The Economy

It’s Like Magic! Lockdowns Are Ending All Over America Just Days After Biden’s Inauguration…

January 25, 2021January 25, 2021 by Michael

Isn’t it amazing how all of the lockdowns can now be lifted now that Donald Trump is no longer president? It has been less than a week since Joe Biden was inaugurated, and COVID restrictions are being ended in Michigan, Chicago, California and New York. What an odd coincidence, eh? Now that Democrats are running everything, it turns out that there is no longer any need for such fear-based control mechanisms. At this point, we are being told that happy days are here again and that the next four years are going to be just great.

Of course the economic devastation that was caused by all of the lockdowns is going to be with us for a while. The lockdowns permanently destroyed more than 100,000 small businesses, they plunged us into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and they sent suicide rates skyrocketing all over the globe.

But at least our rightful rulers are now back in control, and so it was a small sacrifice to make.

Sometimes I use sarcasm to express my frustrations, and there is much to be frustrated about these days.

After putting Michigan residents through hell for most of 2020, two days after Biden was inaugurated Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that the restrictions in her state would start to be lifted…

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Friday that the restrictions worked, COVID-19 infection rates are declining, and indoor dining can resume Feb. 1.

The very next day, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot proudly announced that COVID restrictions were also being rolled back in her city…

“Due to recent progress in the fight against COVID-19, Chicago is now operating under Illinois’ Tier 1 mitigations—which includes limited indoor dining and more.”

Then on Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom “lifted regional stay-at-home orders across the state”…

California lifted regional stay-at-home orders across the state Monday in response to improving coronavirus conditions, returning the state to a system of county-by-county restrictions, state health officials announced. CBS San Francisco reports the move opens the way for a return to limited restaurant dining, religious services and other activities.

Somehow, major Democratic politicians all over the nation have simultaneously come to the exact same conclusion about the COVID lockdowns.

Isn’t that strange?

Of course there are some that are suggesting that all of this is a little bit too convenient. For example, this is what Steve Cortes posted on Twitter…

Michigan, Chicago, now California.

It’s almost as if the “science” changed, once Biden became president? How convenient for Whitmer, Lightfoot, and Newsom?

Using small businesses, churches, schools, and citizens as pawns in a crass political game is evil.

Steve must not have heard the latest, because we just got big news out of New York…

The spread of Covid-19 has slowed enough in New York that Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to ease the extra restrictions some parts of the state have been living under for months.

Cuomo said today he expects to announce changes to the state’s Covid cluster zones soon. It would be the first update to the cluster zones in weeks.

They could have at least waited for a couple of weeks to make it look better.

Many Americans are going to be convinced that these lockdowns were a political ploy all along, and it is going to be extremely difficult to convince them otherwise.

Meanwhile, we are left with a nation in which the gap between the wealthy and the poor is now greater than ever thanks to the lockdowns.

According to Bloomberg, we just witnessed the largest yearly increase in poverty in the United States since the 1960s…

Economists Bruce Meyer, from the University of Chicago, and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame found that the poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points during the latter half of 2020 as the U.S. continued to suffer the economic impacts from Covid-19.

That percentage-point rise is nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty since the 1960s. This means an additional 8 million people nationwide are now considered poor. Moreover, the poverty rate for Black Americans is estimated to have jumped by 5.4 percentage points, or by 2.4 million individuals.

Of course we have also seen poverty rates explode elsewhere around the world, and Oxfam is warning that on a global basis we just witnessed the “greatest rise in inequality since records began”…

As featured in a recent Oxfam study which also sought to assess the financial impact of the pandemic — up to 500 million people globally have been newly pushed into poverty, while at the same time the world’s 10 richest men made a combined $540 billion over the same time frame.

Oxfam is calling it evidence of the “greatest rise in inequality since records began.”

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Meanwhile, the horrific civil unrest that I warned was coming is now raging all over the planet.

In fact, one group of protesters in the Netherlands just blew up a bridge.

When faith in our leaders and in our institutions is gone, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to ever restore it.

Perhaps “the science” really does indicate that our politicians should suddenly be lifting COVID restrictions all over the United States. But even many Democrats are going to admit that it looks incredibly suspicious for them to be doing this in coordinated fashion just days after Biden was inaugurated.

In life, and especially in politics, perception can be everything.

However, even if there is funny business going on, we should all be glad that the lockdowns are finally starting to end because that will definitely help the economy.

Let us hope that economic conditions in this country will improve for at least a short period of time as we wait for the next shoe to drop.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe. I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

We Are Suffering Through The Most Painful Economic Crisis Since The Great Depression Of The 1930s

January 21, 2021 by Michael

I warned that an economic collapse was coming, and an economic collapse is exactly what we got. 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans, approximately 12 million U.S. renters are “at least $5,850 behind in rent and utilities payments”, the Aspen Institute is projecting that up to 40 million people could be facing eviction when the rent and mortgage moratoriums finally end, and more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed since the COVID pandemic began.

