FedUpUSA

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Even though most Americans have become very frustrated with this economy, the reality is that the vast majority of them still have no idea just how bad our economic decline has been or how much trouble we are going to be in if we don’t make dramatic changes immediately.  If we do not educate the American people about how deathly ill the U.S. economy has become, then they will just keep falling for the same old lies that our politicians keep telling them.  Just “tweaking” things here and there is not going to fix this economy.  We truly do need a fundamental change in direction.  America is consuming far more wealth than it is producing and our debt is absolutely exploding.  If we stay on this current path, an economic collapse is inevitable.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers from 2011 that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.

At this time of the year, a lot of families get together, and in most homes the conversation usually gets around to politics at some point.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help you share the reality of the U.S. economic crisis with your family and friends.  If we all work together, hopefully we can get millions of people to wake up and realize that “business as usual” will result in a national economic apocalypse.

The following are 50 economic numbers from 2011 that are almost too crazy to believe….

#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.

#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or impoverished.

#3 If the number of Americans that “wanted jobs” was the same today as it was back in 2007, the “official” unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.

#4 The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.

#5 One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.

#6 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.

#7 Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation.

#8 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006.  Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.

#9 A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that approximately one out of every five Americans that do have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.

#10 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.

#11 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#12 Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.  In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.

#13 One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.

#14 The Federal Reserve recently announced that the total net worth of U.S. households declined by 4.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone.

#15 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.

#16 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages.  According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

#17 The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.

#18 In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percent from where they were at when the housing market peaked.

#19 Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 59 months in a row.

#20 If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.

#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant.  That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.

#22 New home construction in the United States is on pace to set a brand new all-time record low in 2011.

#23 As I have written about previously, 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.

#24 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

#25 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980.  Today they account for approximately 16.3%.

#26 One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.

#27 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#28 The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

#29 It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.

#30 The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse.  According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.

#31 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

#32 According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America’s biggest companies rose by 36.5% in just one recent 12 month period.

#33 Today, the “too big to fail” banks are larger than ever.  The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.

#34 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.

#35 According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.

#36 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

#37 A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7%) than has ever been measured before.

#38 Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007.

#39 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.

#40 Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America.  According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.

#41 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#42 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income.  Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.

#43 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits.  Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#44 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP.  Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.

#45 For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars.  That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.

#46 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.

#47 Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars.  When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.

#48 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#49 The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.

#50 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

Of course the heart of our economic problems is the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve is a perpetual debt machine, it has almost completely destroyed the value of the U.S. dollar and it has an absolutely nightmarish track record of incompetence.  If the Federal Reserve system had never been created, the U.S. economy would be in far better shape.  The federal government needs to shut down the Federal Reserve and start issuing currency that is not debt-based.  That would be a very significant step toward restoring prosperity to America.

During 2011 we made a lot of progress in educating the American people about our economic problems, but we still have a long way to go.

Hopefully next year more Americans than ever will wake up, because 2012 is going to represent a huge turning point for this country.

The Economic Collapse

The only way out of the Eurozone end-game is massive debt forgiveness and a return to national currencies. The first will destroy the banks, the second will destabilize the German export economy. “Extend and pretend” is an endgame, not a fix.

Despite having described why the Eurozone is doomed on numerous occasions, I missed certain dynamics of the EU’s endgame. At the risk of overwhelming you, here are a few of my Eurozone-related stories over the past two years:

The European Model Is Also Doomed (February 7, 2009)
When Debt-Junkies Go Broke, So Do Mercantilist Pushers (March 1, 2010)
Why the Euro Might Devolve into Euro1 and Euro2 (March 2, 2010)
Why the Eurozone Is Doomed (May 10, 2010)
Ireland, Please Do the World a Favor and Default (November 29, 2010)
Why The European Union Is Doomed (March 28, 2011)
Greece, Please Do The Right Thing: Default Now (June 1, 2011)
Why the Eurozone and the Euro Are Both Doomed (June 23, 2011)
Greece Is a Kleptocracy (June 28, 2011)
500 Million Debt-Serfs: The European Union Is a Neo-Feudal Kleptocracy (July 22, 2011)

Let’s dig into the dynamics of doom:

1. The consequences of austerity. The kleptocratic “fix” is to divert more  of the debtor nations’ national incomes to debt service. In other words, money that once went to labor (wages) and social services now goes to debt repayments and interest.

