2012 is shaping up to be a very tough year for the global economy.  All over the world there are signs that economic activity is significantly slowing down.  Many of these signs are detailed later on in this article.  But most people don’t understand what is happening because they don’t put all of the pieces together.  If you just look at one or two pieces of data, it may not seem that impressive.  But when you examine all of the pieces of evidence that we are on the verge of a devastating global recession all at once, it paints a very frightening picture.  Asia is slowing down, Europe is slowing down and there are lots of trouble signs for the U.S. economy.  It has gotten to a point where the global debt crisis is almost ready to boil over, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.  The last global recession was absolutely nightmarish, and we should all hope that we don’t see another one like that any time soon.  Unfortunately, things do not look good at this point.

The following are 22 signs that we are on the verge of a devastating global recession….

#1 On Thursday it was announced that U.S. jobless claims had soared to a six-week high.

#2 Hostess Brands, the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, has filed for bankruptcy protection.

#3 Sears recently announced that somewhere between 100 and 120 Sears and Kmart stores will be closing, and Sears stock has fallen nearly 60% in just the past year.

#4 Over the past 12 months, dozens of prominent retailers have closed stores all over America, and one consulting firm is projecting that there will be more than 5,000 more store closings in 2012.

#5 Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities, is projecting that the global financial industry will lose approximately 150,000 jobs over the next 12 to 18 months.

#6 Investors are pulling money out of the stock market at a rapid pace right now.  In fact, as an article posted on CNBC recently noted, investors pulled more money out of mutual funds than they put into mutual funds for 9 weeks in a row.  Are there some people out there that are quietly repositioning their money for tough times ahead?….

Investors yanked money out of U.S. equity mutual funds for a ninth-consecutive week despite a bullish 2012 outlook from Wall Street and a December rally that’s carried over into the New Year.

#7 There are signs that the Chinese economy is seriously slowing down.  The following comes from a recent article in the Guardian….

Growth had slowed to an annual rate of 1.5% in the second and third quarters of 2011, below the “stall speed” that historically led to recession.

#8 The Bank of Japan says that the economic recovery in that country “has paused“.

#9 Manufacturing activity in the euro zone has fallen for five months in a row.

#10 Germany’s economy actually contracted during the 4th quarter of 2011.  At this point many economists believe that Germany is already experiencing a recession.

#11 According to a recent article by Bloomberg, it is being projected that the French economy is heading into a recession….

The French economy will shrink this quarter and next, suggesting the nation is in a recession as investment and consumer spending stagnate, national statistics office Insee said.

#12 There are a multitude of statistics that indicate that the UK economy is definitely slowing down.

#13 The credit ratings of Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Austria all just got downgraded.

#14 It is being reported that the Spanish economy contracted during the 4th quarter of 2011.

#15 Bad loans in Spain recently hit a 17-year high and the unemployment rate is at a 15-year high.

#16 According to a recent article in the Telegraph, the Italian government is forecasting that there will be a recession for the Italian economy in 2012….

#17 Italy’s youth unemployment rate has hit the highest level ever.

#18 The unemployment rate in Greece for those under the age of 24 is now at 39 percent.

#19 Greece is already experiencing a full-blown economic depression.  About a third of the country is now living in poverty and extreme medicine shortages are being reported.  Things have gotten so bad that entire families are being ripped apart.  According to the Daily Mail, hundreds of Greek children are being abandoned because the economy has gotten so bad that their parents simply cannot afford to take care of them anymore.  The note that one mother left with her child was absolutely heartbreaking….

One mother, it said, ran away after handing over her two-year-old daughter Natasha.

Four-year-old Anna was found by a teacher clutching a note that read: ‘I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her. Please take good care of her. Sorry.’

#20 In Greece, large numbers of people are simply giving up on life.  Sadly, the number of suicides in Greece has increased by 40 percent in just the past year.

#21 In many European countries, the money supply continues to contract rapidly.  The following comes from a recent article in the Telegraph….

Simon Ward from Henderson Global Investors said “narrow” M1 money – which includes cash and overnight deposits, and signals short-term spending plans – shows an alarming split between North and South.

While real M1 deposits are still holding up in the German bloc, the rate of fall over the last six months (annualised) has been 20.7pc in Greece, 16.3pc in Portugal, 11.8pc in Ireland, and 8.1pc in Spain, and 6.7pc in Italy. The pace of decline in Italy has been accelerating, partly due to capital flight. “This rate of contraction is greater than in early 2008 and implies an even deeper recession, both for Italy and the whole periphery,” said Mr Ward.

