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?
Get ready for another major worldwide credit crunch. Today, the entire global financial system resembles a colossal spiral of debt. Just about all economic activity involves the flow of credit in some way, and so the only way to have “economic growth” is to introduce even more debt into the system.
When the system started to fail back in 2008, global authorities responded by pumping this debt spiral back up and getting it to spin even faster than ever. If you can believe it, the total amount of global debt has risen by $35 trillion since the last crisis.
Unfortunately, any system based on debt is going to break down eventually, and there are signs that it is starting to happen once again.
Since I began writing analysis for the liberty movement more than eight years ago, I have always said that we will know when the endgame of the globalists is upon us when the criminals come out into the light of day and admit to their crimes. At that moment, it will be because they no longer fear either the repercussions or their plans being obstructed.
As I plan to show in this installment of my series on the hidden fiscal collapse of America, the endgame has indeed arrived. At the very least, the international elites seem to think success is within their grasp, for they now openly expose their own criminality. But they do so in a way that attempts to divert blame or to rationalize their actions as being for the “greater good.”
What in the world are the elite up to? In recent days, we have learned that the New York Fed is moving a lot of operations to Chicago because of concerns about what a “natural disaster” could do, the federal government is buying 62 million rounds of ammunition commonly used in AR-15 semi-automatic rifles for “training” purposes, and NORAD is moving back into Cheyenne Mountain because it is “EMP-hardened”. In addition, government authorities have scheduled a whole host of unusual “training exercises” all over the nation.
So are the elite doing all of this in order to prepare for something really BIG, or should we just chalk up all of this strange activity to rampant government paranoia?
The very same people that caused the last economic crisishave created a 278 TRILLION dollar derivatives time bomb that could go off at any moment. When this absolutely colossal bubble does implode, we are going to be faced with the worst economic crash in the history of the United States.
During the last financial crisis, our politicians promised us that they would make sure that “too big to fail” would never be a problem again. Instead, as you will see below, those banks have actually gotten far larger since then. So now we really can’t afford for them to fail.
The six banks that I am talking about are JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. When you add up all of their exposure to derivatives, it comes to a grand total of more than 278 trillion dollars. But when you add up all of the assets of all six banks combined, it only comes to a grand total of about 9.8 trillion dollars. In other words, these “too big to fail” banks have exposure to derivatives that is more than 28 times greater than their total assets. This is complete and utter insanity, and yet nobody seems too alarmed about it. For the moment, those banks are still making lots of money and funding the campaigns of our most prominent politicians. Right now there is no incentive for them to stop their incredibly reckless gambling so they are just going to keep on doing it.
Did you know that the number of publicly traded companies declaring bankruptcy has reached a five-year high? And did you know that Chinese exports are absolutely collapsing and that Chinese economic growth in 2014 was the weakest in over 20 years?
Even though things may seem to be okay on the surface for the global economy at the moment, that does not mean that big trouble is not percolating just under the surface.
On Wednesday, investors cheered as stocks soared to new highs, but almost all of the economic news coming in from around the planet has been bad.
In the first three installments of this series, we examined the realities behind supply and demand, unemployment and personal debt, and national debt. As has been proven in each consecutive article with ample evidence, mainstream establishment numbers are, for the most part, utter garbage. They are not legitimate. They are meaningless.
The figures and stats that do have some truth to them are so obscured from the public view and unreported by the media that they may as well be state secrets. The average person has no clue of their existence because his primary sources of information are establishment-dominated. Even MSM talking heads and economic “analysts” are so mesmerized by the false version of the economic world that they have no point of reference when suddenly confronted with singular facts. Some people call this catastrophic behavior a “positive feedback loop.” It is a mainstream echo chamber that has become a financial tomb.
Now that I have covered the lies within our economy that I can prove absolutely, it is time to move on to the lies that are more difficult to pin down. These lies often slip past our investigations because the hard data that could be used to expose them is simply not available to the general public. In fact, much of the data is not even available to government officials. I am, of course, talking about the hard data behind the activities of central banks across the globe — the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve in particular. In this installment, we will explore the purpose of these lies; to hide the imminent destruction of our currency — by hook, by crook and by fiat.
