With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932 – July 4, 2010

The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation.

“Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year. So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing,” he said.

California is tightening faster than Greece. State workers have seen a 14pc fall in earnings this year due to forced furloughs. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is cutting pay for 200,000 state workers to the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to cover his $19bn (£15bn) deficit.

Can Illinois be far behind? The state has a deficit of $12bn and is $5bn in arrears to schools, nursing homes, child care centres, and prisons. “It is getting worse every single day,” said state comptroller Daniel Hynes. “We are not paying bills for absolutely essential services. That is obscene.”

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high.

Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.

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Rush Limbaugh: America has become ‘Obamaville’ – June 30, 2010
‘The only difference is Obama is doing this on purpose. Hoover wasn’t’

At the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, many Americans fighting for survival ended up living in crudely built shantytowns known as “Hoovervilles,” in humiliating honor of President Herbert Hoover, who many blamed for the economic distress.

Now in 2010, radio giant Rush Limbaugh is declaring the United States has become one giant “Obamaville,” thanks directly to the policies of President Barack Obama.

“The whole country is Obamaville,” Limbaugh said on his program today. “Obama is Herbert Hoover. You know they used to call those unemployment camps Hoovervilles. Well, now we’re going to see Obamavilles springing up all across the nation.”

“Hoover was trying to fix things. Obama’s not. The only difference is Obama is doing this on purpose. Hoover wasn’t.”

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Analyst: Obama has U.S. economy in ‘death spiral’ – July 4, 2010
‘Simple math’ confirms unemployment won’t be solved by government hiring

A new analysis of the U.S. economy shows that since 2007, the private sector has lost 10.5 million jobs while the public sector has added 720,000 jobs, creating a “death spiral” for the nation’s economy.

The study comes from The Free Enterprise Nation, a nonpartisan national membership/advocacy organization for individuals and businesses that make up the private sector.

The analysis was done using statistics about employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The recession of the last two years exacerbated the larger problem that already was in place, it revealed.

“Over the 10-year period between March 2000 and March 2010, the private sector lost over three million jobs, while the public sector gained nearly two million jobs,” the analysis concludes.

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Fox and Friends: The Hidden Costs of Government

Dow Repeats Great Depression Pattern: Charts

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.

“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it…there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,” Guppy said.

The Dow retreated 457.33 points, or 4.5 percent last week, to close at 9,686 Friday. Guppy said a Dow fall below 9,800 confirmed the head and shoulders pattern.

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For months Gerald Celente, Peter Schiff, and a few others have been warning us of our impending economic doom if we continued to borrow and spend. Government intervention by printing money to avoid cyclical inflation has only exacerbated the problem. The crisis is global and the entire system is a house of cards waiting to collapse.

Gerald Celente: The Entire System is Collapsing

Gerald Celente: The US is run by Wall Street

Federal financial reform is just another move to regulate the market even further, creating even more headaches for the already stagnant economy. Congress passing laws enforcing corporations to pay higher taxes actually pass the additional costs onto the consumer. It’s insane, and once again, we the American people are stuck with the increased bill.

Financial reform is a failure

In something quite revealing, as many of us have seen for months, we now realize time is running out. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has told the BBC that the world “cannot depend as much on the US as it did in the past”.

Geithner says US can ‘no longer drive global growth’

He said that other major economies would have to grow more for the global economy to prosper.

He also played down any differences in policy between the US and Europe regarding deficit reduction.

Mr Geithner was speaking in Washington ahead of G8 and G20 meetings this weekend in Toronto.

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This has always been this administration’s plan, an agenda carried out by global elites to undermine the American people. Using methods to deceive us through political tactics and keep us divided and distracted. Now the truth is coming out. It’s only a matter of time before our country’s economy comes to a screeching halt.

UPDATE: NEW VIDEO – The U.S. deficit: A ticking time bomb

Statistics on the U.S. economy are becoming reality.

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The We’re-Not-Europe Party
The bill comes due for a life of fairness at the expense of growth.

One of the constant criticisms of Barack Obama’s first year is that he’s making us “more like Europe.” But that’s hard to define and lacks broad political appeal. Until now.

