The sheep have been told their confidence is at a 7 year high by the propaganda peddlers working at the behest of the oligarchy. The sheep are also told that 10 million jobs have been added since the GOTUS played his first round back in 2009. The sheep have been told the record highs in the stock market prove that all is well. If the .1% are doing fantastic, some of the wealth must be trickling down. The sheep are told that QE and ZIRP were really to save Main Street and not the bonuses of Wall Street (at record highs by the way). The sheep are told to fear ISIS, Iran, Assad, Putin, and China. The sheep are told U.S. energy independence is just around the corner and to ignore the fact that gas prices have tripled in the last ten years. The sheep are told drones will keep them safe and the DHS militarizing the police is just for their safety and security. The sheep are told guns are dangerous in their hands, but not in the hands of the government. The sheep passively eat their iGadgets and barely bleat while being led to the slaughter house.
The propaganda machine is working at hyper speed as the wheels fall off this out of control bus. But all the messaging, packaging, and lies can’t change the facts. Ignorance about the facts doesn’t change the facts. The oligarchs are getting pissed. You mindless consumers simply won’t consume as much as you used to, even with 7 year 0% interest subprime auto loans, $1 trillion of government loans to generate consumption disguised as student loans, and five credit card offers per week from the Too Big To Trust Wall Street cabal. WTF is wrong with you?
You’ve ruined the storyline used for months about horrific winter weather being the cause of non-spending in the 1st quarter. Once it stopped being cold you were supposed to spend like drunken sailors again. Just like the old days. How could you spend less in July than you did in June? You’ve only increased your spending by a mere 1.8% so far this year. With real inflation on stuff you need to live running above 5%, you’re actually spending far less than last year. No wonder confidence is skyrocketing.
A little examination into the facts behind the Commerce Department report might shed a little light on the truth about the good old American consumer:
- 25% of all personal income in the country is either a transfer from the government to someone or from a government job. That is $3.7 trillion taken from producers and given to takers. In 2000 this figure was 21%. The relentless increase in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Benefits and Other will drive this percentage to 30% by 2020.
- Real personal income (excluding government transfers) has gone up 2.6% over the last year and this is using the false CPI figure of 1.6% to reach that pitiful number. Using a true inflation figure of 5% yields lower real personal income than last year.
- These numbers also fail to recognize the 2.2 million increase in population. On a per capita basis, real personal income is up 1.9% in the last year.
- Senior citizens and conservative savers are earning $120 billion less today than they did seven years ago. All the grandmothers eating cat food thank you Ben and Janet. If interest rates were allowed to adjust to market levels consistent with inflation, savers would be generating $500 billion to $700 billion more interest income that could be used to propel economic growth. Per capita real disposable income was $37,582 in May of 2008. It is currently $37,553. Again, this is using the fake BLS inflation numbers, so it is even far worse.
Is it really a shocker that Americans are spending less? The MSM is so captured by the organizations providing their advertising revenue that their faux journalists don’t even attempt to examine the facts and reach logical conclusions. Their job is to cheer lead and make excuses for why their storyline of improvement never plays out. The snow storyline is history. The surge in consumer confidence storyline has been proven false by the actual spending data. Now we move onto the surge in jobs storyline that is proven false by the personal income data. I’m sure back to school season will be a resounding success. Just wait until the holidays. The consumer will surely be back this year. And the beat goes on.
The chart below tells you all you need to know about why this recovery is false. The people who are supposed to be in their peak earnings and spending years have seen their real household incomes decline dramatically since the END of the recession in June 2009. Think about that for a moment. The only people who’ve seen their real incomes rise are those who no longer spend. I wonder if it is a coincidence that government transfers since June 2009 are up 18% and the grey hairs have seen their incomes rise?
The consumer is not back. They are not coming back. The decades long debt fueled orgy of consumption has long since peaked and we are on the long road to perdition. Confidence can’t cure our disease. More debt to cure a disease caused by too much debt will not save the patient. Our disease is terminal.
