Todays top 10 indicators that the economic decline is not over
Don’t take my word for it, here is a list of current links to the pulse of what may be happening with the economy, from various sources this week.
1. New York Times: The Economy Is Still at the Brink – “The storm is not over, not by a long shot. Huge structural flaws remain in the architecture of our financial system…..”
2. LewRockwell.com: The Eye of the Economic Hurricane - “One thing you notice is that like the Great Depression, this downturn is global. A collapse in world trade followed the Crash of ’29. It is usually blamed on two protectionist bumblers in Congress – Smoot and Hawley. But in a real depression, trade falls anyway. World commerce needs to readjust to new realities…whatever they are. That’s happening again now….”
3. Bloomberg News: – Looming Loan Losses – “Lenders are stuck with bad loans, they can’t provide new money to consumers or corporations to fuel a potential recovery. Analysts who have examined the quarterly profits and government tests say that accounting rule changes and rosy assumptions are making the institutions look healthier than they are. The government probably wants to win time for the banks, keeping them alive as they struggle to earn their way out of the mess. Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida. “The big banks’ profits were totally bogus,” says Weiss.”
4. USA Today: Benefit spending soars to new high – “The recession is driving the safety net of government benefits to a historic high, as one of every six dollars of Americans’ income is now coming in the form of a federal or state check or voucher.”
5. Human Events: It’s the end of the world as the Greater Depression hits after 2010’s failed “W-recovery” - “The Great Depression will seem like a mild recession as what waits for us in 2011 hits with the force of a Katrina financial hurricane. Trends Report has been successfully predicting the major future trends impacting our lives for 3 decades, including calling the dot com crash back in the 1990′s, says we are bent on destroying our currency, bankrupting our government, and unleashing a violent citizen-against-citizen eruption as the economy collapses into chaos and marshal law fascism. Quite a claim. And God help us if it is right — again. What we’re doing is squandering our wealth, our resources, the genius of our scientists and the future of our children. We’re over-consuming in every way — but under consuming our education and focusing on the quantity, not the quality, of what we’ve built. So much of today’s culture is counter-productive to what American built it’s foundation on — a high-quality producing nation building things, not pushing paper. And we’ve become not only a consumer society but a low-quality consumer, as well as the most obese society in the world, eating low-quality high-carb, high-fat processed foods. We have fallen into a moral vacuum. Look at how people used to dress. Smartly. Not like the cheap hoods of today. Fashion now copies the lowest common denominator. Our children wear clothes without belts, and shoes without shoelaces, to copy the styles of the violent criminals — who have these items removed by the police in prison so they can’t be used as weapons. That’s become the fashion statement of today’s youth. Like rap music from the ghetto. We’ve become an underdeveloped nation.
5. CNN -Struggle to reign in spending - “We’ve been extravagant with our kids and with ourselves,” says Donna. “Now we’re readjusting, this strange new thing called a budget isn’t much fun. “It’s hard,” she says. “It’s like we were shopping, shopping, shopping – then we just stopped.”
6. NBC – Being passed by China – “China had more than 1 billion workers, and over one-third of their annual income went into savings. That’s astoundingly high. In contrast, the savings rate in the United States was a mere 4 percent. (Today it’s just half that, at 2 percent.) Everywhere I traveled, I saw that the capitalism, drive and entrepreneurship that had characterized China for centuries had at long last reemerged following the failure of Communism. And there was no going back.”
7. Arizona Republic: Mortgage delinquencies still rising – “Nationally, home-loan delinquencies rose for the ninth-straight quarter.”
8. Wall Street Journal – 3rd World Countries more attractive than US. – Unemployment is rising, and backlashes against foreign workers are mounting. The result is potentially the biggest turnaround in migration flows since the Great Depression, economists say. Reports and data from government ministries and outside organizations indicate that the flow of immigrants from poor to wealthier countries is slowing significantly for the first time in decades while more people are returning home. Among the returnees: road builders from Bangladesh, construction workers from Mexico, as well as bankers, lawyers and real-estate professionals from around the world who were working in Singapore and Dubai.
9. Foreign Policy: Return to medeivel times. – “But as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century.”
10. Troubling Signs: Alabama County Set to Halt Services, Shut Buildings – “Alabama’s most populous county is preparing to stop road maintenance, close courthouses and shutter services for the elderly after a court struck down taxes that pay for about 35 percent of its budget.” — With companies in no mood to hire, the unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 percent in May, the highest in more than 25 years. – The previously predicted commercial real estate crash is beginning. – The snowballing retail recession, which had initially hit shopping centers in the troubled and overbuilt areas has finally reached wealthier parts, leaving empty storefronts from the deserts to the sea. In Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the vacancy rate in the first quarter rose more than 50% over the previous year.