Nobody can point to a time since the Great Depression of the 1930s when the U.S. economy was in worse shape than it is right now.

Unfortunately, there are no indications that this nightmare is going to end. Last week, another 900,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits…

Another 900,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week, President Donald Trump’s last in office, a snapshot of the significant labor market challenges facing President Joe Biden.

An additional 423,000 people in 47 states filed new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program created to help gig and self-employed workers.

Prior to 2020, the all-time record for new unemployment claims in a single week was just 695,000, and that old record was set all the way back in 1982.

We shattered that old record early in 2020, but the bigger story is what has happened since we broke it.

At this point, the number of new claims for unemployment benefits has been above 695,000 for 44 weeks in a row.

That is starting to come close to a full year.

If that does not qualify as a “collapse”, then you are probably using a completely different definition of the word than I am using.

This unemployment crisis has hit low wage workers particularly hard. At this point, even Fed officials are being forced to admit that the unemployment rate for low wage workers “is above 20%”.

Many of those low wage workers used to be employed in the restaurant industry, but the restaurant industry continues to be mired in the worst stretch that it has ever encountered…

The number of “seated diners,” a daily measure with which OpenTable tracks walk-ins and diners with reservations, in the week through January 20 in the US was down on average by 57% from the same period last year.

The hospitality industry also typically employs large numbers of low wage workers, and we are being told that last year was the “worst year on record” for that industry…

According to STR, Inc, a hotel industry market data firm, 2020 was absolutely the worst year on record for hotels as industrywide profits fell to zero, as the virus pandemic and resulting government-enforced social distancing measures kept travelers at home.

STR’s latest report said the US hotel occupancy rate was 44% for the year, down from 66% in 2019. This was the lowest occupancy rate on record. In an earlier STR report, we noted weeks ago that the industry had one billion unsold room nights for the first time, surpassing the record of 786 million in 2009.

Countless numbers of small business owners have also been absolutely devastated by this economic downturn.

Each month, thousands of small businesses die a permanent death, and the outlook for the months ahead is not good at all.

The Epoch Times recently interviewed one small business owner in Minnesota who admitted that “the fallout by this time next year will be shocking”…

The ramifications of the forced shutdowns on thousands of small businesses in Minnesota is going to be huge, says Julie Schroeder, who owns two craft stores in the Minneapolis metro area.

“The fallout by this time next year will be shocking,” she told The Epoch Times on Dec. 30, 2020.

Meanwhile, north of the border small businesses are being destroyed at a staggering rate as well…

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business is warning that more than 220,000 businesses across the country are at risk of permanently closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CFIB, a lobby group that represents small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Canada, released a new report on Thursday that surveyed 4,129 members about business prospects through the pandemic. The survey found that 181,000 businesses – or one in six – are seriously contemplating permanently closing. That’s up from a similar survey conducted in July, which found that 158,000 businesses were at risk of closing.

In the end, if we can keep the amount of small businesses in the U.S. and Canada that go under to less than 20 percent that should be considered a major victory.

Because I have a feeling that the final number is going to be well above that threshold.

And the Biden administration does not seem too sympathetic to the needs of small businesses at this point. For example, one new law that Biden is likely to sign would absolutely cripple small truckers…

Trucking industry experts expect Joe Biden’s presidency to seriously jeopardize many small American trucking companies, and the prospects of truck drivers who work as independent contractors.

Biden is poised to sign a transportation law passed in the Democratic House and stalled in the then-Republican Senate in 2019. The Moving Forward Act had required commercial motor vehicles to maintain more than $2 million in insurance liability, more than doubling the existing $750,000.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our representatives in Washington were forced to take a basic course in economics before they were allowed to serve?

The blind are leading the blind, and the economic nightmare that we are currently experiencing is eventually going to get a whole lot worse.

But hopefully we can at least have a short period of time where things will plateau a bit before the next major trigger event happens.

So many people out there are really hurting right now, and it is not just financial pain that they are dealing with.

The past several months have been excruciatingly painful for tens of millions of Americans, and the truth is that there are countless people out there that are emotionally shattered at this moment.

If you are one of those people, just keep hanging in there.

It will take some time, but you will get through this and you will recover.

And I will continue to be here pumping out articles as I do my very best to try to help everyone make sense of a world that is going completely mad.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Now That Universal Basic Income Checks Have Started, The American People Will Go Mad If They Don’t Continue

January 17, 2021 by Michael

We crossed a line that should have never been crossed when we sent “stimulus payments” directly to the American people during the very early stages of the COVID pandemic. Even many Republicans that supported the measure acknowledged that what they were doing was pure socialism, but they defended the payments by insisting that we were in the middle of a major national emergency. At the time, I warned that once the government started issuing such checks, the American people would always keep demanding more. When it was announced that the latest round of “stimulus payments” would only be $600 per person, angry activists vandalized Nancy Pelosi’s house. Of course they got Mitch McConnell’s house too. In both cases, the vandals made it exceedingly clear that they wanted more government money.

