The Next Great Depression

Someone Please Tell Powell, Yellen And Biden That We Are Going To Need A Lot More “Weimar Money”…

February 22, 2021February 22, 2021 by Michael

Volatility has returned to Wall Street, and it appears that our absolutely epic stock market bubble may be in serious trouble. The S&P 500 closed down for the fifth trading session in a row on Monday, and that represents the longest losing streak that we have seen since last February. Investors are starting to get quite nervous, because for most of the past year stock prices have gone in just one direction. Even as the real economy has imploded all around us, there has been tremendous euphoria on Wall Street as stock prices have surged to dizzying heights. If stock prices were allowed to crash, that would definitely not be good for the national mood at all.

So what is the solution?

This stock market bubble was originally created by unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve and by extremely wild borrowing and spending by the U.S. government, and in order to keep the bubble going we are going to need a lot more of the same.

So someone needs to tell Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell that it is time to go “full Weimar” so that we can prop up this bubble for as long as humanly possible.

For a while there in 2020, the Fed’s balance sheet was increasing at a nearly vertical pace, but in recent months it has only been going up at an exponential rate…

If the Fed wants to keep stock prices at their current levels, Powell and his minions need to fire up the engines again.

Meanwhile, the federal government has work to do as well. If our politicians in Washington really want stock prices to remain ridiculously high, they need to send more checks to the American people as soon as possible.

The effects of the last round of checks is already starting to wear off, and retail investors need more “stimulus money” to fritter away in their Robinhood accounts.

The good news for Wall Street is that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has reiterated her call for a large stimulus package, and Joe Biden has said that he is ready to sign one into law.

Of course at this point poor old Joe signs anything that his handlers put on his desk.

We haven’t added another trillion dollars to the national debt in a few months, and investors are quite eager to see our grand total cross the 28 trillion dollar mark. Most of them believe that more stimulus money will mean higher stock prices, but more stimulus money will also cause our money supply to grow even larger.

Since the start of the pandemic, M1 has been growing at a rate that would put the Weimar Republic to shame…

When I look at that chart, I feel like I am going to throw up.

But the only way to “save Wall Street” is to throw more giant mountains of money on to the fire. If we don’t go “full Weimar”, stock prices might crash to reasonable levels, and investors would be absolutely horrified.

And we are already starting to see warning signs. Just look at what happened to Tesla on Monday…

Shares of Tesla closed down 8.55% on Monday, as investors betting on a pandemic comeback rotated out of Big Tech and piled into cyclical stocks.

It’s Tesla’s biggest drop since Sept. 23, 2020, when it closed down 10.34%.

Do you want to be responsible for Tesla investors losing hundreds of billions of dollars in paper profits?

If not, then you need to support more printing, more borrowing and more spending.

Of course I am being facetious in this article.

By going down the road of hyperinflation, we are systematically destroying the value of the reserve currency of the world, we are piling up trillions of dollars of debt that future generations would never possibly be able to repay, and we are setting the stage for the inevitable meltdown of our current financial system.

In other words, we are literally committing national suicide.

Following World War I, they did the exact same thing in Germany.

The Weimar Republic created money like there was no tomorrow, and at first it fueled a tremendous speculative boom. Just a couple days ago, Michael Burry posted about this on his Twitter account…

“Speculation alone, while adding nothing to Germany’s wealth, became one of its largest activities. The fever to join in turning a quick mark infected nearly all classes..Everyone from the elevator operator up was playing the market.”

But that bubble didn’t last, did it?

Germany plunged into a horrific economic depression that shocked the entire world. Eventually, people were running around with wheelbarrows full of cash to pay for things, but nobody wanted the money because it was so worthless.

And of course the collapse of the Weimar Republic set the stage for World War II.

So why do we refuse to learn from history?

Sadly, it isn’t just the U.S. that is going down a hyperinflationary path. Governments all over the globe have been printing, borrowing and spending money at unprecedented levels, and now the ratio of the world’s debt to GDP has reached a staggering 356 percent…

The world’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 356% in 2020, a new report from the Institute of International Finance finds, up 35 percentage points from where it stood in 2019, as countries saw their economies shrink and issued an ocean of debt to stay afloat.

We all know how this story ends.

It ends with an absolutely nightmarish global economic collapse.

I have been sounding the alarm for years, and many others have as well.

