AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP
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Post by AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP on Jun 2, 2011 11:44:33 GMT -5
It's here. It started roughly a month ago. The economy is now in full blown free-fall. A second economic crisis is weeks, maybe months away, and there's no more money to keep it all fluffed up anymore.
This is an economic quagmire the likes we have not seen since the Great Depression.
We need an absolute, immediate, tax and regulatory repreive NOW. A flat 15% income tax rate, zero out the corporate rate, and suspend a majority of stiffling regulations or we die. I said that we had 180 days to do something this drastic-- and we have flown past the deadline with no action. Now, it's mandatory-- but they won't do it, so buckle up.
Did you buy FOOD, yet?
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thyme4change
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Post by thyme4change on Jun 2, 2011 11:55:37 GMT -5
Paul - I haven't really been following your threads, although I know you have been predicting this.
What signs have you seen in the past month that indicate the meltdown has begun?
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Post by BeenThere...DoneThat... on Jun 2, 2011 11:55:38 GMT -5
...when Casey and James were voted off Idol, I knew something must be brewing...
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 2, 2011 12:06:36 GMT -5
I've been reading about this. Still trying to deny it..
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cereb
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Post by cereb on Jun 2, 2011 12:12:32 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Jun 2, 2011 12:31:25 GMT -5
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aa81cf92-8c3f-11e0-b1c8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1O8m1zkmcBack towards a US double-dip By Robert Reich Published: June 1 2011 12:51 | Last updated: June 1 2011 12:51 The US economy was supposed to be in bloom by late spring, but it is hardly growing at all. Expectations for second-quarter growth are not much better than the measly 1.8 per cent annualised rate of the first quarter. That is not nearly fast enough to reduce America’s ferociously high level of unemployment. The labour department will tell us on Friday whether the jobs situation improved in May, but there has been no sign of a surge in hiring. Nor in wages. Average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees – who make up 80 per cent of non-government workers – dropped to $8.76 in April. Adjusted for inflation, that’s lower than they were in the depths of the recession. Meanwhile, housing prices continue to fall. They are now 33 per cent below their 2006 peak. That is a bigger drop than recorded in the Great Depression. Homes are the largest single asset of the American middle class, so as housing prices drop many Americans feel poorer. All of this is contributing to a general gloominess. Not surprisingly, consumer confidence is also down. The recovery has stalled. It is unlikely that America will find itself back in recession but the possibility of a double dip cannot be dismissed. The problem is not on the supply side of the ledger. Corporate profits are still healthy. Big companies continue to sit on a cash hoard. Large and middle-sized companies can easily borrow more, at low rates. The problem is on the demand side. American consumers, who constitute 70 per cent of the total economy, cannot and will not buy enough to get it moving. They justifiably worry that they will not be able to pay their bills, or afford to send their children to college, or to retire. Banks, with equal justification, are reluctant to lend to them. But as long as consumers hold back, companies remain reluctant to hire new workers or raise the wages of current ones, feeding the vicious cycle. The timing is unfortunate. Foreign consumers will not help much even if the dollar continues to slide. Europe’s debt crisis and embrace of austerity, Japan’s tragedy and China’s fiscal tightening have reduced global demand. At the same time, the federal stimulus in the US has almost run its course. The Federal Reserve is about to end its $600bn of purchases of Treasury bills, designed to bring down long-term interest rates and make it easier for homeowners to refinance. Worse yet, state governments – starved for revenue and constitutionally barred from running deficits – continue to cut programmes. Local governments are now in worse shape, laying off platoons of teachers and firefighters. Under normal circumstances, this would be the time for the federal government to take bold action to ward off a double dip. For example, it could put more cash in peoples’ pockets while giving employers an extra incentive to hire by exempting the first $20,000 of earnings from payroll taxes, for a year or two. It could lend money to state and local governments. It could launch a new Work Projects Administration (modelled after its antecedent during the Great Depression) to put the long-term unemployed to work on public projects. It could amend the bankruptcy law to allow people to include their prime residences in personal