The World Is Dedollarizing

Peter Koenig

Global Research

What if tomorrow nobody but the United States would use the US-dollar? Every country, or society would use their own currency for internal and international trade, their own economy-based, non-fiat currency. It could be traditional currencies or new government controlled crypto-currencies, but a country’s own sovereign money. No longer the US-dollar. No longer the dollar’s foster child, the Euro. No longer international monetary transactions controlled by US banks and – by the US-dollar controlled international transfer system, SWIFT, the system that allows and facilitates US financial and economic sanctions of all kinds – confiscation of foreign funds, stopping trades between countries, blackmailing ‘unwilling’ nations into submission. What would happen? – Well, the short answer is that we would certainly be a step close to world peace, away from US (financial) hegemony, towards nation states’ sovereignty, towards a world geopolitical structure of more equality.

We are not there yet. But graffities are all over the walls signaling that we are moving quite rapidly in that direction. And Trump knows it and his handlers know it – which is why the onslaught of financial crime – sanctions – trade wars – foreign assets and reserves confiscations, or outright theft – all in the name of “Make America Great Again”, is accelerating exponentially and with impunity. What is surprising is that the Anglo-Saxon hegemons do not seem to understand that all the threats, sanctions, trade barriers, are provoking the contrary to what should contribute to American Greatness. Economic sanctions, in whatever form, are effective only as long as the world uses the US dollar for trading and as reserve currency.

Once the world gets sick and tired of the grotesque dictate of Washington and the sanction schemes for those who do no longer want to go along with the oppressive rules of the US, they will be eager to jump on another boat, or boats – abandoning the dollar and valuing their own currencies. Meaning trading with each other in their own currencies – and that outside of the US banking system which so far even controls trading in local currencies, as long as funds have to be transferred from one nation to another via SWIFT.

Many countries have also realized that the dollar is increasingly  serving to manipulate the value of their economy. The US-dollar, a fiat currency, by its sheer money mass, may bend national economies up or down, depending in which direction the country is favored by the hegemon. Let’s put the absurdity of this phenomenon in perspective.

Read more

A Bank With $49 Trillion In Derivatives Exposure Is Melting Down Before Our Eyes

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse blog

Could it be possible that we are on the verge of the next “Lehman Brothers moment”?  

Deutsche Bank is the most important bank in all of Europe, it has 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives, and most of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States have very deep financial connections to the bank.  In other words, the global financial system simply cannot afford for Deutsche Bank to fail, and right now it is literally melting down right in front of our eyes.  For years I have been warning that this day would come, and even though it has been hit by scandal after scandal, somehow Deutsche Bank was able to survive until now.  But after what we have witnessed in recent days, many now believe that the end is near for Deutsche Bank.  On July 7th, they really shook up investors all over the globe when they laid off 18,000 employees and announced that they would be completely exiting their global equities trading business…

It takes a lot to rattle Wall Street.
But Deutsche Bank managed to. The beleaguered German giant announced on July 7 that it is laying off 18,000 employees—roughly one-fifth of its global workforce—and pursuing a vast restructuring plan that most notably includes shutting down its global equities trading business.
Though Deutsche’s Bloody Sunday seemed to come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a years-long—some would say decades-long—descent into unprofitability and scandal for the bank, which in the early 1990s set out to make itself into a universal banking powerhouse to rival the behemoths of Wall Street.

These moves may delay Deutsche Bank’s inexorable march into oblivion, but not by much. 

Read more

Something Huge Just Happened In Europe

John Rubino
Dollar Collapse

Critics of modern monetary policy have been predicting that the day would come when a central bank would cut interest rates (or at least promise to), and the financial markets, instead of throwing a party, would fall. Then it would be game over for easy money. 

This has yet to happen in the US. Both when the Fed stopped tightening in January and when it promised to resume easing more recently, stock prices soared, which implies that the addict is still responsive to new injections.

But in Europe, where monetary policy is further down the road to universally-negative interest rates, the story is different. On Thursday, European Central Bank chair Mario Draghi went back to his tried-and-true “whatever it takes” script, promising to restart QE and cut interest rates even further if the weak EU economy doesn’t pick up steam. 

The markets, instead of reacting with their typical euphoria, seemed to recoil. Most EU member bond yields went up rather than down, bank stocks fell and the euro — which would normally be expected to fall on the prospect of easier money — rose. 