What are the consequences of this massive diversion of income?  The economy shrinks.Less income means less spending, which means negative growth.

The Eurozone’s “happy story” counts on debtor economies “growing their way out of debt.” If labor’s share of the national income is falling, and both private and government spending and income are falling, precisely where is the “growth” supposed to come from? As private income falls, tax revenues fall, causing the government to raise taxes and junk fees. This further reduces private income, and so on in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of contraction.

Austerity sets up a positive feedback loop of less income and less spending.The people in these debtor economies can look around and see the consequences: everyone has less money, and less confidence that the “austerity fix” will do anything but put debt-junkies into fatal withdrawal.

Once an economy becomes dependent on  debt that rises faster than the resulting “growth,”  then that economy is set on an unwavering path to implosion.  (The Cycle of Dependency and the Atrophy of Self-Reliance).

As belief in the system fades (When Belief in the System Fades March 12, 2008) and institutions lose their legitimacy  (The Three Ds: Delegitimization, Definancialization, Deglobalization July 1, 2011), then people naturally save more as insurance against an uncertain future.  Fewer people are willing to risk their capital in new ventures, and as the economy loses vitality then these trends reinforce each other.

2. This loss of faith and confidence triggers hoarding and capital flight. As Ludwig von Mises noted long ago, the only way to organically “grow” an economy is for capital to accumulate faster than the population, that is, capital increases on a per capita basis. Capital means savings/cash, not debt, that is invested in productive assets and enterprises.

So what happens when you skim more of a nation’s income to service debt? There is less capital accumulated, and thus less capital available for investment.

What happens when people lose faith in the financial institutions and their coercive “fixes”?They move their capital to less-risky, more productive climes. In other words, capital flight is another positive feedback: as people move their capital out of the country, then there is less available per capita for productive investment. Toss in a kleptocratic government which increases taxes while misallocating precious capital on crony Capitalism and corruption, and you get a death-spiral of capital flight and risk avoidance.

The irony of a loss of faith is people instinctively place their capital in non-productive savings: in gold, Swiss lock boxes, and so on. This instinct removes capital from the pool of investments in productive assets.

3. Taxes must be raised to fund higher debt service. There is no other way to service sovereign debts, so taxes must rise, adding another positive feedback to the contracting economy: higher taxes reduce net income, create disincentives to earning more via productive enterprises and incentivizing tax avoidance and capital flight.

4. The frantic rush by the EU and European Central Bank (ECB) into a domino-like series of short-term “fixes” effectively destroys the possibility of long-term solutions.Injecting more debt into debtor nations is like “fixing” the debt-junkie’s withdrawal symptoms with massive doses of euro-denominated smack: the “fix” dooms the “patient” in the long run, even as it “makes everything better” for a brief interlude of faux “normalcy.”

But like any other addiction, resistance to the “fixes” rises and the interludes  diminish in length.

The dynamics of austerity without massive debt renunciation doom the EU, and the dynamics of using taxpayer-funded debt to “fix” over-indebtedness also dooms the EU. Massive debt renunciation will doom the big European banks, and of course those banks are the raison d’etre for the entire project: it’s all about saving the banks, isn’t it?

5. These dynamics set up a double-bind endgame. The EU Overlords and the ECB can busily move their last knight around their king, but the game is already lost. Austerity triggers a positive feedback of economic contraction, debt fixes to over-indebtedness launches a cycle of diminishing returns, and the reliance on short-term fixes over long-term solutions sets off self-reinforcing  losses of legitimacy and faith in the system’s sustainability.

The only real solution to the Eurozone end-game is massive debt forgiveness and the resulting destruction of “too big to fail” banks, and a return to national currencies, which will enable structural imbalances to be resolved via currency devaluations. This will of course destabilize the German export economy; but that is inevitable.

“Extend and pretend” is an endgame,  not a fix.