Sadly, it wasn’t just a handful of activists that went ballistic. Literally millions of enraged Americans posted angry messages on social media that expressed how “insulting” the $600 figure was.

But prior to this pandemic, the U.S. government had never sent out “universal basic income” checks in the entire history of our country.

So you would think that most people should be grateful for an extra $600, but instead there was a tremendous amount of rage.

President Trump wanted the payments raised to $2000 and many Democrats did as well. But Republicans still had control of the Senate, and Mitch McConnell initially blocked that effort.

But now Democrats will shortly have control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, and one of the first things they plan to do is to deliver $2,000 checks to the American people…

Even while $600 stimulus checks are being deposited in tens of millions of bank accounts, congressional Democrats are laying the groundwork for even greater stimulus payments, which some call “survival checks.” As Senate democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recently said, “One of the first things that I want to do when our new senators are seated is deliver the $2,000 checks to the American families.” With Democrats preparing to take power in Washington, a critical question will be whether such survival checks will be one-time payments or recur each month “for the duration of the pandemic,” as Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and others have suggested.

That may pacify the socialist mobs for a month or two, but eventually they will be back for even more payments.

As the voices get angrier and angrier, do you think that anyone in Washington will be willing to stand up and say no?

The incoming Vice-President, Kamala Harris, previously proposed giving out monthly $2,000 checks for the duration of this pandemic…

Recurring monthly $2,000 checks would mirror the payments proposed in the “Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act” that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduced in the Senate in May 2020.

If you are married with three kids, you would have gotten $10,000 every month under her plan.

Considering where we are as a society today, I think that most Americans would have been very eager to sign up for that.

Of course the price tag for such a plan would be nightmarish. It would have been approximately $600 billion every month, and that would mean that it would add more than 7 trillion dollars to our national debt over the course of an entire year.

But since we are liquidating the Republic anyway, who really cares?

Harris insisted that her plan would end once the crisis was over.

Other politicians, however, are ready to start giving citizens “universal basic income” checks on a permanent basis starting right now. For example, Andrew Yang is making this the signature promise of his campaign as he runs for mayor of New York City…

Former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has officially started his run to succeed Bill de Blasio as Mayor of New York City with a call for a universal basic income for half-a-million of the city’s poorest residents.

Yang insists that by giving everyone free money every month he can “eradicate poverty” in NYC…

“We can eradicate extreme poverty in New York City,” Yang said. “If you put just a little money in their hands it can actually be what keeps them in their home and, again, avoids them hitting city services that are incredibly expensive.”

That sounds good, but who is he going to tax in order to pay for it?

After all, hundreds of thousands of wealthy people already left the city during 2020.

The truth is that it is a pipe dream, but that pipe dream is going to win him a whole lot of votes.

Benjamin Franklin once made the following statement…

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”

Sadly, we have now reached that point.

And this comes at a time when tens of millions of Americans are in desperate need because the real economy continues to implode all around us.

For example, we just learned that Christopher & Banks has gone belly up…

Apparel retailer Christopher & Banks, which caters to women over 40, is the latest clothing chain to file for bankruptcy protection amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Minneapolis-based company announced Thursday it filed for Chapter 11 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey. Christopher & Banks said in a news release it “expects to close a significant portion, if not all, of its brick-and-mortar stores.”

Thousands of businesses have been dying every month. As I discussed the other day, the U.S. has lost more than 110,000 restaurants alone.

And to make sure that most of the businesses that have died can never possibly make a comeback, Joe Biden wants to institute “a national minimum wage of $15 an hour”.

Promising people more money is a great way to win elections, but at the end of the day someone always has to pay.

As the U.S. economy continues to come apart at the seams, finding sources of tax revenue will become increasingly difficult.

Perhaps the big tech companies can step up and offer to dramatically enlarge their contributions to the U.S. Treasury.

After all, they were quite instrumental in giving control of the federal government to the Democrats, and so you would think they should be quite willing to help pay for their promises.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

America’s Slide Into Economic Oblivion Is Already Starting To Accelerate Here In 2021

January 15, 2021 by Michael

Isn’t it fun to live in a rotting, decaying society that is coming apart at the seams all around us? The latest economic numbers are extremely depressing, but now that free speech is being abolished and the elite are consolidating control over every aspect of our society, we are being assured that better days are right around the corner. We have just got to be willing to accept the “new normal” which includes living in “tiny homes”, snacking on worms, and never expressing any independent thoughts which diverge from official mainstream narratives. So with that in mind, I will try to share the horrible economic news that we have been getting in the most positive light possible.

This week, we learned that another 965,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits during the previous week…

The number of people seeking unemployment aid soared last week to 965,000, the most since late August and evidence that the resurgent virus has caused a spike in layoffs.

