Category: Economics Page 4 of 8
From Calculated Risk:
This is happening all across the country: falling demand [for commercial real estate] and still more office supply coming available as large commercial real estate projects are completed. This means falling rents and property values. And as the construction loans come due, there will be more and more losses for lenders.
From WashingtonPost article cited in Calculated Risk’s blog:
“We may see the commercial version of the subprime situation,” said Steve Silverman, director of the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development.
This was predicted earlier this year by Gerald Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute. The question is, will the effects of this and other situations prove to be as dire as he predicted? We’ll have to see I guess.
In all reality, we’re already there to some degree. The infrastructure has been put in place for the past 50-60 years. It’s getting switched on now. When a global governing body, in this case the WTO, begins dictating to nation-states when they can and can’t fine other countries, whether one country owes another or not for perceived violations of international law, you no longer have a handle on your own nations’ sovereignty. Found this very interesting. From WSJ.com: WTO Allows Brazil to Fine U.S. (Archive)
American goods will face around $295 million in annual sanctions as a result of the United States’ failure to eliminate illegal subsidies to U.S. cotton growers, the World Trade Organization ruled Monday.
The question though for all of us is, how much further will it go? And how willing is our own government willing to give over even more sovereignty to these global governing bodies? And how does our Constitution play into this?
This really makes you wonder who is really running the engine of this nation now: from politics to corporations to the media, it really seems to be the moneychangers now, the banks and major investment firms. And instead of the Fed addressing the “too big to fail” issue, the bailed out banks are even bigger than before after all of these tax-payer funded bailouts.
Don’t believe everything you read in the headlines out there about the state of things in the economy, or in this case the bailouts. It is not rosy nor can we determine the state of the economy based solely upon what the stock market is doing, as some seem bent on doing.
It seems alternative media are more faithful these days to doing actual economic and financial journalism than many of the big hitters, including blogs like Naked Capitalism, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis and Calculated Risk. In addition, though Alex Jones may be the leader of conspiratorial hype movement in the alternative media world, where everyone and their dog is an agent of the Fed and the global elitist interests that are coming to enslave us, he at least has one thing completely right that I agree on: we are in an information war of vast proportions against some wealthy stake holders in this country now.
Take for example this from Naked Capitalism: More Bogus Bailout Reporting: “As Big Banks Repay Bailout Money, U.S. Sees a Profit” (Archive)
“Clearly, the spin is in. As a post earlier today discusses, the Financial Times is running a story that claims that the Fed made money on its rescue programs, then slips in all the tidbits in the body of the article to let discerning readers know that the reporter understands that the analysis is utter rubbish while looking like it is not crossing the Fed.
I listen to Glenn Beck occasionally and think he comes unhinged a lot. And I obviously don’t agree with his assessments concerning “faith” in these videos. But these are absolutely valid questions and concerns he raises, many of the same one’s I have based on a lot of the same evidence and information I have been researching as well. And it has zero to do with race … good grief, come on MSNBC.
- Brace for a Wave of Foreclosures, the Dam is About to Break – (Archive)
- Nearly One-Third Of All Mortgages Are Underwater (PDF) – (Archive)
- Is This the Start of the Big One? – (Archive)
Apparently, we have not yet come to the end of the foreclosure mayhem, and therefore, the stress on banks, and therefore the rest of the economy, including the Fed, government and taxpayers. On top of the potential landslide of commercial real estate foreclosures expected this fall, it now appears that about one-third of all mortgages in the U.S. are now underwater (meaning they are on the path to foreclosure or are in the process). Many of the things Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente were saying earlier this year are now coming to fruition. And as Biden said that they “misread how bad the economy was,” well, that appears to be exactly the case. What we have been seeing in the markets since March or so has been a bear market rally it appears.
If Celente’s and Schiff’s predictions hold up, we have years to go before it gets any better in the economy. Just as in the Great Depression, government intervention didn’t fix the problem, it just prolonged it and kept us from a solid recovery. The only thing that got us out of the depression was production and savings, brought on by a massive war, which in Europe was greatly a product of the logical end of eugenics. History repeats itself in strange ways sometimes. This time around, we have economic calamity (like the depression), climate change (like eugenics), and an unstable Middle East (like Europe).
This couldn’t be any more prescient:
Interesting quotes by Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President under the Socialist Party ticket, one of which is mentioned in the audio above:
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.” – Norman Thomas, 1927
“I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democrat Party has adopted our platform.” – Norman Thomas