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Get ready to pay much more for groceries. I have been warning that the flood of new money that the Federal Reserve and Congress have been pumping into the system would have very serious consequences, and I have also been warning that food prices would be shooting higher. When things start getting really crazy, demand for food and other basic essentials goes way up, and meanwhile this pandemic has significantly disrupted production of certain products. So even though most of the economy is currently still in a deflationary phase, food prices are beginning to spike. In fact, the U.S. Labor Department says that we just witnessed the largest one month increase since February 1974…

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that prices U.S. consumers paid for groceries jumped 2.6% in April, the largest one-month pop since February 1974. The spike in supermarket prices was broad based and impacted items from broccoli and ham to oatmeal and tuna.
The price of the meats, poultry, fish and eggs category rose 4.3%, fruits and vegetables climbed 1.5%, cereals and bakery products advanced 2.9%, and dairy goods gained 1.5%.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

Prior to this pandemic, Americans spent about 10 percent of their incomes on food.

As this new economic depression deepens, expect that number to eventually more than double.

We live at a time when global food supplies are becoming increasing stressed for a variety of reasons. In wealthy countries this is going to force food prices aggressively higher, and in poor countries this is going to mean that a lot of people simply will not have enough to eat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The True Size Of The U.S. National Debt, Including Unfunded Liabilities, Is 222 Trillion Dollars

March 29, 2019

The True Size Of The U.S. National Debt, Including Unfunded Liabilities, Is 222 Trillion Dollars

The United States is on a path to financial ruin, and everyone can see what is happening, but nobody can seem to come up with a way to stop it. According to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government is currently 22 trillion dollars in debt, and that represents the single largest debt in the history of the planet. Over the past decade, we have been adding to that debt at a rate of about 1.1 trillion dollars a year, and we will add more than a trillion dollars to that total once again this year. But when you add in our unfunded liabilities, our long-term financial outlook as a nation looks downright apocalyptic. According to Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff, the U.S. is currently facing 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, and when you add that number to our 22 trillion dollar debt, you get a grand total of 222 trillion dollars.

Of course we are never going to pay back all of this debt.

The truth is that we are just going to keep accumulating more debt until the system completely and utterly collapses.

And even though the federal government is the biggest offender, there are also others to blame for the mess that we find ourselves in. State and local governments are more than 3 trillion dollars in debt, corporate debt has more than doubled since the last financial crisis, and U.S. consumers are more than 13 trillion dollars in debt.

When you add it all together, the total amount of debt in our society is well above 300 percent of GDP, and it keeps rising with each passing year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America Is Committing Suicide: Over The Past 12 Months, The U.S. National Debt Has Increased By 1.271 Trillion Dollars

October 2, 2018

America Is Committing Suicide: Over The Past 12 Months, The U.S. National Debt Has Increased By 1.271 Trillion Dollars

If we do not change course, our once great nation will be destroyed by a debt that has grown wildly out of control. We are facing an unprecedented debt crisis that literally threatens to bring our country to an end, and yet our politicians are almost entirely silent on this issue in 2018. In fact, Republicans and Democrats just worked together to pass another big, fat spending bill through Congress that is actually going to increase the pace at which we are going into debt. What the Republicrats are doing is not just wrong. To be honest, the truth is that they are committing crimes against humanity, and they are completely wiping out the very bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have. How in the world is America supposed to be “great again” when we are buried in so much debt that future generations can never have any possible hope of getting free from it?

The fiscal year of the federal government goes from October 1st to September 30th. During the fiscal year that just ended, the U.S. national debt increased by 1.271 trillion dollars…

The federal debt increased by $1,271,158,167,126.72 in fiscal 2018, according to data released today by the Treasury.

The total federal debt started the fiscal year at $20,244,900,016,053.51 according to the Treasury, and finished the fiscal year at $21,516,058,183,180.23.

This is one of the reasons why I wanted to go to Washington. Our current “representatives” are completely and utterly failing us.

Once upon a time, at least members of the Tea Party would stand up and say something, but these days nobody seems to care that America’s future is being systematically destroyed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Are So Many People Talking About The Potential For A Stock Market Crash In October?

September 26, 2018

Why Are So Many People Talking About The Potential For A Stock Market Crash In October?

