Thread: Depressed America: No Longer Safe Harbor For Investors

Depressed America: No Longer the Safe Harbor It Was For Investors


by Bob Chapman
Global Research, May 23, 2009
Bob Chapman Newsletter. Theinternationalforcaster.com


Excuses from Wall Street and Washington DC: We have not hit the bottom with job losses, currency crisis coming in the fall, IMF a creditors cartel, we find ourselves faced with major growing unemployment, falling wages and via inflation and ever lower purchasing power, most major banks and brokerage houses are insolvent, Finances at the state and local levels are a mess.

The excuses coming out of Wall Street and Washington are truly mind-boggling. We wonder how the public swallows them. One of the latest is that for one-week applications for jobless benefits had fallen. That is good, but we’d need a number of weeks of reduction for the fall to be meaningful. Anything to keep the market from falling. This has been followed by a long line of liars telling us we had bottomed out in the economy. The same litany we’ve been hearing for 22 months. Unemployment is a lagging indicator thus; the increases have yet to end. The latest bogus unemployment figures are 8.9% short term, including the birth/death ratio. That is phantom jobs created by the government supposedly by small and medium sized companies. That 8.9% supposedly matched up with the worst of the 1974 recession. That is not true, because the formula in 1974 was far different than today’s monstrous lies. The 1974 figures did not include the birth/death ratio, those working reduced hours and those in part-time employment seeking full-time jobs, which now makes up 2.6% of the workforce. Then there is the 1% plus that is discouraged and have left the workforce and probably won’t return.

Once unemployment has bottomed it could take a year or more before employers begin to rehire. They have to be sure increased demand exists and that the economy is recovering.

Today job losses are not only blue-collar, but white-collar as well. Due to free trade, globalization, offshorting and outsourcing those jobs won’t come back. They could return if Congress passed legislation implementing tariffs on goods and services. All those manufacturing jobs will never return unless Congress acts. If they do not act the economy is permanently doomed. Presently as many white-collar jobs as blue-collar are being lost. Mechanics cannot easily work in healthcare and the wages are a little more than one-third of what they were earning.

In 16 months the government admits that 5.7 million jobs have been lost. In the previous 8 years we lost over 5 million. Just to show you how serious this is, in 8/1981 to 12/1982, we lost 2.8 million jobs. In 3/2000 to 5/2002 we lost 2.2 million. Over 9 years we have lost 10.7 million jobs “officially.â€

Good article and right on the money. They manipulate the unemployment figures to advance their free trade open borders globalist agenda.