This is both huge and, like I said, expected. Once a central bank has pushed interest rates below zero and bought up most of the available high-grade bonds, lower interest rates and more bond purchases ought to lose some of their punch. And it appears that they have.

Read more

The Next Economic Crisis, The Looming Post-Multipolar System And Hybrid War Forever

South Front

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called "globalization" which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many "emerging markets" created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand. However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating-and bursting-several financial "bubbles". 

Even today's US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial "black swan" event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal "firepower" on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply "more of the same." It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy. 

Read more

The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire (Documentary)

Independent POV

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance. 

 

The Spider's Web was written, directed and produced by Michael Oswald, you can sponsor his future films on Liberapay (supports one time donations) and Patreon: https://liberapay.com/IndependentPOV https://www.patreon.com/independentdo... 

 

Share this documentary with your friends, and ask sites to feature it:  

https://twitter.com/spiderswebfilm  

 

https://www.facebook.com/Spiderswebfilm/  

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6483026/ 

 

The Spider's Web was substantially inspired by Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands you can read an extract of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardi... 

 

Translate this documentary here on youtube or contact us for the .srt file 

 

contact@independentpov.org 

 

For those interested to learn more about tax justice and financial secrecy, read about the Tax Justice Network's campaigning and regular blogs - become part of the movement for change and listen to the Tax Justice Network's monthly podcast/radio show the Taxcast https://www.taxjustice.net/taxcast/ 

 

Review on Filmotomy: https://filmotomy.com/the-spiders-web... 

 

Review on Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/open... 

 

Website: www.spiderswebfilm.com 

 

German Version: https://youtu.be/1ZZR8vBKqwc 

Spanish Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dsT... 

French Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hizj_... 

Italian Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwmvX... 

 

Subtitles: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Hungarian, English, Turkish, Portugese.

The Normalization and Institutionalization of Fraud

Charles Hugh-Smith

Normalizing and institutionalizing fraud undermines the foundations of the economy and the financial system.

I am indebted to Manoj Samanta (twitter: @flation_debate) for the insightful concept the commoditization of fraud. The first step in the commoditization of fraud is to normalize fraud as Business as Usual (BAU) to the point that it's no longer viewed as "wrong," destructive or an aberration of evil-doers but as an accepted way to maximize gain and offload risk onto others.

The last step in the process is to institutionalize fraud within central banking and government policies.

How is selling shares in a money-losing corporation at outlandish valuations not the commoditization of fraud? The fraud has been normalized into a game of hoping that greater fools will be so enamored of the normalized fraud that they'll take the IPO shares off your hands at ever-higher valuations until the fraud breaks down.

But by then, the instigators of the fraud--the IPO--have escaped with billions in gains and zero liability.

How is private equity loading companies up with debt as a means of paying outlandish dividends to themselves not commoditized fraud? How is paying dividends with debt rather than earnings not fraud? The net result of this fraud is the debt-burdened company eventually defaults on its debt, defrauding the investors who were suckered into the scam.

But once again, the instigators of the fraud--private equity--have escaped with billions in gains and zero liability.

Read more

The National Debt is the Most Serious Crisis America Faces

David Unsworth
Activist Post

A generation ago, the national debt stood at just a smidgen over USD $4 trillion and a young presidential candidate named Bill Clinton was discussing a great plan he had to have it entirely paid off by now. Oops. The national debt is now 5.5 times bigger.

More than anything, this astoundingly bad public policy is the fault of Barack Obama, undoubtedly the most irresponsible president in our history…who added on more to the national debt than all other presidents combined in an orgy of Washington, DC, debauchery that saw the size of the federal government mushroom while hundreds of thousands of new bureaucrats were added to federal payrolls, and Washington, DC, housing prices skyrocketed as federal government employees and private industry sub-contractors paid for by the government reveled in their six-figure paychecks and outrageously lavish healthcare and pension plans… all paid for by us, the taxpayers. 

Unwarranted Trust

 

Obama’s stewardship of our national finances was truly obscene, but George W. Bush was nearly as bad. He has even less of an excuse, in fact, because he had a Republican Congress to work with for most of his eight years. During that time, Bush took us from USD $5.8 trillion to USD $10 trillion, something that seemed reckless at the time. Of course, in light of the Obama USD $10 trillion spending extravaganza, Bush looks prudent by comparison.

