Good evening, ladies and
gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of
an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried
to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to
you to decide just how urgent a message it is.
My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in
the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet
Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use
is the "Collapse Gap" – to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space
Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the
Cold War.
What this means is that if people do not need the products and services of the banks and corporations, rather than let them die, we are going to use government and central banks to simply take money from people to keep a bank or corporation alive...
The imbalances that caused the current recession have actually worsened. We are now in an even deeper hole than when the crisis began. Rather than wrapping up a recession, we are actually sinking into a depression...
The reality is that AIG seems to have been running something akin to a shell game of massive proportions. Its shell game version took the form of selling insurance and assigning the resultant risks among its 71 different North American insurance companies
"He basically predicted everything that has been happening in the US over the last five or six years, basically making the comparison between the US and Russia, demonstrating the collapse of Russia and the US are one in the same thing"...
In other words, the headline extended claims number of 6,416,250 is off by more than 2.6 million. And one also needs to add in another 352,000 from various state programs. The chart shows the exhaustion rate.
Data for the last year or so was revised downward pretty drastically - sequential quarterly growth rates in 2008 and early 2009 were updated as shown below:
Economic growth has now contracted for four straight quarters, the longest stretch since the government began keeping records more than 60 years ago and, aside from rising stock prices, it's hard to see what will drive the economy forward...
The building's 1.2 million square feet could fit 193 full-size copies of the Statue of Liberty. Its parking lot has room for 292 tractor trailers. But on a recent morning the only signs of life were a security guard's trailer, golf cart and bicycle.
Employment compensation for U.S. workers has grown over the past 12 months by the lowest amount on record, reflecting the severe recession that has gripped the country.
The Labor Department said Friday that employment costs rose by 1.8 percent for the 12 months ending in June, the smallest annual gain on records that go back to 1982.
he House has voted to rush an additional $2 billion into the popular but financially strapped "cash for clunkers" car purchase program.
The bill was approved on a vote of 316-109. House members acted within hours of learning from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that the program was running out of money.
The pumpers in the media will burn in Hell for dragging you (the sheeple) back into this market.
Here's the truth on GDP, in picture
I updated the previous Ticker but this is important enough to put up as a separate post. I will maintain this quarterly as new releases come out; this is a new "staple" for The Market Ticker, where unlike the sell-side that is always trying to get you to buy I am concerned with the truth about our economy and deal in the facts, not hype.
This is off Table 3B in the BEA's release and is actual year-over-year change in constant (chained) dollars. Feel free to check my work - in fact, you should check my work, just like you should check everyone else's you hear, especially if you hear a politician or media pundit opine about how "things are getting better."
Baloney. Not only is the GDP still falling it is still falling at an increasing year-over-year rate.
Goldman Sachs raised its rating on the shares to "buy" on the news.
Bloomberg News reported that U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said in an interview that GE's ownership of GE Capital was "not part of the problem" that caused the financial crisis.
Many investors had feared that the Obama administration's planned overhaul of the system could compel Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE to spin off the finance unit. That business over the past year has become the company's Achilles heel, and GE management was working to downsize it in the face of falling profits
If it seems weird to you that the ratio of domestic and overseas shrinking economies and their reduced consumption somehow turned into a positive GDP contributor, well, welcome to the wonderful world of government statistics.
The restaurant business is still contracting, and although not contracting as fast as late last year, the pace of contraction has picked up over the last two months.
"Pensions will be a major issue, sooner more likely than later, because they're going to bankrupt many jurisdictions," said Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles.
However, the fly in the ointment is consumer demand. It is still weak. Look at non-durable spending. If we don't see a significant uptick come Q3, you should be worried.
“Big Government distracts us the most important job of the government
– protecting us” Michael D. Tanner “Liberty in the United State will never be reestablished so
long as elites and masses alike look to the president to perform supernatural
feats and therefore tolerate a virtual unlimited exercise of presidential
power. Until we can restore limited, constitutional
government in this country, God save us from great presidents.” Robert Higgs
“The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines
individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways
discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks
production.” Henry Hazlitt“The more power government has to provide things, the more
power it has to dictate terms.” Sheldon Richman
“In a market, goods and services are exchanged through a myriad
complex of voluntary transactions, each made to the mutual benefit of those
engaging in the transaction. The costs
The jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.5% last month – and many economists are betting for the jobless rate to hit 10%.
“Of the June total,” reports the Labor Department, “1,235 mass layoffs were reported in the manufacturing sector.”
“All the indicators in the real economy,” said Bill Bonner in his final speech at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver, “are actually getting worse.”
Bill Bonner here at The Daily Reckoning pretty much nailed the problem when he said that “During the 2001-2007 period, credit in the United States increased by $22 trillion. The nation’s GDP increased only by $4 trillion.”
"If Bernanke is correct that it takes 2.5% GDP growth just to keep the unemployment rate constant, and McKinsey is also correct in its 2.4% forecast, we will be stuck with 10% unemployment for decades."
s history repeating itself at Goldman Sachs?
In late 2006, Goldman shrewdly began backing away from the residential mortgage market. With little fanfare, the firm began aggressively hedging its exposure to home loans, in particular mortgages to borrowers with shaky credit histories.
This savvy and somewhat stealthy strategy enabled Goldman to pawn off lots of its soon-to-be toxic mortgages and mortgage-backed securities on other institutions — forcing those foolhardy speculators to pay the price when the subprime market blew up.
And much to everyone else’s chagrin, Goldman even made money off the housing meltdown when some of its hedges — specifically a bet that a subprime mortgage index would plunge — paid off handsomely.
Worse, we're going to start losing people off the "extended" benefits soon (next month) which will make it nearly impossible to count the real number of unemployed, and those who drop off extended benefits will have no income whatsoever...
I may be the most uninformed, misunderstanding of issues person in the United States of America if not the entire world. The simple reason is because of the principal 'KISS', keep it simple stupid, I try to use when looking at a problem or
The loss of illegal immigrants has had ramifications for the Arizona economy, with some saying the exodus means less of a drain on taxpayer services and others saying the loss has hurt businesses and tax revenue.
Reprinted from here; no comment necessary. This deserves wide distribution, and as such, guess what - I'm going to help in that endeavor.
Janet is one of the true bright lights when it comes to matters finance, which of course makes her persona-non-grata at the table of ideas when it comes to actually addressing what has gone wrong, and how to prevent it from happening again - just as is the case for the "evil bloggers" such as myself and Zerohedge.
The reason is quite simple: When you stop lying and intentionally obfuscating the facts you come to an inescapable conclusion: This event in our financial system was no accident, and those who are being touted as firemen who "put it out" in fact were the arsonists who set the fire in the first place.
Wake up America....
Last week a story which gained very little traction hit the financial newswires. The US Treasury is working on an internal project informally called "Plan C" which seeks to deal with further problems in the economy before they occur.
Prices have fallen so far that about $1.3 trillion of properties have either lost their owners’ down payment or are close to it, Robert White, president of the New York-based research firm, said in a report.
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