#22 The major industrialized nations of the world must roll over trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt during 2012.  At a time when credit is becoming much tighter, this is going to be quite a challenge.  The following list compiled by Bloomberg shows the amount of debt that some large nations must roll over in 2012….

Japan: 3,000 billion U.S.: 2,783 billion Italy: 428 billion France: 367 billion Germany: 285 billion Canada: 221 billion Brazil: 169 billion U.K.: 165 billion China: 121 billion India: 57 billion Russia: 13 billion

Keep in mind that those numbers do not include any new borrowing.  Those are just old debts that must be refinanced.

As I mentioned at the top of this article, things do not look good.

The last thing that we need is another devastating global recession.

As I wrote about yesterday, the U.S. economy is in the midst of a nightmarish long-term decline.  The last major global recession helped to significantly accelerate that decline.

So what will happen if this next global recession is worse than the last one?

Sadly, the people that will get hurt the most by another recession will not be the wealthy.

The people that will get hurt the most will be the poor and the middle class.

So what should all of us be doing about this?

We should use the time during this “calm before the storm” to prepare for the hard times that are coming.

As always, let us hope for the best and let us prepare for the worst.

But things certainly do not look promising for the global economy in 2012.

The Economic Collapse

It would be a good idea to become grounded in it folks, because it’s coming, and it’s not going to be fun if you’re not well-grounded in the facts.

Let’s take a few examples, some of them from the forum and some from my own personal experience, and flesh them out.

Take many if not most allegedly “middle-class” and “upper middle-class” business owners and managers.  They live in a nice 3,500 sq/ft house in the suburbs with a manicured lawn and the service that comes once a week.  Their home is immaculate and full of granite counter tops and Viking appliances.  There are two $50,000 automobiles in the driveway – and perhaps another one, or some sort of recreational vehicle (a boat or RV) in the garage or a nearby storage area.

Now look at how much actual wealth they have, on a balance-sheet basis.  Their home is likely underwater or has limited equity – 10 or 20% of the current market value at most.  Their vehicles are not owned outright, they all have notes on them.  There’s $100,000 or less in their retirement accounts, but they’re middle-aged – in their 40s.

On the spending side they have a $200/month cellphone bill for themselves and their kids ($2,400 a year), spend $300/month on utilities ($3,600 a year) and pay $5,000 or more in property taxes and hazard insurance.  Between these there’s more than $10,000 that goes out the front door, plus their income tax burden.  This family also eats out a couple of times a week ($200/month or $2,400 a year) and in general treats money and credit as though it’s something they have access to and thus will use.

This prototypical family manages to make it work predicated on being paid by the government for the use of leverage through the mortgage tax deduction.  This has induced them to (among other things) refinance serially, since as a loan amortizes the interest percentage drops and so does the tax write-off. To keep that “extra” $3,000 a year in deduction the family has buried itself in debt – intentionally – through serial refinances, while stripping every dime of equity they could get their hands on to spend on their lifestyle.  What they don’t admit to is that they’re simply pyramiding debt upon debt, goaded on by a tax system that has encouraged profligacy, immaturity and a mathematically-inevitable economic collapse.

As they head toward “retirement age” their children have gone off on their own.  They treated their kids as chattel during the time they were kids, smothering them and yet at the same time showering them with “things.”  A car at 16.  An extravagant prom experience.  Travel-team soccer at hundreds of dollars a month.  New clothes from the latest trendy place – several times a year.  A college that costs $20,000/year.  None of this was earned by Junior, it was “deserved” because the little darlings “should have the best.”

These people will argue, to the last man and woman, that they’ve done “everything right all their lives.”

They’re deluded, and if you’re reading this you’re probably one of them.

The fact is that the bubble that made possible the appearance of rapid accumulation of wealth was just that – a bubble.  It was a fraud.  This prototypical family, and the majority of Americans live like this even today, having learned nothing from the last few years,  is literally one disruption in the ability to put leverage upon leverage from a full-blown economic disaster.

But bubbles always pop.

Always.

It’s not a bubble eh?  Care to rethink that in light of this chart?

If you want to know where that came from, look right here:

When did the market start to take off?  Right after 1980, right when the government, industry and you set forth upon the path of borrowing more and more money to spend beyond your means, saving nothing, investing nothing.

This drove asset prices higher.  But this game must eventually end, because every dollar you borrow comes with interest, and eventually you are unable to borrow any more, since your borrowing has outrun your earnings capacity.

