Showing posts with label world economic depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world economic depression. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Spinning Unemployment in a Collapsing Empire

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
January 10, 2011
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday that the economy gained only 103,000 new jobs in December—not enough to keep up with population growth—but the rate of unemployment (U.3) fell from 9.8% to 9.4%. If you are confused by the report, you are among the many.





Why does the media focus on the unemployment measure that does not count any discouraged workers?


In truth, what fell was not the number of unemployed people but the number of unemployed people who are actively looking for work. Those who have become discouraged and have ceased looking for work are not considered to be in the work force and are not counted as unemployed in the U.3 measure. The unemployment rate fell because discouraged workers increased, not because employment rose.
The BLS counts short-term discouraged workers (less than one year) in its U.6 measure of unemployment. That unemployment rate is 16.7%.  When statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) adds the long-term discouraged, the US unemployment rate as of December 2010 was 22.4%.
The question to ask yourself is: why does the media focus on the unemployment measure that does not count any discouraged workers?  The answer is that the U.3 measurement only counts 42% of the unemployed and makes the situation appear to be a lot better than it is.
Where are the 103,000 new jobs?  As I have reported for years, the jobs are in non-tradable domestic services: waitresses and bar tenders, health care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory health care services), and retail and wholesale trade.
Today the United States has only 11,670,000 manufacturing jobs, less than 9% of total jobs. Yet, despite America’s heavy dependence on foreign manufactures and foreign creditors, the idiots in Washington think that they are a superpower standing astride the world like a colossus.
John Williams reports that “the level of payroll employment still stands below where it was a decade ago, despite the U.S.population growing by more than 10% in the same period. The structural impairments to U.S. economic activity continue to constrain normal commercial activity, preventing any meaningful recovery in business activity.”
Another way of saying this is that American corporations have taken American jobs offshore and given them to the Chinese. So much for big business patriotism.
Williams also reports that, unless it is finagled, next month’s BLS benchmark revision of payroll employment data will lower the level of previously reported employment by more than 500,000.
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke used his testimony before the Senate Budget Committee last Friday to warn that the U.S. government must get its budget deficit under control or “the economic and financial effects would be severe.” Here Bernanke is acknowledging that the Federal Reserve cannot indefinitely print money in order to finance wars and bailouts of the mega-rich.
But how is the government to get its budget under control?  The U.S. government, regardless of political party or president, is committed to American hegemony over the world. The Congress has just passed the largest military budget in history, and there is no indication that any of America’s wars and military occupations are near an end
The financial crisis is not over, with more foreclosures and more losses for the financial sector that will result in more taxpayer bailouts for those “too big to fail.” John Williams says that the double-dip is already happening, just disguised by faulty statistics, and that the deficit implications are horrendous and are likely to result in hyperinflation as the Federal Reserve will have to monetize the otherwise un-financeable deficits.
The dollar is also in danger, its role as reserve currency undermined by the Federal Reserve’s creation of more and more dollars.  Temporarily, the dollar is buttressed by the grief that Wall Street’s sale of fraudulent derivative financial instruments to Europe has caused the euro.
The Republicans will try to destroy Social Security and Medicare in order to pay for wars and bailouts. If Americans are capable of realizing that they are threatened on a much greater level by the Republicans’ evisceration of the social safety net than they are by terrorists, the Republican assault on what they call “the welfare state” will fail.
The fallback target will be private pensions, assuming any survive plunder by the Wall Street investment banks. Pension funds could be required to invest in Treasury debt or they could face a levy. In the Clinton administration, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Alicia Munnell proposed confiscating 15% of all pension assets on the grounds that they had accumulated tax free. Certainly Washington will steal Americans’ pensions, just as Washington has stolen Americans’ civil liberties, in order to continue the empire’s wars of hegemony.
Increasingly, the rest of the world views America as the single source of its financial and political woes. While the superpower massacres Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia, people in the rest of the world have learned from WikiLeaks that the U.S. government manipulates, bribes, threatens, and deceives other governments in order to  have those governments serve the U.S. government’s interest at the expense of the interests of their own peoples.
The American Imperial Empire rests on puppet governments that are increasingly distrusted and hated by the peoples under their rule. Like the Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire, the American Empire is ruled not directly but through puppet states.
Puppet governments are caught between the empire’s power and the power of the local population. To the extent that Europeans have a moral conscience, they will find America’s foreign policy increasingly repugnant. To the extent that Muslim solidarity grows, the Muslim puppet governments that support America’s and Israel’s massacres of Muslims will find themselves threatened from within.
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The American Empire is on the rocks, despite its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and its control over the foreign and domestic policies of its subservient puppet states in  Western and Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, parts of Africa, the Middle East, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Baltic states, Georgia, Kosovo, Mexico, Central America, Columbia, and, no doubt, others.
A country that is the font of war and oppression, whose dominance rests on the weak reed of puppet states, and whose economy is collapsing will not long remain dominant.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Successful Chinese Strategy Of Protectionism, Mercatilism, Dirigism Goes Back To Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
October 27, 2010

The US should dump the failed Chicago-Austrian system of free trade, deregulation, and privatization, and return to the classic American System of political economy, meaning an updated New Deal. No Keynesians, Austrians, Chicago boys, or Marxists need apply. RT panel with Pepe Escobar, Michael Hudson, and Webster Tarpley.