The latest figures for jobless claims, issued Thursday by the Labor Department, remain at levels never seen until the virus struck. Before the pandemic, weekly applications typically numbered around 225,000. Last spring, after nationwide shutdowns took effect, applications for jobless benefits spiked to nearly 7 million – 10 times the previous record high. After declining over the summer, weekly claims have been stuck above 700,000 since September.

But we are being told that this is only because of the failed policies of the outgoing administration and that things will definitely be much better under the next socialist administration.

2020 was particularly a tough year for low paid workers. At this point, even officials at the Federal Reserve are admitting that the unemployment rate for low paid workers “is above 20%”…

Unemployment for the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. is above 20%, a figure that Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard said underscores the importance of policy help for the economy.

The figure indicates how uneven the recovery has seen since efforts to control the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the biggest quarterly GDP drop since the Great Depression.

How can we put a positive spin on this?

Well, at least more of them have had an opportunity to stay home and not catch COVID.

So I guess you could say that this unemployment crisis has actually had a positive impact for public health.

And more Americans are getting the opportunity to “stay home” with each passing day. Here is just one example…

Dropbox is cutting its global workforce by about 11%, the company said in an 8K filing released Wednesday. The company’s stock was down more than 4.5% in late-morning trading.

The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day.

Of course as fear of COVID continues to rise, American consumers are doing less shopping at Walmart and other corporate behemoths, and U.S. retail sales just fell for a third month in a row.

But that problem will soon be fixed, because more universal basic income checks are on the way.

All of the previous socialist “stimulus packages” weren’t enough, and so Joe Biden has unveiled “a $1.9 trillion plan to prop up the economy”…

Friday offered the first chance for traders to act after President-elect Joe Biden unveiled details of a $1.9 trillion plan to prop up the economy. He called for $1,400 cash payments for most Americans, the extension of temporary benefits for laid-off workers and a push to get COVID-19 vaccines to more Americans. It certainly fit with investors’ expectation for a big and bold plan, but markets had already rallied powerfully in anticipation of it.

Doesn’t that sound great?

And Biden is also calling for “a national minimum wage of $15 an hour”.

Don’t worry, that won’t hurt the restaurant industry at all.

I don’t know why that statement is true, but that is what the “fact checkers” want us to say.

And since Republicans and Democrats both abandoned any pretense of fiscal responsibility long ago, nobody is really pointing out that we are already 27.6 trillion dollars in debt and that we simply can’t afford any more “stimulus packages”.

In fact, thanks to all of the reckless spending that we have already done, the budget deficit for the month of December 2020 was more than 10 times larger than the budget deficit for the month of December 2019…

The U.S. government posted a December budget deficit of $144 billion – a record for the month – due to far higher outlays with coronavirus relief spending and unemployment benefits, while revenues ticked slightly higher, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.

The Treasury said the December deficit compares with a $13 billion deficit in December 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic started in the United States.

Overall, the U.S. national debt increased by more than 7 trillion dollars under the outgoing administration, and even CNN is admitting that “it will go much higher under Biden”.

But the adherents of Modern Monetary Theory assure us that “deficits don’t matter” and that we can borrow and spend as much money as we want.

Since that is true, why don’t we make the stimulus payments much larger?

If we are liquidating the Republic anyway, why not send a billion dollars to everyone?

Seriously though, there are millions upon millions of Americans that are deeply hurting as the U.S. economy melts down all around us.

I hope that you enjoyed my attempt at injecting some humor into our situation, but what many Americans are facing right now is not humorous at all.

At this point, most Americans are barely scraping by from month to month, and some are literally facing life or death financial decisions…

A mother’s tearful confession that she can’t afford her son’s insulin despite working full-time has left commenters deriding the American healthcare system.

Katie Schieffer’s ten-year-old son was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and requires insulin every two hours — but the North Carolina mother was left in tears when she couldn’t afford his $1,000 prescription.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be in her shoes?

Our entire system is failing, and things are only going to get worse in the months and years ahead.

For decades, America has been running in the wrong direction and our leaders have been making incredibly foolish decisions.

Now there is deep pain everywhere around us, and the level of suffering is only going to increase as the U.S. slides even faster toward economic oblivion.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

“655 people have $4 trillion in wealth. 200 million can’t cover a $1000 expense.”

January 12, 2021 by Michael

The COVID pandemic has caused the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us to grow larger than it ever has been before. Thanks to the hyperinflationary policies of the Federal Reserve and our politicians in Washington, stock prices have soared to unprecedented heights in recent months. This pushed the wealth of the uber-rich to dizzying heights, but for the rest of the country 2020 was an unmitigated nightmare. As I have discussed previously, one survey found that 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans. More than 110,000 restaurants shut down permanently last year, Americans filed more than 70 million claims for unemployment benefits, and tens of millions are potentially facing eviction in 2021. But even though we are mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, those at the very top of the economic pyramid are laughing all the way to the bank.

