Yes, life goes on. It will go on much better for those who have a skill that requires hands-on. I saw the crash coming in '05. I started writing in '07. I’ve had 12 years of intense reading to understand every facet of the problem. We spent the last 60 years inventing labor-saving devices at the same time that we were trying to keep full employment. The computer pushed us over the edge. Containerized shipping pushed us over the edge.
Massive invesment flowed to China to take advantage of global-wage-arbitrage,. With ultra-cheap shipping, the low-cost labor market set the roof on wages. It was bad enough competing with laborers who earned 30–50$ a month. Competing with robots is even worse.
GOV has always tried to absorb workers who couldn’t make it in the competitive, private labor market. New Jersey spends $ 1,102,465 to maintain one mile of two lane highway for one year. Arkansas spends $ 36, 562. California spends $ 972,461.
The ability of GOV to absorb “excess” workers has been overwhelmed by the job losses from outsourcing and automation. Manufacturing is the number one value-added industry. When China set the roof on wages in manufacturing, everybody else had to follow to compete. The whole world has slowly slid down to a global-mean-wage.
This has wiped out discretinary spending.
“Yet S&P’s Global Luxury Index peaked almost three years ago in July 2014. Since then, it’s down about 13%.”
Inflation has gone up 40 fold but, wages have only gone up 17 fold. Labor’s share of the economic pie has fallen for decades. After WW II, America had 3% of the population and 50% of the manufacturing capacity. Times have changed and national aggregate income has fallen drastically.
I’ve written some 2,000 posts on this. We’re spending ourselves down and running on fumes.
Martin Armstrong has an ENORMOUS computer program that has predicted ALL of this. 23,000 variables and all the economic history of the world running on AI in real-time. He predict a crash in the sovereign-bond market. That would bring and end to most GOV programs and, more importantly, most imports. We import 8.1 million barrels of oil every day.
The whole “edifice” is kept afloat by FED printing. The stock market is at 2.7 times historical valuations. It is currently impossible to say just how long FED printing can keep air under our national hoivercar. When the air blast stops, the hover car comes to a halt. The national debt is now pegged at $ 20 trillion, even though it is twice as high. In a few weeks, we hit the debt ceiling. It is expected that congress will refuse to raise it above $20.1 trillion
The cheerleaders are cheering as loud as they can. Their cheers are sounding more and more hollow. 95% of the financial news is BS meant to keep the muppets from pulling out of the markets. Here is a list of names / writers who have proven to be correct all along.
Automatic Earth
Martin Armstrong blog
Charles Hugh Smith
James Kunstler, if you dare
Jim Willie, another scary one but, very interesting predictions/ideas
Hugo Salinas Price and Adrian Salbuchi write in both spanish and English
Zero Hedge has unbelievably informative articles
Daily Reckoning
Peak Prosperity
MISH, (Mike Shedlock)
The country has spent itself down from it’s post-war prosperity. “The monetary base, or “central bank money” – money created directly by a central bank – has gone from 10% of GDP in 2008 to 35% at the end of 2016 in OECD countries!” The FED is printing 25% of the GDP to keep things going. It takes $10 of new debt to get a $1 increase in GDP. Nobody knows how long this can go on, except perhaps Martin Armstrong.
Currently, the U.S. dollar is the least-ugly horse in the glue factiory. There is a lot of capital flight to the dollar. There is a $1 trillion flight from China alone in the last year. Everyone has acknowledged that the Euro and the Eurozone are TOAST. Greece wants to switch over to the dollar. There is capital flight out of the Euro.
There are a LOT of writers who claim that the dollar will become worthless. BS, the dollar has a very high uitlity value It is the most fungible instrument there is. NOT gold. Gold is a store-of-value, not a currency.
Keep cash in the house. The FDIC has $2.4 billion in assets and insures about $71 trillion. The Pension Benefits Guarantee Corporation is equally underfunded. U.S. GOV unfunded liabilities is reckonned at $ 212 trillion (Kotlikoff)
I wish all of you the best.
but personal experiance is hard to beat.
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