The Economic Collapse

It is starting to look a lot like the Great Recession again.  I thought that the pace of layoffs in 2024 was bad, but it has just exploded here in 2025.  Vast numbers of good paying jobs are being ruthlessly eliminated, and competition for any decent jobs that are still available has become extremely fierce.  In some cases, workers that have many years of experience are applying for hundreds of jobs but are not even able to get a single interview.  I have said this before, and I will say it again.  If you currently have a job that you highly value, hold on to it as tightly as you can.  You don’t want to be left without a chair when the music stops playing. (Read More...)

For a long time, a lot of people wanted to deny what was happening to us. But now we have reached a point when you can no longer do that and retain your credibility. Job openings have been plummeting, and layoffs have been spiking. Manufacturing activity is way down, and delinquency rates are way up. In fact, the credit card delinquency rate just hit the highest level that we have seen since 2011. Just about everything has gotten significantly more expensive, and America’s food banks are being overwhelmed by vast numbers of hungry people. Nobody can deny any of these things, and now U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is publicly admitting that “there are sectors of the economy that are in recession”… (Read More...)

As grocery prices have risen, demand at food banks throughout the country has surged to very alarming levels.  At the end of 2024, I wrote about how demand at food banks had risen to record levels all over the United States.  Unfortunately, demand has continued to rise in 2025, and now the government shutdown has shifted America’s hunger crisis into overdrive.  Millions of very hungry people are showing up at food banks looking for something to eat, and resources are being stretched to the limit. (Read More...)

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The good news is that 50 percent of food stamp benefits will be paid out during the month of November. The bad news is that a lot of food stamp recipients are still extremely angry. Food stamp protests are already starting to happen, videos are being posted on social media that show people how to take groceries right out the front door of a Walmart, and one woman is claiming that “everyone was stealing” when she visited her local grocery store. Of course if you live in an area where food stamp use is very low, conditions may seem perfectly normal. It just depends on where you live. Hopefully the government shutdown will be resolved very soon, because if we get to a point where no more food stamp money is coming from Washington at all things could get really crazy. (Read More...)

What is the Fed not telling us?  The numbers clearly indicate that big trouble is brewing in the banking system.  I wish that I could specifically tell you which banks are in the most trouble, but at this stage we simply aren’t being told anything.  They probably figure that the best approach is to try to keep everyone as calm as possible.  But they won’t be able to keep a lid on what is going on indefinitely, and when word finally gets out people could start to panic. (Read More...)

After many years of steady economic deterioration, a very dark cloud of economic pessimism hangs over our country.  The cost of just about everything has been rising faster than paychecks have been, thousands of stores are closing all over the nation, and large corporations are conducting mass layoffs on a scale that we haven’t seen since the Great Recession.  Most of the population is just barely scraping by in this very harsh economic environment, and I have been hearing from so many people that are quite frightened about what is going to happen next. (Read More...)

I suppose that we should not be surprised, because they told us exactly what they intended to do. For weeks, food stamp recipients have been posting videos on social media telling us what will happen if their food stamp benefits are cut off. We have been warned that they will go to their local grocery stores and fill up their carts just as they normally do. We have also been warned that there will be violence if anyone tries to stop them when they leave without paying. A lot of people out there were convinced that these lunatics were bluffing, but the truth is that what they threatened to do has already started to happen. (Read More...)

It appears that this government shutdown could go on for a while, and that is not good news for the U.S. economy at all. On day 28 of the shutdown, the U.S. Senate failed to advance a bill to end the shutdown for the 13th consecutive time. They can keep holding more votes, but the outcome will remain the same. We are potentially just days away from a scenario in which approximately 42 million Americans will lose their food stamp benefits, and that could result in widespread chaos all over the nation. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy as a whole continues to move in the wrong direction very rapidly. (Read More...)