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Archive for the ‘Employment’ Category

Non-Manufacturing ISM: Rocket Fuel

Just as the market was starting to flag a bit on the NFP number here comes services ISM and blows out the bears’ teeth.

The report was issued today by Anthony Nieves, C.P.M., CFPM, chair of the Institute for Supply Management™ Non-Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. “The NMI registered 56.8 percent in January, 3.8 percentage points higher than the seasonally adjusted 53 percent registered in December, and indicating continued growth at a faster rate in the non-manufacturing sector. The Non-Manufacturing Business Activity Index registered 59.5 percent, which is 3.6 percentage points higher than the seasonally adjusted 55.9 percent reported in December, reflecting growth for the 30th consecutive month. The New Orders Index increased by 4.8 percentage points to 59.4 percent, and the Employment Index increased by 7.6 percentage points to 57.4 percent, indicating substantial growth in employment after one month of contraction. The Prices Index increased 1.5 percentage points to 63.5 percent, indicating prices increased at a slightly faster rate in January when compared to December. According to the NMI, 12 non-manufacturing industries reported growth in January. Respondents’ comments are mostly positive about business conditions. There is concern about cost pressures and the sustainability of the recent spike in activity.”

I’m surprised by this number – particularly the employment index, which is not congruent with the household survey.  In addition the prices number is trouble.

But it is what it is, and the market loved it (as expected with a beat of this type), so for today the right thing to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

Reality will intrude when you look at the size of government and its fiscal demands given the employment participation rate, but today is not the day — the junkie got his fix, the needle went in and was loaded with heroin, and he’s up and dancing on both the TV and in the markets.

The Market-Ticker

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Non-Farm Payroll Report – Abysmal

 

Full report (PDF).

The important bit:

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+54,000) in May, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains continued in professional and business services, health care, and mining. Employment levels in other major private-sector industries were little changed, and local government employment continued to decline.

A bit more commentary from The Market-Ticker about the actual report:

The household data showed a small increase in employment, most of it coming from “not in labor force” decrease, and accounting for seasonal variation it was immaterial:

The problem with the “not in labor force” numbers is that they’re highly seasonal; monthly they improved, but annually they’re flat.  In other words, that’s seasonal delta and not a reason to cheer; on an annualized basis there has been no material change since the beginning of 2010 and the number of “not in labor force” folks continue to rise every month.

The employment rate of the population, the key number for tax revenues, is showing the same bounce we saw last year – and if it’s playing out the same way then this should be the peak month in that bounce.  That’s bad.

If you’re looking for a piece of good news in the numbers, there was one tiny bit of it: six cents of hourly wage increase and U-6 ticked down one tenth.  But that’s all.  The diffusion indices collapsed, down more than 11 points to 53.6 with the manufacturing diffusion index off a near-even 10 points.

$1.7 trillion in deficit spending, $600 billion in QE2, over $4.5 trillion in deficit spending in aggregate over three years and we not only haven’t fixed the employment problem we’re still doing QE2 and now the heroin is doing nothing at the current dose as the addict has once again built tolerance and the negative effects continue to accumulate.

The real problem that has been going on, but only just now are people beginning to understand, is that real wages have been declining all the while prices have been going up.  Prices have been going up for ONE REASON:  the Federal Reserve has been devaluing the dollar by printing more of them and giving them to the banks in order to hide their insolvency.  You see, these mechanisms are perpetual bailouts for Wall Street, and it is DESTROYING the real economy – i.e. your production, your income, your wages. Don’t believe me?  See below:

Most of us know how horrific things were for people during the Great Depression.  Now consider the fact that things are much WORSE and much harder for people RIGHT NOW!  What we have been experiencing since 2008 is far worse than the Great Depression, despite what the government and the mainstream media have tried to force you to believe through their manipulation of the data and their outright lies in their commentary thereto.  In actuality, over the past DECADE, real private-sector wage-growth has scraped the bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, during the Great Depression!  So, your reality and what the government wants you to think are two entirely different things.

