Market crash: are we there yet ?

[Superpickle]

I really dont belive we have seen the Worst YET,
This Government is going to Drag us to the Utter Bottom of the Poop Pile and shovel it on top of us...
I am on Service connected disability and fully expect to find one day soon.. No Frikkin money when the Eagle was supposed to have Crapped in my bank.
So, if I dont have a Boat by then and Cannot LEAVE to go Fishing for my dinner.. I WILL be a News paper headline.. "Crazed Viet Nam Vet goes Postal" Probably be some Government office of sorts.. In DC, of course ;-)
hehehehehehehe
Does that sound Scary ?, it should...
Oh. I know it wont help, but when you have Nothing to lose and your as full of Frustration and Resentment and ANGER as I am,, its Easy
Ya"ll have a nice day now, ya Hear.. ;-)

[wind_magic]

Originally Posted by Superpickle

I am on Service connected disability and fully expect to find one day soon.. No Frikkin money when the Eagle was supposed to have Crapped in my bank.

You'll still get money, it just won't be worth anything. Oh yes I know, I'm sure it'll be raised to account for "cost of living" increases, everyone is really fair about that, CPI is a very accurate measure of inflation, just ask Trop, CPI is Trop's favorite.

[wind_magic]

Let's not forget this ..

In particular, changes made in CPI methodology during the Clinton Administration understated inflation significantly, and, through a cumulative effect with earlier changes that began in the late-Carter and early Reagan Administrations have reduced current social security payments by roughly half from where they would have been otherwise. That means Social Security checks today would be about double had the various changes not been made. In like manner, anyone involved in commerce, who relies on receiving payments adjusted for the CPI, has been similarly damaged. On the other side, if you are making payments based on the CPI (i.e., the federal government), you are making out like a bandit.

Source: Shadowstats

[Superpickle]

Well, I guess....

But I STILL need/want/require a BOAT...
so There..

[wind_magic]

Originally Posted by Superpickle

Well, I guess....

But I STILL need/want/require a BOAT...
so There..

You'll still get enough money to keep a boat, I'm telling you, it is all right there, figured into CPI. See what Shadow stats says again ...

The Boskin/Greenspan argument was that when steak got too expensive, the consumer would substitute hamburger for the steak, and that the inflation measure should reflect the costs tied to buying hamburger versus steak, instead of steak versus steak. Of course, replacing hamburger for steak in the calculations would reduce the inflation rate, but it represented the rate of inflation in terms of maintaining a declining standard of living. Cost of living was being replaced by the cost of survival. The old system told you how much you had to increase your income in order to keep buying steak. The new system promised you hamburger, and then dog food, perhaps, after that.

Source: Shadowstats

CPI will get adjusted with inflation, see, hamburger, that's just as good as steak, it's still cow, right ? This is still a boat, right ? And it'll only cost you 1000000 inflation adjusted bucks.

[TropicCat]

We all know that Small business has traditionally been the engine of employment in this county. This report pretty much rules out any employment recovery in 2010. This is 'the' leading indicator of small business report.

http://www.nfib.com/Portals/0/PDF/sbet/sbet201001.pdf

The Great Recession will deepen. I think it's time we begin discussions on a closed cycle economy.

There is no such thing as a service and information economy with one notable exception. There never has been outside of the Cayman Islands..

There is not only no requirement to globalize trade, in fact, Free Trade has killed the America we all knew by decimating the middle class. If we plan on keeping a middle class, it's high time we address the trade issue instead of ***** footing around the subject. That sucking sound we all hear is jobs leaving the country and is the reason our 'experts' coyly mention that they aren't coming back..

I read an article which mentioned that America is down to 173,000 mechanical engineers. Why? Simple... there is no job for them. New forecasts have Electrical engineers joining them on the unemployment lines as India and China are both promoting engineering educations at home. As we all know, if can be done cheaper off shore..it will be. Computer programmers already know what happened to their jobs.

No one has figured out that there will soon be no one left in this country to buy anything. The classic Spiral of economic death. Our corporations are no longer worried about this inconvenient fact as they will just adjust their sales forecast, print the owners' manual in different languages and sell their products somewhere else, leaving America left standing like a deer caught in headlamps.

Corporations won't save us, hell, they are burying us. Politicians won't save us as guess who bought and paid for them?

Wake up folks, it's left for 'Us' to save us. It's that simple.

[kootenay]

Tropicat where your argument leads is towards trade restrictions. Protectionism in a word. Unfortunately that simply will not serve to solve the problem You are dead right globalism is changng the world as we know it. The so called jobs of the future which are for the most part education knowledge based are moving offshore and they are there because our education system here in North America kind of sucks and our kids are not nearly motivated enough. Labour based jobs can be done cheaper else where. We are lucky to a degree in the north and some parts of the states thanks to Raw material production. But is it protectionism you seek? And how do you propose making it work?

