Thread: Economic Apocalypse topic

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

CA might have nice weather but their economy sucks.

Because some hypocrites don't pay their state taxes and run off to Thailand.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

CA might have nice weather but their economy sucks.

Because some hypocrites don't pay their state taxes and run off to Thailand.

no reply to this post.

how not surprising.

^
You two jokers are so out of touch it's pathetic!

People we are looking at an idiot who has managed not to get himself killed. I don’t know if it’s attributed to an amazing run of good luck or what. But there he is. A man with a completely distorted and inaccurate view of his surroundings and yet he's still alive.

I'm not sure the scientific community would be interested. It's more of a wonder to the average person.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Anyone who buys into that nonsense that your are posting is nothing more than a lemming that marches to the drum of Glenn Beck

attaboy is a card carrying member of the "savage nation".

Originally Posted by attaboy

Typical ray. Totally clueless. Quotes out of context. The habitual quoting out of context is actually an insight into his vision of the world around him and the mind that creates that vision as well as that mind's information processing process. He has to quote out of context in order for information to fit his vision of his surroundings.

He's been called on this repeatedly but just continues to spam with this far-left lunatic fringe sophomoric clueless posting style. Actually, he's just trolling but it's real lame trolls...

This is about the decline (or signfnicant decline) of the US dollar. There is a dollar thread and US strongest economy thead, but I'll put this hear for the sake of the title and there would/will be consequences of a dollar drop.

Worth noting, is that it's not just analysts outside of the mainstream media that are predicting a significant decline of the US dollar. It's now in the mainstream.
--
Apocalypse Soon: The U.S. Dollar's Grim Future -- And How To Prepare For It

The U.S. dollar’s predicament can be summed up in three observations:

The U.S. balance of payments deficits have multiplied three-fold since the 1980s, and now typically run between 2.5 and 5 percent of GDP.

Manufacturing’s share of GDP is down to 11 percent.

Services do little exporting.

Taken together, these facts spell doom for the U.S. dollar. Short of attempting – highly unrealistically – to increase its manufactured output by nearly 50 percent and to sell the increased output abroad, America can’t dig itself out of the hole — at least not if it sticks with free trade. The ultimate outcome will surely be a total collapse of the dollar. And in that event, as the former top Reagan administration economic policymaker Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, shoppers in Walmart will feel they are in Neiman Marcus.

The world’s kingpin currency for more than half a century, the dollar has survived in recent years thanks only to the “charity” of strangers: export-minded East Asian governments, principally those of Japan and China, have bought ever larger amounts of U.S. Treasury bonds to keep their own currencies low. For the East Asians, the attraction is that they can continue for a few more years to hollow out the American manufacturing base. But elastic bands can be stretched only so far and this one is near breaking point.

Of course, conventional wisdom holds that it is other currencies that are in trouble. The current issue of the Economist magazine, for instance, cites various superficial problems elsewhere in the world to suggest that the dollar is headed higher. Entirely missing is any reference to international trade. In the long run the trade figures will determine the dollar’s fate – and the Economist’s failure to allude to them illustrates the sort of air-headed thinking that makes East Asians question (discreetly, of course) Western sanity.

Let me fill in the gaps: in the latest twelve months America ran a current account deficit of $426 billion. By contrast the Eurozone earned a surplus of $208 billion. Even Japan has been showing surprising strength, with a surplus of $56 billion (not bad in any circumstances but particularly impressive given the continuing constraints and adjustments consequent on the Tohoku earthquake).

The key question now is precisely when will the East Asians pull the rug from under the dollar? Any Westerner who tells you he knows is either delusional or mendacious. Not only have East Asian policymakers always kept their monetary policy cards close to their chests, but they are adept at acting out carefully choreographed little dramas intended to throw everyone off the scent.

Nonetheless it is time to take a stand. My bet is that within five years the dollar will have gone the way of the pound sterling, if not the Weimar papiermark (that’s the one that people needed wheelbarrows to take to the grocery store).

Entire: Apocalypse Soon: The U.S. Dollar's Grim Future -- And How To Prepare For It - Forbes

Originally Posted by Neo

Max is the man.

One thing mentioned in this Keiser Report was that nowadays you need degrees or extra study to do jobs that high school kids used to do in the past. One example of this would be being a lifeguard which was mentioned in the report. Seems to be a lot of unnecessary walls blocking or at least discouraging applicants to positions.