Simply put, during the Great Depression the government did not interfere with prices of goods by printing money.  They allowed prices to fall in response to real demand, thereby allowing the majority of people to at least afford essential items for daily living.  If you had a job during the Great Depression, your standard of living actually increased because of falling prices.  If you didn’t have a job, most likely you had some savings that would tide you over.  Now, unless you have a government job, like these 77,000 federal workers who are paid more than state governors, your standard of living is not only falling, you are now having difficulty paying for daily essentials like food, heating your home, and gasoline for your car to actually get to and from work.

This is what happens when the government (through the Federal Reserve) tries to manipulate the free market.  In this case, all of the manipulation is due to Wall Street and our insolvent banking sector.  We truly have a government by the few and for a very elite few.  If you’re working for the government or Wall Street, you’re doing fine.  The rest of us are living in something far worse than the Great Depression – we’ll call it the Greater Depression, or better yet, call it what it is:  the largest looting operation in the history of humanity.  We no longer have capitalism; we have fascism.  This is precisely how the middle class is being destroyed.  Soon, there will only be the 1% at the very top and 99% of us at the very bottom, with nothing in between.  Welcome to reality.

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50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy

 

Right now, we are witnessing a truly historic collapse of the economy, and yet most Americans do not understand what is going on.  One of the biggest reasons why the American people do not understand what is happening to the economy is because our politicians and the mainstream media are not telling the truth.  Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keep repeating the phrase “economic recovery” over and over, and this is really confusing for most Americans because things sure don’t seem to be getting much better where they live.  There are millions upon millions of Americans that are sitting at home on their couches right now wondering why they lost their jobs and why nobody will hire them.  Millions of others are wondering why the only jobs they can get are jobs that a high school student could do.  Families all across America are wondering why it seems like their wages never go up but the price of food and the price of gas continue to skyrocket.  We are facing some very serious long-term economic problems in this country, and we need to educate the American people about why the collapse of the economy is happening.  If the American people don’t understand why they are losing their jobs, why they are losing their homes and why they are drowning in debt then they are going to keep on doing all of the same things that they have been doing.  They will also keep sending the same idiot politicians back to Washington to represent us.  There are some fundamental things about the economy that every American should know.  The American people need to be shocked out of their entertainment-induced stupor long enough to understand what is really going on and what needs to be done to solve our nightmarish economic problems.  If we do not wake up enough Americans in time, the economic collapse that is coming could tear this nation to shreds.

The U.S. economy was once the greatest economic machine in modern world history.  It was truly a wonder to behold.  It worked so well that entire generations of Americans came to believe that America would enjoy boundless prosperity indefinitely.

But sadly, prosperity is not guaranteed for any nation.  Over the past several decades, some very alarming long-term economic trends have developed that are absolutely destroying the economy.  If dramatic changes are not made soon, a complete and total economic collapse will be unavoidable.

Unfortunately, the American people will never agree to fundamental changes to our economic and financial systems unless they are fully educated about what is causing our problems.  We have turned our backs on the principles of our forefathers and the principles of those that founded this nation.  We have rejected the ancient wisdom that was handed down to us.

It has been said that those that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.

We are about to experience the consequences of decades of really bad decisions.

Hopefully we can get the American people to wake up.

The following are 50 things that every American should know about the collapse of the economy….

#1 Do you remember how much was made of the “Misery Index” during the presidency of Jimmy Carter?  At that time, the “Misery Index” was constantly making headlines in newspapers all across the country.  Well, according to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, if we calculated unemployment and inflation the same way that we did back during the Carter administration, then the Misery Index today would actually be higher than at any point during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

#2 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of about 5 million Americans were being hired every single month during 2006.  Today, an average of about 3.5 million Americans are being hired every single month.

#3 According to the Wall Street Journal, there are 5.5 million Americans that are currently unemployed and yet are not receiving unemployment benefits.

#4 All over America, state and local governments are selling off buildings just to pay the bills.  Investors can now buy up government-owned power plants, prisons and municipal buildings from coast to coast.  For example, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey recently sold off 16 government buildings (including the police and fire headquarters) just to pay some bills.

#5 When Americans think of “government debt”, most of them only think of the federal government, but it is not just the federal government that has a massive debt problem.  State and local government debt has reached an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP.