How is it that we supposedly elect the best and the brightest to represent us in Washington, DC,…people with law and medical degrees and MBAs from Ivy League universities, people that come from the finest law practices and accounting firms and consultancies and banks and financial institutions in the country…and our end result is the debt avalanche we now have before us?

Why do we believe politicians of either party when they tell us that they will make our national debt a top priority?

Why is it that the American people seem to fail to understand how ruinous our national debt truly is and what an astounding percent of our national budget we are now spending on servicing that debt?

Read more

Here Are 14 Very Alarming Numbers That Reveal The Current State Of The Economy

Activist Post

The economic numbers just continue to get worse and worse, and at this point it has become exceedingly clear that an economic slowdown is happening.  In fact, even the chair of the Federal Reserve is using the term “slowdown” to describe what is taking place.  But of course many are still hoping that the U.S. economy can pull out of this slump and avoid the sort of crippling recession that we experienced in 2008.  Unfortunately, that may be really tough because the entire global economy is slowing down right now.

Our world is more interconnected than ever before, and what happens on one side of the planet is invariably going to affect the other side of the planet.  Some parts of the globe are already mired in deep economic problems, and the U.S. appears to be following down the same path.

 

If you still think that the economy is in “good shape”, please read over the following list very carefully.
The following are 14 very alarming numbers that reveal the true state of the economy…
#1 Continuing jobless claims are rising at the fastest pace in 10 years.
#2 U.S. businesses are adding jobs at the slowest pace in 18 months.
#3 General Motors, Ford, Nissan and Fiat Chrysler all reported sales declines of at least 5 percent on a year over year basis in March.
#4 Tesla vehicle deliveries were down a whopping 31 percent during the first quarter of 2019.
#5 U.S. consumer confidence fell more than 7 points in March.
#6 Manhattan real estate sales have now fallen for six straight quarters.  That is the longest losing streak in 30 years.
#7 London real estate sales just dropped by the most we have seen in 10 years.
#8 The owner of Kay, Zales and Jared jewelers just announced that they will be closing 150 stores.
#9 Retail layoffs are 92 percent higher than they were at this time last year.
#10 U.S. freight shipment volume has fallen for three months in a row.
#11 The inventory to sales ratio in the United States has risen sharply for five months in a row.
#12 At this point, almost half of all renters in America spend more than 30 percent of their incomeson rent.
#13 The real median net income for Minnesota farmers was only $26,055 in 2018, and that was before many of them were absolutely devastated by the recent flooding.
#14 Overall, U.S. economic numbers are off to their worst start for a year since 2008.

Read more

American Farmers On Verge Of Disaster

Grant's Pub

 

It’s been a tough road for the U.S. farming industry, which is seemingly beset on all sides. Agricultural commodity prices remain low, with spot corn and soybean currently fetching $3.62 and $8.99 per bushel, respectively, each roughly 22% below their respective 10-year average prices. 

 

Meanwhile, the ongoing Sino-American trade war continues to crimp overseas demand, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that soybean deliveries to China fell more than 80% year-over-year since September. That helped push soybean stocks to a record 3.7 billion bushels as of year-end 2018.  

By the same token, the USDA forecast Friday that corn plantings will rise 4.1% in 2019 to 92.8 million this year, an unwelcome development considering that “American silos are already bulging with the grain,” according to Bloomberg. Adding insult to injury, devastating floods have afflicted large swaths of the Midwest during the heart of spring planting season.  

The USDA estimates that net farm incomes plunged 16% year-over-year in 2018 to $63.1 billion, down from more than $120 billion as recently as 2013.  Rising operating costs play a prominent role in that shrinkage. According to the All Farms Index tabulated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the prices received component fell to 84.9 in January from 95.1 in June, while prices paid registered 109.3 and has remained north of 100 since 2011.

Read more

U.S. national debt tops $22 trillion for the first time

market watch

 

The U.S. national debt topped a record $22 trillion this week, less than a year after it crossed the $21 trillion mark, indicating a further deterioration in the nation’s finances.

The Peterson Foundation said the U.S. national debt has risen by $1 trillion in the past 11 months, calling it “the latest sign that our fiscal situation is not only unsustainable, but accelerating.”