Unfortunately, those warnings have gone unheeded.

Even though our forefathers handed us the keys to the greatest economic machine the world had ever seen, in our insatiable greed we always had to have more.

We just kept borrowing and spending, and many of us assumed that our self-destructive behavior would never actually catch up with us.

Disaster didn’t strike when our national debt hit 10 trillion dollars, and it didn’t strike when it hit 20 trillion dollars either.

To a lot of Americans, it seemed like we could keep this charade going indefinitely.

But now we are facing a day of reckoning, and the price for going “full Weimar” is going to be very bitter indeed.

***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.

8 Million More Living In Poverty, 9 Million Small Businesses In Danger Of Closing, 10 Million Behind On Rent…

February 9, 2021 by Michael

The economic downturn that we are currently experiencing is making the last recession look like a Sunday picnic. Yes, 2008 and 2009 were bad, but they weren’t anything like this. Unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve has allowed the rich to get even richer during this crisis, but meanwhile millions upon millions of ordinary Americans are deeply suffering. Unfortunately, what we have gone through so far is just the beginning.

As a child, I was a big fan of Sesame Street, and one of the characters that really stood out to me was Count von Count. I loved the fact that he was always counting things, and that is what I am going to do in this article in order to illustrate how bad economic conditions have now become.

Let’s start with the number 7. According to the Congressional Budget Office, approximately 7 million more Americans would have jobs right now if the COVID pandemic had never happened…

But in fact, what the CBO is projecting is dire: around 7 million people out of work in 2021 whom CBO thought before the pandemic would be working. That’s dire – and a call to immediate action, not calm, not wait-and-see.

Personally, I think that estimate is way too low.

In fact, the Federal Reserve says that 152 million Americans were working before the pandemic started, and only 142 million Americans are working now.

So the CBO estimate appears to be off by about 3 million.

Count von Count would not be happy.

Let’s try another number. According to Bloomberg, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 8 million during this crisis…

Support is rising among policy makers to address America’s child-poverty crisis, which is getting worse as the pandemic drags on.

More than 8 million Americans — including many children — fell into poverty during the second half of last year, exacerbating the racial and income inequalities that are holding back the U.S. economy.

In this case, I think that this is a reasonable estimate, but that number will inevitably keep growing in the months ahead.

One of the big reasons why it will continue to rise is because hordes of small businesses will be collapsing, and that brings us to our next number.

According to a study that was recently released by the Fed, 9 million small businesses in the U.S. say that they “won’t survive” in 2021 without more government assistance…

Three in ten small businesses — or 9 million out of the estimated 30 million in the United States — fear they won’t survive in the coming year without additional government assistance, according to a survey recently published by the Federal Reserve.

The Small Business Credit Survey, which was conducted last September and October and released last week, showcased the incredible burden the coronavirus pandemic has placed on America’s small businesses, as 88% of the businesses surveyed reported that sales had not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Can you imagine what our country would look like if almost a third of all small businesses permanently disappeared?

If you watched the Super Bowl, you were bombarded with messaging about the plight of our small businesses. We have never seen anything like this before, and that is because our small businesses have never had to face a crisis of this magnitude.

With each passing day, more small businesses are folding, and nothing that the federal government is going to do will completely stop this trend.

Our next number is 10. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 10 million renters were behind on their rent payments in January, and many more people anticipated not paying rent in February…

An estimated 10 million renters were behind on their rent and at risk of eviction in the middle of January, according to a Census Bureau survey. And an estimated 16 million renters had little to no confidence they could pay rent in February.

Overall, U.S. renters now owe at least 30 billion dollars in back rent.

This has created extreme financial pain for America’s landlords, and when the rent moratoriums are finally lifted we are going to see the largest tsunami of evictions in all of U.S. history by a very wide margin.

Before I wrap up this article, let me leave you with just one more number. So far in 2021, the number of passengers at U.S. airports is down by more than 60 percent compared to 2019…

Over the past seven days, not quite 707,000 passengers per day on average passed TSA checkpoints at US airports, a measure of how many passengers in the US are flying somewhere. This was down by 61.6% from the same period in 2019, the last full year of the Good Times. At the end of January, the drop from 2019 was over 65%.

I honestly do not know how the airline industry is going to survive this without government help.

