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"Those soldiers will have to be brought back, and those bases will have to be shut down. So that means a lot of soldiers and no economy, no domestic economy to integrate them into." Dmitry Orlov
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.
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar declined the most against the euro in a month and dropped versus the yen after China repeated its call for a new global currency.
The Swiss franc declined against the euro and dollar this week as foreign-exchange analysts said the central bank sold its currency three times to support the economy. The greenback fell against most of its major counterparts after the People’s Bank of China said yesterday the International Monetary Fund should manage more of members’ foreign-exchange reserves.
“The dollar’s status as a reserve currency is being questioned,” said Benedikt Germanier, a foreign-exchange strategist in Stamford, Connecticut at UBS AG, the second- largest currency trader. “There are reasons to sell the dollar.”
The U.S. currency fell 0.9 percent to $1.4056 per euro this week from $1.3937 on June 19, the swiftest depreciation since the five days ended May 29. The dollar fell 1.1 percent to 95.18 yen f
Notably, an experiment reported in March ... demonstrated that some of the brain’s decision-making circuitry showed signs of money illusion on images from a brain scanner.
But credit cards can also be a slippery slope. One misstep and you’ll tumble into the abyss of credit card debt hell, a mounting spiral of missed payments, fees, high APRs, and rate increases that will take years to recover from.
The unprecedented decline in room revenues combined with the jump in cap rates has resulted in a massive loss in values. We estimate that values are currently 50-80% lower than at the market’s peak in 2006-2007.
Five U.S. banks with total assets of about $1.04 billion were seized by regulators, pushing this year’s tally of failures to 45 as a recession drives up unemployment and home foreclosures.
This is a series of pictures which is gives a visual representation on what a Trillion dollars looks like. It is a series of slides that goes from 100 "dollars" all the way up to ONE TRILLION dollars. A Trillion Dollars is 1 followed by 12 zeros. to get an idea on how large a Trillion really is, take a guess now as to how many YEARS a trillion seconds is the answer will be provided at the end of the slide show. From all of us to all of you...ENJOY!! And while you are enjoying the pictures consider that your governmental overlords have indebted your children and your children's children to the tun of 50 TRILLION dollars. Be sure to share this with as many people as you possibly can!
"We are setting the stage for big pressures for states to restrict eligibility and benefit levels," McHugh said. "Those type of restrictive actions undercut the (Depression-era program's) economic and social stability purposes."
It’s largely due to two things: “Their retirement nest eggs have taken a hit,” and they are increasingly aware that “they might be one of the people who lives to — not just 80, but — 90, 95 or 100,” Zultowski explained.
Right. The government hands out money (which it taxes or borrows) and this is reflected in these numbers but taking money from one hand and giving it to another does not help GDP as it does not represent income produced...
California regulators delayed a decision on whether to
implement the nation's first statewide carbon fee on utilities, oil
refineries and other polluting industries. [100% of which would pass onto consumers.]
When most of the home owning voters cannot pay their major debt or have no incentive to pay their mortgage debt, there will either be a debtors revolt that society will sanction...
The point I am making is that the industry is obviously been run by sharps who have now forced the creation of new legislation to protect consumers from abusive practice. Anyway, this is the tip of the iceberg of what has happened to our formerly robust financial system. What makes it particularly stupid, unless someone shows me different, is that the credit industry cannot go to the courts to successfully collect at all. Thus if credit card holders went of a mass revolt, the industry would not be able to ever recover. It is very much in their interest to coddle their customers who actually enjoy the service and will work hard to keep it in good order.