That’s what happened in 2007.  It is why all the games with QEx have failed – all they did was create more “excess reserves” that could be loaned out, but the economy’s ability to absorb more loans and pay more interest has been exceeded.

Pressing that bet further and further will not work.  It cannot work.

Now we’re in trouble, and lots of it.  We’re faced with the reality of what we’ve done because when that leverage comes out of the system and it will the market is likely to go right back where it started – or fairly close to it.  Contemplate that, and read the Ticker I posted yesterday, because that’s the macro economic impact of that leverage being removed.

But on a personal note the impact is going to suck too. In no particular order you might want to consider all of the following:

• Americans have levered themselves up to the gills.  Despite claims in the media, that leverage has not been taken down.  Think about yourself, your family, neighbors and friends. Would you be ok if you had no credit cards, in fact no credit of any sort, no government handouts and no job – for six months.  Very few families would be able to survive such a thing without ending up in the street, yet without that ability you have excessive financial leverage in your life.  You have not removed that leverage.  You had better start – now.  If you didn’t believe in the risk in 2007 when I started writing about this, the 2008/09 market collapse should have convinced you.  If that wasn’t enough this latest swoon should have underlined the point.  If neither of those two events has made clear what you must do – right now – then like it or not you deserve what’s going to happen to you, despite the fact that I’m sure I’ll get hate mail for saying it.
• Can you make it in “retirement” – by whatever means, including continuing to work, without government support?  If not, you’re not unlevered.  You’ve simply believed the lies told to you by the political establishment that it could lever itself up on an indefinite forward basis and give the benefits to you despite the fact that the demographics – that the Baby Boomers were going to retire en-masse and overload the Medicare and Social Security systems – has been known for more than 30 years.  The government did nothing about it because fixing this would have meant curtailing forward promises of benefits or massive tax increases thirty years ago.  Today, that problem cannot be solved with tax increases as the money is not there and cannot be extracted from the economy.  As a consequence major benefit cuts are going to happen, irrespective of the political demands placed on the government.  You must be prepared to survive and continue onward without any government support.  Figure it out, right now and alter your lifestyle today, or suffer the consequences.

• Did you successfully transition your relationship with your children (if any) from one of dependence to one of mutual respect?  This doesn’t always work, by the way.  Kids are independent human beings, and no matter how you parent them some percentage will be anti-social jackasses as will some parents.  This is reality.  However, it doesn’t help if you treated your kids as chattel or worse, abused them or worse, or showered them with all sorts of “entitlements” as kids, because now they’ll expect the same as adults!  Historically the solution to getting older meant living in extended family units.  It will again – if you didn’t ruin those connections with your children.  If you did, I hope you’re wealthy – truly wealthy – or you’re in lots of trouble.  Begging sucks as does apologizing for your previous acts along with repairing broken family relationships but it beats the hell out of starving and/or freezing to death.  Choose wisely and choose today.

• Got faith?  There may or may not be a God, but it’s a fact that there’s a congregation in the corner Church on Sunday.  Consider that if the Zombie Apocalypse comes knocking your local faith community may be the best option for mutually-arranged self-defense, the patching of any holes that might get made in places you’d rather not have them, and the provision of basic human needs, including most-particularly something hot to put down the pie hole.  Is faith practical?  You decide, and consider this along with the following indisputable fact: Once you know for sure if there’s a God it’s too late to change your mind.

• Resolve self-regulation issues – now.  The majority of Americans are overweight or obese.  A minority exercise three times a week for 20 minutes at a moderate to intense level of activity.  One of the Christian “seven deadly sins” is gluttony, and it’s not just found in the bottle or the dope bag – it’s also found in the grocery store, at the fast-food joint and on the couch.  America has enjoyed the ability to call “911″ any time and have an ambulance magically appear to whisk you to the hospital when you feel that nasty tightness in your chest.  In fact, an amazing number of municipalities have managed to vote into place ridiculous tax increases (including my local area) to pay for exactly that.  Instead, a volunteer fire department would be sufficient without the “ALS” ambulance service at a quarter of the cost – and the average homeowner, who pays $250 a year or more for that “enhanaced” level of service, could buy more than enough running shoes and save five times that much or more on food not consumed – and not need the EMS!  The same thing happens in the doctor’s office every day: “Doc, do you have a pill for that?”  Guess what – we can’t afford to pay for your pills, the EMS, or the hospital – you can’t cover it individually and we can’t cover it as a society.  Therefore, either solve your self-regulation issues or suffer the inevitable consequences.  It’s time to grow up America.
• Come to grips with your mortality.  If you prefer to use faith, that’s fine.  If you don’t believe in God, that’s fine too – Darwin will do as well.  Nonetheless we are all mortal and we are going to have to deal with the fact that we cannot have medical services we are unable to personally pay for.  This is a major shift after the idiotic moves of the last 30 years, but it is nonetheless a fact.  Leverage enabled the pulling forward of demand for medical services into today that were promised to be paid for tomorrow, but now tomorrow has come and there’s no more ability to pull that demand forward.  See the “Self-Regulation” bullet point above and consider that your success or failure in dealing with that will materially change your interaction with this point, then choose.  If you believe that with the global finance ponzi collapsing you’ll be able to demand a pair of $100,000 hips, a $90,000 prostate cancer treatment or $250,000 for bypass surgery from “society”, you’re wrong.  The money doesn’t exist any more, which means you either earn and stash it yourself during your productive years, do what you need to so those things are unnecessary (to the extent you can), or face the fact that we all die and your time might be now.

