The Perfect Storm of Misery, Blowing Out Way By James Reed
I am keeping my peepers open for good material offering sensible approaches to the coming economic collapse. Most people do not see it coming, and perhaps, contrary to all the trends, they are right; however, I think the balance of evidence indicates that they are wrong. Many intellectual types from our side see the opportunity from the chaos for political and financial change, which is of course needed. But we little people need to survive first and do not exist as invulnerable beings, immune to the coming chaos. Michael Snyder at the ver pessimistic Economic Collapse blog.com, outlines the 12 factors indicating that we are being blown into economic collapse.
“You have heard me say it over and over again. What we are witnessing right now reminds me so much of 2008, and we all remember what happened in the fall of 2008. That doesn’t mean that this new crisis will unfold exactly the same way that the last one did. Ultimately, every economic downturn is unique. But the fact that we are seeing so many parallels between what is transpiring now and what transpired 14 years ago should deeply alarm all of us. We appear to be on the precipice of another economic crash, and all of the “solutions” that our leaders give us just seem to make things even worse.
Hopefully someone out there can find a way to pull a miracle out of a hat and a worst case scenario can be averted.
But I wouldn’t count on that happening. The following are 12 numbers that show that we are getting dangerously close to an economic crash as the fall of 2022 approaches…
#1 The government is telling us that the unemployment rate only went up to 3.7 percent in August.
#2 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were being used the real rate of unemployment in the United States would be over 24 percent.
#3 About half of all U.S. companies say that they will be eliminating jobs within the next 12 months.
#4 The government is telling us that the inflation rate in the United States is only 8.5 percent.
#5 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the real rate of inflation would be somewhere around 17 percent right now. That is worse than anything that we experienced during the Jimmy Carter era.
#6 At one company, the number of Americans taking out short-term loans for groceries has nearly doubled this year.
#7 One out of every five home sellers in the United States dropped their asking price last month. This is more evidence that home prices are starting to rapidly move in a downward direction.
#8 Sales of previously-owned homes were about 20 percent lower this July than they were last July.
#9 One recent survey found that 3.8 million Americans believe that they could be evicted from their homes within the next two months.
#10 According to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, approximately 20 million U.S. households are currently behind on their utility bills.
#11 The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen for three weeks in a row. We also witnessed this sort of a gradual slide just prior to the big crash of 2008.
#12 In August, a whopping 2,150 corporate executives sold off shares in their companies. Are they trying to cash in while they still can?
Gustavo Arnal was one of the corporate executives that recently sold off large amounts of stock.
Now he is dead…
The man who jumped to his death from the 18th floor of the famous ‘Jenga’ tower in lower Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood Friday has been identified as a Bed Bath & Beyond executive.
Gustavo Arnal, 52, was the Chief Financial Officer of Bed Bath & Beyond, a company that has been going through struggles of late due to high inflation and a sagging economy. The company announced plans to close 150 stores, of its roughly 900, and lay off 20 percent of staff just two days before Arnal’s death.
He reportedly sold over 42,000 shares in the company, oft-identified as a ‘meme stock’, for $1million just over two weeks ago, according to MarketBeat.com.
It appears that Arnal was involved in a “pump and dump” scheme, and he may have decided that he didn’t want to spend much of the rest of his life locked away in prison…
The executive vice president and chief financial officer of Bed Bath & Beyond who plunged to his death from the 18th floor of a New York City skyscraper on Friday was the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging that he and majority shareholder, GameStop Chairman Ryan Cohen, had artificially inflated the company’s value in a “pump and dump” scheme.
Gustavo Arnal, 52, and Cohen, are listed as defendants in the class-action lawsuit filed last month in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Sadly, I think that we will see quite a few more people jumping off of buildings before this whole thing is over.
Of course most Americans would never do such a thing.
Most Americans will just suffer through whatever comes even as their standard of living is being systematically destroyed.
For example, CNN recently interviewed one young mother that couldn’t even afford to buy a backpack for her preschooler…
As Sarah Longmore finished her back-to-school shopping, the mother of five looked at a $25 backpack for her preschooler. Soaring inflation had crunched the family’s budget, and she decided her daughter could make do with a hand-me-down. She put the backpack back.
Unfortunately, she is not alone.
In fact, one recent poll found that only 36 percent of all parents will “be able to pay for everything their kids need this school year”…
Just 36% of parents said they would be able to pay for everything their kids need this school year, according to Morning Consult’s annual back-to-school shopping report. That’s down sharply from 52% in 2021, when inflation was lower and stimulus checks plus advance child tax credit payments helped some families.
Are things really this bad already?
If so, what will conditions look like six months or a year from now?
2023 is less than four months away, and the stage has been set for an economic implosion of absolutely epic proportions.
Do you remember the extreme pain that our nation went through in 2008 and 2009?
Many believe that what is ahead will be even worse.
The greatest debt bubble in the history of the world is starting to burst, and central banks all over the globe are starting to panic.
If you always wanted to live in “interesting” times, you are going to get your wish.
But for most people, the times that we are moving into will not be fun at all.”
