The Economic Collapse

The latest numbers are horrible, and they are going to get even worse if the Federal Reserve pushes interest rates even higher.  We were warned that high rates would have an enormous negative impact on the economy, and that is precisely what has happened.  Layoffs are way up so far this year, the commercial real estate market is absolutely imploding, and we are witnessing things happen in the housing market that haven’t happened in more than a decade.  For example, last week it was revealed that sales of existing homes have fallen to a level that we have not seen since 2010… (Read More...)

If the American people have lost faith in almost all of our major institutions, how is our civilization going to survive?  If any collective effort is going to work, people have to believe in that effort.  That is true whether we are talking about a sports team, a business partnership, a romantic relationship or a nation as a whole.  When people stop believing, it is just a matter of time before failure arrives, and at this point the American people simply do not believe in those that are currently running our society.  In fact, a recent Gallup survey discovered that faith in our major institutions has dropped to depressingly low levels.  The survey asked people if they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in a long list of prominent institutions, and these were the results… (Read More...)

Supply chain problems were supposed to be a thing of the past, but instead our supply chains just keep getting hit by issue after issue.  Have you noticed that it has become really difficult to acquire parts and get things repaired?  It isn’t just your imagination.  And have you noticed that store shelves seem rather sparse just about wherever you go shopping?  During my latest visit to the local grocery store, I was stunned to see how thin stock levels had become.  I assumed that it was because I had arrived at a bad time and that they were about to be restocked.  But then I started looking into this, and I discovered that major supply chain issues are starting to develop all over the country. (Read More...)

Not another one.  As I have repeatedly warned my readers, leaders all over the globe seem to have come down with a really bad case of war fever.  Instead of sitting down and attempting to find solutions through diplomacy, many of our leaders seem quite eager to use military force to settle matters these days.  There is no peaceful end to the war in Ukraine on the horizon, China is making preparations to invade Taiwan, and the “shadow war” in the Middle East could easily erupt into a full-blown regional conflict.  But in this article I am going to focus on the next war that is reportedly about to begin.  A group of nations in western Africa known as ECOWAS is preparing to invade Niger with the approval of the EU and the Biden administration, and CNN is reporting that “D-Day” has already been chosen… (Read More...)

Do you remember what happened in 2008?  Many people believe that another historic financial disaster is coming and that it will absolutely devastate the U.S. economy.  Earlier this week, I wrote about an investor named Michael Burry that has actually bet 1.6 billion dollars that the stock market is going to crash.  He made all the right moves in 2008, and he fully intends to be proven right once again in 2023.  Of course current conditions definitely resemble 2008 in so many ways.  The residential housing market is so dead right now, and commercial real estate prices are plummeting at a very frightening pace.  Unfortunately, officials at the Federal Reserve are making it quite clear that they are not done strangling the economy. (Read More...)

Would you be willing to bet a billion dollars that stock prices are going to collapse?  Needless to say, only an extremely small fraction of the population has that much money.  And once you have accumulated a billion dollars, one would think that you would be extremely determined to protect it.  But that is not what Michael Burry is doing.  During the financial crisis of 2008, his massive bets against the housing market made him incredibly rich, and now he is making another “big short”.  According to CNN, Burry has bet over 1.6 billion dollars that the stock market is going to crash… (Read More...)

The middle class in the U.S. has been steadily shrinking for decades, but in recent years our leaders have greatly accelerated that process.  In 2020, 2021 and 2022 they absolutely flooded the system with new money, and almost all of that new money went into the pockets of the wealthy.  The gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is now larger than ever, and that isn’t a good thing for our society.  Even if you are still making as much money as you did a few years ago, you have lost a lot of ground financially, because the cost of living has been rapidly eating away at our standard of living.  As I covered the other day, household income in the United States has declined by 9.1 percent since April 2020 after adjusting for inflation and taxes.  In other words, the middle class is a whole lot smaller than it was in April 2020, and it continues to get smaller with each passing day. (Read More...)

In order for a civilized society to function, most people have to willingly follow the rules of that society.  If that happens, law enforcement authorities can deal with the few that choose to be lawless.  For generations, that is how things worked in America.  There was a high standard of morality among the general population, and so the police were able to successfully handle the few bad apples that insisted on breaking the law.  But now everything has changed.  As a result of decades of extreme moral decay, lawlessness is rampant and there are vast multitudes of young people that openly flaunt the rules of our society.  In fact, there are already some areas of the country that are literally on the verge of being ungovernable. (Read More...)