The Economic Collapse

This is a very bad time for those that work in the real estate industry.  Thanks to the Federal Reserve, mortgage rates are much higher than they were a couple of years ago, and this has deeply frozen America’s housing market.  Millions upon millions of U.S. homeowners are currently paying off fixed rate mortgages that were financed when mortgage rates were at historic lows.  If you are one of those homeowners, selling your current home and buying another home that will come with a mortgage at a much higher rate would be very painful financially.  So vast numbers of current homeowners feel “locked in” to their current homes.  At this point, the number of Americans that are selling homes has fallen to a depressingly low level, and the number of Americans that are buying homes has fallen to a depressingly low level.  This isn’t going to change until interest rates go down significantly, but the Federal Reserve is very hesitant to reduce interest rates because of the nightmarish cost of living crisis that we are facing.  So our housing market will probably continue to be in a deep freeze for the foreseeable future. (Read More...)

I have a great idea.  Let’s wildly print money, let’s systematically destroy the reserve currency of the globe, let’s add a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days, let’s strangle the economy with all sorts of ridiculous regulations, let’s dramatically hike interest rates, let’s make things exceedingly difficult for our domestic energy industry, and let’s allow theft, violence, homelessness and migration to run wild.  Then we’ll sit back and see what happens.  What I have just described is essentially what we have witnessed over the last three years.  Joe Biden and others in positions of power in Washington are running our economy into the ground.  The system really is coming apart at the seams, and Bidenomics really is the beginning of the end for the U.S. economy. (Read More...)

Did you know that U.S. households are 17,690,000,000,000 dollars in debt?  Of course household debt is only one part of a much larger story.  The federal government is 34 trillion dollars in debt, state and local governments are absolutely drowning in debt and unfunded liabilities, and corporate debt is at an all-time high.  As a society, we are on the greatest debt binge in the history of the world, and it just gets worse every single year.  Previous generations handed us an economy that provided us with an incredibly high standard of living, but we always had to have more.  So we have been borrowing and spending with no end in sight, and now our day of reckoning is fast approaching. (Read More...)

I never imagined that we would ever see a time when it takes $177,798 for a family of four to live comfortably in the United States.  Unfortunately, that day has arrived.  Our leaders have been pursuing highly inflationary policies for many years, and now we have reached a point where inflation is wildly out of control.  In fact, the latest wholesale inflation figure that was released on Tuesday came in much higher than expected.  Sadly, this is just the beginning and we are in far more trouble than most people realize. (Read More...)

You can get a really good idea how the U.S. economy is doing by watching restaurants in your area.  When the economy is booming, restaurant parking lots are full and chains are feverishly establishing new locations.  But when the economy is struggling, restaurants get a lot less traffic and poor performing locations get shut down.  Sadly, in 2024 it appears that a “restaurant apocalypse” has started to sweep across America.  Most people have very little discretionary income to spend as a result of our cost of living crisis, and that is particularly true for our young adults.  Americans under the age of 40 love to eat out, but these days most of them are experiencing financial stress, and this is having an enormous impact on the restaurant industry. (Read More...)