Expect some cities to become unliveable; who knows what will happen to millions, if not billions, of people. Depopulation and die off, no doubt:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/why-some-cities-may-no-longer-be-viable
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/09/why-some-cities-may-no-longer-be-viable.html
“Any city whose lifeblood ultimately depends on hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization will no longer be viable.
The human migration from the countryside to cities has been an enduring feature of civilization. Cities concentrate wealth, productivity and power, and so they're magnets to talent and capital, offering newcomers the greatest opportunities.
Cities are efficient, packing population, productivity and wealth creation into small areas. Slums and sweatshops are immensely profitable, and cramming people into centers of manufacturing is far more efficient than scattering people and production across a landscape.
Cities generally arose on coastal harbors, navigable rivers or the confluence of overland trade routes, as these hubs enabled profitable trade and transport of goods protected by defensible barriers.
In sum, cities offered unmatchable advantages over more widely distributed settlements, trade and production. Given their typically strategic location and regional dominance, they tend to become political, military and cultural centers as well as economic / financial heavyweights.
But the nature of cities has changed, and so has their viability as magnets for talent and capital. I recently discussed these shifts with longtime correspondent T.D., who succinctly summarized the economic foundations of New York City--a set of dynamics that applies in one way or another to virtually all major cities globally: cities are transport / value-added hubs.
"With the creation of the Erie Canal, New York became a major port and city, a place where cheap immigrant labor and the precursors to all sorts of products could be immediately brought together in a value-added manner for finishing into a manufactured product which was then cost effectively shipped onward."
These longstanding economic foundations began shifting in the 1970s. Slums and manufacturing were deemed undesirable for environmental and aesthetic reasons, and globalization began chipping away at manufacturing within costly urban zones as production was shipped to lower-cost regions.
The other core dynamic of the past 40 years, financialization, replaced value-added trade and goods with value-added financial instruments and services. As globalization and financialization transitioned to hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization, cities became magnets for real estate speculation, global capital seeking a safe place to park money, healthcare and higher education. status-enhancing conspicuous consumption and entertainment, i.e. the good life of diverse cultural attractions, neighborhoods, venues, cafes, bars and nightlife, all of which are the foundation of global tourism, now the primary industry in many cities.
The shift to finance funded both the speculation and the consumption. Cities morphed from centers of value-added manufacturing and trade to financial transactions and the origination of financial instruments, developments which enabled and expanded a series of ever-larger speculative bubbles.
Cities have always been more expensive than the countryside, but hyper-financialization has boosted urban costs to the point that only the top 10% or 20% can own their own home and afford all the good things the city has to offer without family wealth or speculative gains banked by playing hyper-financialization games.
One driver of higher costs is cities are magnets for graft, corruption, insider deals and quasi-monopolies, as the aggregation of money and power make the rewards of insider self-service irresistible. All of these forms of skimming add cost without adding any value to residents or enterprises.
Even worse, they erode competence and accountability, as the essence of insider self-service is the elimination of accountability so low-level corruption and incompetence cannot be reined in. Insiders have a free hand to exploit their access to the enormous flows of money and power that sluice through every major city.
As T.D. explained, large-scale industry is the only force with sufficient heft to demand competence and accountability of city governments. The current batch of what passes for "industry"--tourism, hospitals, universities, museums, etc.--can't threaten to leave, as their own existence depends on the city. None wield sufficient political power to clamp down on corruption and incompetence.
As the energy, water, waste and transport infrastructure decays to the point of breakdown, industry would have stepped in and demanded managerial competence to get it fixed because industry needed those systems to survive. The complaints of highly segmented service industries don't seem to wield the same power or urgency.
As for finance, it's already global, and it right-sizes its footprint to match the flows of capital sluicing through the city as well as its costs and amenities. If any of these factors goes the wrong way, finance will abandon the city in a New York Minute.
In effect, globalization and financialization have hollowed out the traditional economic foundations of cities in favor of services and entertainment which are dependent on the speculative gains of financialization. Should the flood of wealth being generated by ceaseless hyper-financialization reach its zenith and crash, cities will lose their source of wealth and income even as their managerial competence has been eroded by the very success of financialization in generating staggering flows of money.
Given an ever-expanding flood of money, competence and accountability can both be dispensed with. If the flow of money keeps expanding, simulacra of accountability and competence will do just fine.
But when the flood of money dries up, and the city needs administrative competence and accountability to adapt, these have decayed to the point nobody in power has any experience of anything but an ever-expanding flood of money.
In other words, the "efficiencies" of the city now depend on the permanent expansion of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization, both of which are increasingly vulnerable to decay, downsizing or collapse.
Any city whose lifeblood ultimately depends on hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization will no longer be viable. Non-viability of the globalized, financialized urban model is currently considered "impossible." Let's check in around 2030 and make an accounting of the second-order effects of the demise of globalization and financialization. One such effect might be a reversal of the human migration as people leave no-longer-viable urban zones en masse.”
However, all migration will do is spread the misery, as globalisation does. Alex Jones explains further:
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