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For Americans, this has been a two-week cram course in what not to be if you hope to have a vibrant future. What was once an unfocused criticism of Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that they are nudging America toward a European-style social-market economy, came to awful life in the panicked, stricken faces of Europe’s leadership: Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, Papandreou. They look like that because Europe has just seen the bond-market devil.

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Economic stagnation arrives like a slow poison. Look at the floundering United Kingdom, whose failed prime minister, Gordon Brown, said on leaving, “I tried to make the country fairer.” Maybe there’s a more important goal.

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The second debt storm

The debt mountain that brought down some of the world’s biggest banks and dragged the international financial system to the brink of disaster has simply shifted to governments. Now it’s threatening countries around the globe — and, if left unchecked, could rip the very fabric of Europe’s economic system and wreck economic recoveries in the U.S., China and Latin America.

The impact on markets has been severe. The euro has slumped more than 12% against the dollar since the sovereign-debt crisis flared in southern Europe. Gold has marched to new highs as investors seek a safe haven and, perhaps most alarming, it is now more expensive to buy insurance against national default than it is to insure against corporate failure.

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Some investors and analysts are increasingly concerned that governments may be no more capable of repaying their debts than the banks and insurance companies they saved. And, they warn, if a major country comes close to default, it could trigger a financial meltdown that would eclipse the panic that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

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“All we’re doing is shifting chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” he added.

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Economic drag

Once government debt levels approach 100% of GDP, things can get tricky.

That’s because a lot of a country’s income from taxes and other sources has to be spent on interest payments.

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U.S.

The U.S. government has spent more than $1 trillion bailing out financial institutions like American International Group (NYSE:AIG) and rolling out fiscal stimulus programs to bolster the flagging economy.

In 2009, the government took in about $2.1 trillion in taxes and other revenue and spent more than $3 trillion, according to TrimTabs’ Schnapp. The gap, or deficit, is made up by borrowing more money through sales of Treasury bonds and notes.

In coming years, U.S. government debt will exceed 100% of GDP, according to economists at Exane BNP Paribas and elsewhere.

In the next 20 years, if fiscal policies aren’t changed, U.S. debt to GDP will exceed 150%, putting the country in the same league as Greece and Portugal, according to recent research led by Stephen Cecchetti, head of the Monetary and Economic Department at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.

And the official data don’t tell the whole story, Buiter says.

Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) have been the responsibility of the U.S. government since the mortgage giants were placed into conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency during the financial crisis in 2008, he noted.

Fannie and Freddie’s liabilities at the end of last year’s third quarter were almost $1.8 trillion, according to Buiter. This equals 13% of U.S. GDP and should be included in measurements of the country’s general government debt, he added.

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How will all this debt be repaid? Developed nations could generate strong productivity gains, while rising exports from their pharmaceutical, technology and financial-services industries could generate better-than-expected income. Combined with “frugality, sacrifice and good fortune,” there could be enough money to repay debts, he explained. This may include lower government spending and higher taxes.

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US faces one of biggest budget crunches in world – IMF

Earlier this week, the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, irked US authorities by pointing out that even the world’s economic superpower has a major fiscal problem -“even the United States, the world’s largest economy, has a very large fiscal deficit” were his words. They were rather vague, but by happy coincidence the International Monetary Fund has chosen to flesh out the issue today. Unfortunately this is a rather long post with a few chunky tables, but it is worth spending a bit of time with – the IMF analysis is fascinating.

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Now, it is true that the US has some similar issues to Greece – the high debt, the need to roll over quite a lot of debt each year, the rising healthcare costs and so on. But it has two secret (or not so secret) weapons. The first is that unlike Greece it is not trapped in a monetary union. The US, like Britain and Japan, can independently control its monetary policy; it can devalue its currency. These are hardly solutions in and of themselves, but they do help make the adjustment a lot easier and more gradual. Second, the US has growth. It remains one of, if not the, world’s most dynamic economies. It is growing at a snappy pace this year (in comparison to other countries). And a few percentage points of GDP make an immense difference, since they make those debts much easier to repay.

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America is not Greece, but if it does not start making efforts to cut the deficit within a few years, it will head in that direction. The upshot wouldn’t be an IMF bail-out, but a collapse in the dollar and possible hyperinflation in the US, but it would be horrific all the same. America has time, but not forever.

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