Good times will not be returning any time soon.

We continue to lose jobs month over month. And, while the statistics being released are showing a slow down, this is basically a fabrication. There are thousands of people falling off of unemployment compensation each week — none of them are reflected in the official numbers. Shadowstats.com estimates unemployment is above 20%. Take it for what you will, but these numbers are rapidly approaching the unemployment rate during the last well known depression.

Credit is contracting. The last decade in America has seen credit, or debt, however you want to look at it, essentially become a second income. No more. The banks may be getting billions in loans, but for the individual on the street, credit is frozen. Couple this with the loss of primary income streams and you have a lot of people with no money for even essential goods.

Foreclosures continue to mount. In addition to the foreclosures of the last 2 years, we have millions more in play right now, regardless of the mortgage programs the government institutes. Job Loss + Credit Contraction means there is no way millions of people will be able to make their monthly payments. Nowadays, once you lose your job, you aren’t going to have an easy time finding a new one that adequately services personal debt. In real terms housing prices are not done dropping. There are some conservative down-side estimates that say an additional 15% is likely. But, what if they are underestimating? What if it turns out to be 30%, or more? If we are in a depression, the downside is huge. Japanese real estate lost 80% (adjusted for inflation) in the 1990’s (and so did their stock market!). In some parts of the country, home owners would probably agree that the 45% their homes have already lost would constitute a depression.

Debt defaults keep rising. Bank of America just released their numbers and lost upwards of $2 billion dollars, due in part, to credit card defaults. This is not the sign of a healthy consumer. When a consumer defaults on a credit card, that is leading indicator that they will not get easy credit if they need it in the future. A default in 2009 is a big red flag for lenders. Empirically, this seems like it may be a leading indicator for continued credit contraction on the consumer side.

Small businesses are getting hit hard. Small business is the engine that runs the entire economy, employing around 70% of the workforce. Right now, they have no access to loans, and the consumer is drying up. To survive, they’ve had to cut costs significantly. The next step will be to cut jobs. Many have already resorted to letting people go. As much as owners may not want to let go of their people, they realize they have no choice at this point. Incidentally, many major corporations showing “better than expected” results employed these same strategies. But, the businesses themselves, not necessarily by choice, are perpetuating the negative feedback loop. As they lay off employees, more consumer income is destroyed, leading to fewer revenues across the board for a majority of businesses, big and small.

The Middle Class is holding on for dear life. If small business drives jobs and production, it is the middle class that drives consumption. And the middle class is getting hammered for all of the reasons mentioned above. Many middle class families are realizing, or will realize very soon, that their lifestyle choices are going to need changes. Cut out the gym and take a jog instead. Why pay $100 for cable when you can get similar, if not better, news and movies online for $30 a month? Is organic really necessary at the grocery store when one can save 30% buying the regular stuff we grew up on? Do I really need to get a new car when my 2005 Explorer is just fine? Why go out and spend $100 when dinner and a movie at home a couple of Fridays a month saves enough money to pay the electric bill? These and other questions are going through the collective mind of middle class America. They are desperately trying to avoid becoming a member of working or under class America. The initial step to maintain stability is the same as with small businesses - cut spending.

Visualize a car engine. When there is enough motor oil, the pistons are firing up and down rapidly and the system runs efficiently. When the oil dries up, the engine begins to deteriorate. It’ll go for a little while longer. And it’ll become much more violent and volatile each time it fires. Invariably the engine seizes up and fails.

What we see in many aspects of the system right now are pistons that are firing violently. First a crash in the stock market. Then trillions in bailouts. Then an historic and massive stock market swing in the other direction. We see individuals speaking out in public, on the airwaves and on personal blogs en masse about one topic or another. Whether it is rep-on-Obama or dem-on-Bush bashing, there are extreme levels of divisiveness and heated, sometimes violent clashes. The system is moving into extreme peaks and troughs at a much more rapid pace now than anytime in the last 50 or more years.

We are in the opening stages of the Greatest Depression, a term coined by Trends Forecast founder Gerald Celente. The next stage, as Mr. Celente has said, will be “like nothing we've ever seen in our life time.”

Welcome to the Greatest Depression.


(Mac Slavo is a legend in his own mind. He spreads the legend wherever he can, though most people point, laugh and snicker -- but he's good with that. Mac would be considered by some to be a doom and gloomer, though he believes reality is reality, and he tries to assign no positive or negative personal perceptions to any particular event. This is quite difficult, so at times Mac does provide personal commentary and spin on news, economic & financial happenings, and other people's blogs.)



Agree or disagree - and why?

Before you comment please listen to and watch this short film..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4yT0KAMyo

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945.