Earlier today, I came across a tweet from Sven Heinrich that really struck an emotional chord with me…

655 people have $4 trillion in wealth.

200 million can’t cover a $1000 expense.

I certainly don’t have any problem with people gaining wealth by working extremely hard and making society a better place in the process.

But most of the people at the very top of the economic pyramid only increased their wealth in 2020 because the powers that be decided to open up the firehoses and rain obscene amounts of money on them.

That isn’t right.

As a result of the deeply flawed policies that were implemented because of the COVID pandemic, the gap between “gains in financial assets and the health of the economy” was the largest ever recorded last year…

But as stock market indexes staged a huge rebound from the lows seen in March when the pandemic first hit, the gap between the wealthy and the poor extended an already widening trend to historic proportions.

A report via BofA Global Research published on Friday notes that a measure of the differential between gains in financial assets and the health of the economy hit a record at 6.3X in 2020.

My regular readers are probably sick and tired of hearing me say that the stock market has become completely divorced from economic reality, and now we have a hard number which backs up what I have been saying all along.

As I write this article, the Dow is sitting just above 31,000, and that is utterly absurd.

If the Dow were to fall to 15,000 it would still be overvalued.

Meanwhile, a brand new survey has discovered that only 39 percent of all Americans “would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense”…

Just 39% of Americans would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, according to a new report from Bankrate.com.

That’s down from 2020, when 41% of people said they could cover a $1,000 cost with their savings.

If only 39 percent of Americans currently have enough money for such an unexpected expense, that means that 61 percent of Americans do not.

According to Google, the current population of the U.S. is 328 million, and 61 percent of 328 million is just over 200 million.

So that is where Sven Heinrich got that figure from.

200 million of us have so little money that we are just barely scraping by from month to month.

And according to one of Walmart’s top executives, many of their customers do not expect “any kind of speedy recovery”…

Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside said Tuesday that many of its shoppers don’t expect the economy to quickly bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.

Almost half of customers surveyed in November told Walmart that they were worried about the current health of the economy, she said when speaking at the virtual National Retail Federation conference. She said 40% said they didn’t expect “any kind of speedy recovery.”

Unfortunately, those that are pessimistic about how the U.S. economy will perform in 2021 are right on target.

It is going to be a very painful year.

Of course it isn’t just consumers that are concerned about the year ahead. Small business optimism is falling as well…

A popular gauge of small-business confidence in the US sank to a seven-month low in December as stricter lockdown measures and climbing daily case counts cut into economic activity.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses’ index of small-business optimism fell 5.5 points last month to 95.9, according to a Tuesday release. The reading lands below the average index value since 1978 of 98 and marks the lowest level since May. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected the gauge to dip slightly to 100.2.

Americans generally tend to be quite optimistic about the future, but looking ahead there just aren’t any reasons to be optimistic about the U.S. economy in 2021.

The COVID pandemic continues to get even worse, new lockdowns have been instituted all over the country, our federal government is in a state of chaos, and there will inevitably be more rioting, looting and civil unrest in the months ahead.

Plus, there will undoubtedly be some additional unexpected surprises that most people are not anticipating.

Before I wrap up this article, there is just one more thing that I wanted to mention. A programmer in San Francisco named Stefan Thomas is the proud owner of 7,002 Bitcoin, but he can’t access his fortune because he forgot the password, and he only has two more tries before he is locked out permanently…

Take Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, who told The New York Times that he has 7,002 Bitcoin tucked away — currently worth about $236 million, nearly a quarter billion dollars — but that he has no idea how to access it and can only guess two more passwords before being locked out forever.

Even setting aside the long term prospects for crypto, the key message of these horror stories is that taking digital finances into your own hands is a huge risk if you can’t manage your passwords.

Can you imagine how you would feel if that happened to you?

Sadly, it could be argued that essentially the same thing is happening to the nation as a whole.

America has “forgotten the password” to what once made us so great, and we are running out of chances.

Let us hope that we wake up before it is too late, because time is not on our side at this point.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

The U.S. Has Lost More Than 110,000 Restaurants, Setting The Stage For A Commercial Real Estate Collapse Of Epic Proportions

January 4, 2021January 4, 2021 by Michael

The restaurant industry is in the midst of a complete and total meltdown that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before. If you ask Google how many restaurants there are in the United States, it will tell you that there are 660,755, although that number is a few years old. But for the purposes of this article, that is a good enough estimate. Americans love to eat out, and restaurant workers are some of the hardest working people in the entire country. So it is incredibly sad to see more restaurants constantly going under. In some cases, restaurants that have served their communities for decades are deciding to permanently close their doors. For example, over the weekend Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse in New York City announced that it had finally reached the end of the road…

Landmark New York City restaurant Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse has closed its iconic basement-level doors as the coronavirus pandemic continues to cripple the restaurant industry.

The Lower East Side fixture was famous for its latkes spreads, chopped liver, and vodka bottles frozen in blocks of ice and was known as a boisterous party spot frequented by celebrities.

