Economic Nostradamus: We Are Literally Witnessing A Collapse

SHTF Plan ^ | 4-28-2012 | Mac Salvo

[blam]

Economic Nostradamus: We Are Literally Witnessing a Collapse

Mac Slavo
April 27th, 2012

With the Presidential election cycle in full swing our incumbent administration, the media, and their financial pundits continue to maintain that the US economy’s green shoots have blossomed into fields of golden sunflowers. Despite what we’re being told, however, the actual data tells a stunningly different story.

Richard Yamarone, a senior economist for Bloomberg Brief, has been called an economic Nostradamus for his prescient forecasting of the 2008 financial crisis, and now he’s warning that the worst is not over. In a recent interview with King World News he suggests that not only is the economic outlook a barren desert devoid of any existence of green shoots, but we have a front row seat to witness the collapse of life in America as we know it:

King World News Interview via SGT Report:

I think people are just running out of money. We have contracting, real disposable incomes. Most of the job creation that we have is from minimum wage type jobs.

you are actually seeing this collapse, contracting on a real basis, of real disposable personal incomes. If you don’t have the money, you can’t facilitate expenditures. So that’s the core of the problem. That’s what’s really going on in the US economy.

You don’t listen to what all of these bigger numbers coming across the screen tell you. You talk to the people who are running the country. 99.7% of all employer firms in this country are small businesses. So when they speak, you have to listen.

You have to listen to what the small businesses are telling you and right now they are telling you, ‘Hey, I’m the head of a 3rd or 4th generation, 75 or 100 year old business, and I’ve got to shut the doors’ or ‘I’ve got to let people go. And if I’m hiring anybody back, it’s only on a temporary basis.

In this current recession, we are not even close (to getting the jobs back) and that’s 50 months and counting.

The fact of the matter is that meaningful jobs won’t be returning any time soon. Recent (un)employment data indicate that cumulatively we are losing jobs each and every month. And, those jobs that do become available are minimum wage jobs that are insufficient to offset the income loss we’ve experienced since 2008.

The bottom line is that if people don’t have money, they can’t consume to keep the economy going. This leads to a vicious negative feedback loop that forces small (and large) business employers to lay off workers, which takes even more money out of the economy, which subsequently leads to more business closures and cutbacks.

As evidence of this effect we need look only at the most recent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data which indicate that, while the economy is still officially growing, it’s doing so at a snail’s pace of just 2.2%. That’s the official government statistic, so of course it’s loaded with fuzzy math that fails to account for one very critical piece of information – inflation. According to John Williams of Shadow Stats, if we accounted for inflation and calculated GDP as it should be done, without government up-side distortions, our economic growth has not only slowed, it’s actually contracting at a rate of negative 2.2%. By all accounts, even though the mainstream narrative is one of growth, recovery and increased consumer spending, the US economy is and has been in a recession since 2005.

Consider that food stamp rates have doubled over that period to 48.5 million participants (that’s one in six Americans!) and that we have an unofficial machination-adjusted unemployment rate in excess of 22% and one thing becomes absolutely clear: the average Joe Sixpack is broke, hungry and dangerously close to ripping to shreds the remainder of our country’s social safety nets.

Every piece of official data the government and their mouth pieces throw at us is and has been fabricated for the better part of a decade. Inflation is four times higher than Ben Bernanke will admit. Foreclosures continue piling up and the shadow inventory of foreclosed homes is now in the multiple millions. Real estate prices are still falling, with even ‘new’ buyers who purchased homes after the 2008 collapse and thought they were getting a deal now underwater on their mortgages.

To top it all off we have the price of essential goods like food and energy going through the roof as a result of easy Fed money to banks and investment firms that has nowhere to go but stock and commodities paper markets. While all those freshly printed Federal Reserve dollars have yet to make their way to consumers in any significant way, we’re already seeing the initial effects of our monetary policies and they’re have a devastating impact on consumer gas prices and grocery store trips.

We’ve oft opined that the collapse that so many naysayers believe will never happen is, in fact, happening right here and now. The data suggests it likely occurred well before global stock markets melted down in 2008.

The aforementioned handful of data (there’s plenty more where that came from – we haven’t even gotten into the European debt debacle or the coming Japanese and Chinese economic meltdowns) is providing us a clear picture of where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

We are literally witnessing the collapse of our entire borrow-and-consume paradigm, the aftereffects of which will not be pretty, complete with hyperinflationary depression, riots, starvation and bloodshed.

[tet68]

President Clinton hails economic down turn
a mulligan.

[RegulatorCountry]

I keep seeing references to votes being counted in Spain for the 2012 election, and don’t really see how that’s possible, unless all 50 staes have colluded or been forced to do so.

Federal elections are determined by voting state by state. There is no national vote, other than the end result of all the states having done so.

[yank in the UK]

The taxes and regulatory burden on business in the US must be worse then ever.
I am a CNC Machinist, I work for a company in England that supplies parts to the Aerospace industry. In the last few months we have been absolutely swamped with orders from the US, they are outsourcing work to the UK (that speaks volumes)
I am currently working 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week. I’ve not had a day off since March.

[UCANSEE2]

I keep seeing references to votes being counted in Spain for the 2012 election

Wouldn't want the money spent on Michelle and Kids campaigning in SPAIN to go to waste now, would we?

[EBH]

We are being charged thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to participate in safety surveys and monitoring programs mandated by our clients who are mandated to do this by the Feds... it all just rolls down the hill.