It is that time of the year again. Every year, people start talking about a possible stock market crash in October, because everyone remembers the historic crashes that took place in October 1987 and October 2008. Could we witness a similar stock market crash in October 2018? Without a doubt, the market is primed for another crash. Stock valuations have been in crazytown territory for a very long time, and financial chaos has already begun to erupt in emerging markets all over the globe. When the stock market does collapse, it won’t exactly be a surprise. And a lot of people out there are pointing to October for historical reasons. I did not know this, but it turns out that the month with the most market volatility since the Dow was first established has been the month of October…

The difference is quite significant, as judged by a measure of volatility known as the standard deviation: For all Octobers since 1896, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was created, the standard deviation of the Dow’s daily changes has been 1.44%. That compares to 1.05% for all months other than October.

Like me, you are probably tempted to think that the reason why October’s number is so high is because of what happened in 1987 and 2008.

But even if you pull out those two months, October is still the most volatile…

You might think that this difference is caused by a few outliers, such as the 1987 crash (which, of course, occurred in October) or 2008 (the Dow suffered several thousand-point plunges that month as it reacted to the snowballing financial crisis). But you would be wrong: The standard deviation of daily Dow changes is much higher in October than other months even if we eliminate 1987 and 2008 from the sample.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stock Prices Are Surging Because Corporations Are Spending More Money On Stock Buybacks Than Anything Else

September 21, 2018

Stock Prices Are Surging Because Corporations Are Spending More Money On Stock Buybacks Than Anything Else

The primary reason why stock prices have been soaring in recent months is because corporations have been buying back their own stock at an unprecedented pace. In fact, the pace of stock buybacks is nearly double what it was at this time last year. According to Goldman Sachs, S&P 500 companies spent 384 billion dollars buying back stock during the first half of 2018. That is an absolutely astounding number. And in many cases, corporations are going deep into debt in order to do this. Of course this is going to push up stock prices, but corporate America will not be able to inflate this bubble indefinitely. At some point a credit crunch will come, and the pace of stock buybacks will fall precipitously.

Prior to 1982, corporations were not permitted to go into the market and buy back stock.

The reason for this is obvious – stock buybacks are a really easy way for corporations to manipulate stock prices.

But these days it is expected that most large corporations will engage in this practice. Large stockholders love to see the price of the stock go up, and they are never going to complain when smaller shareholders are bought out and their share of the company is increased. And corporate executives love buybacks because so much of their compensation often involves stock options or bonuses related to key metrics such as earnings per share.

So in the end, stock buybacks are often all about greed. It is a way to funnel money to those at the very top of the pyramid, and those stock market gains are taxed at capital gains rates which are much lower than the rates on normal income.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Destroying America: It Is Being Projected That The U.S. National Debt Will Hit 99 Trillion Dollars By 2048

September 18, 2018

Destroying America: It Is Being Projected That The U.S. National Debt Will Hit 99 Trillion Dollars By 2048

Temporary prosperity that is created by exploding levels of debt is not actually prosperity at all. At this moment, the U.S. government is 21.4 trillion dollars in debt, and we have been adding an average of more than a trillion dollars a year to that debt since 2009. And if we stay on the path that we are currently on, the trajectory of our debt will soon accelerate dramatically. In fact, as you will see below, the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that the U.S. national debt will reach 99 trillion dollars by 2048 if nothing changes. Congressional Budget Office projections always tend to be overly optimistic, and so the reality will probably be much worse than that. Of course we will never actually see the day when our national debt reaches 99 trillion dollars. Our government (and our entire society along with it) will collapse long before we ever get to that point. In our endless greed, we are literally destroying America, and emergency action must be taken immediately if we are to survive.

Debt always makes things seem better in the short-term, and it is always destructive in the long-term.

When we go into debt as a nation, we are literally stealing from the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have. Through the first 11 months of this fiscal year, the official U.S. budget deficit was $895,000,000,000, which means that we continue to steal more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day.

