Free Republic

Military spending helped prop up November's headline figure. Orders for defense capital goods surged 44.4% last month including a 46.9% increase in orders for defense aircraft and parts. Excluding defense, orders for durable goods fell 1.5% in November after increasing 3.0% in October. Durable-goods orders excluding the often-volatile transportation category fell 0.1% in November from the prior month after rising 0.5% in October. A closely watched proxy for how much businesses are spending on new equipment-orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft-fell 0.4% in November from the prior month after rising by a downwardly revised 0.6% in October. New orders...

Kraft Heinz To Close Seven Plants, Cut 2,600 Jobs Thu, 11/05/2015 - 9:37am Andy Szal, Digital Reporter Kraft Heinz on Wednesday announced that it will close seven facilities and cut 2,600 jobs as part of its continued efforts to reduce costs. The plan includes shuttering the nearly century-old Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, Wisconsin, which houses the company's U.S. meats business. The meats operation will instead move to Chicago along with about 250 of the plant's workforce of more than 1,000. Kraft Heinz will move its Illinois office from the former Kraft headquarters in suburban Northfield to downtown Chicago early...

Target plans to close 13 stores nationwide, most in the Midwest where the store has its roots. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based retailer says a decision to close a store usually follows several years of decreasing profitability. The retail giant plans to close the stores on January 30, 2016. The 13 are among Target's nearly 1,800 stores in the U.S.

By one dismal measure, America is joining the likes of Third World countries. The number of U.S. residents who are struggling to survive on just $2 a day has more than doubled since 1996, placing 1.5 million households and 3 million children in this desperate economic situation. That's according to "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America," a book from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that will be released on Sept. 1. The measure of poverty isn't arbitrary -- it's the threshold the World Bank uses to measure global poverty in the developed world. While it may be the...

That is a 3.12% loss in a single day. 5.18% today and yesterday. To put that in perspective between 750 billion and 1 trillion dollars in market value were just wiped out in two days in the U.S. alone. And it isn't even September yet. It is about to get really, really ugly. CNBC is reporting that China's market is now mirroring 1929, and we could see the Chinese market crash a further 9% over just the next 4-5 days. Again I'll ask you: is your treasure in Heaven or on earth? You can't eat your gold, your silver, or...

Macy's Inc. on Wednesday cut its sales guidance for the year after reporting steeper-than-expected slides in sales and profit in its second quarter. Chief Executive Terry J. Lundgren said the company was disappointed with its second-quarter results, but said Macy's expects improvement in the second half of the year.

The heavy federal hand in the housing market has been a disaster. Despite spending more than $13,000 for every household, Washington has record low homeownership to show for it, even among the middle class. In fact, a just-released report by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies not only finds more middle-class families renting but many also struggling to make rent, as homeownership rates plunge lower than ever. This is as shocking as it is depressing. It used to be that the middle class owned homes. Now it's increasingly feeling "the strain of rising rents," the reports says, as foreclosures and...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. economy went into reverse in the first three months of this year as a severe winter and a widening trade deficit took a harsher toll than initially estimated. The Commerce Department says the overall economy as measured by the gross domestic product contracted at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the January-March period. The revised figure, even weaker than the government's initial estimate of a 0.2 percent growth rate, reflects a bigger trade gap and slower consumer spending. It marked the first decline since a 2.1 percent contraction in the first three months of...

About 10% of adults of working age have at best marginal ties with the economy ___ Last month, when Baltimore was burning after a young African-American man died in police custody (six officers were subsequently charged), I did a Google search to find what David Simon thought about it. Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was the creator and show runner of “The Wire,” which ran for five seasons on HBO and which Entertainment Weekly called the greatest television show ever. It was a brilliant narrative of the struggle for survival in a violent, drug-riddled Baltimore neighborhood much...

Rebounding from a dismal start to the year, the U.S. economy added 223,000 jobs in April, a solid gain that suggested that employers are helping fuel a durable if still subpar recovery. The job growth helped lower the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent in March, the Labor Department said Friday. That is the lowest rate since May 2008, six months into the Great Recession. The figures provided some reassurance that the economy is recovering from a harsh winter and other temporary headwinds that likely caused it to shrink in the first three months of the year. Yet...

