"We Haven't Seen This Since The Great Depression" - Gallup CEO Destroys The "Recovery" Lie

The Invisible American

I've been reading a lot about a "recovering" economy. It was even trumpeted on Page 1 of The New York Times and Financial Times last week.

I don't think it's true.

The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and 2008 to 51% today.

Ten percent of 250 million adults in the U.S. is 25 million people whose economic lives have crashed.

What the media is missing is that these 25 million people are invisible in the widely reported 4.9% official U.S. unemployment rate.

Let's say someone has a good middle-class job that pays $65,000 a year. That job goes away in a changing, disrupted world, and his new full-time job pays $14 per hour -- or about $28,000 per year. That devastated American remains counted as "full-time employed" because he still has full-time work -- although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.

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The Bank For International Settlements Warns That A Major Debt Meltdown In China Is Imminent

The pinnacle of the global financial system is warning that conditions are right for a “full-blown banking crisis” in China.  Since the last financial crisis, there has been a credit boom in China that is really unprecedented in world history.  At this point the total value of all outstanding loans in China has hit a grand total of more than 28 trillion dollars.  That is essentially equivalent to the commercial banking systems of the United States and Japan combined.  While it is true that government debt is under control in China, corporate debt is now 171 percent of GDP, and it is only a matter of time before that debt bubble horribly bursts.  The situation in China has already grown so dire that the Bank for International Settlements is sounding the alarm…

A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese premier Li Keqiang to wean the economy off debt-driven growth before it is too late.

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China’s “credit to GDP gap” has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution. It is also significantly higher than the scores in East Asia’s speculative boom on 1997 or in the US subprime bubble before the Lehman crisis.

Studies of earlier banking crises around the world over the last sixty years suggest that any score above ten requires careful monitoring.

If you are not familiar with the Bank for International Settlements, just think of it as the capstone of the worldwide financial pyramid.  It wields enormous global power, and yet it is accountable to nobody.  The following is a summary of how the Bank for International Settlements works that comes from one of my previous articles entitled “Who Controls The Money? An Unelected, Unaccountable Central Bank Of The World Secretly Does“…

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China 'Banking Stress Indicator' Spikes To Record High

China’s credit-to-gross domestic product "gap" has reached 30.1%, the highest for the nation in data stretching back to 1995, according to the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements. As Bloomberg points out, the warning indicator for banking stress rose to a record in China in the first quarter, underscoring risks to the nation and the world from a rapid build-up of Chinese corporate debt.

The gap is the difference between the credit-to-GDP ratio and its long-term trend. As BIS explains:

The build-up of excessive credit features prominently in discussions about financial crises.

While it is difficult to quantify “excessive credit” precisely, the credit-to-GDP gap captures this notion in a simple way.

Importantly from a policy perspective, large gaps have been found to be a reliable early warning indicator (EWI) of banking crises or severe distress.

Readings above 10 percent signal elevated risks of banking strains. A blow-out in the number can signal that credit growth is excessive and a financial bust may be looming.

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10 Things That Every American Should Know About Donald Trump’s Plan To Save The U.S. Economy

Can Donald Trump turn the U.S. economy around?  This week Trump unveiled details of his new economic plan, and the mainstream media is having a field day criticizing it.  But the truth is that we simply cannot afford to stay on the same path that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have us on right now.  Millions of jobs are being shipped out of the country, the middle class is dying, poverty is exploding, millions of children in America don’t have enough food, and our reckless spending has created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the planet.  Something must be done or else we will continue to steamroll toward economic oblivion.  So is Donald Trump the man for the hour?

If you would like to read his full economic plan, you can find it on his official campaign website.  His plan starts off by pointing out that this has been the weakest “economic recovery” since the Great Depression…

#1 Donald Trump would lower taxes on the middle class
#2 Donald Trump would lower taxes on businesses
#3 Childcare expenses would be exempt from taxation
#4 U.S. manufacturers will be allowed to immediately fully expense new plants and equipment
#5 A temporary freeze on new regulations
#6 All existing regulations would be reviewed and unnecessary regulations would be eliminated
#7 Donald Trump would fundamentally alter our trade relationships with the rest of the globe
#8 Donald Trump’s plan would be a tremendous boost for the U.S. energy industry
#9 Trump would repeal Obamacare