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

#7 Credit card usage in the United States is on the increase once again.  During the month of March, revolving consumer credit jumped 2.9%.  Sadly, it looks like Americans have not learned their lessons about the dangers of credit card debt.

#8 Last year, Social Security ran a deficit for the first time since 1983, and the “Social Security deficits” in future years are projected to be absolutely horrific.

#9 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than they were projecting just last year.

#10 Right now we are watching what could potentially be the worst Mississippi River flood ever recorded play out right in front of our eyes.  One agricultural economist at Mississippi State University believes that this disaster could do 2 billion dollars of damage just to farms alone.

#11 The “tornadoes of 2011” that we just saw in the southeast United States are being called the worst natural disaster that the U.S. has seen since Hurricane Katrina.  It has been estimated that up to 25 percent of all of the poultry houses in Alabama were either significantly damaged or destroyed.  It is also believed that millions of birds were killed.

#12 The economic effects of the BP oil spill just seem to go on and on and on.  The number of very sick fish in the Gulf of Mexico is really starting to alarm scientists.  The following is how one local newspaper recently described the situation….

Scientists are alarmed by the discovery of unusual numbers of fish in the Gulf of Mexico and inland waterways with skin lesions, fin rot, spots, liver blood clots and other health problems.

#13 The number of “low income jobs” in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 30 years and they now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States.

#14 All over America, hospitals that care for the poor and needy are so overwhelmed and are so broke that they are being forced to shut down.  Recently, a local newspaper in Florida ran an article about two prominent charity hospitals in Illinois that have served the poor for more than 100 years but are now asking for permission to shut down….

Two charity hospitals in Illinois are facing a life-or-death decision. There’s not much left of either of them – one in Chicago’s south suburbs, the other in impoverished East St. Louis – aside from emergency rooms crowded with patients seeking free care. Now they would like the state’s permission to shut down.

#15 The U.S. dollar is in such bad shape that now even Steve Forbes is predicting that the U.S. is “likely” to go back to a gold standard within the next five years.

#16 Most Americans don’t realize how much the U.S. dollar has been devalued over the years.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $115.93 today.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $454.36 today.

#17 Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.

#18 U.S. oil companies will bring in about $200 billion in pre-tax profits this year.  They will also receive about $4.4 billion in specialized tax breaks from the U.S. government.

#19 It is being projected that for the first time ever, the OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year.  Their biggest customer is the United States.

#20 According to the Pentagon, there are minerals worth over a trillion dollars under the ground in Afghanistan.  Now, J.P. Morgan is starting to tap those riches with the help of the U.S. military.

#21 Speaking of J.P. Morgan, most Americans don’t realize that they are actually the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States.  In fact, the more Americans that go on food stamps the more money that J.P. Morgan makes.

#22 When 2007 began, there were about 26 million Americans on food stamps.  Today, there are over 44 million on food stamps, and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#23 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#24 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

#25 The financial system is more vulnerable today than it was back in 2008 before the financial panic. Today, the world financial system has been turned into a giant financial casino where bets are made on just about anything you can possibly imagine, and the major Wall Street banks make a ton of money from this betting system.  The system is largely unregulated (the new “Wall Street reform” law has only changed this slightly) and it is totally dominated by the big international banks. The danger from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”. It is estimated that the “derivatives bubble” is somewhere in the neighborhood of a quadrillion dollars, and once it pops there isn’t going to be enough money in the entire world to bail everyone out.

#26 Between December 2000 and December 2010, the United States ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars with the rest of the world, and the U.S. has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976.

#27 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the U.S. trade deficit with China is now 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.

#28 In 2010, the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.

#29 All over the United States, many of our once great manufacturing cities are being transformed into hellholes.  In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 70 schools are being permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas.

#30 During the first three months of this year, less new homes were sold in the U.S. than in any three month period ever recorded.

#31 New home sales in the United States are now down 80% from the peak in July 2005.

#32 America’s real estate crisis just seems to get worse and worse.  U.S. home prices have now fallen a whopping 33% from where they were at during the peak of the housing bubble.

#33 According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.