bankruptcy, thereby giving homeowners more leverage to get mortgage lenders to mitigate the terms of their loans. But these are not normal circumstances. America has been through a devastating recession that poked a giant hole in the federal budget. And with a presidential election coming up next year, both parties are already manoeuvring for tactical advantage. Since taking over the House of Representatives in January, Republicans have focused on cutting government spending and paring back regulations. Their colleagues in the Senate, whose leader has proclaimed his major goal to unseat President Barack Obama, are almost as single-minded. Cynics might suspect Republicans of quietly hoping the economy stays rotten up until election day. Democrats, meanwhile, are behaving as if they are powerless to affect the economy, even though a Democrat occupies the White House and his appointees run the federal government. They would rather not dwell on the slowdown because they do not want to spook the bond market or add to the prevailing gloom (Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated comment about the nation’s “malaise” during the stagflation of the late 1970s has served as a permanent admonition for presidents to stay upbeat). Democrats are staking their electoral hopes on continuing disarray among Republican presidential aspirants, as well as the Republicans’ suicidal plan to turn Medicare, the popular health insurance system for seniors, into vouchers that would funnel money to private, for-profit insurance companies. The result is as if Washington were on another planet from the rest of the country (many Americans would argue this is hardly a new phenomenon). The noisiest battle in the nation’s capital is over raising the statutory debt limit – a game of chicken in which Republicans are demanding, in return for their votes, caps on future federal spending while Democrats insist on preserving the possibility of tax increases on the wealthy. Countless budget analysts are combing through endless projections of government revenues and expenditures in five or 10 years. Think tanks and blue-ribbon panels are issuing voluminous reports on how to tame the budget deficit in decades to come. The president, meanwhile, is trying to appear as fiscally austere as possible – keeping a lid on non-defence discretionary spending, freezing the wages of civil servants and offering his own deficit-reduction plans. Washington’s paralysis in the face of a stalled recovery is bad news – not just for average Americans but for the world. Ironically, it also worsens America’s future budget crisis because it postpones the day when the debt begins to shrink as a proportion of GDP. Yet as the 2012 campaign season looms, the prospects for sensible policy seem to decrease by the day.
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Post by BeenThere...DoneThat... on Jun 2, 2011 12:37:54 GMT -5
<<< Meanwhile, housing prices continue to fall. They are now 33 per cent below their 2006 peak. >>> ...I remember house-hunting and chatting with house-hunting friends... and while they were excited, I was not... just could not get excited about a home that seemed twice as high as it should be...
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AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP
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Post by AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP on Jun 2, 2011 12:45:27 GMT -5
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b2r
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Post by b2r on Jun 2, 2011 12:49:10 GMT -5
Great Depression Looms, Money Managers Panicked: TraderPeter Yastrow is possibly the most bearish trader on earth. Yastrow is the “world’s largest LIBOR trader,” according to CNBC. His trading focuses on equities, currencies, and interest rates. In light of the terrible economic data on Wednesday and weak data in the last couple of weeks, Yastrow had the following to say in an interview on CNBC. “What we’ve got right now is almost near panic going on with money managers…They cannot find a yield and you just don’t want to be putting your money into…things that are punts that might work out or…not depending on what happens with the economy,” he said. As a result, they’re putting money in Treasuries, the classic fear trade. Investors only bet on risk-assets (what Yastrow calls “punts”) when they think the economy is going to do well. If they’re not sure, they rush into the safety of Treasuries, which guarantee a fixed amount of return. So how bad is the economy? Yastrow said “we’re on the verge of a great, great depression” and the Federal Reserve “knows it.” www.ibtimes.com/articles/155890/20110601/great-depression-yastrow.htm
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Angel!
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Post by Angel! on Jun 2, 2011 13:16:06 GMT -5
It's here. It started roughly a month ago. The economy is now in full blown free-fall. I guessed I missed the start of the meltdown. How is the economy in a full blown free-fall?
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hello fromWarsaw
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Hiya! Wake UP!!