The foundation drew its estimate from the Treasury Department’s daily statement on the government financial assets and liabilities. The group has long called for reducing the national debt to ensure the nation’s long-term financial health.

“We already pay an average of $1 billion every day in interest on the debt, and will spend a staggering $7 trillion in interest costs over the next decade,” asserted Michael Peterson, CEO of the foundation. “In order to build the strong and stable future that we want for America, we must put our fiscal house in order and begin to manage our national debt.”

Economists agree the U.S. will suffer in the long run if the government fails to rein in the debt, but that day may still be a long way off.

The standard method of judging a nation’s fiscal health is to look at the level of debt relative to GDP — or the size of the economy. The ratio of publicly held debt-to-GDP is seen rising from about 78% in 2019 to 106% by 2029 and to as high as 193% by 2049 under current tax and spending policies, the Brookings Institution calculates in a new report.

While the interest payments on such a large debt would siphon off a lots of money the government could use for other things, it’s by no means clear how much the economy would suffer.

Japan has run huge debt-to-GDP ratios for years and it still has one of the strongest economies in the world. The country’s debt is around 236% of GDP.

The U.S. national debt soared in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession, accelerated again after the Trump tax cuts in 2017 and an increase in federal spending. 

Read More

Is The World Becoming Wealthier Or Poorer?

Charles Hugh-Smith
OfTwoMinds blog

At the request of colleague/author Douglas Rushkoff (his latest book is Team Human), I'm publishing last week's Musings Report, which was distributed only to subscribers and patrons of the site.)

The core assumption of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and other plans to redistribute wealth and income more broadly is that the world is becoming wealthier, and so the pool of income and wealth that can be taxed is always expanding.

This pool of available wealth and income is so vast, we're assured, that taxing the super-wealthy will not really dent their wealth or the economy as a whole.

But what if the world is rapidly becoming poorer in every important sense?

What if the decline in the standard of living of the bottom 90% of households that I've often addressed is not simply the result of the top 10% taking a greater share of the output (gains), but of the entire pie shrinking?

I believe the steady decline of the purchasing power of labor--the source of most households' income--is not just the result of way income is distributed, but of a steadily diminishing pool of real-world wealth.

We must start any discussion of total wealth/income by asking: what are we measuring with currencies such as dollars? What's not being measured?

Read more

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

John W. Whitehead
Information Clearing House

Our nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments.

America has so much to offer—creativity, ingenuity, vast natural resources, a rich heritage, a beautifully diverse populace, a freedom foundation unrivaled anywhere in the world, and opportunities galore—and yet our birthright is being sold out from under us so that power-hungry politicians, greedy military contractors, and bloodthirsty war hawks can make a hefty profit at our expense.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for national security and urgent military needs.

It’s all a ruse.

You know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the government’s fiscal year? Government agencies—including the Department of Defense—go on a “use it or lose it” spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the next fiscal year.

We’re not talking chump change, either.

We’re talking $97 billion worth of wasteful spending.

According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).

So much for draining the swamp.

Read more

The OTHER Debt Bubbles: How Private Sector Debt Could Trigger the Next Financial Crisis

Activist Post

The $22 trillion official national debt is a much discussed problem, even as politicians exhibit zero motivation to do anything about it. But as big an economic overhang as it is, government debt isn’t likely to trigger the next financial crisis.

Yes, servicing the growing federal debt bubble will depress GDP growth, cause the value of the dollar to drop, and raise inflation risks. But the bubble itself won’t necessarily burst – not anytime soon.

As long as politicians face no political consequences for deficit spending, and as long as the Federal Reserve keeps the Treasury bond market propped up… then many more trillions can be added to the national debt.

Meanwhile, more fragile debt bubbles exist in the private sector. Unlike government debt – which carries the implicit backing of the Fed’s unlimited printing press – debts incurred by corporations, investors, consumers, and students can default.

 

Globally, there exists $250 trillion in debt against economic assets of around $100 trillion. The notional value of all derivatives now approaches a quadrillion dollars.

It’s been called the “everything bubble”… and it could soon lead to the “everything bust.”
U.S. household debt rose to a record $13.5 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2018. Mortgages, student loans, car loans, and credit cards represent enormous burdens even during a good economy. These burdens will prove unbearable for millions of Americans in the years ahead.