#34 The European debt crisis could cause a global financial collapse like the one that we saw in 2008 at any time.  The world economy is incredibly interconnected today, and the United States would not be immune.  A recent IMF report stated the following about the growing sovereign debt crisis in Europe….

Strong policy responses have successfully contained the sovereign debt and financial-sector troubles in the euro area periphery so far. But contagion to the core euro area and then onward to emerging Europe remains a tangible risk.

#35 According to one study, the 50 U.S. state governments are collectively 3.2 trillion dollars short of what they need to meet their pension obligations.

#36 A different study has shown that individual Americans are $6.6 trillion short of what they need to retire comfortably.

#37 The cost of college tuition in the United States has gone up by over 900 percent since 1978.

#38 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%.

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

#40 The combined debt of the major GSEs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae) has increased from 3.2 trillion in 2008 to 6.4 trillion in 2011.  Thanks to our politicians, U.S. taxpayers are standing behind that debt.

#41 The U.S. government is over 14 trillion dollars in debt and the budget deficit for this year is projected to be about 1.5 trillion dollars.  However, if the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion each and every year.

#42 Most Americans don’t understand that the Federal Reserve and the debt-based monetary system that it runs are at the very heart of our economic problems.  All of this debt is absolutely crushing us.  The U.S. government spent over 413 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2010, and it is being projected that the U.S. government will be shelling out 900 billion dollars just in interest on the national debt by the year 2019.

#43 Standard & Poor’s has altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and is warning that the U.S. could soon lose its AAA rating.

#44 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income.  Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.

#45 U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

#46 59 percent of all Americans now receive money from the federal government in one form or another.

#47 According to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans believed that the economy was “getting better” at this time last year.  Today, that number is at just 27 percent.

#48 The wealthiest 1% of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States.

#49 The poorest 50% of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#50 The percentage of millionaires in Congress is more than 50 times higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population.

The Economic Collapse

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Introducing The We R Screwed Indicator

 

Those who have read my work for a while know that I strongly support environmental and wage-parity tariffs.  I do not consider this “protectionism”, but rather leveling the playing field for those nations that corporations intentionally exploit through both near-slave labor conditions and the ability to dump pollutants into the air and water (not to mention poisoning their workers) as a means of “competing” with US workers and manufacturing.  They then export their products back here and claim to be geniuses.

This is the evidence for my position.

This chart shows the annualized (that is, seasonality removed) change in employment adjusted for population change.

One must always look at employment ex population changes.  If you add 1 million people of working age to the population then you must subtract them out of the employed figures to figure out whether your workforce, as a percentage of the total working-age population, is growing or shrinking.  This is essential since those who are not working but of working age are a huge net drain on the government and economy.

The claims that we are “net beneficiaries” of off-shoring, that H1B Visas make us “more competitive” in our corporations, and that we’re “doing ok” in regard to our employment situation when one ignores the recession we just went through are proved utterly fallacious by this chart.

In point of fact even during the “boom times” of the most-recent recovery – from 2003-2007 – we managed to barely improve actual employment, and even then, only on a sporadic basis!

This came despite the allegedly-strong economy.

In short, there was no “strong economy” in point of fact.  The claims were false.  They were predicated on a lie – that expanding credit in fact is expanding wealth. 

It isn’t.

The employment base, when one looks at it ex-population, never expanded to any material degree at all even in 2000, which was the top of the market.  It also never recovered any material number of jobs from 2003-2007.  

We cannot recover until we address this.  And we cannot address this so long as we continue to allow corporations to offshore jobs and import cheap workers on the H1B program.

We must impose tariffs that level the playing field for American production and shut off importing foreign workers who come here with subsidized educations while our graduates are coming into the workforce with six-figure debts, requiring salaries $18,000/year and more in excess of what that foreign worker can do the same job for.

If we don’t stop this, right now, we’re not going to recover.

We cannot force another credit-driven expansion.  It will not work.

The numbers are what they are.

If we do not act now when the folly of the intended credit-driven expansion becomes realized both the stock market and government funding capacity will collapse, and the 2007-2008 downturn will look like a cakewalk.