Friday, August 27, 2010

China Buys Euros as Fear of World Depression Grows

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
August 25, 2010

The US Treasury has just announced that China’s official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities declined by about $30 billion between April and May of this year, from about $900 billion to some $868 billion. According to the US authorities, this means that Chinese holdings of US government paper are now at the lowest level in the past year. A 2% to 3% decline in a month does not qualify as massive dumping, but simply means that China is in the process of diversification. It is also very likely that China has more U.S. Treasury bonds than this official count would indicate, quite possibly through proxy purchases via Hong Kong and other places.
With the sales of existing homes in the United States falling by 27% this morning, together with disastrous statistics regarding unemployment and foreclosures, it ought to be obvious that the US economy is in depression. Even experts interviewed on CNBC are beginning to wake up to this obvious fact.

World Bond Bubble

On August 24, the Treasury’s two-year note reached its highest price in recorded history, meaning that the yield was at a record low. The entire world is piling into short-term U.S. Treasury paper, and many buyers cannot get enough. This makes a mockery out of the right wing reactionary refrain that the US equals Greece and soon will be unable to borrow. If, according to the crackpot Austrian theory, markets know things that individual humans cannot know, then surely the market is signaling a great desire for T
Treasury bills and Treasury notes at the short end. The main reason for this demand is of course fear and panic – coming from the growing awareness that the world is indeed experiencing the second wave of a world economic depression of colossal proportions.
There is now a large-scale international bond bubble involving, among others, US treasuries and German Bunds. Since the flash crash of May 6, many investors have fled the stock markets entirely. It is still too soon to sound the alarm on deflation ahead, but deflation has now appeared over the horizon as a concrete possibility – partly because so many major financial players are now convinced that deflation is the wave of the future. If this were to come about, it would mean a depression looking much more like 1929-1933 than the relatively more mild situation we have experienced over the last two years. The depression may be taking a turn toward something far more excruciating for the masses of the population. One by-product of that would be vastly decreased popular gullibility for the anti-government recipes of the libertarian Austrian school, which are tailored for those who have money, and which have very little appeal to people who are unemployed, homeless, and starving.
Also on August 24, the Japanese yen hit a 15-year high compared to the dollar, and a nine-year high compared to the euro. This kind of currency championship is a Pyrrhic victory which nobody wants, since it means the Japanese exports are in the process of being strangled. This is true currency chaos and world depression at the same time, pointing once again towards the urgent need to restore the fixed rate system of Bretton Woods, which was destroyed 39 years ago this month by Nixon and Kissinger, urged on by Milton Friedman and other snake oil economists.
For the past year, the main thrust of the London and New York financial centers has been the effort to export the Depression into Europe by means of a speculative attack on the government bonds of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and some other countries, all designed to provoke a panicked flight out of the euro, which would in turn allow the Anglo-Americans to loot and asset strip the accumulated wealth of the old continent. This was not a market event, but it orchestrated strategic attack, inspired by such figures as Soros, Einhorn, and Paulson. During July and the first half of August, it became apparent that this Blitzkrieg as originally planned had failed to reach its objectives. But the Anglo-Americans, one-trick ponies as always, maybe persisting in the assault.

China Blocks US-UK Attack On Euro

The Anglo-American hedge fund attack, as we have documented here, employed credit default swaps as the primary weapon against Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish government bonds. The failure of London and New York to induce a panic flight out of the euro during the May-June timeframe was partly results of the German self-defense measures, involving bans on naked credit default swaps and bans on naked shorting of German equities. In addition to this, Chinese support for the euro has played a decisive role.
There is every indication that the Chinese made a decision not to allow the destruction of the euro during the late spring and early summer. That decision was technical, commercial, and political at the same time. The technical part was the China sought to re-balance the basket of currencies it uses to maintain the international stability of the renminbi. As the euro looms larger in Chinese trade, purchases of euros and Eurobonds are in order. It is also worth pointing out that the Chinese have not delivered on their promise to radically raise the international value of the renminbi, as hysterically demanded by Tiny Tim Geithner and others.
The commercial and political sides of Chinese support for the euro were reflected in the June visit of the Chinese vice prime minister to Greece, notably to the port of Piraeus. This Chinese envoy signed more than a dozen important economic cooperation deals, including shipping and shipbuilding, telecom, and container ports. The deputy Greek finance minister, Theodoros Pangalos, was quoted as saying: “The Chinese want a gateway into Europe. They are not like these Wall Street [blankety-blanks], pushing financial investments on paper. The Chinese deal in real things, in merchandise. And they will help the real economy in Greece.”1 The emphasis on the production of tangible physical commodities by the Chinese, in contrast to Wall Street’s reliance on a mass of toxic and kited derivatives, points to the real basis of Chinese economic ascendancy. If the Chinese are wise, they will not go overboard with short-term greed, but rather be ready for generous concessions to the Greek labor movement, so as to get the unions on their side. In any case, these euro-denominated Greek purchases are one obvious reason why Beijing is holding fewer greenbacks and more euros.

