03/03/10 Stockholm, Sweden – It’s been declared countless times in the mainstream media that the economy has recovered. The US is out of recession and good times are back again. Yet, there is plenty of data to support that this is not the case. Seven of the top warning signs that the US economy may be hitting a wall are highlighted below.
According to Irwin Kellner, chief economist at MarketWatch:
1. Both consumer confidence and sentiment have fallen unexpectedly.
2. After-tax personal incomes adjusted for inflation have flattened.
3. Sales of both new and existing homes took a surprising stumble.
4. Orders for most durable goods are down.
5. Manufacturing has slowed.
6. Jobless claims are up.
7. Fourth-quarter GDP growth came largely from a slower pace of inventory liquidation, not from an increase in consumer spending.
8. And, as a matter of fact, consumer spending weakened last quarter.
Kellner also points out that consumer confidence has dropped to a nearly 30-year low, new home sales hit record lows, existing home sales are at a seven-month low, and even unemployment claims rose six of the past eight weeks.
In case you need an updated dose of cold, hard reality about the economy, this MarketWatch coverage of the recovery running out of gas is a worthwhile read.
Best,
Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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The Recovery is on and it is strong. The debt isn’t a worry, as it never needs to be re-paid. The Federal government can print more money to fill the holes. It is essential to the leaders of men that everyone keeps working mindlessly at their jobs: producing junk that nobody can afford, producing disposable junk that will need to be replaced, shuffling papers and other meaningless activities that constitute modern work. For, if large numbers of people have too much free time to think, they will realize that god and the state are two of the biggest scams ever foisted upon the world.
RE: ‘The debt isn’t a worry, as it never needs to be re-paid’.
What is this supposed to mean?! In this debt are mixed up foreign trade saldo and financial speculations at the stock exchanges, and pension funds, and various other things. How exactly are these supposed ‘not to be repaid’.
If we take a look at http://www.usdebtclock.org there are some other questions:
1. The whole world economy is sinking into debts. To whom are these debts?!
2. What is driving this ‘clock’- can somebody draw up its economic ‘circuit diagram’.
3. If the banks et. al. with their irresponsibility ‘devised’ this clock in the last decade or so, does anyone have any idea how to deactivate it, or at least to control it. As far as I can see at present it is out of control.
4. How far will this go?!
and so on.