The higher financial markets rise, the harder they fall. By any objective measurement, the stock market is currently well into bubble territory. Anyone should be able to see this – all you have to do is look at the charts. Sadly, most of us never seem to learn from history. Most of us want to believe that somehow “things are different this time”. Well, about the only thing that is different this time is that our economy is in far worse shape than it was just prior to the last major financial crisis. That means that we are more vulnerable and will almost certainly endure even more damage this time around.
It would be one thing if stocks were soaring because the U.S. economy as a whole was doing extremely well. But we all know that isn’t true. Instead, what we have been experiencing is clearly artificial market behavior that has nothing to do with economic reality. In other words, we are dealing with an irrational financial bubble, and all irrational financial bubbles eventually burst. And as I wrote about yesterday, the way that stocks have moved so far this year is eerily reminiscent of the way that stocks moved in early 2008. The warning signs are there – if you are willing to look at them.
With all of that job creation being claimed by the Obama administration and disseminated by mainstream media outlets as signs of a sustained recovery you’d think most college graduates would have no trouble keeping up with their bills.
But new data released by the Department of Education tell a different story.
According to the report as many as 33% of American college grads with student loan debt are now in delinquent status on their repayments.
When an economic crisis is coming, there are usually certain indicators that appear in advance. For example, commodity prices usually start to plunge before a recession begins. And as you can see from the Bloomberg Commodity Index which you can find right here, this has already been happening. In addition, I have previously written about how the U.S. dollar went on a great run just before the financial collapse of 2008. This is something that has also been happening over the past few months.
Some people would have you believe that nobody can anticipate the next great economic downturn and that to try to do so is just an exercise in “guesswork”. But that is not the case at all. We can look back over history and see patterns that keep repeating. And a lot of the exact same patterns that happened just before previous stock market crashes are happening again right now.
Just a few days ago, the bull market for the S&P 500 turned six years old. This six-year period of time has been great for investors, but what comes next?
On March 9th, 2009 the S&P 500 hit a low of 676.53. Since that day, it has risen more than 200 percent. As you will see below, there are only two other times within the last 100 years when the S&P 500 performed this well over a six-year time frame.
In both instances, the end result was utter disaster.
How do you know when you are about to be run down by a train? Well, typically you see it coming. What about when Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are about to blow up and you see the financial world flying off a cliff; how does one see that coming? Well, you can only see that after you have fallen and are tumbling toward planet earth, picking up speed as you fall!!
This is exactly the point that our financial system has reached. The Hypo bank in Austria was recently declared to be a zombie bank. The government of Austria had previously bailed out (read: taxpayers' money), Hypo bank, but the bank management thought they could beat the bookie and then pay off their debt if they could get one roll of the dice to fall in their favor. The dice had other plans and the gamble has not worked in Hypo’s favor. The problem with Hypo is they have all these government bonds on their books. The bonds are tied to the CDS and now we - the world, that is - are waiting to see if we are heading over the cliff or if the bankster mafia members are going to be able to work their magic and make the CDS go away. The only way the banksters were able to make the previous CDS crisis go away was to sacrifice Lehman Brothers and steal trillions of dollars from the American taxpayer. We will never be able to pay this debt. Ever. Debt jubilee, anyone?
We are only two months into 2015, and it has already proven to be the most volatile year for the economic environment since 2008-2009. We have seen oil markets collapsing by about 50 percent in the span of a few months (just as the Federal Reserve announced the end of QE3, indicating fiat money was used to hide falling demand), the Baltic Dry Index losing 30 percent since the beginning of the year, the Swiss currency surprise, the Greeks threatening EU exit (and now Greek citizens threatening violent protests with the new four-month can-kicking deal), and the effects of the nine-month-long West Coast port strike not yet quantified. This is not just a fleeting expression of a negative first quarter; it is a sign of things to come.
Are we at the tail end of the stock market bubble to end all stock market bubbles? Wall Street was full of glee Monday when the Nasdaq closed above 5000 for the first time since the peak of the dotcom bubble in March 2000. And almost everyone in the financial world seems convinced that things are somehow “different” this time around.
Even though by almost every objective measure stocks are wildly overpriced right now, and even though there are a whole host of signs that economic trouble is on the horizon, the overwhelming consensus is that this bull market is just going to keep charging ahead.