The Market-Ticker

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Even Donald Trump Is Warning That An Economic Collapse Is Coming

 

In a shocking new interview, Donald Trump has gone farther than he ever has before in discussing a potential economic collapse in America.  Using phrases such as “you’re going to pay $25 for a loaf of bread pretty soon” and “we could end up being another Egypt”, Trump explained to Newsmax that he is incredibly concerned about the direction our economy is headed.  Whatever you may think of Donald Trump on a personal level, it is undeniable that he has been extremely successful in business.  As one of the most prominent businessmen in America, he is absolutely horrified about what is happening to this nation.  In fact, he is so disturbed about the direction that this country is heading that he is seriously considering running for president in 2012.  But whether he decides to run in 2012 or not, what Trump is now saying about the U.S. economy should be a huge wake up call for all of us.

Trump says that the U.S. government is broke, that all of our jobs are being shipped overseas, that other nations are heavily taking advantage of us and that the value of the U.S. dollar is being destroyed.  The following interview with Trump was originally posted on Newsmax and it is really worth watching….

Now, you may or may not think much of Donald Trump as a politician, but when a businessman of his caliber starts using apocalyptic language to describe where the U.S. economy is headed perhaps we should all pay attention.

The following are 12 key quotes that were pulled out of Trump’s new interview along with some facts and statistics that show that what Trump is saying is really happening.

#1 “If oil prices are allowed to inflate and keep inflating, if the dollar keeps going down in value, I think there’s a very distinct possibility that things could get worse.”

Donald Trump is exactly right – we are headed for big trouble if we continue to allow the Federal Reserve to pump hundreds of billions of new dollars into the system.  As I have written about previously, all of this new money will give us the illusion of short-term economic growth and it will pump up the stock market, but in the end all of the inflation the new money is gong to cause is going to be very painful.  Just look at how rapidly M1 has been skyrocketing over the last couple of years.  Is there any way that we are going to be able to avoid paying a very serious price for all of this reckless money printing?….

Already all of this money printing has had a very serious affect on world financial markets.  The price of agricultural commodities is skyrocketing and the price of oil has almost reached $100 a barrel once again.  The last time that the price of oil soared above $100 a barrel was in the early part of 2008, and we all remember the horrific financial collapse that followed in the fall of 2008.

#2 “….you’re going to pay $25 for a loaf of bread pretty soon. Look at what’s happening with our food prices. They’re going through the roof. We could end up being another Egypt. You could have riots in our streets also.”

The price of corn has risen 88 percent over the past year and the price of wheat has soared a whopping 114 percent over the past year.  Let’s hope that we don’t have to pay $25 for a loaf of bread in the United States any time soon, but in some areas of the world that is what it now feels like.

Approximately 3 billion people in the world today live on the equivalent of $2 a day or less, and most of that money ends up getting spent on food.  When food prices go up 10 or 20 percent in deeply impoverished areas of the globe, suddenly the lives of millions are threatened.  The riots that we have seen in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and other nations recently were not entirely caused by rising food prices, but they were certainly a big factor.

#3 “I think gold will go up as long as people don’t have confidence in our president and our country. And they don’t have confidence in our president.”

Investors run to gold and other precious metals when they don’t feel secure.  We saw that happen a lot in 2010.  As confidence in the paper currencies and the financial systems of the world has rapidly diminished, precious metals have become increasingly attractive.

In fact, the price of gold has doubled since the beginning of the economic downturn in 2007.  As the global financial situation continues to become more unstable, the demand for precious metals is likely only going to become more intense.

#4 “The banks have really let us down. Number one, they did some bad things and caused some bad problems. Number two, if you have something that you want to buy, like a house, they’re generally not there for you.”

Banks were given massive bailouts with the understanding that they would open up the vaults and start lending money to average Americans again.

Well, that has not happened.

In particular, it has become much, much harder to get a mortgage in the United States today.  Not that the big banks didn’t need to make changes to their lending practices, but things have gotten so tight now that it is choking the real estate market to death.

#5 “I see $3.50 for a gallon of gas for cars, and cars are lined up trying to get it and it’s $3.50. It’s a shame, a ridiculous shame.”