If you’d like the above in a “religious” format someone on the forum posted a link to the a sermon tracking much of the above.  Yeah, it’s 45 minutes.  But it’s pretty much spot-on in Christian terms.

Time is short; choose wisely.

When Barack Obama, the Federal Reserve and the mainstream media tell us that we are in the middle of an economic recovery, is that supposed to be some kind of sick joke?  According to newly released numbers, over 44 million Americans are now on food stamps.  That is a new all-time record and that number is 13.1% higher than it was just one year ago.  So how many Americans have to go on food stamps before we can all finally agree that the U.S. economy is dying?  50 million?  60 million?  All of us?  The food stamp program is the modern equivalent of the old bread lines.  More than one out of every seven Americans now depends on the federal government for food.  Oh, but haven’t you heard?  The economy is showing dramatic improvement.  Corporate profits are up.  The stock market is soaring.  Happy days are here again.

It just seems inconceivable that anyone can claim that the economy is improving when the number of Americans on food stamps continues to set a brand new record every single month.  But the food stamp program is not the only indicator that the economy is still having massive problems.  The following are 10 more reasons why the U.S. economy is simply not getting any better….

#1 Some recent statistics actually indicate that the number of unemployed Americans is still going up.  According to Gallup, unemployment in the United States rose to 10.3% at the end of February.  That is the highest number Gallup has reported since early last year.

#2 The housing industry is still a complete and total disaster.  In fact, new home sales in the U.S. in January were 11.2% lower than they were in December.  Not only that, the number of new home sales in January was 18.6% lower than the number of new home sales in January 2010.  That is not a sign of improvement.

#3 There wouldn’t even be much of a housing industry at all at this point if it was not for the U.S. government.  Right now the U.S. government is either writing or guaranteeing well over 90 percent of all mortgages in the United States.  So what would the housing market look like in 2011 if the government was not in the picture?

#4 In 2010, more than a million U.S. families lost their homes to foreclosure for the first time ever, and that number is expected to go even higher in 2011.

#5 Due to rampant economic decay and record numbers of foreclosures there are areas in most of our major cities that now look like “war zones”.  For example, the Huffington Post is reporting that there are now approximately 15,000 vacant buildings in the city of Chicago and there are approximately 60,000 vacant houses and apartments in the city of Las Vegas.

#6 According to the Oil Price Information Service, U.S. drivers spent an average of $347 on gasoline during the month of February, which was 30 percent more than a year earlier.  This represented 8.5% of median monthly income.  So what is going to happen when gas prices go even higher?  Sadly, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. has risen another 4 cents since yesterday and it is likely to go much higher from here.

#7 The U.S. trade deficit continues to grow.  The trade deficit was about 33 percent larger in 2010 than it was in 2009, and the 2011 trade deficit is expected to be even bigger.

#8 The CredAbility Consumer Distress Index, which measures the average financial condition of U.S. households, declined in every single quarter in 2010.

#9 The number of Americans that have become so discouraged that they have given up searching for work completely now stands at an all-time high.

#10 The U.S. national debt is growing faster than ever.  The Obama administration is projecting that the federal budget deficit for this fiscal year will be a new all-time record 1.65 trillion dollars.  It is hard to even imagine how much money that is.  If you went out today and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.  Long ago the U.S. government should have been getting these deficits under control, but instead they are just getting even larger.

So in light of the statistics above, can anyone really claim that we are in the middle of an economic recovery?

The truth is that there is no sign that any of the long-term trends that are destroying the U.S. economy are even slowing down.

