Economic Crisis

Rats, Public Defecation And Open Drug Use: Our Major Western Cities Are Becoming Uninhabitable Hellholes

Almost everyone that goes out to visit one of our major cities on the west coast has a similar reaction.  Those that must live among the escalating decay are often numb to it, but most of those that are just in town for a visit are absolutely shocked by all of the trash, human defecation, crime and public drug use that they encounter.  Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline.  The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out to care.  The ironic thing is that these cities are not poor.  In fact, San Francisco and Seattle are among the wealthiest cities in the entire nation.  So if things are falling apart this dramatically now, how bad will things get when economic conditions really start to deteriorate? (Read More...)

Global Inequality Explodes: 26 Ultra-Wealthy Billionaires Now Have As Much Money As The Poorest 3.8 Billion People

If you add together all of the money owned by the poorest 3.8 billion people living on this planet, it would roughly equal the wealth controlled by the 26 wealthiest men in the world.  Oxfam has just issued a brand new report on global inequality, and what they have discovered is making headlines all over the globe.  The rich just keep getting richer, and meanwhile the slice of the pie owned by the poor just keeps getting smaller.  Today, almost half the world lives on less than $5.50 a day, and approximately 795 million people “do not have enough food”.  And even in a “wealthy country” like the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor is the largest that it has been since the 1920s, and more than half a million Americans are homeless right now.  This growing inequality is a ticking time bomb, and at some point it is going to explode. (Read More...)

The Myth Of American Capitalism Exposed: Competition Is Dying As The Biggest Corporations Gobble Up Everything

Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively.  Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.  John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists.  According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries.  In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily.  But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us. (Read More...)

The Next U.S. Housing Crisis Has Arrived: Existing Home Sales Post Their Biggest Decline In 4 Years

Things just continue to get even worse for the U.S. housing industry.  New homes sales have been absolutely plummeting, homebuilder stocks have lost over a third of their value, and existing home sales just posted their biggest decline since 2014.  For years, we had been witnessing a real estate boom in the United States, but now that has officially ended.  It is starting to feel like 2008 all over again, and many of those that work in the industry are really starting to freak out.  The Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates, and it is having the exact same effect on the housing industry that it did just before the last recession. (Read More...)

U.S. Job Losses Accelerate: Here Are 10 Big Companies That Are Cutting Jobs Or Laying Off Workers

Job cuts and layoffs are coming fast and furious now as the U.S. economy really starts to slow down.  We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, when millions of Americans lost their jobs in just a matter of months.  Things are certainly not that bad yet, but there has been a very noticeable shift over the last couple of months.  Back during the summer, everyone was talking about how well the U.S. economy was doing, but now things have dramatically changed.  At this point, economic activity has slowed down so much that even Jim Cramer of CNBC is admitting that the U.S. economy has “cooled”.  If current trends continue, things will certainly get even worse, and the job losses in this article will be just the tip of the iceberg. (Read More...)

Why Does America Have 13 Million Households That Don’t Have Enough Food To Eat?

Have you ever had a day when your children were crying due to hunger but the cupboards were completely bare and your bank account was empty?  If you haven’t, you should consider yourself to be extremely blessed, because this is what real life feels like for millions upon millions of Americans in 2018.  As you will see below, a third of all Americans cannot even afford “the basics” each month, and 13 million households are officially considered to be “food insecure”.  In other words, they don’t have enough to eat.  Many parents out there choose to skip a meal (or two) each day just so that their kids can have full stomachs.  But sometimes the money runs out completely, and that is when it gets really tough. (Read More...)

A Million Americans Are Living In Their RVs As The American Dream Continues To Be “Redefined”

Could you imagine living in an RV on a permanent basis?  On the one hand, such a lifestyle can offer a sense of freedom that is absolutely exhilarating.  Instead of being tied down to just one place, you can freely travel the country and live anywhere that you want.  Such a lifestyle makes it easy to escape the cold in the winter and the heat in the summer, and if you don’t like your neighbors you can literally leave the next day.  But of course there are a lot of negatives too.  Life in an RV can be extremely cramped, there is very little privacy, and most people have to cut their possessions way, way down in order to fit all their things into an RV.  Living on the road constantly can get really old, because you have to sacrifice many of the comforts of a traditional home in order to live such a lifestyle on a full-time basis.  But without a doubt, more Americans are choosing to go this route than ever before.  In fact, the RV Industry Association says that a million Americans now live in their RVs full-time… (Read More...)

62 Percent Of All U.S. Jobs Do Not Pay Enough To Support A Middle Class Life

We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is rapidly disappearing.  According to a shocking new study that was just released, 62 percent of all jobs in the United States do not pay enough to support a middle class life.  That means that “the American Dream” is truly out of reach for most of the country at this point.  Today, Americans are working harder than ever but the cost of living continues to rise much faster than our paychecks are increasing.  Earlier this month, I went and looked at the latest numbers from the Social Security Administration, and I discovered that 50 percent of all American workers make less than $30,533 a year.  But that is just above poverty level.  In fact, the federal poverty level for a family of five is currently $29,420.  Most families are just barely scraping by from month to month, and most U.S. workers are just one major setback away from falling out of the middle class. (Read More...)