Will Hungary, Ireland, or Budget Austerity Sink The Euro?

The Anglo Americans are still beside themselves with rage and consternation over the fact that their original attack on the euro has not worked. But since about the middle of August, the euro has fallen from over $1.30 to about $1.26 or thereabouts. Part of this is due to the decline of the New York Stock market, given the long-standing dollar-Dow trade-off. Another negative factor for the euro is doubtless the cruel and stupid deflationary policies introduced by many EU governments in a craven attempt to ward off further speculative attacks. In a depression, government spending is the main thing that supports the entire economy, so cutting the government budget is a recipe for economic disaster, as some EU countries are now being reminded. Another factor is simply the month of August, when Catholic Europe, including France, Italy, Spain, and Bavaria, tends to shut down.

Where Will The Next Panic Break Out?

The world is now in a time of mixed signals and cross-currents. The forces of depression, in the form of $1.5 quadrillion of toxic and kited derivatives, are most emphatically still lurking, and since they have not been shredded, canceled, deleted, outlawed or abrogated, they will soon find a way to explode once again. Serious financial observers are now waiting to see where the next currency or banking panic will come. Over the last day or two, there have been reports of heavy selling of the Hungarian forint, which is inside the EU but not part of Euroland. Late on August 24, Standard & Poor’s announced a major downgrade of Irish debt, switching to a negative outlook. If the panic comes in Hungary or Ireland, then the euro could indeed go down. CNBC traders, in response to the question of how to make money off the crisis of the Hungarian currency, immediately replied that the way to do that was to short the stocks of Austrian banks, who hold much Hungarian debt. From here, the crisis would move on to Germany, and soon the entire continent would be back in the soup. The British pound sterling also has massive vulnerabilities to being the next monetary unit to crash.
But the most likely victim remains Wall Street itself. A glance at the stock chart of Bank of America over the past three months shows what any technical analyst would regard as a very ugly picture. There are rumblings that Citibank may be heading towards liquidity trouble in September and October. For those who like to read the tea leaves, CNBC’s Jim Cramer today responded to a question about Citigroup by emphatically declaiming “Stick with Citi,” and “Stick with Pandit.” Citigroup, he affirmed, remained his “favorite speculation.” For contrarians who have learned something over the past two years, this may already be enough to head for the hills. In any case, if the banking panic breaks out in New York, then the dollar may turn out to be the victim.

Bernanke and QE2

Today also brought the publication of the August 10 minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. These minutes reveal a serious split in the management committee of the US financier oligarchy. Bernanke and his majority are afraid of deflation, and want a new round of quantitative easing – already dubbed QE2 by the Street. But there is also a significant Austro-monetarist reactionary minority who regard inflation as the greater evil, and to whom a deflationary crash would not be unwelcome, as libertarian rantings over many decades have made plain. These tensions may well be on display at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming at the end of this week.
Another CNBC analyst has ventured to predict a ragged decline of the Dow to about 5,000 over the months ahead. If that begins to happen, then the danger of deflation will be enhanced, and in such a scenario the dollar would actually tend to increase in value compared to other currencies. On the other hand, Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s trademark is his strategy for flooding the system with bailouts and other liquidity if deflation looms. Bernanke is the captain of that ship of fools known as the QE2. The one certainty is that there is no recovery, and that the second wave of a world economic depression dominates the world.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Bankers Destroy Global Economy by Design to Consolidate Power

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, May 10, 2010

American taxpayers have been freshly liberated of hundreds of billions more dollars as part of the IMF’s new bailout package which is principally going straight to European banks, in addition to the Federal Reserve program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe, in a move that represents little more than a desperate effort to save the Euro and rescue the credibility of economic global governance.
“The Federal Reserve late Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent,” reports the Associated Press.
“The Fed’s action reopens a program put in place during the 2008 global financial crisis under which dollars are shipped overseas through the foreign central banks. In turn, these central banks can lend the dollars out to banks in their home countries that are in need of dollar funding to prevent the European crisis from spreading further.”
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Max Keiser Reveals 1000 Point Plunge was Digital Financial Terrorism






Tuesday, May 4, 2010

A Financial Conflagration Of Immense Proportions

International Forecaster Weekly
 
Fiat money buckling, an inflationary depression, years of reckless spending, Greek debt unpayable, Euro zone in jeopardy, a loss of integrity in US markets, criminal charges for Goldman Sachs, side pockets a new hedge fun trick, Banks on subprime offensive, Fed works the printing presses overtime...
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