40 years of housing data – U.S. homes still too expensive for typical families. In 1970 the median home could be purchased with 657 ounces of gold. Today, it only requires 155 ounces. The erosion of the U.S. dollar
The last 40 years have seen the U.S. housing market transform into a market largely driven by incredible amounts of debt. The credit card companies understood the basic notion that the monthly payment drove most financial decisions. Even though people purchase a home with a 30 year mortgage, the implicit understanding was that in a few years the home would be sold again and yet another new mortgage would be taken out. Housing became like the national debt in that most realized we would never get around to paying it off. We would simply roll over the debt over and over apparently in an endless process. Yet this can only go on as long as average Americans have an increase in their standard of living and wages. The opposite has occurred. For that reason, housing is expensive in today’s market. The median sales price of an existing home is $184,000:
FDIC flashes SOS – 1,000 bank failures before recession is over – FDIC not too far away from tapping into U.S. Treasury $500 billion taxpayer lifeline. Georgia leads the pack with 40 bank failures since 2008.
By the end of the recession, there will be approximately 1,000 bank failures. Does this sound extreme? It should but the numbers don’t cover the entire story. Since 2008 the number of bank failures has reached 269 and this doesn’t include consolidations done through the FDIC where bigger banks ate up smaller banks before they officially failed. Last week, 7 banks failed. At that pace, we are looking at 364 bank failures per year and the actual number of closings per week has consistently gone up. The FDIC is in a precarious situation. The Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) is technically speaking, broke. They have added additional cash reserves by front loading premiums on surviving banks but this can only stunt the financial bleeding for so long. The problems in the banking system run deep and many of the smaller regional banks are failing because of commercial real estate loans going bad.
Broken financial generations – U.S. households only have a median of $2,000 saved in retirement accounts. The median net worth for those 25 to 34 is $3,700. Which generation will support the economy going forward? Social Security beneficiaries make up 19 percent of all Americans.
I recently had a conversation with a retired neighbor, a former Navy vet who worked most of his life at a local grocery store. I wouldn’t call him wealthy but he has his financial house in order; he paid off his home in the early 1990s, has no other debts, and lives well below his means. His big source of income comes from Social Security. We talked about the current economy and the strain we are facing. It was a good conversation and ultimately the mathematical problems we are facing for the working and middle class become extremely obvious when confronted face to face. We both conceded that government retirement programs will have problems in one or two decades (doesn’t help many who are still working). The economic issues faced between the generations will cause many hard decisions down the road.
Middle class financially squeezed by the plutocracy – 13 million people added to food assistance from 2007 to 2010. Nearly 40 percent of all unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.
The mainstream press and their lack of focus or even caring about a shrinking middle class is disturbing. Yet this shouldn’t be a surprise given that their focus of appeasing their sponsors is directly focused at keeping people stuck in a debt induced sleepwalking financial nightmare. Wall Street has successfully infiltrated our government and most policies are vetted to ensure banking success before ever becoming law or what we now pass as reform. Take this sobering figure as a measure of how deep this recession has impacted our national economy; in December of 2007 at the start of the recession 27 million Americans were receiving food assistance (already high in a supposed recovery). Today, we have over 40 million receiving food assistance and we are supposedly in a recovery. From March to April of 2010 we added 300,000 people to the food assistance column. This is what passes as recovery. Also, the persistent long-term unemployment is a perplexing issue facing the middle class: