Mac Slavo
SHTFplanFri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC
The system is breaking apart as we speak.
Retail has taken a brutal pounding over the last several years, and an epidemic of closing stores continues. Jobs have never picked up, despite the optimism. The flaws of the larger economy are compounding, and what has already been for several years a "recession" may soon crumble into an outright great "depression."
As the
X22 Report discusses, the stress points are all there, and absolute destruction is looming over the United States, and the global economy in general. The music has already stopped in terms of Federal Reserve stimulus money; as interest rates soar, the debt implosion becomes little more than a matter of time.
No man knows the day, but it is clear enough that something big is happening.
Beware of the bubbles popping... and the rest of the fallout.
"The situation right now is a disaster, and people are going to be really hurt by it. Now, Trump gave his speech to Congress and he said some very interesting things in the speech. And this gives us some type of indicator on how well the economy is doing. The first one he said was 94 million Americans are out of the labor force... 43 million are living in poverty. 43 million Americans are on food stamps. More than 1 in 5 people in their prime working years are not working. We have the worst financial recovery in 65 years - actually, it's not really a recovery; it's a manipulation; it's an illusion to make you think we've recovered."
"In the last eight years, the past administration has put on more debt than nearly all other U.S. presidents combined. We lost more than 1/4 of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved. We lost 60,000 factories since China joined the WTO in 2001. Our trade deficit with the world last year was nearly $800 billion; and Obamacare premiums nationwide have increased by double digits. We spend trillions and trillions of dollars over seas, and we didn't do anything here in the United States for the infrastructure, and that's why things are falling apart."
"He's letting the country know that the economy is a disaster, that the economy is collapsing... a complete disaster."
As many experts have pointed out, President Trump cannot avoid the debt crisis. For starters, the U.S. government debt ceiling deal expires at the end of March - more debt must be approved, or budgets altered.
But beyond that, there is a palpable sense that another big event is coming... with a lot of talk about the second half of 2017. Has a date been set?
Comment: Via the
Washington Times we also learn:
It's about as hard for a 20-something worker to find a job today as it was in 1986. The economy is growing at a slightly slower pace, but not by much. And yet young workers today are significantly more pessimistic about the possibility of success in America than their counterparts were in 1986, according to a new Fusion 2016 Issues poll reported in conjunction with the Washington Post โ a shift that appears to reflect lingering damage from the Great Recession and more than a decade of wage stagnation for typical workers.
That rise in pessimism among millennials is concentrated among white people. It is most pronounced among whites who did not earn a college degree.
The Fusion poll replicated the questions from a Roper/Wall Street Journal poll of young Americans that was conducted in 1986... Both polls posed a series of questions about the American Dream: what it meant to individuals, whether it actually existed and, if it did, how hard it was to attain.
In the three decades between the surveys, pollsters found, share of young Americans overall who said the American Dream "is not really alive" grew sharply from 12 to 29 percent. Among white people, it nearly tripled from 10 percent to 29 percent. One in three white non-college graduates now say it is not alive, compared to one-fifth of white college graduates; the increase from 1986 was larger for non-graduates than for graduates.
The poll found no statistically significant change among young Americans of color over the decades. In 1986, they were about twice as likely as whites to say the American Dream does not exist. Now, the groups are about equally pessimistic.
But among the respondents who said the American Dream does mean something to them personally, whites were far more likely to say the dream has become harder to achieve compared to a generation ago. Just over 6 in 10 white college graduates said the dream had become harder to achieve, and 7 in 10 non-college graduates said the same, while 53 percent of non-white respondents said so.
And the following unemployment stats put this into
further perspective:
According to John Williams of Shadow Stats, if we were to calculate unemployment using the same metrics as we did during the 1930's, or even the 1980's, we'd already be in Great Depression territory. Williams, who utilizes a reporting methodology that accounts for "long-term discouraged workers who were defined out of official existence in 1994," notes that the real unemployment rate is rapidly approaching 25%.
Now compare the above chart to similar measurements from the 1930's and you'll see just how bad things really are:
(via Casey Research)
It's so bad, in fact, that we have seen sustained unemployment exceeding that of the Great Depression for almost the entirety of Barack Obama's Presidency.
But how can it be possible to have a full-fledged recovery and record stock prices when nearly one-third of the adult population is not working?
If the government is to be believed, it's because our economy continues to grow at a pace of about 2%.
But once again, if we calculate the real growth rate and adjust for inflation, we see exactly why jobs are non-existent and getting worse every month.
The following chart made available by Williams shows that despite a positive "official" GDP growth rate being disseminated to the public, the reality is exactly the opposite. The U.S. economy is by all accounts shrinking and has been doing so for the better part of a decade:
We've already witnessed numerous shocks to the global economy over recent weeks and the prospects of any sort of stability just went out the window.
There is no recovery. There are no jobs. There is no growth.
The United States, regardless of what is being said by mainstream financial pundits or believed by their TV-watching myrmidons, is now (and has been for quite some time) in a recession.
What's worse is that most have no clue of how bad things really are or that they are witnessing America's Second Great Depression.
The world is flush with money, you know, the paper stuff and everyone knows (and should by now) that it can be printed, as the situation determines. As some pundit said, it's like the Caxton printing press.
Remember the bible, due to Caxton the bible was printed en masse.
[Link]
He also discusses the precious metal market. Interesting! Over all very interesting.
The date of March of 15th has been bandied around as the date of collapse, I don't think so, but then again remember the Ides of March.