Speaking of not surviving, Democrats have introduced a bill in Congress that would essentially deal a death blow to the gig economy…

The legislation at the core of their agenda is the PRO Act, which Democrats just re-introduced with sponsors including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer. Among many other things, the bill would severely restrict the legal definition of independent contractors in a way that would largely end the gig economy as we know it.

The legislators’ stated intention is to protect workers and bolster their rights under law. Through the reclassification of independent contractors, Democrats hope to force gig economy companies to hire workers as full employees and thus provide them the accompanying salaries and benefits.

If this bill passes, it would absolutely devastate Uber, Lyft and countless other companies that rely on gig workers.

Basically, millions of jobs would go “poof” with one stroke of Joe Biden’s pen.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 50 million Americans are currently employed by the gig economy. It is great to want those workers to have higher pay and more benefits, but if those companies go out of existence there won’t be any jobs at all.

These are very dark times for the U.S. economy, and the outlook for the future is exceedingly bleak.

However, in the short-term economic conditions should stabilize somewhat thanks to the huge stimulus payments that the government will be sending out.

But that bubble of hope will be very brief, and everyone should be able to see that much more pain is on the horizon.

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

We Must Have MOAR: Almost Everyone In Washington Seems To Agree That More Free Money Will Fix The Economy

February 8, 2021 by Michael

There seems to be a growing consensus in Washington that the only way to fix the worst economic downturn in more than 70 years is by giving out much more free money. Joe Biden wants more “stimulus”, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants more “stimulus”, and most members of Congress from both parties want more “stimulus”. Of course none of the previous “stimulus packages” that we spent trillions of dollars on fixed the economy, but they insist that this latest one will finally do the job. In addition to the 1.9 trillion dollar package that Biden has already proposed, Democrats in Congress are now pushing monthly direct payments to parents that have children under the age of 18. Needless to say, that proposal has overwhelming support among the American people, because direct socialist payments have become wildly popular since they were first introduced last year. But by borrowing and spending so much money, we are literally committing national suicide, but very few people are concerned about that at this point.

Even though the previous round of “stimulus payments” is still being sent out, Biden and his minions can’t wait to start sending out another round.

In fact, Biden insists that we literally “don’t have a second to waste”…

“We don’t have a second to waste when it comes to delivering the American people the relief they desperately need. I’m calling on Congress to act quickly and pass the American Rescue Plan.”

Quite a few independent economists are alarmed by the inflation that previous “stimulus payments” have created, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is dismissing those fears.

Instead of focusing on inflation, she says that not sending out more free money would be an even greater risk…

“As treasury secretary, I have to worry about all of the risks to the economy, and the most important risk is that we leave workers and communities scarred by the pandemic and the economic toll that it’s taken, that we don’t do enough to address the pandemic,” Yellen told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

“I’ve spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation, and I can tell you, we have the tools to deal with that risk if it materializes,” she continued. “But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country. We’ve got to address that. That’s the biggest risk.”

She is assuring us that inflation is not an imminent threat, and perhaps we should believe her.

After all, if we can just completely ignore the hard numbers and the extremely shocking charts the Federal Reserve keeps putting out, what she is saying sounds pretty good.

I know that it is not “normal” for M1 to nearly double over the course of 12 months, but this is the “new normal” where the laws of economics are suspended and we can do whatever we want.

So let’s borrow and spend trillions more, because this party is just getting started.

A while back, “Republican” Senator Mitt Romney proposed thousands of dollars in direct payments to parents with children, and Democrats liked that idea so much that they plagiarized it…

Under the proposal, the Internal Revenue Service would provide $3,600 over the course of the year per child under the age of 6, as well as $3,000 per child of ages 6 to 17. The size of the benefit would diminish for Americans earning more than $75,000 per year, as well as for couples jointly earning more than $150,000 per year. The payments would be sent monthly beginning in July.

The benefits would not be deducted off taxpayers’ existing tax liability, meaning American parents would still receive $250 per month per child — or $300 per month per young children — even if they have an existing tax obligation with the IRS.

I think that this proposal will have a 90 percent approval rating with U.S. parents.

Of course a minority will strongly object. They will insist that these are “socialist welfare payments” and that the federal government should not be doing this.

If you are one of those objectors, you are 100 percent correct.

But take the money anyway.

