The Economic Collapse

Joe Biden just can’t quit fibbing.  On Labor Day, he traveled to Philadelphia where he delivered a speech touting the success of “Bidenomics”.  Who does he think he is fooling?  The American people aren’t buying that nonsense.  They know that prices are out of control at the grocery store.  They know that the cost of living has been rising much faster than their paychecks have been.  They know that high interest rates have made it much harder to buy a home.  And they can see that lots of people are starting to lose their jobs.  The truth is that Joe Biden’s time in the White House has been an economic nightmare, and it appears that conditions are likely to get even worse before he is scheduled to leave. (Read More...)

How far would you go to feed your family?  Hopefully that is a question that you will not have to answer any time soon, but right now we are seeing millions upon millions of people become more desperate as economic conditions rapidly deteriorate and food costs soar.  At this point, most Americans are just barely scraping by from month to month, and in poorer countries on the other side of the world there are people that are literally starving to death.  As I have detailed previously, the UN has reported that 2.4 billion people did not have enough food to eat last year, and 900 million of them were facing severe food insecurity.  Sadly, those numbers will inevitably be even higher for 2023.  A global rice crisis has erupted, and the collapse of the Black Sea grain deal has greatly restricted the flow of agricultural goods from that part of the globe.  Food costs are spiking all over the planet, and that is really bad news for all of us. (Read More...)

Censorship of the Internet has been getting worse for years, but we just crossed a threshold which is going to take things to a whole new level.  On August 25th, a new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union.  Under this new law, European bureaucrats will be able to order big tech companies to censor any content that is considered to be “illegal”, “disinformation” or “hate speech”.  That includes content that is posted by users outside of the European Union, because someone that lives in the European Union might see it.  I wrote about this a few days ago, but I don’t think that people are really understanding the implications of this new law.  In the past, there have been times when governments have requested that big tech companies take down certain material, but now this new law will give government officials the power to force big tech companies to take down any content that they do not like.  Any big tech companies that choose not to comply will be hit with extremely harsh penalties. (Read More...)

The Biden administration is trying really hard to convince us that the U.S. economy is doing just fine, but the numbers just keep getting worse and worse.  Consumer confidence is plummeting, large corporations are conducting mass layoffs all over the country, and major retailers are really struggling right now.  Meanwhile, some of the smartest guys in the financial world are making moves that would only make sense if the economy was headed for big trouble.  Earlier this month, I wrote about how Michael Burry has bet 1.6 billion dollars that the stock market is going to crash.  He made a ton of money in 2008 by being on the correct side of the financial crisis, and he plans to make even more money this time around.  This week, speculation has been growing that Warren Buffett also believes that a major downturn is coming.  In fact, Business Insider is warning that Warren Buffett “may be bracing for a recession” because he has been selling off stocks at a staggering pace… (Read More...)

We aren’t quite there yet, but an enormous credit card debt crisis is definitely brewing.  Americans are becoming increasingly dependent on their credit cards to make ends meet from month to month, the percentage of us that are carrying balances from month to month is growing, and the average rate of interest on such balances has risen above 20 percent.  If you can possibly avoid it, do not carry credit card balances from month to month, because that will strangle you financially.  Unfortunately, our young people are never taught this in school, and so many of them get into deep financial trouble when they become adults.  And once you get into deep financial trouble, it can take many years to get out of it. (Read More...)

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...)