The number, while lower than forecast a few months ago, underscored the challenges ahead in shrinking the deficit even as the White House and Congress are considering more steps to stimulate an economy that is making a slow recovery. The political hurdles to finding a solution were evident on Friday as each political party immediately blamed the other for the growth of the deficit.

The shortfall for the fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, translates to 10 percent of the economy, according to a joint statement from the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter R. Orszag. For the 2008 fiscal year, the deficit of $459 billion was 3.2 percent of the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product.

Economists generally agree that annual deficits should not exceed 3 percent of the G.D.P., and that is the level President Obama had vowed to reach by the end of his first term in 2013.

But subsequent spending and tax cuts to stimulate the economy, and lower-than-expected revenues as the recession deepened before bottoming out, combined to push the administration’s deficit forecast to 4.6 percent of G.D.P. for the fiscal year 2013.

At 10 percent of the gross domestic product, the 2009 deficit is the highest since the end of World War II, when it was 21.5 percent. At that level, it already has become a bigger economic and a political issue than any time since the late 1980s.

Investors who are essential to financing the debt, including China and other foreign interests, are eager for signs that the government will eventually regain control over its budgets.

And polls show that Americans are increasingly worried as well, raising concerns about Mr. Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda, including his signature health care overhaul, that Republicans are stoking. At the same time, many Americans are demanding further help, confronting forecasts that job losses will not peak until mid-2010.

Mr. Orszag alluded to the administration’s fiscal quandary in a statement on Friday. “As we move from rescue to recovery, the president recognizes that we need to put the nation back on a fiscally sustainable path,” he said. He said proposals to help do that would be part of Mr. Obama’s next budget early next year, for fiscal 2011.

The 2009 fiscal year began last October, just as President George W. Bush and Congress were contending with the near-collapse of the financial system and working to enact what became a $700 billion rescue plan. After Mr. Obama took office, administration officials calculated that the deficit would surpass $1.2 trillion. Mr. Geithner and Mr. Orszag recalled that forecast in their statement on Friday.

The 2009 deficit, they said, “was largely the product of the spending and tax policies inherited from the previous administration, exacerbated by a severe recession and financial crisis that were under way as the current administration took office.”

The economic recovery efforts, through the Troubled Asset Relief Program for financial institutions, known as Tarp, and the $787 billion, two-year stimulus package, accounted for just under a quarter of the deficit, they said.

The administration’s calculation of a $1.4 trillion deficit tracks an estimate last week from the Congressional Budget Office that anticipated the data from the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget. The actual deficit was slightly lower than each had expected in August, when the White House budget office projected a $1.8 trillion deficit and the Congressional office forecast $1.6 trillion.

The decrease from the earlier projections largely reflected updated accounting, including, Mr. Geithner said, the fact that “we are managing to repair the financial system at a lower cost to taxpayers.”

The Obama administration ultimately did not need additional billions it had budgeted for the effort. Also, several major institutions repaid their bailout money with interest, and other financial companies that have not are paying interest on their borrowings.

While many financial institutions have recovered — and prospered, as this week’s eye-popping earnings reports for JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs showed — the persistent high unemployment, home foreclosure rates and credit needs of small businesses are keeping the White House and Congress focused on stimulating the economy. This adds to the deficit, rather than reduces it.

“It would be harmful to try to balance the budget at a time when the economy has not fully recovered and so many Americans are still struggling,” said Representative John M. Spratt Jr., Democrat of South Carolina and chairman of the House Budget Committee.

But on Friday, the deficit was front and center. The overall national debt, which is the accumulation of annual deficits, is nearly $12 trillion, and projected deficits for the next decade will add an estimated $9 trillion more. Administration officials say two-thirds of that is due to Bush administration policies — chiefly tax cuts, wars and the Medicare prescription drug benefit — not paid for with other savings.

“Today’s deficit announcement again highlights the fiscal mess handed to the Obama administration,” Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican minority leader in the House, rejected that position. “It is irresponsible for Democrats to continue spending taxpayers’ money we don’t have to fund an agenda that would destroy the jobs we need to get our economy moving again,” Mr. Boehner said.

“Today’s deficit announcement again highlights the fiscal mess handed to the Obama administration,” Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement.


Typical Liberal excuses. here is the logic.

Bush (and the others before him) Steered the USA Titanic into a DEBT iceburg on the right. The ship is sinking for sure.

Obama and friends condemn the horrible stupidity of Bush.

Bush goes to his ranch. Obama takes over the wheel and in his mind (weak - vapid) the solution is to steer it into another larger DEBT iceburg on the left. Brilliant!

1. He is not competant (a difinite) to run the USA
2. By adding TRILLIONS he is deliberately weakening the USA so she will have to join the new world order as a weaker nation.

