Welcome to the land of the poor and rich – Trading the middle class for economic extremes.
The extremes in the US have gotten more pronounced in this economic crisis. It is hard to imagine a country where 46 million people are living with the assistance of food stamps while 6 of the 400 top income earners pay no federal tax. I’m sure that just like most Americans you pay your fair […]
US Dollar already went off a fiscal cliff – what does a falling dollar mean to US families? Masking de-leveraging via debt markets.
People tend to have a short-term memory when it comes to financial panics. Even when told that the US dollar has lost over 90+ percent of its purchasing power since 1914 when the Federal Reserve was first established, many just assume this is normal. Inflation is as common as air. Today’s purchasing power of one […]
The other side of persistently high unemployment – Underemployment rate shoots up to 15 percent but is actually more problematic because of the civilian employment-population ratio.
Spending time examining the employment report shows continuing trends that appear beyond the headline figures. The number of Americans unemployed or marginally attached to the work-force increased to 15 percent and appears to be a new staple of our current workforce. A key data point is the civilian employment-population ratio that shows a continuing drop. […]
The engineering of bigger financial bubbles – corporate profits as a percent of GDP at record levels while unemployment is historically high and record number of Americans on transfer payments. Paying interest on excess reserves to banks for our own bailout funds.
The market is perched on the edge of a chair looking out for what the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have to say. The almighty Oz is the only game in town. With the Fed, the expectation is of some sort of additional quantitative easing to prime the economy once again whereas the market […]