US Economy Thread

nemrod wrote:Since the beginning of this week, U noticed that all financial centers in the world are declining.
There too soon to say this is a Krach, nevertheless the collapse of paper-gold -so called prices of gold -are tumbling, it showed that the great banks seeems to get ride their useless financial titles, as the raw materials are in decline everywhere. It produced after China published a disapointing state of its economy.
Are we on the eve of huge US economy collapse ? If this is the case who could save the banks ? How to do for that ?
If USA are on the verge krack, this krack will be far much harder than 2008. This time the dollar will sink as never.

Let's wait and see.

AlfaT8 wrote:
With all do respect, the collapse of the dollars will be an event that people including myself will have to see to believe.

AlfaT8 wrote:

nemrod wrote:Since the beginning of this week, U noticed that all financial centers in the world are declining.
There too soon to say this is a Krach, nevertheless the collapse of paper-gold -so called prices of gold -are tumbling, it showed that the great banks seeems to get ride their useless financial titles, as the raw materials are in decline everywhere. It produced after China published a disapointing state of its economy.
Are we on the eve of huge US economy collapse ? If this is the case who could save the banks ? How to do for that ?
If USA are on the verge krack, this krack will be far much harder than 2008. This time the dollar will sink as never.

Let's wait and see.

With all do respect, the collapse of the dollars will be an event that people including myself will have to see to believe.

BTRfan wrote:
Just so you know, the Federal Reserve [central bank in the USA] stopped publishing data on the M3 [total amount of US currency in circulation] back in 2005. We literally have no idea how much money they have printed into existence during the last 8 years.

I wouldn't hold US government/treasury bonds/securities because I don't believe they are going to be able to make good on the debt and I don't believe they will even try to make good on the debt.

Viktor wrote:Fake gold bars from Fort Knox

collegeboy16 wrote:

Viktor wrote:Fake gold bars from Fort Knox

They should have used DU
Hint: They plated all the gold with DU for use in armor and weapons.

Viktor wrote:

collegeboy16 wrote:

Viktor wrote:Fake gold bars from Fort Knox

They should have used DU
Hint: They plated all the gold with DU for use in armor and weapons.

I have read that Germans had similar experience. Thats why they demand their 3500 tons of gold to return to them (it was sent away

so the Russians could not get them) from Bank of England, France, Fort Knox but are still experiencing numerous problems.

The release of the June Jobs' Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists' expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don't are finding it increasingly out of reach.

Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday's report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job.

The market's positive reaction to Friday's report is another sign of how far our economic expectations have fallen. If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would be almost 9 million more people working. Just in the last year, almost 2 million Americans have left the labor force. With a majority of the population not holding a full-time job, it isn't surprising that economic growth has been so weak.

In June, the number of Americans who wanted to work full-time, but were forced into part-time jobs because of the economy, jumped 352,000 to over 8 million.

The Jobs' Report is increasingly measuring only a part of the American economy. While Friday's report was better than expected, it only measures those who are working or actively looking for work. There is a growing number of Americans slipping through the cracks of the job market.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-4-5-us-face-175906005.html


Exclusive: Working-class whites are gloomy about future amid rising income gaps, racial shifts

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

___

Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.

Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."

"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."

___

Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.

By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.

By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."

The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.

Among the findings:

—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.

—Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.

—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.

The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.

—Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.

___

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites — defined as those lacking a college degree — remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for 'the middle class' and 'average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.

"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.

"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

___

AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

US national debt is actually $70 trillion

A new study by an American economist concludes that the U.S. federal debt is mind-bogglingly larger than it is officially said to be. The study by James D. Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, says the U.S. government’s off-balance-sheet liabilities are six times the size of the official debt or $70.1 trillion.


“U.S. federal debt has exploded in recent years, growing from $5 trillion (or 36% of GDP) in 2007 to an estimated $12 trillion (72% of GDP) by the end of 2013,” Hamilton said in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But the $12 trillion federal debt is only the tip of the iceberg because the figure is not inclusive of a number of off-balance-sheet commitments and liabilities.

“But the officially reported debt is only one respect in which current policy has left a burden for future taxpayers. In addition the government has made a number of implicit and explicit commitments that are not included in the net debt figures just reported, but which could potentially require much larger adjustments in future spending or taxes than those associated with paying interest on the official debt itself. The biggest items in this category come from Social Security and Medicare which, if current policy is maintained, will require enormous sacrifices from future taxpayers.”

The study identifies five key off-balance-sheet commitments which are “support for housing, other loan guarantees (including federal loan guarantee programs in addition to those involving housing such as loans for post-high-school education, small business loans and loans from the Export-Import Bank of the United States), deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds.”

The biggest category of off-balance-sheet liabilities comes from the additional funds that the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds believe would need to be found in order to fulfill commitments to current program participants (i.e., those currently aged 15 and older). These are reported to be $26.5 trillion for Social Security and $27.6 trillion for Medicare.