America is poor because everyone wants to get rich quick more often than not at the expense of another Americans or the third world. They want to consume. College is a joke europe students laugh at final year maths exams in US. They are supported in this by the most corrupt churches in the World some having had to leave their intrnational organizations. If my pastor extorts 1/4 mill and has a 3000 sq ft house and trashes the world at a great rate why shouldn't I? is their attitude.

One British friend works for Astrium the space arm of the profitable EADS. He earns a good salary, works hard and smart, enjoys good holidays and a short working week. He doesn't see the need to be ultra competitive in the car he owns, the house he lives in, the restaurants he visits etc. much more than the typical American he respects collective endeavor and teamwork to achieve results. Americans go round blaming someone else ( auto workers, unions etc. etc. ) when it is their supposedly educated elites in almost every field who have grown, greedy, exploitative and careless of the World's resources. I have to exclude the Amish and a few other groups/professions/greens etc.

Welcome to the Greatest Depression: Agree or disagree - and why?
AABC,

Perhaps you should try to answer the question - without those useless unrelated links you like to include.

in the US i agree here is why http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/17/794282/-Your-Work-Life-RevealedA-Chart-Extravaganza many interesting pie charts with lots of colors for dummies

Since the 1970s, taxes on the wealthy have been drastically cut.
Currently the highest income earners pay a mere 23 percent tax:


The above is one on numerous false claims made on that site you posted. Truth is they pay 68% of the taxes, the bottom 50% of earners pay 3%





. What has happened to tax rates in America over the last several decades?

They’ve fallen. In the early 1960s, the highest marginal income tax rate was a stunning 91 percent. That top rate fell to 70 percent after the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts and remained there until 1981. Then Ronald Reagan slashed it to 50 percent and ultimately to 28 percent after the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Although the federal tax rate fell by more than half, total tax receipts in the 1980s doubled from $517 billion in 1981 to $1,030 billion in 1990. The top tax rate rose slightly under George H. W. Bush and then moved to 39.6 percent under Bill Clinton. But under George W. Bush it fell again to 35 percent. So what’s striking is that, even as tax rates have fallen by half over the past quarter-century, taxes paid by the wealthy have increased. Lower tax rates have made the tax system more progressive, not less so. In 1980, for example, the top 5 percent of income earners paid only 37 percent of all income taxes. Today, the top 1 percent pay that proportion, and the top 5 percent pay a whopping 57 percent.
6. What is the economic logic behind these lower tax rates?

As legend has it, the famous “Laffer Curve” was first drawn by economist Arthur Laffer in 1974 on a cocktail napkin at a small dinner meeting attended by the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley and such high-powered policymakers as Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Laffer showed how two different rates—one high and one low—could produce the same revenues, since the higher rate would discourage work and investment. The Laffer Curve helped launch Reaganomics here at home and ignited a frenzy of tax cutting around the globe that continues to this day. It’s also one of the simplest concepts in economics: lowering the tax rate on production, work, investment, and risk-taking will spur more of these activities and will often produce more tax revenue rather than less. Since the Reagan tax cuts, the United States has created some 40 million new jobs—more than all of Europe and Japan combined.



. What income group pays the most federal income taxes today?

The latest data show that a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shoul­dered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 per­cent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent—those below the median income level—now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes. These are proportions of the income tax alone and don’t include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

So those are the facts!

I do not think they are unrelated.
If I spend all my enerergies being ulra competitive and trying to rip off my fellow citizen and fellow producer then yes , I may block him, frustrate him etc. In some circumstances I can produce a monopoly for myslef at get rich - sometimes at everyone's expense, sometimes agreed because I have a special flair and make outstanding innovations.
the correct balanc must be struck between rewarding the innovator and and protectecing those who suffer when those with the most asset use foul means to produce tjhier riches while other people suffer.
Consumers, producers, entrepreneurs etc.
The culture of USA education is 'to produce results at any coste' employees, environment, consumers etc etc.
A central tenet of Judaism and Christianity is that profit accepted so long as it results from just honest fair ethical business dealings.
For full details refer to the text:
http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/curriculum/Syllabi/epstein.pdf
( nice essay cthis )
And hey this is not communist!
These were the principles under which Cadbury etc worked
Now adevrts for wonder creams; medicines etc. are beamed to the third World by US satellites to attract the dollars that should be spent on food for their chidren as the US has turned into a nation of snake oil salesmen and college party goers exemplified by the film clip.
Yes Cadbury saw the problem look at this link very famous if you have not seen it before:
http://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/hogarth_william_ginlane.htm
American society needs reforming ........ is Obama the right man ........ the jury is out.....
S.







IF i SPEMND ALL MY ENEGRIES TRYING TO RIPP OFF MY NEIGHBOR AND MY NEIGHBOR DOES LIKEWISE THE

In the DR when your neigbour spends all his energies trying to rip you off we shoot him!