Our lack of a cohesive energy policy is a national disgrace.  There is no way in the world that a gallon of gas should be $3.50 a gallon.

The U.S. has massive reserves of oil and natural gas that it should be using.  In addition, the lack of progress on developing alternative energy sources in light of our sickening dependence on foreign oil is very puzzling.  We should be very far along towards solving our energy problems by this point.

Meanwhile, we keep pouring billions into the pockets of foreign oil barons every single month.  Unfortunately, Trump was exactly correct in the interview – if something is not done the price of gas is going to keep going higher.

 

#6 “I think the biggest threat is that our jobs are being stolen by other countries. We’re not going to have any jobs here pretty soon.”

Donal Trump is one of the few prominent leaders that is openly speaking the truth about the predatory economic practices of some of our “trading partners”.  Most of our politicians have just kept endlessly promising us that free trade is “good for us” even as tens of thousands of factories and millions upon millions of jobs have been shipped overseas.

Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

Yes, computers and robots have replaced a lot of manual labor today, but technology does not account for most of the decline we have seen in manufacturing.

n 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output.  In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent.  Meanwhile, manufacturing in the “developing world” has absolutely exploded.

#7 “We’re like a whipping post for other countries. We are standing there and just being beaten by South Korea, by Mexico, by China, by India.”

Most Americans have absolutely no idea how lopsided many of our “trade agreements” actually are.  Other nations openly manipulate their currencies in order to keep their exports dirt cheap and we allow it.  Other nations openly subsidize their domestic industries that are directly competing with businesses in the United States and we don’t complain.  Other nations make it incredibly difficult for American companies to do business in their countries while we allow foreign corporations to come on in and do pretty much whatever they want here.

Then there are certain nations (such as China) that brazenly rip off trade secrets from foreign corporations time after time after time and never get penalized for it.

Meanwhile, our economy continues to bleed jobs at a staggering pace.  The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.

Fortunately, more Americans than ever seem to be waking up and are realizing that globalism is causing many of these problems.  A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last year discovered that 69 percent of Americans now believe that free trade agreements have cost America jobs.

#8 “All of our jobs are going to China. We’re rebuilding China and other places.”

China is doing great.  China is now the number one producer in the world of wind and solar power.  They now possess the fastest supercomputer on the entire globe.  China also now has the world’s fastest train and the world’s biggest high-speed rail network.

Most Americans don’t realize that China is literally kicking the crap out of us.

Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.

Every single month we buy about 4 times as much stuff from them as they buy from us.  Our trade deficit with China has ballooned to enormous proportions.  In fact, the U.S. trade deficit with China during this past August was more than 4,600 times larger than the U.S. trade deficit with China was for the entire year of 1985.

So when Donald Trump says that we are rebuilding China he is not joking around.

Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.

Yes, that is how serious things have become.

#9 “We are a laughingstock throughout the world.”

Donald Trump has said on several occasions that his friends and business partners in China just laugh and laugh at us.  They can’t even believe what they are getting away with.

We have become an incompetent giant that is the butt of all the jokes.

According to Stanford University economics professor Ed Lazear, if the U.S. economy and the Chinese economy continue to grow at current rates, the average Chinese citizen will be wealthier than the average American citizen in just 30 years.

Our formerly great industrial cities are slowly becoming ghost towns.  The number of long-term unemployed Americans is at an all-time high.  Tens of millions of Americans can’t even survive without government assistance anymore.  The number of Americans on food stamps set a new all-time record every single month during 2010, and now well over 43 million Americans are enrolled in the program.

We really have become a joke.

#10 “The federal government has no money.”

Unfortunately, our federal government has continued to borrow and spend like there is no tomorrow.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government will have the biggest budget deficit ever recorded (approximately 1.5 trillion dollars) this year.

So much for fiscal discipline, eh?

It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will increase by $150,000 per U.S. household between 2009 and 2021.

Do you have an extra $150,000 to contribute for your share?

By 2015 our national debt will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 trillion dollars.

It is the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world by far, and it is the gift that we are going to pass down to future generations of Americans.