Consumer is definitely not back, nor likely to be back any time soon. Still, “consumer spending” is relative; I tried to post this graph earlier today, but the Fed Reserve graphs never seem to allow posting.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PCE
And here’s the one for Personal Savings Rate:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PSAVERT
What we’ve really seen is complete decimation of the Middle Class. We now have a lower class and an upper class, and those still hanging on for dear life to their middle class status (as someone pointed out here) are slowly losing their grip.
Anecdote: I have a friend who is an attorney. She mentioned she’s looking for a new place to rent, because she sat down and figured out that her monthly expenses were $600 more than her monthly income. How someone so smart can not know that she’s got deficits is beyond me, but I’m guessing a lot of people have believed the story line that “inflation is low” and “the economy is recovering” and so lived accordingly. Welcome to the real world, folks.
@Thinker – your attorney friend probably puts everything on a credit card, and wasn’t paying attention to the increasing balance owed. Reality is a bitch.
“25% of all personal income in the country is either a transfer from the government to someone or from a government job. That is $3.7 billion taken from producers and given to takers.”
What? Only 3.7 Billion?
I have one pair of sneakers. They’re about 7 years old. I’ll keep them until the TOP wears out. Fuck spending.
OTOH, the house directly across the street from us went on the market for $739,000 …. and sold for $730,000 in ONE week.
WTF do I know?
The Economy is Bush’s Fault. In 2 years time when the Health Care taxes kick in and it gets worse it will still be Bush’s Fault.
As a result of the the do nothing Republican congress with the exception of raising a War on Women the Democrats will storm to victory in 2016.
Mark, love the sarcasm. Unfortunately that is exactly who is going to win, as though a republican winning would be any different. Hillary is just as radical as Obama. We are in for a very stressful and bizarre decade.
WIP
You’re right.
It’s $3.7 trillion.
My bad.
By this analysis, adjusted Core Retail Sales were down 0.1% in July from the previous month, up only 0.4% year-over-year and down 1.9% from its record high in November 2007.
The Great Recession of the Financial Crisis is behind us, a close analysis of the adjusted data suggests that the recovery has been frustratingly slow. The reality is that, in “real” terms — adjusted for population growth and inflation — consumer sales remain below the level we saw at the peak before the last recession.
This Is An Actual Conversation With A Car Dealer — And It Shows How The Industry Is Juicing Sales
Car dealers and buyers across the country are having a disturbing conversation.
In late June, Morgan Stanley auto-industry analyst Adam Jonas highlighted that car dealers were stretching out the length of auto loans, allowing sales to strengthen as monthly auto payments decline.
In Thursday’s note, Jonas relays a recent conversation with his uncle “Chuck,” a Chevy dealer in Canton, Ohio, which shows that this trend toward ever-lengthening hasn’t slowed but accelerated through the summer.
Here’s what “Chuck” had to say:
Jonas: How are August sales going so far?
Chuck: We’re holding our own. Nothing earth-shattering. We’re pushing hard for a big, strong Labor Day weekend finish. The month hasn’t been as good as we hoped, but it could have been worse.
Jonas: How’s the incentive environment?
Chuck: GM brought back 0% for 72 on the trucks and selected models, so that was a Godsend to us. It’s not uncommon anymore to do 75- to 78-month loans. It used to be that 60 months was the norm. Then it went to 66, and now it’s over 70.
Jonas: Are you saying >72-month loans are normal?
Chuck: Absolutely. People don’t seem to care anymore. It’s all about the monthly payment. Folks just want a car, have a monthly budget and they say: “Just tell me how I can fit this into my monthly budget.” They don’t care as much if they still have half the loan balance left after five years. Now we do get people who we put into 75-month loans from four or five years ago that are coming back today asking us: ‘How can I get out of this loan?’ … but that’s a different story.
This trend toward longer loans isn’t limited to new cars, but also leases, as the “subprime lease” category has emerged as a more popular type of auto loan.
