Category Archives: Business & Economy
Bankrupt America: A Fragile Nation Grappling With Unprecedented Debt Problems
Consumer bankruptcies are surging, corporate debt has doubled since the last financial crisis, state and local government debt loads have never been higher, and the federal government has been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the federal debt ever since Barack Obama entered the White House. On top of everything else, everyone else around the world has been on a massive debt binge as well. Unfortunately, all debt bubbles must burst eventually, and the one that we are in right now is definitely on borrowed time.
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“A Stealth Mortgage On Your House” – The Reality Of The Looming Pension Crisis
State taxes are collected on four economic activities: consumption (sales tax), labor and investment (income tax) and real-estate ownership (property tax). The affluent can escape sales and income taxes by moving to a new state—but real estate stays behind. Property values must ultimately support the obligations that politicians have promised, even if those obligations aren’t properly funded, because real estate is the only source of state and local revenue that can’t pick up and move elsewhere. Whether or not unfunded obligations are paid with property taxes, it’s the property that backs the obligations in the end.
Read more“Their Wealth Has Vanished”: Baby Boomers File For Bankruptcy In Droves
An alarming number of older Americans are being forced into bankruptcy, as the rate of people 65 and older who have filed has never been higher – at three times what it was in 1991, while the rate of bankruptcies among Americans age 65 and older has more than doubled, according to a new study by the The Bankruptcy Project.
Read moreCar Sales Tumble As Automakers Slash Discounts For The First Time In 5 Years
For the first time in 55 months, the auto industry cut back spending on incentives. The result was a plunge in auto sales.
Read moreStossel: The End of Tipping? [VIDEO]
Activists want to increase minimum wage for tipped workers.
Read moreThe Root Of The Crisis: Every $1 Of Debt Generates Just 44c Of Economic Output
The debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States is now 106%, meaning that the national debt is larger than the size of the entire US economy. Yet the debt keeps growing. Rapidly. The problem is the way that it’s been used.
Read moreWhy Americans Are About To Experience Sharply Higher Prices
After several rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs and retaliations between the US and China, American consumers are about to be hit with sharply higher prices as tariffs on industrial metals put pressure on U.S. manufacturers.
Read moreOver-Promising Has Crippled Public Pensions, A 50-State Study
The real problem plaguing public pension funds nationwide has gone largely ignored… Most reporting usually focuses on the under-funding of state plans and blames the crises on a lack of taxpayer dollars. But it’s the uncontrolled growth in pension promises that’s actually wreaking havoc on state budgets and taxpayers alike. Over-promising is the true cause of many state crises. Under-funding is often just a symptom of this underlying problem.
Read moreGovernment’s Already-Dismal Budget Forecast Just Got 106% Worse
This week, the Office of Management and Budget released a new report called the “Mid-Session Review” of the US federal budget. Last March, they projected a total budget deficit of $526 billion for Fiscal Year 2019. But according to the revised projections they published yesterday, the budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2019 will now be $1.085 TRILLION… 106% worse than projected.
Read moreFutures Tumble After Trump Says “Ready To Go” With $500BN In Tariffs On All Chinese Imports
“I’m ready to go to 500,” Trump said, roughly the value of Chinese goods imported to the US last year.”I’m not doing this for politics. I’m doing this to do the right thing for our country,” Trump said in a CNBC interview aired Friday. “We are being taken advantage of and I don’t like it.”
Read moreAmazon: Prime Day Was “Biggest Shopping Event Ever, Surpassing Cyber Monday And Black Friday”
Amazon said Prime Day sales grew more than 60%, breaking last year’s record and surpassing Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as the previous Prime Day. The company had also added “tens of millions of Prime members” to its platform, who purchased more than 100 million products for the first time ever.
Read moreStudent Debt Bubble Expands As Parents Do More Of The Borrowing
Parents have given up trying to moderate the cost of their kids’ education and started doing the borrowing themselves. They’re now taking on the majority of new debts, and the gap is widening dramatically.
Read moreUS Equity Futures Tumble As US Readies Additional $200 Billion China Tariff List
Bloomberg reports that President Donald Trump is preparing to release a list of an additional $200 billion in Chinese products to be hit with tariffs, according to two people familiar with the matter. “The list could be released as soon as Tuesday, and likely this week.”
Read more“Dark Path Ahead”: Why American Farmers Dread The Trade War
While automakers – and their dealerships – are getting most of the headlines this week, the effects of the escalating trade war between Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin are rippling across numerous US industries – directly, and indirectly. Makers of whiskey, cheese, auto parts and more are contending with the global tariff battle – but it is US farmers that appear to be suffering the most.
Read moreFour Trade War Scenarios: From ‘One-&-Done’ To ‘All Hell Breaks Loose’
On July 6th, President Donald Trump’s tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods are set to take effect. And, as Bloomberg’s Chief Asia Economist, Tom Orlik, notes, with an additional $16 billion coming close behind, and China threatening retaliation, it looks like the opening shots of a trade war are about to be fired.
Read moreThe Supreme Court Just Put Small Online Businesses at Serious Risk [VIDEO]
Small online businesses and consumers around the country will suffer the most from the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday in South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc. The court essentially ruled that all 50 states and the tens of thousands of local tax jurisdictions are now permitted to reach outside their borders and require out-of-state internet retailers to collect and remit local sales taxes.
Read moreEU Threatens $300 Billion Retaliation If US Moves Ahead With Auto Tariffs
More than a week after President Trump threatened to slap a 20% tariff on auto imports from the European Union, Brussels has issued a written warning to the US Department of Commerce with a threat of its own: If the Trump administration moves ahead with the auto tariffs, the bureaucrats in Brussels won’t hesitate to respond with tariffs on $300 billion in US goods…
Read moreWill Blockchain Free Us from Wall Street? [AUDIO]
An inside look at how blockchain technology might blow up the financial service and banking industries.
Read moreHarvard Warns About The Nation’s “Housing Affordability Crisis”
As the report marks its 30th anniversary, this year’s report suggests the housing market is overbought, immobile, and unequal. The influential Harvard think tank even believes the American housing sector is broken, as “income inequality has helped to fuel today’s housing affordability challenges.”
Read moreLate-Cycle: The Stressed-Out, Tapped-Out American Consumer Just Paid Off A Ton Of Credit-Card Debt
A new report from WalletHub, the personal-finance website, showed a considerable amount of Americans repaid $40.3 billion in credit card debt during the first quarter of 2018 — the second-largest quarterly payoff ever.
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