[TropicCat]

You make a good point yet when you have 2 billion people in China and India willing, ready and able to replace every American job they can, and American corporations more than willing to oblige them, what choice is there? As long as the job market is tanking, real estate goes down with it. This is a significant portion of our economy. As real estate goes down, we need more and more bank bailouts, industry bailouts... and so on. Right now our debt exceeds our GDP. This can not continue. In our race to join Mexico at the bottom of the economic ladder, the American economy is being systematically damaged and American lives along with it.

Free trade was supposed to prevent this. Instead, it's accelerating it. So I ask once again, what choice is there?

You ask how this will be implemented? That's a very good question. Ronald Reagan headed us towards this cliff, Bill Clinton put us on the precipice and George Bush pushed us over the edge.

Consider that the $36 billion American monthly trade deficit is the equivalent of 4 IBM size companies hiring and doing business in America. That's 400,000 employees x 4. Look at the unemployment numbers and you will discover that 22% of our workforce can not find a job. That's 30 million people. Economists use a 4 x multiplier to estimate service jobs created to support high paying jobs. My point is that even if we passed laws tomorrow to zero out our trade imbalance, this would create a grand total of 4 x 400,000 x 4 or only 6.4 million jobs. No where near enough to address America's unemployment issue.

This is how bad things are. Our economy has not only fallen off a cliff but politicians have attached rocket motors to accelerate it's race to the bottom of the ravine. What is being sacrificed is our middle class.

Drastic measures are necessary to save us at this point. I can only hope that somewhere in Washington there is the political will to begin the process of unraveling the issue.

[kootenay]

I dont disagree with your points but the nut is how do you turn the world around because that is what you would have to do. The US isnt going to abbrogate their existing free trade agreements openly because doing that would create an uproar that would sink the ship totally. Their are a few things you can do. Use the existing envrionmental concern to tack on a carbon tax to imports based on the miles they have traveled to the US and the carbon footprint. This would hit china hard and drive up the costs of some imports. Invest heavily in R&D and Education these really are your only hope to pull out of the death spiral. Enact measures to reduce consumption. Short term pain because a good chunk of the GDP is made up of that consumption. In fact I hate the way we measure GDP because the majority of it isnt production but rather consumption that it indicates. The US is like a family living beyond its means running rampant with the Credit card. The first step....cut up the friggen credit card. Unfortunately Bush/Obama didnt do that they simply upped the spending limit. Both parties are reacting to their political need to get reelected not doing what is right which is allowing some stuff to crash and burn like Detroit and some of the banks. Now that aint gonna happen because it isnt in those guys interest in the house who have to get reelected on too often a basis. So my advice sit back and get ready for the mess to come it will be worse than last year by far because all that has really happened is a delay of the inevitable.

[TropicCat]

Wait, you're insinuating that we do nothing? That's what got us into this mess.

Consider the quality of what we are being told:

"For the week ended 12/19, 10.42 million Americans were receiving unemployment benefits, With 5.44 million Extended claims (week ended 12/19) and 4.98 million Continuing claims.

"But NSA jobless claims show a far different story. The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 645,571 in the week ending Jan. 2, an increase of 88,000 from the previous week. There were 731,958 Initial claims in the comparable week in 2009... The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,479,110, an increase of 388,729 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 4.0 percent and the volume was 5,317,388.

"So the actual, the real benefits paid (Initial, Continuing, and EUC claims) hit another record of 11.268 million." (source: The Big Picture)

Yet, we were told we only lost 85,000 jobs in December. I guess BLS is trusting that none of us own calculators. Certainly Wall st. investors do not as they greeted this as 'evidence' the recession is over. Never mind the inconvenient fact that ECRI Leading Indicators Fell to Lowest Level Ever.. that's EVER!!!!!!!!!

Where are the front page news headlines?? Do papers think no one cares if they have a job or not????

We were also told that retail sails dropped far less than expected. I believe the number was 1% in December. OK, that's positive news, right? So, I spent the morning verifying. Can anyone tell me which state in America does not have a sales tax? If retail sales were off just 1%, why are state sales tax collections down 10% or more?

Again, bogus economic numbers are being released and parroted by major news media outlets which aren't even bothering to check them and ask questions. Who would disagree that Wall St. seems totally oblivious and just as importantly our Spiral of Death remains unchecked? Neither elected officials, ( of either party ) nor the news media is serving us well.

Frankly, with incorrect information, almost no opinion pages and certainly no outrage as to what's happening to America along with no questions why it's happening, it's no wonder all newspapers are showing reduced readership. If conservative talk radio doesn't wake up, they will be right behind the papers.

All of the news media ought to be ashamed of themselves and they deserve what they get.