The Economic Collapse

Have you noticed it too?  There has been a dramatic shift in the economy in recent days.  It has been sudden and it has been severe.  All over the country, sales are falling like a rock, inventories are piling up to alarming levels, and large companies are beginning to conduct mass layoffs.  Perhaps it was inevitable that such a downturn would arrive, but the Federal Reserve has made things far worse by rapidly hiking interest rates.  Every other time the Fed has engaged in such a rate hiking binge it has resulted in a recession, and there is no way that we are going to escape unscathed this time around.  The following are 11 signs that economic activity is plunging off a cliff… (Read More...)

The level of anger that we are witnessing all over the United States right now is extremely alarming.  Millions of voters on both the left and the right are filled with rage, and I have never seen this country more bitterly divided than it is at this moment.  Interestingly, survey after survey has found that the economy is the number one issue that voters are concerned about.  Our once great economic machine is coming apart at the seams, and the cost of living has become extremely oppressive.  But to be honest, for now the economy is still relatively stable.  So how angry will Americans be once the wheels start coming off and economic conditions really start deteriorating very rapidly? (Read More...)

This is starting to look like 2008 all over again.  For years, the tech industry was the strongest part of the U.S. economy by a wide margin.  The largest tech firms were raking in billions upon billions of dollars in revenue and their stock prices soared to unprecedented levels.  But now the tech industry has suddenly fallen on difficult times.  Many large tech companies are laying off huge numbers of workers, and we are being warned that even more layoffs are ahead.  If the most prosperous sector of our economy is experiencing this much trouble already, what is the outlook for the rest of the economy as we head into 2023? (Read More...)

If you live in a major urban area, you may have noticed that “tent cities” are starting to pop up all around you.  The worst inflation crisis in decades has combined with the worst drug crisis that we have ever seen to create an unprecedented homelessness crisis.  Every night, even more Americans join the rapidly growing “unsanctioned encampments” that are taking up more and more real estate in our largest cities.  If things are this bad now, how many of our fellow citizens will be sleeping in the streets when economic conditions are much worse a year or two from today?  We are supposed to be the greatest nation on the planet, but with each passing day even more tent cities are established.  Our system is failing, and the widespread economic suffering that we are witnessing right now is truly difficult to comprehend. (Read More...)

The last time interest rates were this high, the U.S. economy plunged into “the Great Recession” and millions of Americans lost their jobs.  But the Federal Reserve is not going to stop here.  In fact, Fed Chair Jerome Powell is telling us that more rate increases are on the way and that officials at the Fed are determined to “stay the course until the job is done”.  If “the job” is to destroy the U.S. economy, they have already made a tremendous amount of progress toward that goal.  The housing market is completely and utterly imploding, and economic activity is steadily slowing down all around us.  But even though Powell can see the damage that is happening, he insists that the Fed will keep raising rates until the official rate of inflation returns to 2 percent. (Read More...)

They are trying really hard to convince all of us that everything is just fine.  But close to one-fifth of the U.S. population is skipping meals because food prices are too high.  And nearly 40 percent of our small businesses couldn’t pay rent in October.  Our leaders are trying to put a positive spin on things, but the truth is that we are witnessing a tremendous amount of economic suffering all over the United States right now.  The core consumer price index just surged to “the highest level since 1982”, and this is putting an enormous amount of financial stress on American families and businesses. (Read More...)

In my entire lifetime, global supplies of diesel fuel have never been tighter than they are right now.  And that is really bad news, because the entire economy of the western world runs on diesel.  If we suddenly had no more diesel fuel, virtually all of our trains, trucks and ships would stop running.  Needless to say, just about everything that stocks our store shelves comes to us via trains, trucks and ships.  So the fact that there is not enough diesel fuel to go around is a really big deal.  Supplies have been declining for months, and at this point diesel inventories have fallen so low that we only have a 25 day buffer remaining… (Read More...)

We have reached a point where nearly two-thirds of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.  So what happens if millions of those people suddenly lose their paychecks during the severe economic downturn that is ahead of us?  In 2008, unprecedented numbers of Americans found themselves unable to pay their mortgages when the recession struck, and foreclosures surged to absolutely shocking levels.  Unfortunately, we have set ourselves up for the same thing to happen again.  Most Americans are literally teetering on the brink of financial disaster, and it won’t take much to push them over the edge. (Read More...)