in the streets.

Solutions?

So do our politicians have any solutions?

Of course not. Everything that they have tried has failed.

Several top Democrats in Washington D.C. are now calling for a new economic stimulus package. When in doubt, our politicians usually revert to spending more money.

Sadly, this is about the best that our economy is going to get.

What we are experiencing right now is “the recovery”. As we move forward things are going to get progressively worse.

A lot of people don’t like to hear that we are in the middle of a long-term economic decline, but that is the truth.

The era of tremendous economic prosperity for America is coming to an end.

An economic nightmare is coming.

You better get ready.

18 Sobering Facts Which Prove That The Middle Class Is Not Being Included In This “Economic Recovery”

February 21, 2011February 21, 2011 by Michael

Have you heard the news? The stock market is absolutely soaring and according to the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve we are in the beginning stages of a robust economic recovery. Yippee! The S&P 500 is up 6.8 percent so far in 2011, and the stock market recently hit a two and a half year high. So shouldn’t we all be celebrating? Well, if stock market performance was an accurate measure of economic health, then Zimbabwe would have had one of the healthiest economies on the entire globe during the last decade. But just like Zimbabwe’s stock market was artificially pumped up with “funny money” that was rapidly being devalued, so is ours. All of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve has been doing is pumping plenty of money into the financial markets and is helping to inflate a false stock market bubble, but it is doing very little to alleviate the suffering of the U.S. middle class. In fact, when you take a closer look at the numbers you quickly find out that the suffering of the middle class is getting even worse.

According to Gallup, the unemployment rate is now over 10%. The number of Americans that have given up looking for work recently set a new all-time record. The number of mortgages in foreclosure tied a record high during the fourth quarter of 2010. Gas and food prices are rising rapidly. The number of Americans on food stamps continues to increase every single month.

Yes, right now the economic situation is not in free fall like it was a couple years ago. We should be thankful for that. Periods of relative stability such as we are enjoying now will be few and far between in the years ahead. This “bubble” of economic calm is a great opportunity that we should all be taking advantage of.

However, those that are hoping that this is an economic “turning point” and that things will soon be back to “normal” are going to be greatly disappointed. This is about as “normal” as things are going to be ever again.

Even during this time of relative economic stability, the U.S. middle class is still being ripped to shreds. If there are those among your family and friends that are somehow convinced that the U.S. economy is recovering nicely, you might want want to show them the following 18 very sobering facts….

#1 According to Gallup, the U.S. unemployment rate is currently 10.3 percent. When you add in part-time American workers that want full-time employment, that number rises to 20.2 percent.

#2 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of job openings in the United States declined for a second straight month during December.

#3 There are currently more than 4 million Americans that have been unemployed for more than a year.

#4 The number of Americans that have become so discouraged that they have given up searching for work completely now stands at an all-time high.

#5 Gasoline prices in the United States recently hit a 28-month high.

#6 During the 4th quarter of 2010, 4.63 percent of all U.S. home loans were in foreclosure. That matched the all-time high, and it was up significantly from 4.39 percent in the 3rd quarter.

#7 It is estimated that there are about 5 million homeowners in the United States that are at least two months behind on their mortgages, and it is being projected that over a million American families will be booted out of their homes this year alone.

#8 Almost 14 percent of all credit card accounts in the United States are currently 90 days or more delinquent.

#9 The average credit card rate in the United States had increased to a whopping 13.44 percent at the end of 2010.

#10 Americans now owe more than $890 billion on student loans, which is even more than they owe on credit cards.

#11 Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income. In China, average household debt is only 17% of average household income.

#12 U.S. life expectancy at birth is now three years less than Canada and four years less than Japan.

#13 New home sales in the state of California were at the lowest level ever recorded in the month of January.

#14 43 percent of all mortgages in south Florida are currently underwater.

#15 Prior to the most recent economic downturn, there were usually somewhere around four to five million job openings in America. Today there are about 3 million.

#16 When you adjust wages for inflation, middle class workers in the United States make less money today than they did back in 1971.

#17 One out of every seven Americans is now on food stamps.

#18 One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.

You know things are bad when articles start popping up in the mainstream news instructing us how to interact socially with the hordes of unemployed Americans that are out there today. A recent USA Today article entitled “What not to say to someone who is unemployed” listed some of the things that you should not say to someone that does not have a job. The following are some of their suggestions on what NOT to say….

“Hey, have you found anything yet?”

“How’s the search going?”

“You just have to pound the pavement.”

“Something will turn up.”

“It’s tough out there.”

“Other people are going through the same thing.”

“Maybe you’re asking for too much money.”

“Maybe you should go back to school.”

“There are plenty of jobs out there.”

I am sure most of us have heard things like this at one time or another. It can be a soul-crushing thing to have others like at you in pity because you don’t have a job and you can’t pay the mortgage and feed your family.

Most unemployed Americans are not lazy. The vast majority of them desperately want jobs. But the U.S. economy is not producing nearly enough jobs today. As noted above, the U.S. economy currently has about 3 million job openings, but approximately 20 percent of the workforce wants to find a full-time job. The demand for jobs is far, far, far greater than the supply.

Unfortunately, this is the legacy of decades of bad economic decision-making. The U.S. economy should be able to provide work for every single person that wants it, but because of the choices that have been made that will never be the case again.

The middle class in America is being ripped to shreds right in front of our eyes and very little is being done to stop it. Desperation is rising across the nation. More Americans slip into poverty every single day. It is almost as if a cloud of gloom and despair has descended upon the U.S. economy and every single month the situation only seems to get darker.

So what about you? How has this economy affected you and your family? Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….

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