You’ll never hear the Obama administration pass on an opportunity to gloat about the miracles they think they’ve managed to pull off over the past seven years to get America’s economy back on track. The only problem with that is, it’s not remotely true. Somehow, the spin doctors at the White House always manage to cherry pick rare instances of economic improvement and turn them into something much bigger. If you want a real indication of how President Barack Obama’s economy is fairing, just look to a recent report that shows a coming “retail apocalypse,” with major retailers across the...

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog, If the U.S. economy really is improving, then why are big U.S. retailers permanently shutting down thousands of stores? The “retail apocalypse” that I have written about so frequently appears to be accelerating. As you will see below, major U.S. retailers have announced that they are closing more than 6,000 locations, but economic conditions in this country are still fairly stable. So if this is happening already, what are things going to look like once the next recession strikes? For a long time, I have been pointing to 2015 as a...

Sam Ro4-5-2015 Since the beginning of the year, the pace of growth in numerous US economic indicators deteriorated significantly, so much so that many of these metrics even fell short of economists' expectations. Weirdly, the pace of jobs growth had been resilient even amid unexpected plunges in key measures like retail sales and durable goods orders, reports which reflected weakness in both consumers and businesses. However, this weirdness has begun to work itself out. On Friday, we learned the US economy added just 126,000 jobs in March, missing expectations for 245,000 new jobs. You have to go all the way...

In the seventh year of Barack Obama's administration, the economy is still getting failing grades that have been the hallmark of his trouble-filled presidency. While he continues to go about the country telling voters that his policies are working, this week's dreary economic data tell a far different story. The bleak headlines in the nation's major newspapers tell the story in its bluntest terms. "Stocks fall on disappointing economic data," said USA Today. "U.S. stocks fall on weak economic data," blares The Wall Street Journal, with this subhead: "Private payrolls rise less than expected in March, adding to concerns about...

RUSH: It is amazing, folks. It's once again amazing how we were blatantly lied to in January and February about the unemployment numbers and the overall economy. Blatantly lied to. And we're being blatantly lied to about whatever or not is happening in this Iranian deal to boot. JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it's Open Line Friday! RUSH: And, of course, the piece de resistance, we are being lied to about what's happening in Indiana. Every day, every day we have to devote time here to straightening out the lies that are told by the Democrat Party...

Consumer spending is often called an engine of the United States economy. That engine may be about to blow a gasket. Consumers are sitting on their wallets. The government reported Monday that personal consumption expenditures -- aka consumer spending -- rose just 0.1% in February. That follows two months of declines of 0.2%. It comes at a time when people actually do have a little bit more money to spend. In the same report, the government said disposable personal incomes rose 0.4% in February, after rising 0.5% in January and 0.3% in December.

David Alan Stockman interviewed on CBS-TV 60 Minutes (October 2010) Highlights of recent interview by Harry Dent. David Stockman: People don't want to hear the reality and the truth that we're facing. But I think there is an enormous appetite out in the country to get a different perspective than what you have from the media day in and day out, so I say the fed is out of control. Its balance sheet is exploded. It's printing money like never before. Zero interest rates for 70 months have basically destroyed the pricing function in the financial markets. I said...

A few weeks back we commented on the rather disturbing news that repeat foreclosures jumped in January: (link at source) Now, a new report from Zillow seems to offer further evidence that the US housing market may not be the picture of health after all (as if we needed more proof after housing starts cratered 17% in February). The percentage of homeowners underwater in the US was flat from Q3 to Q4 which doesn’t sound all that terrible until you consider that this figure had fallen for 10 consecutive quarters. Things look particularly bad in Florida and the midwest where...

(CNSNews.com) -- The U.S. has a $210 trillion “fiscal gap” and “may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff told members of the Senate Budget Committee in written and oral testimony on Feb. 25. “The first point I want to get across is that our nation is broke,” Kotlikoff testified. “Our nation’s broke, and it’s not broke in 75 years or 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today. "Indeed, it may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece," he said. (See...

Societe Generale's notoriously bearish strategist, Albert Edwards, has poured scorn on the belief that the U.S. economy is recovering and predicts "violent" reactions in asset markets during the second half of 2015. "The downturn in U.S. profits is accelerating and it is not just an energy or U.S. dollar phenomenon – a broad swathe of U.S. economic data has disappointed in February," he said in a research note published Thursday. U.S. indexes have continued to hit all-time highs this year and the Nasdaq is also looking to break through a level last seen at the peak of the tech bubble...