Jonas: How’s the leasing business?
Chuck: We’re witnessing a drastic increase in our lease business. The latest flavor is the ‘Subprime Lease.’ A lot of banks are doing internal scoring now to help consumers with a bad score but a good history to get into a new car. So once we verify employment and income we can run them on a lease with a 2.5 factor instead of a 0.001 factor. It may increase the monthly payment by 40 to 60 bucks, but you can get them into a new car they can afford. Subprime leases have been around for a while but have clearly become more prominent lately. For example, you’ll see it with more young adults, only six months on payroll and getting credit scores established.
Jonas: What do you think of FICO recalibrating their scoring definitions to broaden availability of credit to more consumers?
Chuck: To me … that’s opening up Pandora’s box. When we start recalculating the basics to help more people, we may be inadvertently creating problems. Time will tell.
So basically, dealers are getting customers into longer loans with lower monthly payments that aren’t cheaper.
This chart from a New York Federal Reserve blog post on Aug. 14 shows the composition of auto loans, which are on the rise for borrowers of all credit scores.
As the Fed wrote:
So, subprime auto lending is definitely on the rise in absolute terms, although the increase in prime auto lending over the same period makes the relative increase in the subprime share less pronounced … We will continue to monitor this ongoing change in the consumer lending market.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/subprime-auto-loan-conversation-2014-8#ixzz3BpFgZwci
Two years ago we were contacted by a film company about doing some commercial work on the farm for a leading US boot manufacturer. They got to film the farm for the day, we’d get boots for the whole family.
The crew was great, we fed them a nice BBQ at the end of the shoot, we made it into the commercial and the boots arrived a couple of weeks later. I wore the boots for a month and the lowers separated from the soles from the toe to the ball, every pair.
I personally have little to no consumer confidence because everything is crap. Nothing is made to last, most of the best articles of clothing I own are ten to twenty years old as the newer stuff just wears out in a few months. The companies spend all their money on advertising and promotions and constantly scale back on quality, hoping perhaps that idiots will replace the old crap with new crap.
Here’s the commercial-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEwVQze19JA
HSF,
The last two pair of dress shoes I bought were used from Savers, all leather uppers and soles, $7.99 each, Bostonians. I would prefer to buy something used of good quality rather than something new that is a piece of crap. I am still amazed at the poor quality of the clothing in most stores. I ran a men’s department for Jordan Marsh in the Mid 80’s before the influx of cheap Chinese goods and there was always a decent selection of quality clothing. As for buying a vehicle one should never shop for a payment,always shop for the price of the vehicle. Car salesmen are aghast when I walk in and say to them if they try to sell me a payment I will walk out before they finish the words. Of course all this sub prime selling of vehicle has pushed prices sky high, another bubble that will end sadly for the car companies.
Bob.
Hardscrabble
That’s a beautiful ad which links a product with a romanticized view of a way of life unavailable to most. I noticed not a word was said about the actual boots. I wonder why the consumer was not informed as to why he would want to own a pair?
It looks like some of you have found the 1% and the 99%, the 1% is for customer service and the 99% for promotion and marketing.
total bs the credit cards, mortgages, student loans, all to be paid back with fiat (money the evil banksters, wall street filth create “out of thin air” Every single debt should morally be wiped off the face of the earth. Think about it. The banks do absolutely nothing. The money is created when you apply for each loan, to be paid back with interest. Usury was judged by God in the old testament, as being evil. The US Corporation took God off the throne and put these evil politicians there instead. A holy God must judge this corrupt nation. You do not learn any of this in the indoctrination camps (school, universities) We are all under mind control, from the toxic vaccines, to fluoride now being sprayed in the chemtrails, gmo’s, and drugs for every made up ache and pain. Its come to a time that evil is called good, and good is judged as evil. God has warned us. The sheep serve the interest of the US corp for pay. its time to get angry and put our bodies into the machine to stop the death and destruction of our loved ones.