“These numbers are so huge it is hard even to discuss them in a coherent way … But although one can quarrel with the specific numbers, there is an undeniable important reality that they reflect-- the U.S. population is aging, and an aging population means fewer people paying in and more people expecting benefits. This reality is unambiguously going to be a key constraint on the sustainability of fiscal policy for the United States. One would think we should be saving as a nation today as preparation for retirement, and if in fact we are not, the current enormous on-balance-sheet federal debt is all the more of a concern,” the paper says.

“Adding all these items together, I calculate total off-balance-sheet federal liabilities of around $70 T, or 6 times the size of reported on-balance-sheet liabilities,”

The paper working concludes that “Some may argue that the current off-balance-sheet liabilities of the U.S. federal government are smaller than those tabulated here; others could arrive at larger numbers. These off-balance-sheet concerns may or may not translate into significant on-balance-sheet problems. But one thing seems undeniable-- they are huge. And implicit or explicit commitments of such a huge size have the potential to have huge economic consequences, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse. Acknowledging their size is a necessary first step for making wise policy decisions.”

nemrod wrote:For a long time ago, I heard from several serious sources a similar echo. Indeed, US are already in bankrupcy, the system's staff is well aware about the catastrophic situation. But as blind boat, no one could do something. The tragedy will be : the people, the average people that pay a hard price, meanwhile bastards like Greenspans, Ben Shalom Bernankle, Loyd Blansfein -who said, he is doing the God's job, obviously in order to ruin people-, Rothschild, Buffet,... will escape.
The US bankrupcy is near, and the end of dollar, is near too.

US national debt is actually $70 trillion

A new study by an American economist concludes that the U.S. federal debt is mind-bogglingly larger than it is officially said to be. The study by James D. Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, says the U.S. government’s off-balance-sheet liabilities are six times the size of the official debt or $70.1 trillion.


“U.S. federal debt has exploded in recent years, growing from $5 trillion (or 36% of GDP) in 2007 to an estimated $12 trillion (72% of GDP) by the end of 2013,” Hamilton said in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But the $12 trillion federal debt is only the tip of the iceberg because the figure is not inclusive of a number of off-balance-sheet commitments and liabilities.

“But the officially reported debt is only one respect in which current policy has left a burden for future taxpayers. In addition the government has made a number of implicit and explicit commitments that are not included in the net debt figures just reported, but which could potentially require much larger adjustments in future spending or taxes than those associated with paying interest on the official debt itself. The biggest items in this category come from Social Security and Medicare which, if current policy is maintained, will require enormous sacrifices from future taxpayers.”

The study identifies five key off-balance-sheet commitments which are “support for housing, other loan guarantees (including federal loan guarantee programs in addition to those involving housing such as loans for post-high-school education, small business loans and loans from the Export-Import Bank of the United States), deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds.”

The biggest category of off-balance-sheet liabilities comes from the additional funds that the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds believe would need to be found in order to fulfill commitments to current program participants (i.e., those currently aged 15 and older). These are reported to be $26.5 trillion for Social Security and $27.6 trillion for Medicare.

“These numbers are so huge it is hard even to discuss them in a coherent way … But although one can quarrel with the specific numbers, there is an undeniable important reality that they reflect-- the U.S. population is aging, and an aging population means fewer people paying in and more people expecting benefits. This reality is unambiguously going to be a key constraint on the sustainability of fiscal policy for the United States. One would think we should be saving as a nation today as preparation for retirement, and if in fact we are not, the current enormous on-balance-sheet federal debt is all the more of a concern,” the paper says.

“Adding all these items together, I calculate total off-balance-sheet federal liabilities of around $70 T, or 6 times the size of reported on-balance-sheet liabilities,”

The paper working concludes that “Some may argue that the current off-balance-sheet liabilities of the U.S. federal government are smaller than those tabulated here; others could arrive at larger numbers. These off-balance-sheet concerns may or may not translate into significant on-balance-sheet problems. But one thing seems undeniable-- they are huge. And implicit or explicit commitments of such a huge size have the potential to have huge economic consequences, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse. Acknowledging their size is a necessary first step for making wise policy decisions.”

Hachimoto wrote:Yes this is completely different path and according to lot of analysts including Russians if the fall is around 2014-2015 USA should regain it's strength 2020+ so this the only windows for other to catch up. and China will suffer during this period more than anyone.

And this is not the case of Europe if their is a fall it will took them long time to recover.

GarryB wrote:There is a huge difference between the Soviets in the late 80s and the US now... and the main difference is that the Soviets were operating within a western based world economy where the west made the rules.

GarryB wrote:
With the US being the country in trouble of course we can expect the rules to be bent if not totally ignored...

GarryB wrote:
...the credit rating agencies are all US based companies so there is no level playing field.

GarryB wrote:
We have already seen what will happen the Banks have already gone through this... tiny foreign banks will collapse, but big western banks will be considered too big to fail and will suck money from a range of sources that will cause misery and suffering and "austerity" but will not have to pay back a cent and will not be held responsible for the fact that their irrational lending (spending) got them into this place in the first place.
....the poor get poorer and the rich get richer... the American dream.

GarryB wrote:
No one of any consequence will go to jail and the main people to suffer will be the ones that had nothing to do with any of the crimes committed in the first place to create the situation.