This is why I got out of the EHS field. I could no longer see a way clear to bring the ideals of EHS to benefit the bottom line of the company. Ten years ago being very good at EHS management would lower the cost of doing business for many industries. But around 2004-05 it seemed things started to really turn to nit-pick costly programs being pushed by the 'sustainable' lobby folks. As I said then and still stand by today..."It ain't sustainable if it puts people out of work or eventually shuts down a company due to the cost of execution."

Unfortunately thousands of businesses listened to this lobby and never acted in their company's best interests. And for many companies we can understand why. Just look at the advertisers that opted to bail on Rush Limbaugh. Many of them never realized the people calling, emailing, and railing about them advertising on Limbaugh never considered those same people didn't use their products and never would.

As a retired EHS manager it became grossly apparent that EHS no longer represented doing the right things, it became doing the PR things.

[Gritty]

It appears Hope and Change has turned into Horror and Chains...

[khelus]

I keep seeing references to votes being counted in Spain for the 2012 election, and don’t really see how that’s possible, unless all 50 states have colluded or been forced to do so.

Federal elections are determined by voting state by state. There is no national vote, other than the end result of all the states having done so.

Well however it's being done, it's being done. Electronic voting counted via internet by SCYTL.

SCYTL news

SCYTL Customers

SCYTL acquires SOE software [Clarity Software Suite] used in US elections





525 jurisdictions currently served by SOE software

One more step in Globalism's de facto elimination of national sovereignty and those pesky borders. Now hold hands and sing ‘We are the World’.

[blam]

A Spanish Company Known As Scytl Will Be Reporting Election Results For Hundreds Of U.S. Jurisdictions On Election Day

[mjp]

The bottom line is that if people don’t have money, they can’t consume to keep the economy going. This leads to a vicious negative feedback loop that forces small (and large) business employers to lay off workers, which takes even more money out of the economy, which subsequently leads to more business closures and cutbacks.

The belief that a fall in wage rates is equivalent to a fall in total wage payments and would thus result in a reduction in consumer spending and a deepening of a depression is naive.

Free market laissez-faire economists know that a contraction phase in the business cycle is cured by allowing wage rates and price to fall to a point where they have fallen more than the demand for labor and the demand for consumers goods. At that point, costs will have dropped enough to make investments in the present more worthwhile than investments in the future.And costs will be low enough that profits and rate of profit will begin to increase, and businesses will then begin investing more in hiring more workers and expanding.When prices fall just as much as wages, there is no decrease in the standard of living for the average wage earner. This is the way a free market naturally recovers from a depression. But this is precisely what the Keynesians deny, and government and unions try to prevent.

[blam]

The Barter Value Of Skills

[Sequoyah101]

Manufacturing here has been beaten to its knees as has a lot of other business. One of the big problems in your field is lack of skilled labor. We have too few trade schools and journeyman programs. Instead we have droves of marginal college kids with useless degrees and less passion and unions that are primarily political hack organizations.

I don’t know what a CNC Machinist there makes but I know of one major manufacturer here in Houston in oilfield equipment that pays CNC programmers a whopping $16 an hour plus benefits, good benefits but that is paltry wages. We pay laborers more than that.

[Chaguito]

If you produce nothing that can be bought into overseas economies, you are a slave to domestic consumption. But of course, the US wages mean that we must buy foreign goods mainly. So the “economy” is little more than borrowing money internationally and churning it internally via “service jobs”. When the service jobs dry up, and the international fuel dries up, there is nothing to churn.

There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.

[Sequoyah101]

You made the correct observation, EHS has become about PR. It has been reduced to jingoism and cheer leading. Small fortunes are spent on programs that look more like playschool.

EHS goes to ever more cheeky practices such as backing cars into parking spaces. Parking areas are not designed for backing in. I guess with all the SUVs the parking lots have become just another blind alleyway.

[RedMDer]

Click the link. The Republic you save may be your own.

[griswold3]

If Debtism ends, folks will not like the pain that accompanies the work that will be necessary.

[thesearethetimes...]

http://www.mailmagazine24.com/politics/04-2012/u-s-roads-and-bridges-being-built-by-chinese-companies-as-american-economy-teeters-on-collapse.html

May God guide our course out of this mess.
Tatt

[thesearethetimes...]

And today, Eric Cantor’s PAC backed Lugar.

They, (the RepublicanElite), simplyly refuse to listen to the message we have been sending since well before 2010, that we have had all we can take of the same old, same old. And I honestly believe they have no idea, that when it comes to forcing such an incredibly weak nominee as Romney on us, that they may well have pushed their LAST nominee - that if 0 gets back in, it may be our last election.

May God give us strength.
Tatt

[thesearethetimes...]

Heck, the IRS is after EVERYONE. TeaParty groups across the nation are being poked, and private citizens as well : /

Tatt

[Son House]

Good God ya’ll don’t have to be so paranoid, Democrats are going to get the economy moving;

http://twitter.com/#!/donnabrazile/status/195973635066953728

Donna Brazile “Democrats must get the economy to move fast enough in order to outrun the House Republican efforts to drag it down.”

[thesearethetimes...]

Dad? Is that you?

Wow. My father’s words from over 30 years ago... It is just as well that he has long since passed on. Our current state would NOT sit well with him : |

Dear Lord, please impress upon folks the serious nature of our situation.
Tatt