Of Two Minds

The European Union would like us all to believe that they will be able to continue to shove all the bad debt under the rug.  They’d like the world to believe that government funded, socialist entitlement programs are sustainable forever, despite the fact that more people draw on the funds than pay for them.  They’d also like the world to believe that the answer to the insolvency problems of certain countries (Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal) is to just take money from those who are still solvent.  Well, the problem with socialists is eventually they run out of other people’s money – and eventually those who are stolen from get angry.

From The Brink of Total Financial Collapse by Michael Coffman, Ph.D. and Kristie Pelletier:

Other European banks have also loaned Greece tens of billions of dollars. It is extremely difficult to determine the exact amount, but private banks in the U.S., France and Germany all have about a $40 billion exposure (loss) if Greece defaults. They are currently rolling over the debt into new loans, hoping for the impossible – that Greece will recover, or they can shed their debt to some other institution, preferably their government’s central bank.

Then it becomes the liability of the people. (We’ve already seen how that works out with TARP – the banks profit, the people suffer). The central banks will provide unlimited liquidity to the banks suffering runs or default on Greek loans, thereby limiting the damage. However, the world could ride out the storm; albeit with some significant belt tightening. The downside is that if Greece defaults, the PIIG nations fall like dominos. Again, it is hard to estimate total private bank exposure, but Bloomberg estimated in April of 2011 that U.S. private banks held a $236.8 billion exposure. Bloomberg reports that European private banks hold over $1 trillion in Greek and Spanish debt alone.  Ironically, some economists are warning that Spain and Italy are very close to total collapse already. They believe that it may happen this year regardless of what happens in Greece.1 It is impossible to get accurate information from the central banks because they don’t 2 provide an accounting, but the exposure is likely in the many trillions of dollars. In the case of the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed), American citizens are liable for any bad debt incurred by the Fed.

This is not idle speculation. The Fed recently complied with a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed that all of the $630 billion Second Quantitative Easing (QE2) ending June 30 this year directly, or indirectly went to bailing out defaulting European banks, not to U.S. banks to help the U.S. economy. No wonder small business could not get loans! Tyler Durden, writing for zerohedge.com made this staggering conclusion:

In summary, instead of doing everything in its power to stimulate reserve, and thus cash, accumulation at domestic (US) banks which would in turn encourage lending to U.S. borrowers, the Fed has been conducting yet another stealthy foreign bank rescue operation, which rerouted $600 billion in capital from potential borrowers to insolvent foreign financial institutions in the past 7 months.

QE2 was nothing more (or less) than another European bank rescue operation!  (Original in bold) Durden also provides evidence that the Fed has done this in the past to bail out the European Central Bank as well as many other private European banks. These machinations have saved Europe from going under already. However, there is no way either private or central banks can weather a PIIGS default storm. Trillions of dollars would soon disappear from the balance sheets of hundreds of private and central banks in Europe and the United States. As banks directly affected by the PIIGS’ defaults begin to fail themselves, their failure will set off a domino effect, seriously affecting banks not directly involved.

As I write this the DOW is down 178, the S&P is down 19, and the Nasdaq 100 is down 32, all well more than 1%.  In addition volume is more than 10:1 down on the NYSE and about 8:1 on the Nasdaq.

It’s a bloody day in the markets.

But one problem is apparent – the TNX, or 10 year Treasury bond interest rate, is actually up about 0.2% on the day, and the 30 year is up 1% in yield.

They shouldn’t be.

When investors get nervous about stocks, they usually flow to bonds.  Today, they’re not.  They’re buying Gold instead which is up just under 1%, or silver, which is up 3.2%, both on the day.

These correlations have been solid for a long time.  Now they’re failing.  This failure is telling you something – that our Congress and President had better get their heads out in the daylight instead of up their respective asses, and they better do it soon.

Oh sure, we’re not seeing the sort of out-of-control ramp in government bond rates that Italy has seen the last few weeks.

Yet.

But remember the 1930s.  A bank called Creditanstalt turned what was a nasty stock market crash and credit contraction into a global Depression.

