Is the US headed for a major economic meltdown?
Posted by: totemphile on 11 April 2013
Never mind the commercial advertising here. Some of the economic fundamentals described are spot on though. Worse times to come not just for the US then?
Seems to me the whole thing is a commercial 
. This is the same crew who've been running around with their hair on fire screaming about impending hyperinflation for the last five years....still waiting.
Seems to me the whole thing is a commercial . This is the same crew who've been running around with their hair on fire screaming about impending hyperinflation for the last five years....still waiting.
+1. There are lots of people who try to profit by selling fear to gullible people. Usually they target the elderly. If you google "Newsmax ripoff report", you can get a good idea of their business practices:
Newsmax offers an ostensibly "free" copy of the book, Aftershock, and free trials to 3 newsletters as part of their offer, for just the price of $4.95 shipping. That is the only information given before filling out the order form and submitting a credit card. After filling in the form to order the book, a welcome email is sent informing you that the different subscriptions will be billed at different intervals after the trail period if one does not unsubscribe. Aha, when you try to unsubscribe you are told that one must wait to be notified for the end of the trial periods at 2, 3 and 4 month notifications for the different unwanted subscriptions.
When you email customer service to unsubscribe you are then informed of the undisclosed terms and conditions: if you want to unsubscribe you will be billed $27.95 for the full retail price of the book. They've got you!!
Adding insult to injury your email is distributed to their affiliates and all the tentacles are out.
Please beware and read all the complaints consumers like me have filed. If you do business with Newsmax, use Paypal so they will not be able to bill your credit card for unwanted publications.
Wait till all that money printing gains velocity - they are playing a very dangerous game...but it's the only card they have. Right now the billions upon billions the Fed is creating with "QE to Infinity" is landing mainly in the financial sector and the stock market. Joe Average ain't getting nothing.
And as for inflation being low, that's only if you believe the gummint's concocted numbers - if you figured inflation by the method they used in the early 80's under Carter, it is around 9-10%. Either that, or I need to find out where the politicians buy their damned groceries, because mine sure as hell have gone up in the past 2 years. Couple that with paying savers 0.001% interest on savings, and those on fixed income are really getting the squeeze, as are savers.
Printing money (hell, they don't even have to print it any more, just add a few trailing zeros on a computer) and artificially low interest rates are creating a tremendous mis-allocation of capital, and eventually it will end badly. All I can do is try to play the game under the rules they make up as they go; I just closed on a house today with an absurdly low 3.75% mortgage, and my little stock portfolio is zooming ever upward. But it will end badly, and I have to be ready with my trailing stops or I'll get buggered like I did in 2008.
It will go on for a little while longer (my guess is around 2015 or 2016), until grandma & grandpa finally get suckered back into the stock market (because there is no other way for they to get any yield) and then you'd better have your shorts ready, or you will take it in the shorts as it all collapses. (With the banksters and politicians front-running it & locking in their gains of course.)
Grandma & grandpa will get wiped out, and the government will perform some stunt to get their 401K & IRA money...forcing them to buy treasuries because they can't find anyone else to buy their sh*t paper to finance their party any more.
But the banks perpetuated the biggest, most costly fraud ever on the US economy, and somehow Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer couldn't find anyone worth prosecuting. And they not only pulled the fraud off, but received boatloads of money for bailouts and bonuses, and handed the bill to the American citizens in the form of capital destruction, taxes, inflation (the "hidden" tax), and yet the people clamor for more of the same...hell, Jack Lew got to be Treasury Secretary, replacing another criminal, who replaced another criminal before him. Anyone see a pattern yet?
But don't worry, the Democrats/Republicans will fix it.
And I heard Obama say the other day that we need to do something so that more people could be able to buy a home. I seem to remember that's how the whole f%^$ing thing got started. I was working in the mortgage business in 2004, and said it would blow up, and when it did, I only wished I had bought puts on Fannie Mae - got as far as the order screen in the summer of 2008 and chickened out. Oh well, better luck this time?