Millions of jobs continue to be shipped overseas.

The U.S. dollar continues to be devalued.

The federal government continues to go into more debt.

State and local governments continue to go into more debt.

Our trade deficit continues to grow.

Our cities continue to be transformed into wastelands as they are being systematically deindustrialized.

The number of Americans that are dependent on the government continues to soar.

The U.S. middle class continues to shrink.

I know that I harp on these themes over and over, but it is vitally important that everyone understands that the mainstream media is lying to us.

The U.S. economy is dying a very painful death and there is no hope on the horizon.

Things are not going to be getting better.  Well, they may get a bit better for the boys down on Wall Street, but for the rest of us our standards of living are going to continue to decline.

The best days for the U.S. economy are already behind us.  What lies ahead is a whole lot of pain.

We are going to pay the price for decades of corruption and incompetence.

An economic collapse is coming and you had better get ready.

The Economic Collapse

The recent eight year forecast published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 4.19 million jobs will be gained in the US in professional and business services, followed by 4 million health care and social assistance jobs, while 1.2 million will be lost in manufacturing. This is great news for website designers, Internet entrepreneurs,  registered nurses, and masseuses in California, but grim tidings for traditional metal bashers in the rust belt manufacturing states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

I’m so old now that I am no longer asked for a driver’s license to get into a night club. Instead, they ask for a carbon dating. The real challenge for we aged career advisors is that probably half of these new service jobs haven’t even been invented yet, and if they can be described, it is only in a cheesy science fiction paperback with a half dressed blond on the front cover. After all, who heard of a webmaster, a cell phone contract sales person, or a blogger 40 years ago? Where are all these jobs going to? You guessed it, China, and other lower waged, upstream manufacturing countries like Vietnam, where the Middle Kingdom is increasingly subcontracting its own offshoring.

These forecasts may be optimistic, because they assume that Americans can continue to claw their way up the value chain in the global economy, and not get stuck along the way, as the Japanese did in the nineties. The US desperately needs no less than 27 million new jobs to soak up natural population and immigration growth and get us back to a traditional 5% unemployment rate. The only way that is going to happen is for America to invent something new and big, and fast. Personal computers achieved this during the eighties, and the Internet did the trick in the nineties. The fact that we’ve done diddly squat since 2000 but create a giant paper chase explains why job growth since then has been zero, real wage growth has been negative, and American standards of living are falling.

Alternative energy and biotechnology are two possible drivers for a new economy. Unfortunately, the last administration did everything it could to stymie progress in both these fields, coddling big oil so China could steal a lead in several alternative technologies, and starving stem cell researchers of Federal cash, ceding the lead there to others. While the current crop of politicians extol the virtues of education, the reality is that we are dumbing down our public education system. How do we invent the next “new” thing, while shrinking the University of California’s budget by 20% two years in a row? If my local high school can’t afford new computers, how is it going to feed Silicon Valley with computer literate work force? The US has a “Michael Jackson” economy. It’s still living like a rock star, but hasn’t had a hit in 20 years.

China can have all the $20 a day jobs it wants. But if it accelerates its move up the value chain, as it clearly aspires to do, then America is in for even harder times. I’ll be hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. How do you say “unemployment check” in Mandarin?

Since the institution of banking was founded, bankers have
been guilty of deceit, fraud and theft. During Biblical times, “Jesus went into
the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and
overthrew the tables of the moneychangers [bankers]..And he taught, saying unto
them, Is it not written, my house shall be called of all nations the house of
prayer? But ye have made it a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:15-17)

Fast forward almost a couple thousand years later, and
bankers were still committing the same theft. In fact, over a period of
eighteen hundred years, bankers learned nothing from being cast out by Jesus
from the temples, and they continued to commit such questionable acts of
morality that even a man of very questionable character himself showed nothing
but contempt for them. Though historians noted that former US President Jackson
committed numerous hateful acts against Choctaw, Chikasaw, and Cherokee
American Indians, Jackson despised bankers so much, that in front of a
delegation of bankers, he stated the following:

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and
I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the
breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you,
and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the
deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand
families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you
go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are
a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God,
I will rout you out.”