Let me be 100 percent serious for a moment. Since the entire ship is going down anyway, take anything that they send to you and use it for yourself and your family. At this point, survival is the priority.

There is no going back to the way that things once were. We are literally committing national financial suicide, and at this point even most Republicans in Washington have completely discarded any pretense of fiscal responsibility.

In the old days, Republicans in Congress at least made minimal attempts to slow down the wild spending that the Obama administration was pushing. But now almost all resistance is gone, and the left is greatly rejoicing that “the path to a fast recovery and an era of prosperity is now open for Biden”…

The left has stewed for a dozen years over Obama’s inability to secure more fiscal stimulus. And while he might perhaps have gotten a bit more out of Congress with more clever design, ultimately the most important constraints came from outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama’s economic-recovery push came in an atmosphere of pure hysteria, in which media and business elites joined by many members of his own party believed the United States stood on the precipice of hyperinflation and a public-debt crisis, the resolution of which had willing partners across the aisle. All those myths now lay in tatters. After hard experience, the path to a fast recovery and an era of prosperity is now open for Biden.

Yeah, we’ll see about that.

But what we do know is that all of the insane borrowing and spending that has been going on is already causing inflation to show up in countless ways.

In 2020, silver performed even better than the stock market did, and it continues to climb higher.

Gold has been surging too, and the outlook for precious metals is going to continue to be bright as long as our leaders continue to flood the system with more money.

Meanwhile, the real economy continues to steadily deteriorate…

Without a fresh round of COVID-19 aid from the federal government, about a third of the nation’s pandemic-stricken small businesses are warning they won’t be able to survive.

That’s according to a new report published by the Federal Reserve, which found that sales for 88% of small businesses have not yet returned to pre-crisis levels. About one in three — roughly 30% — of businesses said they expected they could not stay afloat without further assistance from the government, according to the report from the U.S. central bank’s 12 regional offices.

No amount of complaining from the rest of us will prevent a new round of stimulus payments from going out.

The good news is that all of this new money is likely to improve short-term economic conditions for a very brief period of time.

But the bad news is that our long-term problems continue to get much, much worse.

We are literally in the process of completely destroying our money, and since the U.S. dollar is the de facto reserve currency of the whole world, the economic fate of the entire globe is in our hands.

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

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.***

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.***

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.***

$600 Stimulus Checks Won’t Pull America Out Of This Mess…

December 28, 2020 by Michael

Well, it looks like we are going to get $600 stimulus payments from the federal government after all. Oh goody! For the millions of Americans that are on the brink of being evicted from their homes, that will be enough for about half a mortgage payment or about half a month of rent. Many are referring to this as America’s “let them eat cake moment”, and that probably is not too far off target. As our politicians spend hundreds of billions of dollars on other nonsense, we are supposed to be deeply grateful to them for tossing a few hundred bucks our way. But the truth is that $600 dollars does not go as far as it once did. 20 years ago, it would have bought more groceries than any of us could have possibly put into a single vehicle, but today it will buy about two carts of food and maybe a tank of gas.

If we are going to go “full Weimar” and destroy any hope of ever getting our national finances under control, we might as well make the checks big enough to smile about.

But while you get a measly $600, the federal government is spending $6,900,000 on a “smart toilet” which can actually recognize a user’s “analprint”…

In his latest report on federal government waste, a project he completes every year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) highlights $54.7 billion in government spending that he deems wasteful. Among the items noted this year is the creation of a $6.9 million “smart toilet,” which operates with three cameras, one of which can identify a user’s “analprint.”

As explained in The Festivus Report 2020, researchers at Stanford University used $6,973,057 in funds granted through the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a so-called “smart toilet.”

Really?

Just when I think that it can’t possibly get any worse, the federal government comes up with even more bizarre ways to waste our tax dollars.

At least if we were only spending what we brought in I could live with that. But instead, we have been stealing more than $100,000,000 dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day ever since Barack Obama first entered the White House.

I am not just picking on the Democrats. At this point most Republicans have abandoned any pretense of fiscal responsibility, and that fact makes me sick to my stomach.

Today, we are 27.5 trillion dollars in debt, and soon it will be 30 trillion dollars.

If we are going to liquidate the nation anyway, let’s give people checks that are so large that they will be dancing in the streets.

Because giving people $600 checks in this economic environment is essentially the equivalent of spitting into Niagara Falls.