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Post by hello fromWarsaw on Jun 2, 2011 13:33:28 GMT -5
Anything-to-get-power mega rich Pubs, thanks for the fraud, boom and bust Depression, the STUPIDEST wars ever, and now the paralysis and gloom and doom 24/7/365- confidence is SO important And thanks to the Pub Bankers and CEOs now stting on record amounts of cash. You're real patriots!! Unfortunately, your crappe is TOO obvious now to most people. Hoping for your recovery, misled ones
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AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP
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Post by AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP on Jun 2, 2011 15:09:09 GMT -5
Anything-to-get-power mega rich Pubs, thanks for the fraud, boom and bust Depression, the STUPIDEST wars ever, and now the paralysis and gloom and doom 24/7/365- confidence is SO important And thanks to the Pub Bankers and CEOs now stting on record amounts of cash. You're real patriots!! Unfortunately, your crappe is TOO obvious now to most people. Hoping for your recovery, misled ones You've earned yourself a cloak of invisibility, too. Try posting something of substance just once, you have a shot at becoming visible again. I don't even care if I disagree- that's not what I'm implying. I'm ignoring your posts because they are, sorry- not a nice way to say this: stupid. Confidence is not as important as fundamentals-- whence real confidence comes. Bankers may, or may not be-- you provided no examples-- sitting on record "piles of cash"-- so what? Maybe UNCERTAINTY is causing everything to stop because nobody knows what their costs are going to be a year out- let alone ten years out. And name calling is a violation of CoC-- I think you've been warned enough by the mods about your "misled" and other bombs you like to throw.
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fairlycrazy23
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Post by fairlycrazy23 on Jun 2, 2011 15:45:41 GMT -5
Banks are sitting on huge reserves at the FED, and the FED is paying them interest on that money as an incentive to not loan money. If the banks actually started to loan money in a big way, because of the multiplication effect the money supply would balloon and you could see run away inflation ( it is not just the FED that can create money out of thin air). Also I think up until we hit the debt ceiling, it was the FED that was actually purchasing up to 70% of US debt because the other buyers where drying up.
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Post by ed1066 on Jun 2, 2011 15:54:07 GMT -5
Just now? I've been ignoring that "crappe" for weeks...
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 2, 2011 15:54:42 GMT -5
Did you guys know that Geitner is a multiple year Bilderberg attendee?? Even this Fareed Zakaria guy goes.... weird stuff.......
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cereb
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Post by cereb on Jun 2, 2011 16:10:23 GMT -5
"Did you buy FOOD, yet? " Why yes Paul actually did do my weekly shopping. But, when the apocalypse actually gets here I really won't have to worry so much about food, since all you tin foil hat wearing individuals have been kind enough to post your locations and how much food you have stocked for the coming of the antichrist, you just might be one of the persons on the list for me to visit. You know, having stocked away all those supplies that I will need.
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Post by ed1066 on Jun 2, 2011 16:20:26 GMT -5
Oh yeah, come visit...
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cereb
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Post by cereb on Jun 2, 2011 16:22:21 GMT -5
Oh yeah, come visit...
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cereb
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Post by cereb on Jun 2, 2011 16:23:21 GMT -5
Gotta love that Go and guns thingy!
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cereb
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Post by cereb on Jun 2, 2011 16:24:07 GMT -5
Oops, meant to say "God". Think my keyboard needs replacing.
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shelby
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Post by shelby on Jun 2, 2011 16:30:30 GMT -5
Even though we may be worse off than before the risk of absolute collapse was possible as soon as we got off the gold standard. Yes our dollars are based on nothing more than confidence so it does play a huge factor in the game. Social behavior or psychology and the economy/markets are extremely closely linked very interesting to watch too if you think about it in a herd mentality point of view. JMO
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deziloooooo
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Post by deziloooooo on Jun 2, 2011 16:36:27 GMT -5
I know Publicks were stacking Fogers coffee last night so it's on sale this week...the biggie, 33.9 oz..so do I buy 2 or 4, any crises , I need my coffee.....nothing else matters.
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