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 […]
Ph.D. in food stamps – the rise of food stamp usage among those with advanced degrees. Record number of households on food stamps.
t is hard to declare a recovery when a record 22.3 million households are now on food assistance. The latest data shows that 46.5 million Americans are still relying on SNAP, the food assistance program, to get by each month. Since this data lags, we see that in May we added 77,000 jobs but added […]
A clash of generations – 1 out of 6 Americans receiving Social Security benefits. A larger share of workforce dominated by older Americans.
The bill is coming due. A stunning 61,000,000+ Americans receive Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, or both. Add another 46,000,000+ Americans on food assistance and you begin to see why we are running on borrowed time on a variety of fronts. With Social Security, working Americans are taxed for current retirees. This works when you […]
The four horsemen of the sluggish economy – Total credit market debt above $55 trillion, few jobs for many unemployed, the student debt bubble, and long-term compression of wages.
The US economy is facing tremendous financial hurdles in the years to come. The current market is being held together by a flood of debt that is masking underlying issues. Total credit market debt is many times larger than our annual GDP. Student loan debt continues to expand unabated even though the return-on-investment for many […]