And it is important to remember that not all additions to the national debt are included in the official budget deficit. One year ago, our national debt was sitting at 20.1 trillion dollars, and that means that we have added an astounding 1.3 trillion dollars to the debt over the past 12 months.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Major Currencies All Over The World Are In “Complete Meltdown” As The $63 Trillion EM Debt Bubble Implodes

September 5, 2018

Major Currencies All Over The World Are In “Complete Meltdown” As The $63 Trillion EM Debt Bubble Implodes

The wait for the next global financial crisis is over. Major currencies all over the planet are in a “death spiral”, many global stock markets are crashing, and economic activity is beginning to decline at a stunning rate in quite a few nations. Over the past 16 years, the emerging market debt bubble has grown from 9 trillion dollars to 63 trillion dollars. Yes, you read that correctly. Now that emerging market debt bubble is imploding, and as a result emerging market currencies all over the globe are in “complete meltdown”. In fact, at least 20 different currencies have fallen by double-digit percentages against the U.S. dollar so far in 2018, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.

You may be tempted to think that this must be a good thing for the United States since the value of the U.S. dollar has been rising, but it is not.

During the “boom years”, trillions of dollars were borrowed by emerging market economies, and a high percentage of those loans were denominated in U.S. dollars. Now that their currencies are crashing, it is going to take much more local currency to service those U.S.-denominated debts, and a whole lot of them are going to start going bad.

That means that many financial institutions here in the United States and over in Europe are going to end up holding enormous piles of bad debt, and the losses could potentially be astronomical.

The dominoes are starting to fall, and even the mainstream media is admitting that what we are facing is really bad. For example, the following comes from a CNBC article entitled “The emerging market crisis is back. And this time it’s serious”…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Economic Doom Returns: Emerging Market Currencies Collapse To Record Lows As Global Financial Chaos Accelerates

September 1, 2018

Economic Doom Returns: Emerging Market Currencies Collapse To Record Lows As Global Financial Chaos Accelerates

After a little bit of a lull, the international currency crisis is back with a vengeance. Currencies are collapsing in Argentina, Brazil, India, Turkey and other emerging markets, and central banks are springing into action. It is being hoped that the financial chaos can be confined to emerging markets so that it will not spread to the United States and Europe. But of course the global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and a massive wave of debt defaults in emerging markets would inevitably have extremely serious consequences all over the planet. It would be difficult to overstate the potential danger that this new crisis poses for all of us. Emerging market economies went on an unprecedented debt binge over the past decade, and a high percentage of those debts were denominated in U.S. dollars. As emerging market currencies collapse, it is going to become nearly impossible to service any debts denominated in U.S. dollars, and that could ultimately mean absolutely enormous losses for international lenders. Our system tends to do fairly well as long as everybody is paying their debts, but once the dominoes begin to tumble things can get messy really quickly.

Let’s start our roundup today with India. While India is currently not in as bad shape as some of the other emerging markets, the truth is that they could get there pretty rapidly if they keep going down this path.

On Thursday, concerns about rising oil prices drove the Indian rupee to a brand new all-time record low…

The Indian rupee fell to a record low on Thursday morning, following a declining trend all year — which economists attributed to rising oil prices, broader emerging market concerns, and strong month-end dollar demand.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The 5 Previous Times This Stock Market Indicator Has Reached This Level Stock Prices Have Fallen By At Least 50 Percent

August 23, 2018

The 5 Previous Times This Stock Market Indicator Has Reached This Level Stock Prices Have Fallen By At Least 50 Percent

Have you ever heard of the “Sound Advice Risk Indicator”? Every single time in our history when it has gone above 2.0 the stock market has crashed, and now it has just surged above that threshold for the very first time since the late 1990s. That doesn’t mean that a stock market crash is imminent, but it is definitely yet another indication that this stock market bubble is living on borrowed time. But for the moment, there is still quite a bit of optimism on Wall Street. The Dow set another brand new all-time record high earlier this week, and on Wednesday we learned that this bull market is now officially the longest in our history…

For context, a bull market is defined as a 20% rally on a closing basis that’s at no point derailed by a subsequent 20% decline. March 9, 2009, has long been the agreed-upon starting point for such calculations because that was the absolute bottom for the prior bear market, which ended that day.

The S&P 500 has surged a whopping 323% over the period, with its roughly 19% annualized return slightly lagging behind the historical bull market average of 22%.

Of course the U.S. economy has not been performing nearly as well. Even if you accept the highly manipulated numbers that the federal government puts out, we haven’t had a year when GDP grew by at least 3 percent since the middle of the Bush administration.