Unfortunately, Sammy’s is far from alone.

In fact, in a recent article that he penned for Fox Business, Adam Piper lamented the fact that more than 100,000 U.S. restaurants have gone out of business during this pandemic…

State and local governments have wielded the coronavirus pandemic as license to steal freedom and opportunity in pursuit of unprecedented omnipotence. Unreasonable, unnecessary and hypocritical actions have forced over 100,000 restaurants to close and endanger countless others.

And according to Bloomberg, the true number of dead restaurants is now over 110,000…

More than 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently or long-term across the country as the industry grapples with the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Just think about that.

More than one out of every six restaurants in the U.S. is already gone, and the National Restaurant Association is warning that there will be more carnage in the months ahead because the industry is in “an economic free fall”…

“The restaurant industry simply cannot wait for relief any longer,” Sean Kennedy, executive vice president of public affairs at the association, said in a letter to Congress. “What these findings make clear is that more than 500,000 restaurants of every business type — franchise, chain and independent — are in an economic free fall.”

This is what an economic depression looks like.

With tens of thousands of restaurants sitting empty, and with tens of thousands of others not paying rent, the stage has been set for a commercial real estate disaster of unprecedented scope and size.

Of course there are millions of square feet of office space and retail space that are not being productive right now as well. In a recent article, Lee Adler referred to this looming commercial real estate nightmare as “a monster in the room”…

I think that if there’s anything that illustrates the head in the sand problem of the banks, it’s this. Commercial real estate (CRE) finance. There’s a monster in the room. All that empty space. No longer income producing.

For now, big financial institutions are doing their best to hide their coming losses, but according to Adler for certain sectors the losses will simply be unavoidable…

Multifamily will take a haircut but will survive. My guess is that industrial, while overpriced and overvalued, will produce enough income to get by. Office and retail? Kiss it goodbye. It’s done. Over. Kaput.

Sadly, he is right on target.

The coming commercial real estate crisis is going to make the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008 and 2009 look like a Sunday picnic.

And the longer this pandemic stretches on, the larger the losses will ultimately become.

For residential real estate, the big story is that hordes of Americans are fleeing both coasts and are moving to smaller communities in the middle of the country.

So even as housing prices drop substantially in major cities on the east coast and the west coast, they are rising rapidly in cities such as Pittsburgh, Boise and Austin…

Smaller metropolitan markets like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Boise, Idaho, Austin, Texas, and Memphis, Tennessee are seeing some of the strongest price gains in the nation now, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Prices in those cities are now at least 10% higher than with a year earlier.

And as I discussed yesterday, we are actually starting to see hyperinflation for high end properties in desirable rural and suburban areas of the country.

Just recently, a friend sold a home that is located not too far from us for a price that almost made my eyes bug out of my head. I literally had a difficult time believing the insanely high price that they were able to get, but this is what happens in a hyperinflationary environment.

2020 may have been a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans, but thanks to the hyperinflation in the stock market the wealthy have more money to throw at high end real estate than ever before.

Unfortunately, all of this wild money printing is not going to be able to prevent the coming crash in commercial real estate.

No matter how much money they have, many Americans are simply too afraid of COVID to eat out right now, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

And we are going to continue to see more Americans migrate away from the large cities on both coasts, and more businesses in those core urban areas will continue to fail.

As the commercial real estate crash unfolds, a lot of financial institutions simply won’t be able to make it without government help.

So will the federal government bail them out?

You never know, but every dollar the federal government borrows and spends just makes our long-term problems even worse.

All of the dominoes are starting to fall, and we are still in the very early chapters of this horrifying economic collapse.

Unfortunately, most Americans still don’t understand what is happening, and most of them have no idea that economic conditions will soon get even worse.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

The United States Has Become A Banana Republic

January 3, 2021 by Michael

If we continue destroying the U.S. dollar at our current pace, toilet paper will eventually be more valuable than U.S. dollars. I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but it is true. Once the COVID pandemic hit the United States, those that control the levers of power in this country decided to go “full Weimar” and they never looked back. As a result, the size of our money supply is rising at a rate that would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. To illustrate what I am talking about, I would like for you to check out this chart that was posted on Twitter by James Turk. As you can see, M1 was up by more than 50 percent in 2020.

This chart is not from a 3rd world banana republic. It’s #USD M1 money supply. Prices are already rising in soybeans, stock indices, crude oil, copper #BTC & many more items. Money printing by the #federalreserve means #inflation in 2021 is baked into the cake. Own physical #gold pic.twitter.com/OhhlnDx8tN

— James Turk (@FGMR) December 30, 2020

We’ve never had a year like that in all of U.S. history. What we are doing is literally insane, but most Americans aren’t even aware of what is happening because the mainstream media isn’t talking about it.