Regulators then, as now, ignored the crash’s warnings and refused to force those who were not properly capitalized to close.  They allowed people to double into bad bets.  Those bad bets compounded, and when the economy started to slip for real, instead of just on paper, the leverage they were carrying, both that which everyone knew about and that which people did not, ultimately blew them up.

Now we have a “little bank” in Italy that is teetering on the same edge – Unicredit.  It is too big to bail out – it holds hundreds of billions in liabilities.  There’s no money available to bail them out and the time to resolve them, as with our banks, was two and three years ago.

The risks are extremely high here folks.  I know many have laughed at my warnings for the last three years and have hooted and hollered as the stock market “recovered”, buoyed by yet more cheap money.  But during this the coverage of government debt with employment has not recovered at all – in fact, it’s worse now by far than it was in 2008.

So now what’s available in terms of policy tools?  There’s no funds available to bail people out, and a bank of that size isn’t able to be bailed out anyway in reality – all you can do is lie and hope people believe it.  But the market is calling all the bluffs now, one after another.

Remember 2008?  Buffet was going to buy the world.  Then it was Korea’s Development Bank.  Both, and many more yarns that were spun, were lies.  Those who believed got skinned alive in the collapse that followed.

If you think it can’t happen again, you’re wrong.  It both can and will, and nobody will be held to account for the lies they tell, just as they weren’t the last time.

Our government isn’t helping.  We should have taken all the big banks into receivership and went through every one of their alleged “assets” in 2008, forcing them to prove by independent valuation that they were holding them at reasonable valuations and that their “credit insurance” was backed by someone with 100% of the actual cash required to pay.  We didn’t, because Paulson and Geithner both knew that under such a standard not one of the big banks would survive.

So instead of forcing bondholders to eat it, which is what should have happened, they rolled the dice.  They bet that there would not be another Creditanstalt.

This is now looking like a bet they are going to lose.

The government borrows about 40 cents of every dollar it spends at present.  This means two things:

• There is more than enough money coming in to pay the debt and interest that matures. Therefore, a default would be an intentional act by Tim Geithner, much as it is when you decide not to pay your mortgage (despite having the money to do so.)  Selective default is a choice, but it is a freely-entered into choice. What Geithner is doing is threatening an intentional, strategic default if he doesn’t get his (and Obama’s) way.
• If the government does not get its debt increase it must immediately balance the budget. This is good, not bad, in the intermediate and longer term.

The problem is that this situation also exposes the truth, which nobody wants to face in Congress: Whether you raise taxes or cut spending the economic impact is the same – 12% of GDP disappears.

Greenspan was also pessimistic about the U.S. deficit talks, saying he didn’t think Congress would reach an agreement on raising the debt ceiling by the Aug 2 deadline.

“We’re going to get up to Aug 2 and I think on that night, we are not going to have the issue solved,” he said.

If that happens, he said, the U.S. would have to continue paying debt holders or risk major damage in global financial markets. As a result, “we will default on everything else.”

I remain amused by the complete silliness of statements coming from ECB officials. At best ECB proclamations are laughable, at worst they are completely counterproductive.

With that introduction, please consider ECB’s Mersch says Greek default would bring “chaos”

European Central Bank Governing Council member Yves Mersch said on Saturday a Greek sovereign debt default would lead to chaos, adding it was up to the parliament to deliver on its austerity promises.

Banks and policymakers moved closer to a deal on Friday to help Athens secure funds ahead of a parliamentary vote on austerity next week that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou must win to avert default.

If the vote next week is lost, international lenders are unlikely to release a 12 billion euros funding tranche, meaning the government will run out of cash within days.

“Now it’s up to the Greek parliament. I observe,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the Bank for International Settlements annual meeting in Basel.

“The next step will be to observe whether there will be delivery.”

When he asked about what would happen if Greece defaulted, Mersch said: “Chaos.”

Greece Default Irrelevant

Here is a succinct summation of the current state of Euro-Zone affairs.

1. Greece will default, but at this point it is irrelevant.
2. The situation in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy is now so dire that it is does not matter whether or not Greece defaults.
3. Expect chaos

Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Global Economic Analysis