For many the financial crisis is already here:

• Pending home sales have fallen on a year over year basis for 13 consecutive months.
• Farm loan delinquencies recently hit their highest level in 9 years.
• More than 7 million Americans are delinquent on their auto loan payments – an all-time record.
• Some 5.1 million people are in default on their student loans.

Read more

The US economy is falling apart: 18 big signs

Comment: Michael seems to have spent the last ten years saying that collapse is imminent only to proven wrong every time. But he's bound to be right eventually.

One thing is for sure, the longer this global bubble of toxic derivative debt and various other debilitating factors continue to inflate, the bigger the next crash will be. 

----------------

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog

Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that. But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing. But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there. The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly... 

#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years. 

#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December. 

#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores. 

#4 Victoria's Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores. 

#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years. 

#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores. 

#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online. 

#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to "millions of dollars in severance pay". 

#9 The Baltic Dry Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.

Read more

The Doomsday Scenario for the Stock and Housing Bubbles

Charles Hugh-Smith
Washington's Blog

The Doomsday Scenario for the stock and housing bubbles is simple: the Fed’s magic fails. When dropping interest rates to zero and flooding the financial sector with loose money fail to ignite the economy and reflate the deflating bubbles, punters will realize the Fed’s magic only worked the first three times: three bubbles and the game is over.

So what happens when punters realize there won’t be a fourth bubble? They sell. Bids disappear because who’s dumb enough to bet (with Japan and Europe as lessons) that more liquidity and negative interest rates will magically work when zero interest rates didn’t move the needle?

Who’s foolish enough to catch the falling knife (i.e. buying plummeting assets on the way down) on the unsupported assumption that the next dose of Fed magic will reverse a bidless market?

And should the Fed start buying stocks, mortgages, housing and bonds to prop up those bidless markets, what’s the message it will be sending? Desperation.If the only buyer is the money-printing central bank, that’s pretty good evidence that your economy and markets are in free-fall.

The loss of faith in central bank magic will be gradual at first, as magical thinking dies hard. It’s oh so comforting to believe the central bank will rescue every overleveraged mal-investment and bail out every high-risk speculation, but the funny thing about the Fed’s magic is it only works in liquidity crises–in every other condition, it only makes matters worse.

Does making it cheap to borrow improve the productivity of capital investments? You must be joking. The poster child of Fed magic is corporate buybacks, which 1) create no goods 2) create no services 3) do nothing to improve real wealth creation, i.e. higher productivity and 4) burden the company with higher debt loads, inhibiting future capital investment in actual productive capacity.

Read more

National Debt Passes $21 Trillion: A Crisis In The Making

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

The national debt should be a huge concern for every single American, as the government is essentially stealing from people not yet born to pay for things now.  As debt increases, so does volatility and interest rates; and at some point, the government will have to admit they cannot pay that money back.

“Reaching this unfortunate milestone so rapidly is the latest sign that our fiscal situation is not only unsustainable but accelerating,” said Michael A. Peterson, chief executive officer of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization working to address the country’s long-term fiscal challenges.  According to Yahoo, the problem is that our taxes are too low, not the government’s frivolous spending.

According to Yahoo, a big national debt can also make it harder for the government to increase spending to combat the next recession or devote more money to retraining workers and helping the poor, among other programs.  It seems that the media is more concerned about making sure money is funneled through incompetent bureaucrats than anything else.  If government programs designed to help the poor with stolen funds (taxes) were effective, there wouldn’t be a skyrocketing homeless epidemic infecting socialist cities in California.

Read more

The Coming Global Financial Crisis: Debt Exhaustion

Charles Hugh-Smith 

The global economy is way past the point of maximum debt saturation, and so the next stop is debt exhaustion.
 
Just as generals fight the last war, central banks always fight the last financial crisis. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-09 was primarily one of liquidity as markets froze up as a result of the collapse of the highly leveraged subprime mortgage sector that had commoditized fraud (hat tip to Manoj S.) via liar loans and designed-to-implode mortgage backed securities.

The central bank "solution" to institutionalized, commoditized fraud was to lower interest rates to zero and enable tens of trillions in new debt. As a result, total debt in the U.S. has soared to $70 trillion, roughly 3.5 times GDP, and global debt has skyrocketed from $84 trillion to $250 trillion. Debt in China has blasted from $7 trillion 2008 to $40 trillion in 2018.

