There are some interesting information that I found on this website that just happened the last couples of years.
* On September 18, 2008 the National Debt stood at $9.66 trillion. Today it stands at $14.16 trillion, a 47% increase in 2 1/2 years.
* The country is running $1.5 trillion annual deficits and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
* The States are running cumulative budget deficits of $130 billion in FY11 and expect deficits of $112 billion in FY12. This is leading to conflicts with unions, higher taxes and mass layoffs of government workers.
* The working age population has risen by 5 million, while the number of employed Americans has declined by 6.5 million. The true unemployment rate http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts has risen from 12% to 22%.
* In September 2008 there were 30.8 million Americans on food stamps. Today there are 44 million Americans on food stamps (14% of the U.S. population), a 43% increase in 2 1/2 years. The annual cost has risen by $37 billion, a 100% increase in 2 1/2 years.
* Real inflation http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts bottomed at 5% in early 2009, but has accelerated to 9% today, with further increases baked in the cake.
* Gasoline prices bottomed out at $1.61 per gallon in January 2009 and have risen to $3.54 per gallon today, a 120% increase in just over two years.
* Households have lost $6.3 trillion of real estate related wealth since the peak of the housing market. Home prices have fallen for six straight months.
* Almost 3 million homes have been lost to foreclosure since 2007.
* There are 11.1 million households, or 23.1% of all mortgaged homes, underwater on their mortgages today, with rates above 50% in Nevada, Arizona, California, and Michigan.
* Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the US government and have lost $170 billion of taxpayer funds so far. Losses are expected to reach $400 billion. Along with the FHA, they continue to prop up a dead housing market with more bad loans.
* The Federal Reserve balance sheet in September 2008 consisted of $895 billion of US Treasury bonds. Today it totals $2.55 trillion of toxic mortgages bought from Wall Street banks and Treasury bonds being bought under QE2.
* The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept. intimidated the FASB into allowing Wall Street banks to account for worthless mortgage and real estate loans as fully collectible. Magically, insolvent banks became solvent – on paper.
* The Dow Jones was 11,700 in late August 2008 and today stands at 12,000. The Dow has risen 84% from its March 2009 low. The top 1% wealthiest Americans own 40% of all the stocks in America, so they are feeling much better.
* In late 2007, a risk averse senior citizen could get a 5% return on a 6 month CD. Today, after two years of no increases in their Social Security payments, a senior citizen can “earn” .38% on a 6 month CD.
* The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to 0% in order to allow the Wall Street banks to borrow for free and earn billions without risk.
* Over 300 smaller banks have been closed by the FDIC, with losses exceeding $50 billion. There are another 900 banks on the verge of insolvency, with estimated future losses of $100 billion.
* The Federal Reserve initiated QE2 in November 2010, purchasing $70 billion per month of Treasury bonds and attempting to create a stock market rally. They have succeeded in creating a tsunami of energy, food, and commodity price inflation across the globe, sparking revolutions among the desperately poor in the Middle East.
* Wall Street banks “earned” record profits of $19 billion in 2010 after nearly destroying the worldwide financial system in 2008 and raping the American taxpayer in 2009.
* No Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for the fraudulent actions committed by their banks.
* Wall Street banks handed out $43.3 billion in bonuses in 2009/2010 for a job well done. The average Wall Street employee received a $128,000 bonus in 2010. In 2008, the year they crashed the financial system, they still doled out $17.6 billion in bonuses.
* The median household income in 2007 was $52,163. Today the median household income is $46,326, an 11% decline in three years. Real average weekly earnings are lower today than they were in 1971.
We're going backward. A lot of people don't even know those happened. Some know but don't really care because they do not directly affect them. With the debt at this rate, even if they tax everybody 100% for a long time, they wouldn't be able to pay off the debt. What the government is doing is print more money to make it worthless and the debt will go away, what a joke!
The economy and political systems in America are so corrupt. In a real free market there's no such thing as "too big to fail" that the government has to bail out. If one company fails, the opportunity will open for better ones to rise. What the government did was backing up their buddies (or campaign donators) from Wall Street. Their "solution" to fix the economy brought unintended (or intended) consequences and lay out a path for future storms to come that could potentially be worse. We can't afford another crisis similar to the one in 2008 but it's going to come. Last time we still have houses, jobs, retirement accounts, savings ... Many people already lost those and don't have anything left.
I love many things in America but there are a lot of wrongs. These systems are so corrupt and we go to other countries telling them to model after us? I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)