#10 Trump’s plan says nothing about the Federal Reserve

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More Jobs Shipped Out Of The Country: Ford Moves All Small Car Production To Mexico

What is going to happen when America finally doesn’t have any manufacturing jobs left at all?  On Wednesday, we learned that Ford Motor Company is shifting all small car production to Mexico.  Of course the primary goal for this move is to save a little bit of money.  This hits me personally, because my grandfather once worked for Ford.  He was loyal to Ford all his life, and he always criticized other members of the family when they bought a vehicle that was not American-made.  When I was young I didn’t understand why making vehicles in America is so important, but I sure do now.  By shipping jobs overseas, we are destroying jobs, we are destroying small businesses and we are destroying our tax base.  If we want to be a wealthy nation, we have got to make things here, and hopefully we can get the American people to start to understand this.

In 1914, Henry Ford decided to start paying his workers $5.00 a day, which was more than double the average wage for auto workers at the time.

One of the reasons why he did this was because he felt that his workers should be able to afford to buy the vehicles that they were making.  This is what he wrote in 1926…

“The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”

These days Ford is going in the complete opposite direction.  Pretty soon, Ford won’t be making any more small vehicles in the United States at all…

Ford is shifting all North American small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico, CEO Mark Fields told investors today in Dearborn, even though its plans to invest in Mexico have become a lightning rod for controversy in this year’s presidential election.

“Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States,” Fields said.

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"Rampant Fraud" Exposed In Obamacare Exchanges: 100% Of Fictitious Enrollees Obtained Subsidies

A recent "undercover enrollment" investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that pretty much anyone can sign up for Obamacare and receive taxpayer funded incentives without having to worry about pesky little details like proving citizenship, identity or income-based needs.  In fact, the study found that every single one of its 15 fictitious Obamacare applications were actually approved for coverage despite intentional application omissions, fictitious identification and citizenship documentation, etc. Moreover, all of the applications were also approved for federal subsidies which totaled $60,000 per year. 

Per the GAO:

Our undercover testing for the 2016 coverage year found that the eligibility determination and enrollment processes of the federal and state marketplaces we reviewed remain vulnerable to fraud, as we previously reported for the 2014 and 2015 coverage years. For each of our 15 fictitious applications, the marketplaces approved coverage, including for 6 fictitious applicants who had previously obtained subsidized coverage but did not file the required federal income-tax returns. Although IRS provides information to marketplaces on whether health-care applicants have filed required returns, the federal Marketplace and our selected state marketplace allowed applicants to instead attest that they had filed returns, saying the IRS information was not sufficiently current. The marketplaces we reviewed also relaxed documentation standards or extended deadlines for filing required documentation. After initial approval, all but one of our fictitious enrollees maintained subsidized coverage, even though we sent fictitious documents, or no documents, to resolve application inconsistencies.

For each of our 15 fictitious applications, the federal or state-based marketplaces approved coverage at time of application—specifically, 14 applications for qualified health plans, and 1 application for Medicaid.  Each of the 14 applications for qualified health plans was also approved for APTC subsidies. These subsidies totaled about $5,000 on a monthly basis, or about $60,000 annually. These 14 qualified-health-plan applications also each obtained CSR subsidies, putting the applicants in a position to further benefit if they used medical services.

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Wells Fargo Exec Who Oversaw Fake Accounts Received $125 Million Upon Recent Retirement, Praise from CEO; Senate Hearings Next Week

Sanctimonious Wells Fargo, which was a major perp in foreclosure abuses, has finally managed to go too far. Even normally complacent institutional investors are disturbed how Wells Fargo threw customers illegally under the bus to wring some incremental revenues out of them.

Adding fuel to the fire is the revelation by Fortune that the officer on whose watch this abuse took place, one Carrie Tolstedt who conveniently resigned at the end of July, identified by an alert NC reader the day the scandal broke, made off with a cool $125 million in addition to earlier cash and prizes. From the Fortune story:

When Tolstedt leaves Wells Fargo later this year, on top of the $1.7 million in salary she has received over the past few years, she will be walking away with $124.6 million in stock, options, and restricted Wells Fargo shares. Some of that hasn’t vested yet. But Tolstedt gets to keep all of it because she technically retired. Had she been fired, Tolstedt would have had to forfeit at least $45 million of that exit payday, and possibly more.