Let me try to illustrate what I am talking about. Right now, there are 12 million U.S. renters that are more than $5,000 behind on their rent and utilities…

The newest data from Moody’s Analytics shows about 12 million renters are now at least $5,850 behind in rent and utilities payments — and eviction protections expire in weeks.

Okay, so let’s assume that all of those people get $600 payments on a timely basis.

In the end, on average they will still be about $5000 behind on their payments, and the start of a new month is right around the corner.

And there are millions of other Americans that are living so close to the edge financially that they have been putting their rent payments on a credit card…

There’s been as much as a 70% percent increase from last year in people paying rent on a credit card, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

“If you’re putting your rent payments on to a credit card, that shows you’re really at risk of eviction,” says Shamus Roller, executive director of the nonprofit National Housing Law Project. “That means you’ve run out of savings; you’ve probably run out of calls to family members to get them to loan you money.”

Yes, $600 will help.

But not much.

For 32-year-old Jo Marie Hernandez, $600 might buy a little bit of time, but what she really needs is a new job…

Jo Marie Hernandez doesn’t know how she and her 4-year-old daughter will survive after her unemployment aid lapsed this weekend.

Hernandez, who lives in Olean, New York, is on the brink of losing her home in days after she lost her job as a customer service associate at a gas station in the spring. Enduring prolonged unemployment, she’s struggled to make ends meet and has nothing left in savings to keep her afloat.

I can’t even imagine the emotional pain that she must be going through right now.

When you have a young child and you are about to be thrown out into the streets, nothing else really matters…

“I only have $100 left to my name. My whole world is shattered,” says Hernandez, 32, who was forced to put her car up for sale. “We can’t wait a few weeks for help. We’re starving and will be out on the street soon.”

Sadly, there are millions and millions of other Americans that are facing similar scenarios right now.

This is what an economic depression looks like, and economic conditions are going to continue to deteriorate moving forward.

Many on the left are assuming that future stimulus checks will be bigger once Joe Biden gets into the White House. But every additional dollar that we borrow makes our long-term problems even worse.

Our national debt continues to spiral wildly out of control, the money supply is shooting up at an exponential rate, and we are mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s despite unprecedented government intervention.

This is the big meltdown that everyone has been waiting for, and we are still only in the very early chapters.

So no, $600 stimulus payments won’t actually fix anything.

But hopefully they will ease the suffering slightly as the U.S. economy continues to relentlessly steamroll toward oblivion.

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

‘Tis The Season For Bankruptcies, Store Closings And Tent Cities…

December 27, 2020 by Michael

We need to make 2021 a year of hope, because right now there is more economic suffering in America than we have seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. More than 100,000 businesses have permanently closed down since the pandemic began, many of our most iconic chains have filed for bankruptcy over the past 12 months, and tent cities are popping up in major cities all across the country. Coming into this year, the suicide rate in the U.S. was already at an all-time record high, and a Gallup survey recently discovered that the mental health of Americans is at an all-time low. If we can’t find a way to give people hope, multitudes of Americans will decide that life is no longer worth living just like Anthony Quinn Warner did. The explosion in Nashville should be a wake up call for all of us, because there are countless others out there that are feeling the hopelessness that Warner did.

In 2020, we saw retail stores close their doors at a pace that we have never seen before. According to the New York Post, NYC lost more than 1,000 chain stores all by itself…

The Big Apple saw almost one in seven nationally recognized chain-store branches close their doors as the pandemic sent consumers scurrying for cover, according to a new report.

A record high 1,057 chain stores — including 70 Duane Reades, 49 Starbucks and 22 Papyruses — have waved the white flag over the past 12 months, according to the Center for an Urban Future’s annual “State of the Chains” report, set to be released Wednesday.

If you go back to 2018, 0.3 percent of all chain stores in the city shut down permanently.

This year, that figure has skyrocketed to 13.3 percent…

The 13.3 percent decline shatters all previous records reported by the nonprofit agency since it began tracking the data 13 years ago. Last year, just 3.7 percent of all chain outlets closed, up from 0.3 percent in 2018.

Of course the same thing is happening all over the nation. Empty retail buildings now litter the landscape, and it is only going to get worse.

