The U.S. government just announced a month of robust hiring, a drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3% and that the economic "recovery" is gaining momentum. It is nonsense being pumped out in an election year as the economy continues to deteriorate.
Reality is that most of the jobs that were added were low paying, such as those of a nurse's aid or a corporate clerical position. Worse yet, what it masks are the millions of people underemployed and the millions more no longer counted for having been out of work too long.
Reality is a mountain of foreclosed homes being kept off the marketplace because the government wants to encourage new building and is trying to do all it can to stop the continuing fall of real estate prices. In most major U.S. cities, a large percentage of the housing sales are foreclosures or short sales, in which the owner has lost his/her equity and the lender writes off a portion of the loan.
Reality is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke just testified to Congress and painted a worrisome picture of the economy, which is understandable considering he recently announced the Fed will do all it can to keep interest rates at near zero through the end of 2014 (the next 3 years). Their hope is that this will help the economy finally take off with cheap money, while in the meantime masking the U.S. governments real borrowing costs as its deficits are rapidly mounting.
Reality is this is all being done so consumers, which make up an almost unbelievable 70% of the U.S. economy. and are already deeply in debt, will start to borrow more money to buy mostly foreign made goods they can't afford and get the economy going again.
Reality is the last two U.S. economic recoveries and boom times of the late 1990's - 2000 and 2002 - 2008 were based on a bubble, but created a ton of jobs until that bubble burst. The first "recovery" was led by the "new paradigm" in which Wall Street took vast numbers of new companies with few assets and no profits or proven track record public. This stock run up become so strong it soon led to "day traders" and all sorts of other related nonsense, until reality hit home and most of those new companies crashed, costing many millions of Americans their savings and millions more their jobs.
Reality for the second boom we are still fighting. Because of the economic fallout from the collapse of the prior bubble, then Fed Chairman Greenspan pumped tons of cheap money into the economy to avoid a possible Depression. The result was the huge run up in real estate prices and the many related jobs in sales, escrows, appraisals, lending and packaging and reselling of nearly all these mortgages. And with it millions more jobs in construction and the sales of appliance, carpeting and other furnishings. Then it all crashed.
Reality is the U.S. government is desperately trying to start a new economic bubble, which starts with consumer confidence. But consumers aren't confident, home buyers aren't confident and the government has no idea what bubble to create but is hoping creative entrepreneurs will come up with one. The consequences be damned after this new bubble bursts and it will, if in fact they can create it.
I believe the U.S. will have a better tomorrow but not without a time of turmoil, and by that I mean a Depression, as it continues to spend heavily on its military industrial complex, building weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and biological), fighter jets, drones, ships, tanks and other means of horror, has military bases everywhere and wages wars in its global "war on terror," all in an attempt to build a global empire that as you've seen in Iraq, a place the U.S. has never actually left, is done to serve its corporate political donors at the expense of the vast mass of Americans.
Please, if you haven't yet taken action to protect yourself, do it now. Sell unnecessary items such as an extra car, a boat, a motorcycle, or an RV. Pay down your credit cards and cross train at work so you have more to offer your employer. If the U.S. government does succeed in creating a 3rd bubble, when it crashes, there will be no resources left to provide a safety net. And if it doesn't succeed in building that bubble, you will have reduced the impact its failure will have on you. Ultimately, the answer is we as a people must take back control of our government, and working together allocate our resources to building a better world, one that serves us and all of mankind and provides a better future, a real future for our children. We are capable of doing this.
Dick
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