If there are any future generations of Americans.

#11 “I hate what is happening to this country.”

We should all hate what is happening to this country.  Our economic guts are being ripped out, we are being abused by the rest of the world, America’s infrastructure is being sold off piece by piece, our federal government is drowning in debt, our state governments are drowning in debt and our local governments are drowning in debt.

The only way we can even keep going is to run around to the rest of the world and beg them to keep lending us more money.

The mainstream media keeps proclaiming that we are the greatest economy on earth, but the truth is that we are being transformed into a pathetic loser and our politicians are just standing there with their hands in their pockets letting it happen.

All red-blooded Americans should be horrified by what is happening to this nation.  We have been betrayed by corrupt and incompetent leaders.  As a nation, we have become fat, lazy and stupid.

Hopefully what Donald Trump and others are saying about a coming economic collapse will serve as a huge wake up call and the sleeping giant will arise once again.

If the sleeping giant does not arise, we are in a massive amount of trouble, because right now the road we are on is leading to the biggest economic collapse the world has ever seen.

The Economic Collapse

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Employment Situation Report: December

 

The survey says!

The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.4 percent in December, and nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in leisure and hospitality and in health care but was little changed in other major industries.

Hmmmm…… let’s see.  First, all those people talking about +500,000 are now cleaning the egg off their own faces, and I suspect their clients are going to be quite angry at the “error.”  If you recall on Wednesday I said that due to the ISM Services report, which showed much weaker employment demand than the ADP report, I was not going to believe the ADP number.  That turned out to be a very good call, despite the catcalls it generated.

Second, the internals are a surprise.  But are they the surprise that they appear to be? 

Careful with any sort of bullish interpretation of this.  Here’s the problem:

The number of unemployed persons decreased by 556,000 to 14.5 million in December, and the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4 percent. Over the year, these measures were down from 15.2 million and 9.9 percent, respectively. (See table A-1.)

This is good, right?  It should show up in the ratios. 

The civilian labor force participation rate edged down in December to 64.3 percent, and the employment-population ratio was essentially unchanged at 58.3 percent. (See table A-1.)

It didn’t.

This chart shows the particulars you need to pay attention to out of this report:

Note that the annualized (y/o/y change) is positive – that is, compared to last December, we added employed people.  Compared to last month we did not – the monthly change has been negative since the summer, and in fact the trend has been down since the start of 2010.  There is no trend-level improvement – to the contrary, the trend delta is negative and has been for a year.  So-called “stimulus measures” (including The Fed’s games) have not worked.

Looking at the monthly “employed” numbers are even worse.  Those peaked in the spring of 2010 and are declining.  Yes, including this last month.

Then there’s the “Not In Labor Force” graph:

This is trouble.  On a monthly basis this has been positive since early in the spring of 2010.  That’s where the employed number decrease has come from – remember, the government doesn’t count those who give up as “unemployed.”  On an annualized basis this number has flatlined at a small positive level since January of 2010.   You cannot recover in the economy from an employment perspective until those who have given up come back into the labor force.  Period.

Finally, there’s this chart, which is the one that keeps me up at night

After improvement in the early part of 2010, the employment rate of the population (that is, the number of employed as a percentage of the non-institutional adult population) has been deteriorating once again.  I noted this last month (and have been highlighting it since it turned back down in the summer) as it is the most-important statistic in the series.

As I’ve repeatedly explained we cannot keep funding government expenditures via taxation unless this turns upward.  We are instead, in this alleged “recovery”, threatening the lows. 

There is in fact no “recovery” – all we’re doing and all we’ve been doing is putting our economy on the government Credit Card, but these machinations are failing to produce a response in the private economy that will be able to lift tax revenues and ultimately permit reduction in the deficit spending via “growth.”

We have spent more than two years now on a failed policy, and despite the alleged “ordinary lag” that these policy moves have, which has been the excuse of Bernanke and other policy makers to explain away why there was no immediate response, the six month to one year lag time they usually cite has now been exceeded by more than twice.

It is imperative that we change course – these policies have in fact failed and we are now tightening the flat spin with continued attempts to do that which has proved to not work.

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