Debt to GDP ratios:

Debt Levels Are Skyrocketing To Extremely Dangerous Levels
July 25th, 2013

Never before has the world faced such a serious debt crisis. Yes, in the past there have certainly been nations that have gotten into trouble with debt, but we have never had a situation where virtually all of the major powers around the globe were all drowning in debt at the same time. And what makes this crisis even more unprecedented is that everyone on the planet is using fiat currency that is backed up by nothing. It is all just a bunch of paper and data points that people have faith in. Right now, confidence in this system is being shaken as debt levels skyrocket to extremely dangerous levels. Many are openly wondering how much longer this can possibly go on.

Just consider what is going on over in Europe right now. Even the countries that have supposedly “tried austerity” continue to rack up debt at a mind blowing pace. New numbers that have just been released show that government debt to GDP ratios for some of the most financially troubled nations in Europe are absolutely soaring…

Euroarea: 92.2%, up from 88.2% a year ago
Greece: 160.5%, up from 136.5% a year ago
Italy: 130.3%; up from 123.8% a year ago
Portugal: 127.2%, up from 112.3% a year ago
Ireland: 125.1%, up from 106.8% a year ago
Spain: 88.2%, up from 73.0% a year ago
Netherlands: 72.0%, up from 66.7% a year ago

Meanwhile, the debt to GDP ratio in Japan is now well past the 200% mark and continues to march upward with no apparent end in sight. The following is from a recent MSN article…

In Japan, the good news is that the nation’s budget for the fiscal year, which started on April 1, will see the government raise a higher percentage of spending from tax revenue than at any other time in the past four years. The bad news is that the government will still cover 46.3% of its spending from borrowing. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that Japan’s budget deficit for 2013 amounted to 10.3% of gross domestic product.

In China, the big problem is the absolutely stunning growth of private domestic debt. According to a recent World Bank report, the total amount of credit in China has risen from 9 trillion dollars in 2008 to 23 trillion dollars today.

That increase is roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. commercial banking system.

According to financial journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the ratio of private domestic debt to GDP in China is now wildly out of control…

The 160pc debt ratio for China is based on a conservative measure of credit. Fitch says it is 200pc if you count all offshore vehicles, trusts, letters of credit etc.

This morning China Securities Journal – an arm of the regulators – said it may really be 221pc.
Well, what about the United States?

As I noted the other day, our ratio of federal government debt to GDP has shot up like a rocket since 2008…

At this point, the U.S. already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain. It is a giant mess, and yet our politicians continue to recklessly spend more money.

And of course state and local governments all over the nation are drowning in debt too. The bankruptcy of Detroit is forcing people to come to grips with how bad things really are. Sadly, as Meredith Whitney explained the other day, there are going to be a lot more municipal bankruptcies coming down the pipeline…

As jarring as the reality may be to accept, Detroit’s decision last week to declare bankruptcy should not be regarded as a one-off in the US municipal market – which is what the bond-peddlers are now telling their clients. The aftershocks of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history will be staggering, and Detroit will set important precedents.

Municipal bankruptcies have historically been rare for a number of reasons – including the states’ determination to preserve their credit ratings, their access to cheap funding and the stigma of bankruptcy. But, these days, things are very different in the world of municipal finance.

At the root of the problem is the incentive system that elected officials used to face. For decades, across the US, local leaders ran up tabs for future taxpayers; they promised pensions and other benefits for public employees that have strong legal protection. That has been a great source of patronage for elected officials: they can promise all sorts of future perks to loyal supporters (state and local workers) with very little accountability on the delivery of those promises.
And of course the overall debt level in the United States continues to grow much, much faster than our overall economy is growing.

The greatest debt bubble in the history of the planet is still expanding.

How long will it be before it bursts?

That is a very good question. For now, our “leaders” appear to just be trying to keep the party going for as long as possible. They know that if they suddenly change course hard times will hit almost immediately. For example, just check out what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress last week…

With the economy still facing risks, especially from government spending cuts, Bernanke told a congressional panel on Wednesday the Fed is still planning to trim its quantitative easing stimulus, if growth continues at a steady pace.

But expectations that the Fed was poised to start tightening monetary policy, which have sent interest rates jumping and sparked turmoil in global markets, were unwarranted, he stressed.

“I don’t think the Fed can get interest rates up very much, because the economy is weak, inflation rates are low,” Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee.

“If we were to tighten policy, the economy would tank.”
Nobody wants the economy to “tank”, but the truth is that the more debt that we run up, the larger our long-term economic problems become.

And a growing percentage of Americans realize that something has seriously gone wrong. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 44% of all Americans believe that an economic recovery is still “a long way off“.

Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we are already living in the “economic recovery”.

This is about as good as it is going to get.

