The Real Horror Story: The U.S. Economic Meltdown
by ilene - October 18th, 2010 1:34 pm
The Real Horror Story: The U.S. Economic Meltdown
Courtesy of Michael Snyder at Economic Collapse
This October, millions of Americans are going to watch horror movies and read horror stories because they enjoy being frightened. Well, if you really want to be scared, you should just check out the real horror story unfolding right before our eyes – the U.S. economic meltdown. It seems like more bad news for the U.S. economy comes out almost every single day now. Unfortunately, things are about to get a whole lot worse. The mainstream media has been treating "Foreclosuregate" as if it is a minor nuisance, but the truth is that the lid is about to be publicly lifted on years and years of massive fraud in the U.S. mortgage industry, and this thing has the potential to cause economic chaos that is absolutely unprecedented. Over the past several days, expert after expert has been coming forward and warning that this crisis could completely and totally paralyze the mortgage industry in the United States. If that happens, it will be essentially like pulling the plug on the U.S. economic recovery.
Not that there was going to be a recovery anyway. The truth is that economic statistic after economic statistic has been pointing to incredible trouble for the U.S. economy.
For example, the U.S. government just announced that the U.S. trade deficit went up again in August. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. trade deficit was $46.3 billion during August, which was up significantly from $42.6 billion in July.
So how much coverage did this get in the mainstream media?
Well, just about none.
We have gotten so used to horrific trade deficits that it isn’t even news anymore.
But these trade deficits are absolutely killing our economy.
How long do you think that the U.S. economy can keep shelling out 40 or 50 billion more dollars than we take in every single month?
If you look at the countries around the world that have become very wealthy, almost all of them have gotten that way by trading with the United States.
Meanwhile, many of our once great manufacturing cities are turning into open sewers.
Every single politician in the United States should be talking about the trade deficit.
But hardly any of them are.
Is it because Americans have all become so dumbed-down that we don’t understand these things anymore, or is it because we are so…
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Foreclosure Fraud: 6 Things You Need To Know About The Crisis That Could Potentially Rip The U.S. Economy To Shreds
by ilene - October 18th, 2010 1:05 am
Foreclosure Fraud: 6 Things You Need To Know About The Crisis That Could Potentially Rip The U.S. Economy To Shreds
Courtesy of Michael Snyder at Economic Collapse
The foreclosure fraud crisis seems to escalate with each passing now. It is being reported that all 50 U.S. states have launched a joint investigation into alleged fraud in the mortgage industry. This is a huge story that is not going to go away any time soon. The truth is that it would be hard to understate the amount of fraud that has gone on in the U.S. mortgage industry, and we are watching events unfold that could potentially rip the U.S. economy to shreds. Many are now referring to this crisis as "Foreclosure-Gate", and already it is shaping up to be the worst thing that has ever happened to the U.S. mortgage industry. At this point, it seems inevitable that some financial institutions will go under as a result of this mess. In fact, by the end of this thing we might see a whole bunch of lending institutions crash and burn. This crisis is very hard to describe because it is just so darn complicated, but it is worth it to try to dig into this thing and understand what is going on because it has the potential to absolutely decimate the entire U.S. mortgage industry.
The truth is that there was fraud going on in every segment of the mortgage industry over the past decade. Predatory lending institutions were aggressively signing consumers up for mortgages that they knew they could never repay. Many consumers were also committing fraud because a lot of them also knew that they could never possibly repay the mortgages. These bad mortgages were fraudulently bundled up and securitized, and these securitized financial instruments were fraudulently marketed as solid investments. Those who certified that these junk securities were "AAA rated" also committed fraud. Then these securities were traded at lightning speed all over the globe and a ton of mortgage paperwork became "lost" or "missing".
Then, when it…
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20 Signs That The Economic Collapse Has Already Begun For One Out Of Every Seven Americans
by ilene - September 18th, 2010 10:15 pm
20 Signs That The Economic Collapse Has Already Begun For One Out Of Every Seven Americans
Courtesy of Michael Snyder at Economic Collapse
For most Americans, the economic collapse is something that is happening to someone else. Most of us have become so isolated from each other and so self-involved that unless something is directly affecting us or a close family member than we really don’t feel it. But even though most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbors at this point, it is quickly becoming undeniable that a fundamental shift is taking place in society. Perhaps you noticed it when two or three foreclosure signs went up on your street. Or perhaps it got your attention when that nice fellow down the street lost his job, and he and his family seemingly just disappeared from the neighborhood one day. The Census Bureau made front page headlines all over the nation this week when they announced that one out of every seven Americans was living in poverty in 2009. Every single day more Americans are getting sucked out of the middle class and into soul-crushing poverty.