A funny thing happens when you depend on borrowing from the future (debt) to fund growth today: the new debt no longer boosts growth, as the returns on additional debt are increasingly marginal. This leads to what I term debt exhaustion: lenders can no longer find creditworthy borrowers, borrowers either don't want more debt or can't afford more debt, and the cost and risk of the additional debt far outweigh the meager gains. Whatever credit is issued is gambled in speculations that the current bubble du jour will continue indefinitely.

Read more

Evidence That Half of Americans Are In or Near Poverty

Wake Up World
 

The extreme level of wealth inequality in the U.S. is battering the poor.

Deniers like Nikki Haley refuse to admit that mass poverty exists in their prosperous nation. That would reflect poorly on their capitalist beliefs. But if the skeptics would look at the half of America they don’t care to see, the stark display of destitution might shock them. At least until they invent an excuse to remove it all from their minds.

The U.S. poverty rate in 2016 was between 12.7 and 14.0 percent. But the poverty threshold is based on an outmoded formula from the 1960s. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the threshold should be THREE TIMES HIGHER today. And it could be even higher if the true nature of poverty is considered.

Poverty is not just a dollar figure.

 

There is poverty in the diminishing quality of life for Americans who are unable to pay for medical treatment during years of declining health, and instead turn to life-threatening opioid painkillers, readily available in a nation with less than 5 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the world’s opioid consumption. Poverty is the lack of community support in a winner-take-all society; the stress of overwhelming debt; the steady decline of jobs that pay enough to support a family; the inability to afford a move to a desired neighborhood; the deadening impact of inequality on physical and mental well-being.

Read more

As Social Security and Medicare Go Bankrupt, US Gives $10.5 Million a DAY to Israel

" If countries such as Syria, Russia, or Iran, were targeting civilians in the same way that Israel is, the United States would be calling for a full-scale invasion. Instead, the U.S. continues to condone the country’s treatment of Palestinian civilians by sending Israel $10.5 million a day."

Rachel Blevins
Activist Post

As the United States government admits that Social Security and Medicare services are going bankrupt and will both be completely depleted within the next 16 years, American taxpayers are giving around $10.5 million to a close ally that is routinely accused of human rights violations.

The latest report from the Social Security Administration revealed that Social Security funds will be depleted by 2034, and Medicare funds will be depleted by 2026—three years earlier than what was last reported. Last year, Social Security and Medicare funds accounted for 42 percent of federal program expenditures, and as the report noted:

Both Social Security and Medicare face long-term financing shortfalls under currently scheduled benefits and financing. Lawmakers have a broad continuum of policy options that would close or reduce the long-term financing shortfall of both programs. The Trustees recommend that lawmakers take action sooner rather than later to address these shortfalls so that a broader range of solutions can be considered and more time will be available to phase in changes while giving the public adequate time to prepare. Earlier action will also help elected officials minimize adverse impacts on vulnerable populations, including lower-income workers and people already dependent on program benefits.

While the increased reduction in Social Security and Medicare funds can be blamed on the federal government, it is not the only area where government spending should warrant serious concern. In December 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal debt held by the public was more than $9 trillion or 62 percent of GDP. 

Read more

Russia Dumps Half of Its US Treasury Bonds

The Most Revolutionary Act via 
Socio-Economics History Blog

Russia responds to tightening sanctions by selling off Treasury bonds that finance skyrocketing US debt. China also sells off $7 billion worth. If too many countries sell off their Treasury bonds, the US dollar will collapse and the US government will be forced to live within its means.

RT:

Russia has held a major selloff of US Treasury bonds, dumping some $47bn-worth of papers and momentarily dropping six places on a list of major foreign holders of US securities, recently released statistics for April have shown.
–
In just one month, Russia proceeded to sell $47.4 billion out of the $96.1 billion the country had in US treasury bonds in March. The latest statistics released by the US Treasury Department on Friday showed that, in April, Russia had only $48.7bn in American assets, occupying 22nd place on the list of “major foreign holders of Treasury securities.”–
China, which holds the most US Treasury bonds, also sold off some seven billion-worth of its American assets, from March to April, and now has $1.18 trillion invested in securities. Japan, which is positioned second on the list, in the same timeframe sold…

Read more