It simply is not possible for stock prices to continue to soar about 20 percent a year when the U.S. economy is growing less than 3 percent a year. At some point a major adjustment is coming, and it is going to be exceedingly painful.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

5 Signs That Global Financial Markets Are Entering A Bear Market, And 11 Ways That You Can Get Prepared For The Chaos That Is Coming…

August 19, 2018

5 Signs That Global Financial Markets Are Entering A Bear Market, And 11 Ways That You Can Get Prepared For The Chaos That Is Coming…

We haven’t seen carnage like this in the global financial marketplace in quite some time. On Wednesday, U.S. stocks were down some, but things were much, much worse around the rest of the world. Global banking stocks are plunging, emerging market stocks are cratering, and emerging market currencies continue their stunning decline. This represents a dramatic change from the relative stability that we have seen throughout most of 2018. It is almost as if someone flipped a switch once the month of August began, and the shakiness of global financial markets has many investors wondering what trouble fall will bring. What we are witnessing right now is not a full-blown panic yet, but it definitely has the potential to turn into one.

The term “bear market” is being thrown around a lot lately, but a lot of people don’t understand what a “bear market” actually is.

A bear market is generally considered to be when we see a decline of 20 percent or more from the 52-week high, and after the carnage of this past week a lot of those thresholds are now being crossed.

It would probably be too early to call this a “global stock market crash”, but we are well on the way to getting there. The following are 5 signs that global financial markets are entering a bear market…

#1 Global stocks have now fallen beneath all key moving averages. Those key moving averages are important psychological thresholds for investors, and if we have a few more days like Wednesday we could see global financial markets go into full panic mode.

#2 European banking stocks have now officially entered a bear market, and all major European stock indexes are now red for the year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

That Escalated Quickly: The Emerging Market Currency Crisis Of 2018 Threatens To Destabilize The Entire Global Financial System

August 14, 2018

That Escalated Quickly: The Emerging Market Currency Crisis Of 2018 Threatens To Destabilize The Entire Global Financial System

We haven’t seen emerging market currencies crash like this in over a decade, and analysts are warning that if this continues we could witness a devastating global debt crisis. Over the past decade, there has been an insatiable appetite for cheap loans in emerging market economies, and a very substantial percentage of those loans were denominated in U.S. dollars. When emerging market currencies crash relative to the U.S. dollar, lending dries up and servicing the existing loans becomes extremely oppressive, and that is precisely what we are witnessing right now. This week, most of the top headlines in the financial media have been about the crisis in Turkey. The Turkish lira fell another 8 percent against the U.S. dollar on Monday, and it is now down about 35 percent over the past week. Overall, the lira has fallen 82 percent against the U.S. dollar in 2018, and this is putting an enormous amount of stress on the Turkish financial system…

“It is about credit, since Turkey has been a huge borrower in global capital markets over the past number of years when the world’s central banks were encouraging investors to stretch for yield,” David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff, said in his daily market note. “Over half of the borrowing is denominated in foreign currencies, so when the lira sinks, debt-servicing costs and default risks rise inexorably.”

Turkey’s economy, just like all of the other major economies around the world, is utterly dependent on the flow of credit, and now lending is becoming greatly restricted.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Washington Nuts? Increasing Spending AND Cutting Taxes Will EXPLODE The Size Of The National Debt

February 8, 2018

Is Washington Nuts? Increasing Spending AND Cutting Taxes Will EXPLODE The Size Of The National Debt

Our national debt is rapidly approaching 21 trillion dollars, and yet Congress wants to follow up a large tax cut bill with a massive increase in federal spending. This is absolute madness, and it is going to make our long-term financial problems as a nation far worse. After passing the tax bill, the appropriate thing to do would have been to cut federal spending. Yes, that would have not been a positive thing for the economy in the short-term, but we must start addressing our long-term priorities. If we do not do something about this exploding national debt, it could potentially destroy our republic all by itself.

Earlier today, I was absolutely horrified when I learned of a budget deal in the Senate that would increase federal spending by about 200 billion dollars in each of the next two years…

The Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders unveiled a sweeping two-year budget agreement on Wednesday that would increase federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic and defense programs alike.

That deal would eliminate strict budget caps, set in 2011 to reduce the federal deficit, and would allow Congress to spend about $200 billion more in the current fiscal year and in fiscal year 2019.

Seriously?