Unfortunately, most Americans don’t really care because it has not affected them yet.
But this year, millions more Americans will discover that the music has stopped playing and they are left without a seat at the table.
Meanwhile, neither political party has a workable solution. They just like to point fingers and blame each other.
The Democrats blame Bush for all the poverty and advocate expanding programs for the poor. Not that there is anything wrong with a safety net. But the "safety net" was never meant to hold 50 million people on Medicaid and 40 million people on food stamps. The number of Americans on food stamps has more than…
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Mortgage Debt as a Percentage of Consumer Credit. You Have Officially Entered Hell.
by ilene - March 15th, 2010 1:56 pm
Mortgage Debt as a Percentage of Consumer Credit. You Have Officially Entered Hell.
Courtesy of Paco Ahlgren at Bottom Violation
See the green part of the graph? That’s home mortgage debt up until 2008.
See the blue part? That’s consumer credit.
Call me mathematical, but what’s wrong with this picture? More importantly, what propaganda machine continues to succeed in preventing the breathing portion of humanity from recognizing that the government sponsored and encouraged lending in the home mortgage industry for decades, and this is what happened.
Stated another way: The government not only caused this, it encouraged it. This has nothing to do with market action. This is pure, politically-motivated manipulation. For those of you still so mind-numb that you remain skeptical, ask yourself this: why is the commercial mortgage market still solvent? Answer? Because it doesn’t have government sponsorship.
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Thursday – Bernanke’s BS Bounce Part II
by phil - February 25th, 2010 6:46 am
Yay, more free money!
Oh not for you (unless you are a banker) but for all of Ben’s best buddies as the Fed Chairman promised yesterday to maintain "exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period." He can do this because, according to Bernanke:
Increases in energy prices resulted in a pickup in consumer price inflation in the second half of last year, but oil prices have flattened out over recent months, and most indicators suggest that inflation likely will be subdued for some time. Slack in labor and product markets has reduced wage and price pressures in most markets, and sharp increases in productivity have further reduced producers’ unit labor costs. The cost of shelter, which receives a heavy weight in consumer price indexes, is rising very slowly, reflecting high vacancy rates. In addition, according to most measures, longer-term inflation expectations have remained relatively stable.. the range that most FOMC participants judge to be consistent with the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment.
See! I bet you didn’t realize how well things were going, did you? Oil going from $70 to $80 in 15 days isn’t inflation – it’s SUBDUED! Up from $37 last February and March – SUBDUED – As in, DUED, where’s my money???
I mean come on people – he says it right here in one of the early paragraphs (before people start to nod off) – the cost of shelter (ie. your home’s declining value) is heavily weighted in the CPI and since your home is worth less (worthless?) and will remain so for some time – that offsets all the other nasty inflation that is eating into your paycheck.
Aside from the fact that this assumes your home is something you will be buying at a discount TOMORROW as opposed to something you overpaid for yesterday, the whole measurement that Bernanke uses to define success is ridiculous. Housing makes up 42.7% of the CPI, Transportation makes up 17%, Food makes up 15% Medical Care is 6% and Clothing is 3.7%. That’s 85.4% so we’ll call "other" 14.6%.
Now, let’s say you, like most Americans, already own your home. That means what you pay on a monthly basis doesn’t change. Let’s say though, that the cost of Transportation goes up 20% (3.4 out of 100) and Food goes up 20% (3) and Medical…
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Original Sin
by ilene - September 21st, 2009 4:10 pm
James Kunstler shares his view on the "original sin" committed against our country in the most recent crime spree.
Original Sin
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
It’s odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account ("Eight Days," in the Sept 21 New Yorker Magazine) of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled, reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it all — namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia.
It was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the first place. And it is our inability to come to grips with that underlying catastrophe that prolongs the resolution of the still-florid banking crisis — since the federal government is doing everything possible to prop up the failed capital equation of terminal suburbia, and to deny the obsolescence of that version of the American Dream and all the mechanisms for delivering it.
The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden’s apartment in "The Honeymooners" TV show.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site