That stands in contrast with $185 million in fines paid to the CFPB, the Los Angles City Attorney, and the OCC, and does not include the multi-million amounts she also received in annual pay.

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The Impoverishment Of The Masses

Feudal and mercantilist economic systems were characterised by the lower orders of ordinary people being enslaved by, or subjected to, the commands of an elite.

Beyond basic subsistence, serfs and slaves were not enabled to consume other goods, nor were they given the means to do so. Communism was hawked as handing power to the serfs, or workers, united in and by the state. But again, it meant that workers remained serfs, employed and commanded by a state set up in their name. Freedom from the bourgeoisie became subjugation by the state. Only capitalism, founded on free markets and freedom of choice for all, held the promise of freeing the masses from a life of drudgery and servitude.

This was what the industrial revolution in Britain was about, particularly after the Corn Laws were repealed, and also the basis for the opportunities offered in America for refugees from European feudalism and mercantilism. And as the benefits of this freedom became enjoyed by those that were freed, so the abolition of slavery followed. A minimalist enlightened government based on democracy guaranteed property ownership and ensured that individuals’ rights were enforceable. These were the simple conditions of free markets, the conditions where the lowest consumer is the master of the mightiest producer, who endeavours to serve him. These are the conditions that led to a dramatic improvement in living standards for everyone in only a few decades, an improvement that had proved impossible in all the history of feudalism, mercantilism, and communism. It was the unique achievement of Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire.

But empires strike back. Just as communism enslaved the workers in their own name, so democratic states in the name of capitalism find ways to bind their own electors. Freedoms taken for granted by the British and Americans were never fully adopted by more socialistic states, and even the Anglo-Saxons have been slowly compromised to the point where their democratic systems are now breaking down.

Central to the loss of freedom, the road to serfdom as Hayek put it, is the creation of myths. The myth that the state acts on behalf its people, when it always acts to protect itself. The myth that the state knows better what its electors want than the electors themselves. The myth that only the state has the impartiality to right all wrongs. The reality is the exact opposite. The state intervenes to prevent people from deciding the matters that directly concern them. The middle classes have been taxed in the name of redistribution to the poor, and the poor themselves in turn have been relieved of the value of their earnings and savings by monetary debasement, always in the interest of the common good.

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Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 For Engaging In Massive Fraud, Creating Over 2 Million Fake Accounts

For years we have wondered why Wells Fargo, America's largest mortgage lender, is also Warren Buffett's favorite bank. Now we know why.

On Thursday, Wells Fargo was fined $185 million, (including a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest penalty the agency has ever issued) for engaging in pervasive fraud over the years which included opening credit cards secretly without a customer’s consent, creating fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services, and forcing customers to accumulate late fees on accounts they never even knew they had. Regulators said such illegal sales practices had been going on since at least 2011.

In all, Wells opened 1.5 million bank accounts and "applied" for 565,000 credit cards that were not authorized by their customers.

Wells Fargo told to CNN that it had fired 5,300 employees related to the shady behavior over the last few years. The firings represent about 1% of its workforce and took place over several years.  The fired workers went to far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.

How Wells perpetrated fraud is that its employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created accounts without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as "widespread" and led to customers being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees, because the money was not in their original accounts. Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their knowledge or consent, the CFPB said the analysis found. Many customers who had unauthorized credit cards opened in their names were hit by annual fees, interest charges and other fees.

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The Percentage Of Working Age Men That Do Not Have A Job Is Similar To The Great Depression

Why are so many men in their prime working years unemployed?  The Obama administration would have us believe that unemployment is low in this country, but that is not true at all.  In fact, one author quoted by NPR says that “it’s kind of worse than it was in the depression in 1940″.  Most Americans don’t realize this, but more men from ages 25 to 54 are “inactive” right now than was the case during the last recession.  We have millions upon millions of strong young men just sitting around doing nothing.  They aren’t employed and they aren’t considered to be looking for employment either, and so they don’t show up in the official unemployment numbers.  But they don’t have jobs, and nothing the Obama administration does can eliminate that fact.

According to NPR, “nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked” in the 1960s.

In those days, just about any dependable, hard working American man could get hired almost immediately.  The economy was growing and the demand for labor was seemingly insatiable.