Our federal debt is going to hit 21 trillion dollars some time this year, and they want to throw hundreds of billions of dollars more spending on top of what we are already doing?

This alone is why we need true conservatives all over the nation to run for Congress. Our endless greed is literally destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will America’s Prosperity Be Completely Wiped Out By Our Growing Debt?

October 30, 2017

Will America’s Prosperity Be Completely Wiped Out By Our Growing Debt?

The federal government is now 20.4 trillion dollars in debt, and most Americans don’t seem to care that the economic prosperity that we are enjoying today could be completely destroyed by our exploding national debt. Over the past decade, the national debt has been growing at a rate of more than 100 million dollars an hour, and this is a debt that all of us owe. When you break it down, each American citizen’s share of the debt is more than $60,000, and so if you have a family of five your share is more than $300,000. And when you throw in more than 6 trillion dollars of corporate debt and nearly 13 trillion dollars of consumer debt, it is not inaccurate to say that we are facing a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

Debt cannot grow much faster than GDP indefinitely. At some point the bubble bursts, and when it does the pain that the middle class is going to experience is going to be off the charts. Back in 2015, the middle class in the U.S. became a minority of the population for the first time ever. Never before in our history has the middle class accounted for less than 50 percent of the population, and all over the country formerly middle class families are under a great deal of stress as they attempt to make ends meet. The following comes from an absolutely outstanding piece that was just put out by Charles Hugh Smith…

If you talk to young people struggling to make ends meet and raise children, or read articles about retirees who can’t afford to retire, you can’t help but detect the fading scent of prosperity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How The Elite Dominate The World – Part 2: 99.9% Of The Global Population Lives In A Country With A Central Bank

October 16, 2017

How The Elite Dominate The World – Part 2: 99.9% Of The Global Population Lives In A Country With A Central Bank

Even though the nations of the world are very deeply divided on almost everything else, somehow virtually all of them have been convinced that central banking is the way to go. Today, less than 0.1% of the population of the world lives in a country that does not have a central bank. Do you think that there is any possible way that this is a coincidence? And it is also not a coincidence that we are now facing the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world. In Part I of this series, I discussed the fact that total global debt has reached 217 trillion dollars. Once you understand that central banks are designed to create endless debt, and once you understand that 99.9% of the global population lives in a country that has a central bank, then it finally makes sense why we have accumulated so much debt. The elite of the world use debt as a tool of enslavement, and central banking has allowed them to literally enslave the entire planet.

Some of you may not be familiar with how a “central bank” differs from a normal bank. The following definition of a “central bank” comes from Wikipedia…

A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is an institution that manages a state’s currency, money supply, and interest rates. Central banks also usually oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries. In contrast to a commercial bank, a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the monetary base in the state, and usually also prints the national currency,^[1] which usually serves as the state’s legal tender.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Venezuela Has Officially Abandoned The Petrodollar – Does This Make War With Venezuela More Likely?

September 15, 2017

Venezuela Has Officially Abandoned The Petrodollar – Does This Make War With Venezuela More Likely?

Venezuela is the 11th largest oil producing country in the entire world, and it has just announced that it is going to stop using the petrodollar. Most Americans don’t even know what the petrodollar is, but for those of you that do understand what I am talking about, this should send a chill up your spine. The petrodollar is one of the key pillars of the global financial system, and it allows us to live a far higher standard of living than we actually deserve. The dominance of the petrodollar has been very jealously guarded by our government in the past, and that is why many are now concerned that this move by Venezuela could potentially lead us to war.

I don’t know why this isn’t headline news all over the country, but it should be. One of the few major media outlets that is reporting on this is the Wall Street Journal…

The government of this oil-rich but struggling country, looking for ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions, is telling oil traders that it will no longer receive or send payments in dollars, people familiar with the new policy have told The Wall Street Journal.

Before we go any further, we should discuss what we mean by the “petrodollar” for those that are not familiar with the concept. The following comes from an excellent article by Christopher Doran…

In a nutshell, any country that wants to purchase oil from an oil producing country has to do so in U.S. dollars. This is a long standing agreement within all oil exporting nations, aka OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The UK for example, cannot simply buy oil from Saudi Arabia by exchanging British pounds. Instead, the UK must exchange its pounds for U.S. dollars. The major exception at present is, of course, Iran.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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