But it is hard to imagine that the next 12 months could actually be worse than the past 12 months. In an article published earlier this month, CNN listed 30 major chains that have filed for bankruptcy in 2020…

Papyrus

Bar Louie

Krystal

Pier 1 Imports

Modell’s Sporting Goods

True Religion

J.Crew Group

Neiman Marcus

JCPenney

Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes

Tuesday Morning

GNC

CEC Entertainment

NPC International

Brooks Brothers

Sur La Table

Muji USA

Lucky Brand

RTW Retailwinds

Ascena Retail Group

California Pizza Kitchen

Lord & Taylor

Tailored Brands

Stein Mart

Century 21 (department store chain)

Sizzler USA

Ruby Tuesday

Friendly’s

Guitar Center

Francesca’s

Sadly, now that the holiday season is done there will inevitably be another huge wave of store closings and bankruptcies.

Of course the new lockdowns are certainly not helping matters at all. Millions upon millions of people are staying home and not spending money, and this is hitting the restaurant business particularly hard.

In fact, the National Restaurant Association is warning “that 40% to 50% of restaurants may go bankrupt in the months ahead” if something is not done…

The National Restaurant Association said that 40% to 50% of restaurants may go bankrupt in the months ahead if they don’t reopen immediately. Two of the U.S.’s most iconic restaurants, the 21 Club in Manhattan and the Cliff House in San Francisco, announced they had closed their doors permanently after nearly 100 years of business. As they die, so do hundreds of jobs in these cities. The workers out of work aren’t rich. Overall, 15 million middle-income people work for bars and restaurants.

I can definitely understand why so many restaurant owners are absolutely furious right now.

You can watch one restaurant owner give an impassioned speech in which he boldly declares that “I’m not ready to give my country up to these people” right here. I have to admit, I got pretty fired up watching that one.

Unfortunately, the control freak politicians have shown that they are willing to take draconian measures in order to implement their ridiculous lockdowns. For example, just recently heavily armed police heartlessly raided a hair salon that refused to comply with the COVID lockdown in California. If I was that salon owner, I would move out of California and never look back.

What is ironic is that many of the politicians that are supposed to be the most “liberal” are the ones that are actually hurting those at the bottom of the economic food chain the most…

Democrats and their liberal economic advisers obsess about income inequality. Will someone please tell them that no act in modern times has widened the gap between the rich and the poor more than the lockdowns going on right now?

Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the leftist National Low Income Housing Coalition, said, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.”

As economic conditions continues to unravel, more Americans are falling out of the middle class and into poverty with each passing day, and we continue to see more evidence of this all around the nation. In Chicago, it was being reported that people were lined up for 15 blocks to receive food and toys at a holiday giveaway…

A Chicago actress and her foundation brought 3,000 toys, food, and countless smiles to the West Garfield Park neighborhood for the holidays Wednesday.

As CBS 2’s Marissa Parra reported, people waited for more than two hours in their cars for the giveaway, and there were lines that stretched over 15 blocks – dramatically underscoring the need.

Can you imagine waiting in a line that is 15 blocks long?

The bread lines during the Great Depression were long, but I don’t think they were that long.

Homelessness is also growing at a very frightening rate, and this is fueling the rise of tent cities from coast to coast…

Tent cities are expanding across the United States as experts warn that the ongoing pandemic could lead to a ‘catastrophic’ homeless crisis where hundreds of thousands more Americans are living on the streets.

In Phoenix, authorities have converted two enormous parking lots into tent cities for the homeless, but even the homeless are being required to follow social distancing protocols…

To deal with an exploding homeless population and encourage social distancing during the pandemic, Marcipoa County officials turned this pair of asphalt-topped parking lots into the area’s newest homeless shelter. The county has more than 7,500 people on the streets, and nearly 5,000 dead from COVID-19.

Inside the crowded encampment, ringed by security fencing and barbed wire, each family has been allotted a 12-by-12-foot lot, marked by paint, to separate people as much as possible.

This is the cold, hard reality that multitudes of people are living at this point. Dependence on the government and unquestioning submission to authorities have become a way of life for countless numbers of Americans, and economic conditions are not going to be getting better for the foreseeable future.

This is why we must give people hope in 2021 and beyond, because the amount of economic pain that we are witnessing around the country is already off the charts.

The government may be able to send checks to people, but it cannot give them hope.

And when people have lost all hope and have become extremely desperate, they can end up doing very foolish things just like Anthony Quinn Warner did.

***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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