But today, one out of every six men in their prime working years does not have a job…

In a recent report, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers said 83 percent of men in the prime working ages of 25-54 who were not in the labor force had not worked in the previous year. So, essentially, 10 million men are missing from the workforce.

“One in six prime-age guys has no job; it’s kind of worse than it was in the depression in 1940,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, an economic and demographic researcher at American Enterprise Institute who wrote the book Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. He says these men aren’t even counted among the jobless, because they aren’t seeking work.

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Goldman Bans Partners From Donating To Trump Campaign To "Minimize Potential Reputational Damage"

In the last days of August, Goldman Sachs surprised its employees with a new rule: the firm's top employees will be barred from donating to certain political campaigns, including that of Trump-Pence.

In a memo sent out on August 29, the firm's global compliance office said that starting on September 1, "all partners across the firm are considered “Restricted Persons” as defined by the firm’s Policy on Personal Political Activities in the US." This means that as of this moment, Goldman's partners are "prohibited from engaging in political activities and/or making campaign contributions to candidates running for state and local offices, as well as sitting state and local officials running for federal office", and specifically donating to the Donald Trump campaign, in order to "minimize potential reputational damage."

The memo conveniently provides the following example of the type of political activity that is barred, among others:

Any federal candidate who is a sitting state or local official (e.g., governor running for president or vice president, such as the Trump/Pence ticket, or mayor running for Congress), including their Political Action Committees (PACs).

As Fortune, which first obtained the memo reported, said that Goldman's new rule was meant to remove any implication of so-called “pay to play.” Four years ago Goldman bank paid $12 million to settle charges that a former Boston-based banker had picked up bond underwriting business in the state while working for and contributing funds to the campaign of a then Massachusetts state treasurer and governor-hopeful, Tim Cahill.

Pay-to-play rules were first introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010, after several investment advisors were accused of trying to win business, such as managing public pensions, with improper tactics including political contributions. If a financial advisor were to make a campaign contribution to a public official or candidate, they would be banned from providing advisory services for compensation to the government client for two years under the rules.

Goldman explains that "the policy change is also meant to minimize potential reputational damage caused by any false perception that the firm is attempting to circumvent pay-to-play rules, particularly given partners’ seniority and visibility," adding that “all failures to pre-clear political activities as outlined below are taken seriously and violations may result in disciplinary action."

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From An Industrial Economy To A Paper Economy – The Stunning Decline Of Manufacturing In America

Why does it seem like almost everything is made in China these days?  Yesterday I was looking at some pencils that we had laying around the house and I noticed that they had been manufactured in China.  I remarked to my wife that it was such a shame that they don’t make pencils in the United States anymore.  At another point during the day, I turned over my television remote and I noticed that it also had “Made In China” engraved on it.  It is still Labor Day as I write this article, and so I think that it is quite appropriate to write about our transition from an industrial economy to a paper economy today.  Since the year 2000, the United States has lost five million manufacturing jobs even though our population has grown substantially since that time.  Manufacturing in America is in a state of stunning decline, our economic infrastructure is being absolutely gutted, and our formerly great manufacturing cities are in an advanced state of decay.  We consume far more wealth than we produce, and the only way that we are able to do this is by taking on massive amounts of debt.  But is our debt-based paper economy sustainable in the long run?

Back in 1960, 24 percent of all American workers worked in manufacturing.  Today, that number has shriveled all the way down to just 8 percent.  CNN is calling it “the Great Shift”…

In 1960, about one in four American workers had a job in manufacturing. Today fewer than one in 10 are employed in the sector, according to government data.

Call it the Great Shift. Workers transitioned from the fields to the factories. Now they are moving from factories to service counters and health care centers. The fastest growing jobs in America now are nurses, personal care aides, cooks, waiters, retail salespersons and operations managers.

No wonder the middle class is shrinking so rapidly.  There aren’t too many cooks, waiters or retail salespersons that can support a middle class family.

Since the turn of the century, we have lost more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of gleaming new factories have been erected in places like China.

Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?

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What Else Can Central Banks Do?

During the Great Moderation period from the mid-1980s to 2007, economists grew confident that central banks could stabilise economies by raising and lowering short-term interest rates. A startling development during the Great Recession of 2008-2009 was that policy rates in advanced economies fell to near zero (Blanchard et al. 2016), yet that was not sufficient stimulus to promote strong recoveries. Rates have stayed near zero in many countries, suggesting a liquidity trap: further stimulus is needed, but central banks’ traditional tool of policy rate cuts is not available.