The truth is that the real storm has not even hit yet. When the debt bubble finally bursts, we are going to see economic chaos in this country unlike anything that we have ever experienced before.

I hope that you are getting ready.

This article is brought to you courtesy of Michael Snyder.

http://etfdailynews.com/2013/07/25/d...rous-levels/2/

Has anyone heard or seen the news reports that HSBC Bank is restricting cash withdrawal amounts? A Russian bank is also doing this now.

And this....is this author another "Chicken Little?"

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2014
Something Ominous May Be Coming At Us

Earlier this week 30-day/4-wk T-Bills were auctioned off a 0% rate. Intra-day, after the auction, the rate went negative. Negative short term rates were last observed in 2008, before the Lehman/AIG/Goldman collapse occurred. Of course, Lehman was allowed to implode and Goldman, who's ex-CEO was the Treasury Secretary, was bailed out. AIG was the beneficiary of that bailout because Goldman had impaled itself on AIG nuclear waste.

The point here is that negative T-bill rates only occur when very big investors are concerned about the return OF their money and not the return on their money. Think about what a negative T-bill rate means. It means that someone is paying more for the T-bill than they get in return when it matures a few weeks later. Why would someone do that? It's the "safest" place to park large sums of cash.

A big institutional fund or very wealthy investor pays for a T-bill because they they see something which indicates that the risk of the Government defaulting in the next four weeks is less than the risk of parking that money in a bank or a money market fund. We're talking millions and tens of millions in short term money. Bank deposits are insured only up to a small amount. After 2008, it has been decided that money market funds will no longer be bailed out by the Government/Fed.

In other words, big big investors with cash that needs to be parked are seeing something that gives them concern about the financial system. The negative rates on T-bills means that whatever was spooking big money in 2008 is spooking it again. My best guess right now is that there is massive risk of derivatives default. This would be the derivatives that blew up the system in 2008 but that the Fed/Government quickly monetized. The problem was never fixed, contrary to Obama's recent end zone dance on the safety of the banking system.

In fact, the Fed swallowed a portion of the bad derivatives and has been using the better part of the $85+ billion per month it's been printing since early 2009 to monetize the rest. In other words the catastrophic problems were kicked down the road. Worse, the big banks went out and replaced the crap the Fed took off their balance sheets with even more crap. Accounting rules were changed, and ratified by BOTH political parties plus Obama, which enabled the big banks to hide the problem.

But now the financial system is wearing the Scarlet Letter of negative T-bill rates. The source that is lighting the fuse is emerging market problems, reflected in the currency devaluations by Argentina and Venezuela. But the currencies of other important emerging market economies have been plunging against the dollar as well. The cost of derivatives "insurance" on the sovereign debt of these countries has suddenly increased at a rate that would make Obamacare insurance providers blush.

What the currency plunge/derivatives blow-out implies is that sovereign bond defaults are on the horizon. This is not just confined to "emerging" economic countries. Spain, Portugal, Italy and France are on the ropes financially and economically as well, despite the official European story-line that Europe is in "recovery."

The issue for the U.S. here is that the Too Big To Fail banks are the ones who have underwritten most of the credit insurance derivatives associated with the sovereign debt that may be at risk to default. They also hold a lot of it on their balance sheet. That's why the Fed's Excess Reserve accounts of the big banks have ballooned up in correlation with amount of QE that has been printed. The Fed has monetizing the derivatives exposure but that works only up to the point of a default event.

In other words, a big nuclear derivatives may be coming at our system. Another interesting tidbit to think about. While the paper price of gold was being plunged using Comex futures by the Fed-backed big banks, a major portion of the gold held in the GLD Trust was removed. The common narrative scooped up like dog crap and tossed in our face by Wall Street analysts was that the decline of the gold in GLD was indication of a new bear market in gold.

Essentially gold bottomed in price on June 28th, with a retest of that bottom at the end of December. Based on the $1180 bottom, gold has risen $90 since since the end of June. But guess what? Another 179 tonnes of gold - or 19% - of the amount of gold in the GLD trust at the end of June has disappeared. If gold is rising again, shouldn't gold be flowing back into GLD? The 500+ tonnes of gold that has been removed from GLD in a little over a year has disappeared down the rabbit hole. There's no way to know for sure but I'm sure a large portion, if not all, has been shipped to China.

But maybe not all of it. In addition to the huge ratio of paper gold to physical gold visible on the Comex, according to the latest OCC bank derivatives report the top 4 banks - JPM, Citi, Goldman, Bank of America - are long over $81 billion in gold OTC derivatives. That's the equivalent of about 1800 tonnes of gold at current at the current price. 1800 tonnes is slightly less than than the annual amount produced globally by gold mines. That amount dwarfs by many multiples the ratio of paper/gold on the Comex that has drawn everyone's attention. Maybe that's why the Comex publishes as much data as it does about Comex futures positions and inventory. It draws everyone's attention from the much bigger gold derivatives problem.