If you are not familiar with “M1”, here is a definition that comes from Investopedia…

M1 is the money supply that is composed of physical currency and coin, demand deposits, travelers’ checks, other checkable deposits, and negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts. M1 includes the most liquid portions of the money supply because it contains currency and assets that either are or can be quickly converted to cash. However, “near money” and “near, near money,” which fall under M2 and M3, cannot be converted to currency as quickly.

When new money enters the system, every dollar that you are currently holding becomes less valuable.

And if your paycheck does not rise at the same rate that the money supply is rising, that means that your paycheck becomes less valuable as well.

It is helpful to think of our money system as a pie. When more dollars are added to the pie, your share of the pie steadily becomes smaller.

So who does benefit when the pie is expanded?

The ultra-wealthy do, and I will discuss that more below.

But first, I wanted to share another chart with you. The first chart from James Turk showed how M1 has been rising on a percentage basis, and this next chart which comes directly from the Federal Reserve shows how M1 has been rising on an absolute basis…

Just look at that for a moment.

It truly is breathtaking. M1 has literally been rising at almost a vertical rate, and it makes all of the inflation that has come before look almost meaningless.

This is why the stock market keeps hitting record high after record high. Stocks started to crash when COVID first started to spread in the United States, and the Federal Reserve decided to do whatever was necessary to rescue the markets. The “unprecedented” response that we witnessed ended up being “a key driver of billionaire wealth” in 2020…

A key driver of billionaire wealth concentration was the unprecedented monetary policy response to stabilize financial markets in the early days of the pandemic, which spurred the stock market’s gravity-defying rise. When Wall Street was on the verge of panic in March, the Federal Reserve intervened with the promise of low rates and an open-ended liquidity spigot.

In addition, Congress just kept passing “stimulus package” after “stimulus package” in a desperate attempt to “rescue” the economy.

But in the process they borrowed and spent trillions of dollars that we did not have, and that also helped to fuel our transition into hyperinflation.

The good news is that hyperinflation is not showing up at the grocery store or at Walmart yet. Eventually it will happen, but so far consumer prices are just rising at a pace that is quite a bit brisker than usual. Where we are seeing hyperinflation is in stock prices, high end real estate in rural and suburban areas, and in other areas of the economy that the ultra-wealthy have been pouring their money into.

Despite the fact that we just endured one of the worst economic years in U.S. history, 2020 was actually a banner year for billionaires…

Between roughly mid-March and Dec. 22, the United States gained 56 new billionaires, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, bringing the total to 659. The wealth held by that small cadre of Americans has jumped by more than $1 trillion in the months since the pandemic began.

According to a December report issued jointly by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies using data compiled by Forbes, America’s billionaires hold roughly $4 trillion in wealth — a figure roughly double what the 165 million poorest Americans are collectively worth. The 10 richest billionaires have a combined net worth of more than $1 trillion.

Last year the rich got a whole lot richer, and the poor got a whole lot poorer.

As I discussed the other day, 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans. The year ended with close to 20 million Americans still receiving government unemployment benefits, and poverty and homelessness have been exploding all around us.

In some cases, people were waiting in lines that were up to 12 hours long just to get a couple of bags of groceries at food banks around the nation. We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and many are expecting things to get even worse in 2021.

And with each passing day, more businesses are closing and more Americans are being laid off.

The retail sector has been hit particularly hard. The following comes from Axios…

Malls are going belly up. Familiar names like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and J. Crew have filed for bankruptcy. Increasingly, Americans’ shopping choices will boil down to a handful of internet Everything Stores and survival-of-the-fittest national chains.

And what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg. One recent report projected that “100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025”…

A research report from UBS predicts that 100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025, in a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated amid coronavirus-related shutdowns.

Our national landscape is already littered with abandoned stores and restaurants, and they are telling us that it is only going to get worse.

What is our country going to look like as this process plays out?

Of course our authorities will just respond to every new crisis by printing even more money.

That is what they did down in Venezuela, and now just about everyone in Venezuela is a millionaire.

But most of those “millionaires” are living in crushing poverty because the money is absolutely worthless.

Sadly, many other countries are doing the same thing that the U.S. is doing, and so this hyperinflationary spiral is not likely to end any time soon.

But let there be no doubt that we are also in a global economic depression. Global GDP is about 8 percent lower than it was before the pandemic started, and the outlook for 2021 does not look promising at all.

If you think that there is a way for this economic story to end well, just go back and look at the M1 chart from the Federal Reserve one more time.

Every other time this has been tried in human history, the story has ended badly.

Our story is going to end badly too, and every American needs to get prepared to survive in a very painful hyperinflationary environment.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

20 Numbers From 2020 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

December 30, 2020 by Michael

2020 has been a year that none of us will ever forget. We experienced the worst global pandemic in 100 years, we witnessed the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, civil unrest erupted in major cities all over America, and we had one of the wildest presidential elections in our history. Other than that, it was a pretty quiet year. For a few moments, let’s take one more look back at the past 12 months. The following are 20 numbers from 2020 that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 When 2020 began, nobody had ever heard of “COVID-19” because that term had not even been invented yet. But by the end of the year, there had been more than 83 million confirmed cases around the globe and more than 1.8 million deaths. Here in the United States, there have been more than 20 million confirmed cases so far and more than 350,000 deaths according to the official numbers. Of course nobody is sure if we can trust the official numbers or not, because just recently a politician in Austria showed that a cup of Coca-Cola can test positive for COVID-19.