In the:

2016 Geneva Report on the World Economy,

we examine the liquidity trap, or lower bound on interest rates (Ball et al. 2016). We first document the severity of the problem – how it has constrained monetary policy since 2008, and how it is likely to constrain policy in the future – and then discuss how central bank policymakers can respond. Contrary to the common view that central banks are “out of ammunition” when policy rates fall to zero, we believe they can provide stimulus, notably by pushing rates negative and through aggressive forms of quantitative easing (QE). Looking further ahead, policymakers can greatly reduce the danger of the lower bound by a modest increase in their inflation targets.

The Danger of the Lower Bound

There is little doubt that the lower bound on interest rates has constrained monetary policy since 2008. For the US, for example, a pre-crisis Taylor rule dictates a federal funds rate of -5% or -6% in 2009. The actual rate never fell below zero. Based on a simple macroeconomic model, we estimate that US unemployment rates from 2009 through 2015 averaged more than a percentage point higher than they would have if there were no lower bound on interest rates. Unemployment would have been higher still if not for the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing (discussed below).

A crisis of that magnitude is not necessary for the lower bound to constrain monetary policy, however. Our report emphasises that, going forward, even modest economic downturns are likely to push interest rates to zero. This prospect is the result of two factors. One is the low inflation targets chosen by central banks, typically close to 2%. The second is the apparent fall in the neutral real interest rate over the last two decades, to current estimates of about 1% or even lower. Together, these numbers imply that the steady state nominal interest rate is 2 + 1 = 3%. Starting from this level, a central bank can reduce its policy rate only 300 basis points before hitting zero – not enough stimulus to offset a moderate-size shock to the economy.

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Small Business Defaults Rise, Borrowing Drops: "What Scares Us Is The Rise In Delinquencies"

Yesterday, we pointed out something disturbing when we looked at the latest NACM Credit Manager Index report: over the past year it had declined steadily, hitting the lowest print since 2009, or as the National Asscoiation of Credit Managers' economist Chris Kuehl said “Overall, it was fun while it lasted - the trends had been up and now they aren’t" adding that “the best that can be said about the decline is that it was bad and hasn’t gotten much worse.... The sales collapse is consistent with what has been appearing in the Purchasing Managers’ Index and other statistics, so it is unlikely to be an anomaly, not good timing as far as the retail community is concerned.”

Today, we got a validating, and equally concerning, perspective on how small businesses are doing, courtesy of the latest Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index, which fell to 121.5 in July, the lowest level since January and down from an upwardly revised 139.2 in June. 

But while the headline decline was mildly troubling, the details within the report were worse: according to PayNet, borrowing by U.S. small businesses sank in July, with more firms late on repaying existing loans, trends which according to Reuters "point to softer economic growth ahead."

More troubling is that companies are increasingly struggling to pay back existing debts. Loans more than 30 days past due rose in July to 1.63%, the fourth straight monthly increase and the highest delinquency rate since December 2012, separate data from PayNet showed.

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Global Supply Chains Paralyzed After World's 7th Largest Container Shipper Files Bankruptcy, Assets Frozen

After years of relentless decline in the Baltic Dry index...

... today the largest casualty finally emerged on Wednesday when South Korea's Hanjin Shipping, the country's largest shipping firm and the world's seventh-biggest container carrier, filed for court receivership after losing the support of its banks, leaving its assets frozen as ports from China to Spain denied access to its vessels.

For those unfamiliar with the company, here is a brief overview from its website:

Hanjin Shipping is Korea's largest and one of the world’s top ten container carriers that operates some 70 liner and tramper services around the globe transporting over 100 million tons of cargo annually. Its fleet consists of some 150 containerships and bulk carriers.

With 4 regional headquarters in the U.S., Europe, Asia and South East & West Asia, approximately 5,000 global staffs as well as container terminals in world’s major ports contribute to Hanjin Shipping’s world-class logistics network around the world.

As Reuters reports, banks led by state-run Korea Development Bank withdrew backing for the world's seventh-largest container carrier on Tuesday, saying a funding plan by its parent group was inadequate to tackle debt that stood at 5.6 trillion won ($5 billion) at the end of 2015.

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