Here's a link to the OCC derivatives report for anyone interested (it's from Q3, 2013 - there always a big time lag): Latest OCC Bank Derivatives Report

http://truthingold.blogspot.com/2014...ing-at-us.html

Is this where we are headed?

Things don't look good.

Doesn't worry me though...I'll take the wife and head for a friend's farm and live the simple life.

some gloomy predictions

Citigroup Inc. is sounding the alarm bells for the world economy.
In an analysis published late on Tuesday, the New York-based bank’s chief economist,Willem Buiter, said there is a 55 percent chance of some form of global recession in the next couple of years, most likely one of moderate depth and length.


Unlike the U.S.-driven international slumps of the past two decades, this one will be generated by sliding demand from emerging markets, especially China, which has surged in size to become the world’s No. 2 economy.
“The world appears to be at material and rising risk of entering a recession, led by EMs and in particular by China,” wrote Buiter, a former U.K. policy maker.

Citigroup Sees 55% Risk of a Global Recession Made in China - Bloomberg Business

Goldman Sachs warns Australia faces one-in-three chance of recession in 2016


Goldman Sachs is warning that Australia faces a one-in-three chance of a recession in the coming financial year, as a slump in business investment combines with stagnant wages and falling financial wealth to undermine consumption.
"A recession is not some remote probability, it currently stands at the greatest probability since the financial crisis," the Goldman Sachs Australian economics team said in a research note.
"Slower population growth, weak wage growth amid high levels of under-utilised labour and low yields on investment income have combined with a sharp decline in financial wealth and fragile levels of confidence."
The warning stands in contrast to assurances by Treasurer Joe Hockey and officials from the Reserve Bank.
It follows a forecast by Citigroup that the world faced a 55 per cent chance of a global recession sparked by a slump in economic growth in China.
Goldman Sachs said Australia might sidestep a recession thanks to rising volumes of mining exports, together with a further official interest rate cut and a fall in the Australian dollar to 67 cents against the greenback.

Goldman Sachs warns Australia faces one-in-three chance of recession in 2016 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Lulz. Some good laughs in this thread. Who can guess atta's nick today?

The International Monetary Fund has cut its growth forecasts for the world economy, warning of increasing risks from the slowdown in China, which is dragging other emerging markets down with it.

The global economy will expand just 3.1 percent this year and 3.6 percent next year, the IMF predicted on Tuesday, revising downward its previous forecasts by 0.2 percentage points in both cases.

Even though wealthy countries are showing signs of recovery, the world economy is on track for its worst year since the global recession of 2009, the IMF said.

"Six years after the world economy emerged from its broadest and deepest postwar recession, a return to robust and synchronised global expansion remains elusive," said the IMF's new chief economist, Maurice Obstfeld.

"Downside risks to the world economy appear more pronounced than they did just a few months ago," he added in the Fund's latest report, released ahead of the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Lima, Peru, this week.


Read more at IMF gloomy on world economy as China growth slows - 9news.com.au

IMF gloomy on world economy as China growth slows - 9news.com.au

and 3.6 percent next year,

I think that is optimistic unless it picks up in the second half of next year

I believe "GFC" was a financial crisis and not a manufacturing crisis which I think is what we are facing now and I think the chinese govt holds the key - when they stop their ineffectual moves with interest rates and percentages and move into spending on the planned mega infrastructure projects throughout asia and africa then global demand and manufacture will increase

Wait until reality really sets in and good-minded populations realize that economies, stock markets, interests rates, world finances, and lifestyles are based purely on fantasy and illusion.....

Originally Posted by thaimeme

Wait until reality really sets in and good-minded populations realize

when do you expect that to happen ? ffs

consumers are bred and educated for a reason

and exactly what do you expect to take the place of the current system ? communism ???

grab your lao khow and basket of sticky rice and fuck off out to the paddock hut and have a meditate

Originally Posted by baldrick

and 3.6 percent next year,

I think that is optimistic unless it picks up in the second half of next year

I believe "GFC" was a financial crisis and not a manufacturing crisis which I think is what we are facing now and I think the chinese govt holds the key - when they stop their ineffectual moves with interest rates and percentages and move into spending on the planned mega infrastructure projects throughout asia and africa then global demand and manufacture will increase

Are you being optimistc or sarcasmic Baldrick?