But of course that is what they thought just before the last two stock market crashes in 2001 and 2008 as well. No matter how many times history repeats, we never seem to learn from it.
When the coming economic crisis strikes, more than half the country is going to be financially wiped out within weeks. At this point, more than 60 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and a whopping 24 percent of the country has more credit card debt than emergency savings.
One of the primary principles that any of these “financial experts” that you see on television will teach you is to have a cushion to fall back on. At the very least, you never know when unexpected expenses like major car repairs or medical bills will come along. And in the event of a major economic collapse, if you do not have any financial cushion at all you will be a sitting duck.
Yes, I know that there are millions upon millions of families out there that are just trying to scrape by from month to month at this point. I hear from people that are deeply struggling in this economyall the time. So I don’t blame them for not being able to save lots of money. But if you are in a position to build up an emergency fund, you need to do so. We have been experiencing an extended period of relative economic stability, but it will not last. In fact, the time for getting prepared for the next great economic downturn is rapidly running out, and most Americans are not ready for it at all. The following are 14 signs that most Americans are flat broke and totally unprepared for the coming economic crisis…
On the surface, the United States is currently one of the stronger global economies.
But lurking beneath that may be an ‘impending crisis’ that threatens to drag everyone down with it.
That’s according to the Financial Times, who say that falling oil prices combined with a strong dollar (hence reduced trade in exports) and a likely increase in U.S. interest rates could contribute to the “familiar pattern” of economic slowdown. As Satyajit Das writes, “bankruptcies, defaults, banking problems and reduction in credit availability drive contagion.”
Earlier this week John Williams warned that hyperinflation will begin to appear in America sometime in 2015. He noted that, though the dollar is currently strong compared to other fiat money, signs that a currency collapse is coming will begin with the sell-off of the U.S. dollar.
It’s a known fact that the Russians and Chinese have already begun divesting themselves of dollar dependency by implementing trade agreements that completely sidestep the world’s reserve currency, but there has been no overt sign of a sell-off that might be indicative of a coming attack on our currency.
Europe is on the verge of a horrifying financial meltdown, and there are only a few short weeks left to avert total disaster. On Monday, talks that were supposed to bring about yet another temporary “resolution” to the Greek debt crisis completely fell apart. The new Greek government has entirely rejected the idea of a six-month extension of the current bailout.
The Greeks want a new deal which would enable them to implement the promises that have been made to the voters. But that is not going to fly with the Germans, among others. They expect the Greeks to fulfill the obligations that were agreed to previously. The two sides are not even in the same ballpark at this point, and things are starting to get very personal.
It is no secret that the new Greek government does not like the Germans, and the Germans are not particularly fond of the Greeks at this point. But unless they can find a way to work out a deal, things could get quite messy very rapidly.
America is choking on a corrupt monetary system designed to transfer wealth from the population to the banks and financial sector. It’s choking on central planning that stifles the free market. It’s choking on politicians who punish success and reward failure by playing Robin Hood with your income. It’s choking on a central bank with Keynesian economists who destroy the free market by manipulating the quantity of currency and interest rates, causing massive speculative bubbles that eventually burst, resulting in economic devastation. Then these clueless clowns rush in with more Keynesian stimulus and, while in the midst of the next bubble of their own creation that’s about to burst, they declare “You see! We saved you from the free market!”
Over the past decade, there has been only one other time when the value of the U.S. dollar has increased by so much in such a short period of time. That was in mid-2008 – just before the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression.
A surging U.S. dollar also greatly contributed to the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Today, the globe is more interconnected than ever. Most global trade is conducted in U.S. dollars, and much of the borrowing done by emerging markets all over the planet is denominated in U.S. dollars. When the U.S. dollar goes up dramatically, this can put a tremendous amount of financial stress on economies all around the world. It also has the potential to greatly threaten the stability of the 65 trillion dollars in derivatives that are directly tied to the value of the U.S. dollar.
The global financial system is more vulnerable to currency movements than ever before, and history tells us that when the U.S. dollar soars the global economy tends to experience a contraction. So the fact that the U.S. dollar has been skyrocketing lately is a very, very bad sign.
By Michael Snyder