Fast forward another one hundred and eighty years, and we
discover that bankers have failed to evolve even a tiny iota from their
deceitful nature. When ex-CEO and former US Secretary Henry Paulson lied to the
American people and to US Congress by asking for more than $800 billion of
funds for the purposes of helping American home owners and then committed the
ultimate bait-and-switch fraud by handing this money to his banking friends, he
epitomized the very warning Andrew Jackson levied against bankers in the
1800’s: “When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost,
you charged it to the bank.” In this case, Paulson acted beyond the normal
level of immorality of bankers, and charged the banks’ losses to every single
American citizen.  Unlike the
Grinch, who repented from the error of his ways over a period of a few days,
bankers have refused to repent for the unsound monetary system they have
created for more than two thousand years!

To understand why Jesus threw bankers out of the temple, why
a former governor of the Bank of England stated that banking “was born in sin”,
and why Andrew Jackson, a focus of much hatred and contempt among American
Indians, viewed bankers as so immoral, that despite his own immense character
flaws, he made it his own personal crusade to throw out all bankers from US
government, one must understand how bankers continually rob all citizens of
their wealth every day. To state that bankers lie, deceive, rob and steal from
all citizens every day is not an exaggeration. The means by which they do so
today has drastically changed from the means they employed centuries ago, so
this is why so few people understand that bankers continually rob them.  Most people don’t understand that
bankers ensure the continual devaluation of the purchasing power of all money
in the system by not only literally creating money out of nothing but also by
creating money as debt.

This process, to which they cleverly assign the word
“inflation” is in reality a tax that constitutes a direct theft of your
savings, and no different than the tax British monarch King George imposed upon
the American colonists that triggered the American Revolution. The bankers have
only changed the mechanism by which they collect this tax, and the word that
they use to describe this mechanism. In America, this hidden tax of inflation,
which is a euphemism for the devaluation of the currency that sits in your
savings account, is directly responsible for the following situation that Eric
Schlosser described in his national bestseller, Fast Food Nation:

“It used to be, even in low income families, that the father
worked and the mother stayed home to raise the children. Now it seems that no
one’s home and that both parents work just to make ends meet, often holding
down two or three jobs. Parents increasingly turn to the school for help,
asking teachers to supply discipline and direction.”

The above paragraph described the family life of many
families that lived in Middle America almost a decade ago. Due to an unsound
monetary system that has led to relentless devaluation of the US dollar, the
situation described above will explode in intensity and magnitude over the next
five years, and affect everyone in America, no matter your income level and
socio-economic status. As the US dollar continues to lose purchasing power,
despite a current possible extended rally against the pound and Euro,
middle-class America will sink into the ranks of the poor. If the world operated on a sound monetary system, even in low-income families, the mother could still stay home to raise the children. Today, even in middle-class families, thanks to bankers, the mother does not have the option to stay home and raise the children. When the situation
of both parents working two or three jobs and their kids attending high school
while working 20+ hours a week is still not enough to make ends meet, crime
will explode in America during the next five years. It is the critical problems
of these very families that the bankers are creating through their monetary
policies that will come home to roost in America.

In reality, I don’t hold hatred in my heart for anyone.
Christmas is a time for forgiveness and none among us are infallible and none
among us are without sin. Yet, to be forgiven, those that continually do wrong
must repent, and bankers have yet to do anything that demonstrates that they
have even the slightest amount of regret and remorse for the economic upheaval
and chaos that they have created throughout the world in recent years. The
rich, though they may not care to understand the tale of How the Bankers Stole
Christmas now, should make it their prerogative to understand this as soon as
possible. Why? The current course the bankers have set us on has ensured that
the rich will soon become victims of desperate masses of people in their
country that will see a huge degradation in their quality of life due to the
recent monetary policies bankers have elected to impose upon their
citizens.  When large portions of
the middle class are destroyed, masses of people that never considered stealing
before, will steal and loot due to the simple instinct of survival, and a great
battle between “the haves” and the “have nots” will ensue in future years in
many developed countries, as crazy as this concept sounds today. Should the
people choose to understand “How the Bankers Stole Christmas”, the
inevitable massive increase in crime that will accompany the sinking of the
middle class into poverty can be avoided.

If instead, everyone chooses to buy into the propaganda of
the bankers, then this same scenario, as crazy as it sounds today, will come
true in the future just as the “crazy” stock market crashes I predicted in 2006
eventually materialized in 2008. 
And the biggest culprit of this shameful scenario, should it
materialize, will embarrassingly be our own refusal to see the truth about how
bankers have commandeered today’s “modern” monetary system for their own
benefit, and their own benefit only, to the detriment of every single citizen
they claim to be helping. If one doubts the enormous reach of banker’s
tentacles into governments, then perhaps now is a good time to review former
IMF Chief Economist’s Simon Johnson’s brilliant article, “The Quiet Coup”.