In truth, if you’ve been reading this blog, and the websites and books recommended here, you know this whole thing started years ago, lug-nuts beginning to loosen and slowly rotate without any change being noted by the vast majority of Americans. But, it’s hard to ignore the problem now.
The credit crisis has flared and is now building again in intensity. The stock market, when it opens today (in about an hour from this writing) will almost certainly crash, possibly big.
The European and Japanese stock markets have “been mauled,” on what could very well be known in the years that come as “Black Friday,” or maybe “Bloody Friday.” Whatever the case, it won’t be pretty.
This week has seen a LOT of building bad news. Unemployment projections are looking bad. The snowball of advertising cancellations for November and December, where advertisers cancel already placed advertising orders with radio and television stations and newspapers. Massive layoff talk has been out in the open this week. Despite the fact that oil prices are tumbling, and with them, the price of gas at the pump, economic activity is quickly winding down.
Also out in the open in the news this week, has been talk of state and local tax shortfalls. When there’s lower economic activity, tax revenues fall, and so the amount of money states and cities have to spend on services falls pretty fast. This causes more layoffs, and since in many areas, states and cities are high headcount employers, the problem spirals and can crash pretty quickly.
Which it is most certainly doing.
Posted in
Economy Tags:
Depression,
Economy,
Financial Crisis,
Recession,
Unemployment
—WCN Warning: Economic/Terrorist event possible—
The House of Mis-Representatives have stolen $700 Billion of yours, mine, and our children’s money. Not to “rescue Main Street,” as this breakers of faith state, but rather to bailout Wall Street gamblers bankers and foreign banks that gambled, trying to get in on the mortgage game. The sad thing is these foreign banks will reportedly be able to offload their bad foreign debt on to us as well. In essence, we’re paying for mortages in Europe and China that those consumers couldn’t pay for. The mortgage fiasco isn’t an exclusively American problem.
Michael Panzer of Financial Armageddon on the disasterous bill.
From Jim Sinclair of JSMineset:
Dear International Friends,
Maybe you should consider a visit to your local bank for their abbreviated Saturday hours.. What do you have to lose? That all depends on how much you have deposited there…
I have no doubt that $1650 will come. My concern is not that it will not happen, but that I am much too conservative in my long-term price objective held since 2000.
If major banks can be torn apart how can we have faith in the small local institutions that hold most of your ready cash?
When I said “This is IT,” it is not something that I take lightly. Never in 49 years in finance have I seen a set of circumstances so challenging to the man in the street.
What I am getting at is a simple question. Are you prepared? You have heard us talk repeatedly on removing financial intermediaries between you and your assets, but the time has come for us to recommend going one step further:
Hold enough cash at your household to last you a month or two. It may be largely unnecessary for the majority, but what do you have to lose? If your bank should fail this will save you a lot of grief in the short term. If they do not, you still have all your cash that can easily be deposited back into your account.
Good advice.
Scott Simon, of NPR’s Weekend Edition had a great interview with Libertarian Presidential Candidate Bob Barr. It’s such a shame that our Republic has been hijacked by this “two parties who are really one” as many people believe.
In a way, it’s like our country has liver disease. Your liver acts as a filter that detoxifies the blood. If not for the service of that essential organ, we would (and do, when we do enough damage to it) die. The toxins, infiltered, kill us. The media in our Republic could, and pretends to, act as a liver, showing the toxins for what they are, and allowing the body (you and me) to remove those toxins from influence, by voting them out of office, charging them with crimes and misdemeanors, etc.
Unfortunately, our mainstream media doesn’t do it’s job of unmasking these opportunistic “infections” and “toxins” in the form of career politicians, crooks and liars who take up residence in Washington, DC and pass law after law that enriches them and their friends and allies (on both sides of the political aisle, by the way) and hands us the bill. You got a $700B bill yesterday, and I guarantee you, it won’t be the last. But we’re on the hook, and the next looming catastrophe if the ransom isn’t paid will be much bigger. Bet on it. Sadly, our Republic’s “liver” has gone rogue, and is filtering out the antibodies we need (the Ron Pauls and Bob Barrs) and opening the gates to the true toxins, the Barack Hussein Obamas and Joe Bidens of our world.
As of today, the America I was born into, in which I was raised and fairly well educated, is gone. The world, aided by the very people we elect and trust to protect and govern us, has found a way to dump its financial toxins here, in a bizarre twist on what we’re often accused of doing to other countries and regions in more physical ways. We’ve been accused of dumping tons of depleted uranium in Iraq through the Bush (Sr. and Jr.) wars. Friday’s vote by the House of Representatives does the financial equivalent of dumping $700B of “depleted mortgages” on these shores. These mortgages will be on London flats, French commercial buildings, German multiplexs and probably Chinese high-rises.
What history has to say about all this, we’ll have to wait a few decades to read. But, barring drastic and dramatic political action, the America I grew up in is on life support, suffering greatly from acute liver failure, in dire need of a transplant. What I fear, is that our nation and society’s medical history, so full of unhealthy lifestyle, overconsumption of the very toxins killing us, is keeping us off the transplant list.
Plus, our medical insurance is at best, bad and at worst, bankrupt.
Posted in
Economy,
Politics Tags:
$700 Billion Bailout,
Economy,
Financial Crisis,
Financial Rescue,
Paulson,
Wallstreet Bailout