QUOTE:
"On Wednesday, the S&P/CaseShiller home price index confirmed that 5-year long housing crash was still gaining pace. Home prices have fallen to their lowest level in 8 years with no end in sight. Meanwhile the Chicago Manufacturing Gauge recorded its biggest decline in 2.5 years while factory orders dropped in April by the most since May, 2010. There was also bad news on the unemployment front where privately-owned businesses hired only 38,000 workers from April to May, nearly 100,000 less jobs than analysts had predicted. Also, consumer confidence fell to its lowest reading in six months.
So, housing, manufacturing, unemployment and consumer confidence are all down, down, down and down.
Friday's unemployment report was also worse than expected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that unemployment rose to 9.1 percent
So, no new jobs are being created and the economy is quickly decelerating. It's all bad.
Consumers aren't spending, businesses aren't investing, and credit is not expanding. At the same time, state and federal governments are trimming budgets and laying off workers. So, all the main players are cutting, cutting, cutting. Naturally, the economy has responded in kind; housing prices are falling, unemployment is rising, manufacturing is stalling and consumer confidence is dropping.
There's nothing here that should surprise us. We are headed into a Depression because policymakers have made another Depression unavoidable. A policy-driven Depression is different than a financial crisis. It is a matter of choice." - Mike Whitney
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney06032011.html
We should have learned from the last Depression, and Hoover's initial attempts to balance the budget to correct it that austerity isn't the way to go. Of course, when economic history is re-written to conform to an ideology, then nothing can be learned from it.
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease".
Comments
re: Our Goose Is Cooked?
Or the "chickens have come home to roost." Anyway you look at it we're screwed and the public should not bend over but instead fight back.
Had we not bailed out the banks this would have happened in the fall of 2008 right on Dubya's lap. It would have effected the bansksters more and the public less which I what I argued back then. By delaying it the public is trampled more and the crooked banks less.
One thing not mentioned about the housing collapse is the effect on seniors who counted on selling their homes to get the equity out to purchase a retirement condo or townhouse. For many that "downsizing" is now almost impossible. That is indeed a crime in itself.
re: Our Goose Is Cooked?
If would have been far cheaper to bail the homeowners so the derivative debts in the trillions wouldn't have come into play. However, only those proven to be "deserving" by the size of their bank accounts get bailouts. The "undeserving" get to pay for it with a global economic collapse. Now the undeserving get to pay more for their folly of bailing the "deserving". It bankrupted their governments.
.The nonsense is still going on, as the noted economist Michael Hudson brought to light with his recent article on national "serfdom".
QUOTE: "The moral is that when it comes to bailing out bankers, rules are ignored – in order to serve the “higher justice” of saving banks and their high-finance counterparties from taking a loss. The class war is back in business – with a vengeance, and bankers are the winners this time around.
Finance is a form of warfare. Like military conquest, its aim is to gain control of land, public infrastructure, and to impose tribute. This involves dictating laws to its subjects, and concentrating social as well as economic planning in centralized hands.
This attack is being mounted not by nation states as such, but by a cosmopolitan financial class. Finance always has been cosmopolitan more than nationalistic – and always has sought to impose its priorities and lawmaking power over those of parliamentary democracies.
From the vantage point of the Irish and Greek populations (perhaps soon to be joined by those of Portugal and Spain), national parliamentary governments are to be mobilized to impose the terms of national surrender to financial planners. One almost can say that the ideal is to reduce parliaments to local puppet regimes serving the cosmopolitan financial class by using debt leverage to carve up what is left of the public domain that used to be called “the commons.”
Greece and Ireland have become the litmus test for whether economies will be sacrificed in attempts to pay debts that cannot be paid. An interregnum is threatened during which the road to default and permanent austerity will carve out more and more land and public enterprises from the public domain, divert more and more consumer income to pay debt service and taxes for governments to pay bondholders, and more business income to pay the bankers.
If this is not war, what is?"
Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City
Full article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson06032011.html
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"
re: Our Goose Is Cooked?
Or an even bigger picture from Dr. Paul Craig Roberts:
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/110605_empire.htm
It would be very disgusting if that's what our leaders are up to. Seems like a continuation of the Neocon's dream (or nightmare).