#2 All of the masks that we have been wearing and discarding during this pandemic have taken a heavy toll on the environment. According to one study, more than 1.5 billion (with a “b”) masks will be dumped into the oceans of the world this year alone.

#3 The lockdowns that our politicians instituted to control the spread of COVID-19 resulted in an unemployment shock that was absolutely unprecedented. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits. That means that we have been averaging well over a million new claims per week since the first lockdowns went into effect. To put that into perspective, the old all-time record for a single week was just 695,000 and that was set all the way back in 1982. During this pandemic, we have been above that old record every single week, and now unemployment claims are starting to rise higher once again.

#4 Almost four out of every ten Americans do not plan to get a COVID-19 vaccine, but the federal government is going to spend 250 million dollars on an “information campaign” that is designed to convince them otherwise.

#5 The civil unrest that erupted all over America following the death of George Floyd ultimately sparked a crime wave that seems as if it will never end. According to an analysis of data from 57 big city police departments, the number of murders in those cities is up 36.7 percent compared to last year. In quite a few of those cities, new all-time records are being established in 2020, and many Americans are anticipating even more violence in 2021.

#6 Recent data from Moody’s Analytics indicates that approximately 12 million U.S. renters are now “at least $5,850 behind in rent and utilities payments”. Landlords all over the nation are in financial distress because of unpaid rent, and we could potentially see the greatest tsunami of evictions in all of U.S. history if and when all of the rent moratoriums are finally lifted in 2021.

#7 In 2020 we witnessed massively long lines at food banks all across America. In some cases, people were lining up as early as 2 AM in order to make sure that they would get something before the supplies were gone. Feeding America runs the largest network of food banks in the entire nation, and they were estimating that approximately one out of every four children in the U.S. would suffer from hunger by the time that 2020 was finally done.

#8 We haven’t seen an economic downturn this severe since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the middle class has been hit particularly hard. According to one recent survey, 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans.

#9 But 2020 hasn’t been a financial disaster for everyone. In fact, Forbes recently published an article which celebrated 50 doctors, scientists and healthcare entrepreneurs that become “pandemic billionaires” in 2020.

#10 The U.S. government continues to waste money in some of the most crazy ways imaginable. I know that I shared this the other day, but I just had to include it in this article as well. According to U.S. Senator Rand Paul, the federal government has spent 6.9 million dollars to develop a “smart toilet” which uses a very small camera to identify your “analprint”.

#11 One of the reasons why so much crazy spending happens is because our politicians don’t actually read the bills that they pass. For example, the spending bill that the House of Representatives recently passed was 5,593 pages long, and members of the House were only given a few hours to look it over. Unsurprisingly, the bill passed the House by a vote of 359 to 53.

#12 When Barack Obama first entered the White House, the U.S. was 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. Now we are 27.5 trillion dollars in debt, and soon that total will hit the 30 trillion dollar mark. Needless to say, this is a recipe for national financial suicide.

#13 The decline of the U.S. family continued to accelerate in 2020. According to a recent Gallup survey, only 29 percent of Americans believe that “it is very important for couples who have children together to be married”.

#14 Americans have continued to get even bigger in 2020 as well. At this point, 73 percent of the entire U.S. population is either overweight or obese.

#15 The amount of control that the big tech companies have over our lives has gotten more than just a little bit frightening, but most Americans don’t seem to mind. In fact, one recent survey found that 2 out of every 3 Americans do not care if their smart devices are recording what they say and do at all times.

#16 But if anyone tried to take our smart devices away, then most of us would suddenly become very angry. Another recent survey found that the average person will spend a total of 44 years looking at digital devices during their lifetimes.

#17 The recent presidential election has deeply divided our nation. 96 percent of Democrats believe that Joe Biden was elected fairly, but only 20 percent of Republicans feel the same way.

#18 Joe Biden only won 16.7 percent of all counties in the United States. That was a new record low for a winning candidate, beating the previous record low of 22 percent which Barack Obama established in 2012.

#19 But Joe Biden also somehow won the most overall votes in U.S. history by a very wide margin. He received more than 81 million votes, which was about 12 million more votes than Barack Obama got in 2008 when he set the old record.

#20 On December 14th, the Electoral College voted to make Joe Biden the next president of the United States. Amazingly, that date is precisely halfway between the “Great American Eclipse” of 2017 and the “Great American Eclipse” of 2024. If you plot the paths of those two eclipses on a map of the United States, you will see that they combine to form a giant “X” across the heartland of America.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

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