The Economic Collapse

Most of the time, the vast majority of Americans simply do not care about economics.  And it pains me to say that, because I have been running a website about economics for more than a decade.  But it is true.  Under normal circumstances, most hard working Americans don’t have the time or the energy to debate the finer points of economic policy.  But now things have changed.  Here in 2022, our leaders have messed things up so badly that suddenly just about everyone is feeling the pain.  Most people just want economic conditions to “return to normal”, but that isn’t going to be so easy. (Read More...)

If you are less than 40 years old, you have never seen inflation like this in the United States.  Despite all the warnings, our politicians in Washington just kept borrowing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars that we did not have.  And despite all the warnings, the Federal Reserve just kept pumping trillions of fresh dollars into the financial system.  Now we have a giant mess on our hands, and anyone that believes that this is going to be easily fixed is simply being delusional. (Read More...)

Has it really come to this?  We all knew that shoplifting was getting really bad all over the nation, but does Walmart really need to start locking up the steaks?  I was stunned when I first learned that pharmacies in our core urban areas were locking up toothpaste and deodorant, but I didn’t think that we were already at a point where supermarkets would start locking up the food.  I don’t know about you, but to me this is an extremely chilling omen… (Read More...)

Are you ready for war?  After four years of peace with Russia under President Trump, it has taken Joe Biden and his all-star team of warmongers just over a year to get us to the brink of World War 3.  Americans have grown accustomed to wars that only have consequences on the other side of the world, but a war with Russia would be completely different.  Russia is not Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.  The Russians can fight back, and they would not be afraid to fight dirty.  If the American people truly understood what was at stake, they would be flooding the streets in protest right now.  One of the things that history has taught us is that you don’t mess with the Russians, and every empire that has tried has ended up paying a very great price.  Unfortunately, the Biden administration seems absolutely determined to drag us into a conflict that won’t have any winners. (Read More...)

I warned you that inflation was going to get worse.  On Thursday, we learned that the consumer price index was 7.5 percent higher in January than it was a year ago.  We are being told that this was the highest reading since February 1982, and that sounds really bad.  But it isn’t exactly honest, because the truth is that the way the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than two dozen times since 1980.  So if we are going to compare the rate of inflation today to historical numbers, we should actually be doing an apples to apples comparison. (Read More...)

The last couple of years have not been pleasant, and so nobody wants to hear that more trouble is ahead for the U.S. economy.  Unfortunately, that is precisely what the mainstream media is telling us right now.  A year ago, so many of the talking heads on television were assuring us that a new golden era of prosperity was right around the corner, but of course that wasn’t true at all.  The dismal performance of the economy has been mirrored by Joe Biden’s rapidly declining approval numbers, and at this point there is a tremendous amount of pessimism about the remainder of 2022. (Read More...)

Global supplies of pharmaceutical drugs are getting tighter and tighter, and this has very serious implications for 2022 and beyond.  If you depend upon a certain pharmaceutical drug in order to stay alive, I would recommend doing whatever you can to make sure that you have as much of that drug stockpiled as possible, because a day may come when you are unable to get any more for an extended period of time.  Much of our drug production has been outsourced to China, and our relations with China are not going so well right now.  In fact, the moment that China invades Taiwan we are going to have a major league national crisis on our hands. (Read More...)

Teetering on a precipice can seem exciting until something comes along that knocks you over the edge.  Unfortunately, the events of the past couple of years have perfectly set the stage for a global economic collapse of unprecedented size and scope.  Inflation is out of control all over the planet, the worst global supply chain crisis since World War II continues to get worse with each passing day, and the vast majority of the global population is just barely scraping by from month to month.  In other words, we have never been more vulnerable than we are right now. (Read More...)