Dear Future American Generations, You Are Screwed
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/29/2014 19:22 -0400
Faith that the future will be better than the present is slipping, as despite President Obama’s demands that Americans not be “cynics,” a new report shows there is a major lack of confidence that the next generation will have it better than the last one. As WSJ reports, most strikingly, only 16% of respondents agree that job and career opportunities will be better for the next generation than for their own – a drop from the 56% who were optimistic about this measure in 1999 and down even from the 40% who agreed in November 2009, well into the recession.
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As WSJ adds,
In addition, a majority of those surveyed believe the recession permanently altered economic conditions in the U.S.
The numbers, while measuring individuals’ feelings rather than more objective measures such as employment or income, paint a picture of a workforce scarred by personal experience with unemployment or close proximity to others who suffered.
And despite more than six consecutive months of companies adding 200,000 or more jobs, workers are still pessimistic about their prospects for finding decent work. “Only 20 percent of currently employed workers feel extremely or very confident they could find another job if they were laid off,” the researchers found.
* * *
Cynics!!
One more argument for why people need to rethink the old paradigm of “employment” and “jobs” and instead start thinking about raising families, becoming self sufficient, learning multiple skills and disciplines, and dropping out of a system that is designed to enslave and demoralize rather than to inspire and liberate. Dependence is for infants and slaves. Dependence on an economic system that is hostile to you and your children is a form of collective insanity. When your own elected representatives no longer refer to you as citizens but rather as consumers, you’ve been informed as to what they think of you.
I have one pair of Wolverine shoes that I’ve been wearing regularly going on 10 years now.
I need house slippers ……… again. The last pair I bought at a nice store, Lord&Taylor, for about $35 …. house slippers, I say. They started falling apart in just a few months. Must be Chinese shit. They are rags now.
Fuckit. The next pair will cost REALLY big bucks. Rather than spending $35 every year, I’ll spend a lot more to get something that will last a decade, or more. You get what you pay for.
From my research, there’s a company in Maine that makes their shoes by hand. Gonna give them a shot this Christmas.
http://www.rancourtandcompany.com/our-shoe-story
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Comment on ZH:
I just closed my office & put 5 people on the unemployment rolls thanks to obamacare. As owner i am not eligible for the gummint freebies. Fuku corrupt incompetent arrogant narcissistic illegal indonesian kenyan alien sociopathic pathological lying fudge packer in chief. Fuku.
Piss on the Bastards Economics!
The Obama Depression: In Poll, 7-in-10 Say Economy Has Permanently Changed for the Worse Since ’09
The news articles and the survey report don’t say it, but the findings from the new Rutgers University poll on the economy are nothing less than a devastating indictment of the Obama administration and its inept — indeed, malicious — handling of the economy since the crash of 2008.
Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill was a boondoggle that proved Keynesian economics doesn’t work.
Today, more than 5 and a half years since Obama took office, the national unemployment rate stands at 6.2 percent, and the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment in July increased in 30 states. We’re still stuck in a tepid recovery, and Americans are hopping mad about it.
Here’s the Rutgers report, “Unhappy, Worried, and Pessimistic: Americans in the Aftermath of the Great Recession”:
The protracted and uneven recovery from the Great Recession has led most Americans to conclude that the U.S. economy has undergone a permanent change for the worse. Seven in ten now say the recession’s impact is permanent, up from half in 2009 when the recession officially ended. Much of this is rooted in direct experience. Fully one-quarter of the public says there has been a major decline in their quality of life owing to the recession, and 42 percent say they have less in salary and savings than when the recession began. Despite five years of recovery, sustained job growth, and reductions in the number of unemployed workers, Americans are not convinced that the economy is improving. Only one in three thinks the U.S. economy has gotten better in the last year and only one-quarter thinks it will improve next year. Moreover, just one in six Americans believe that job opportunities will be better for the next generation of workers, down from four in ten five years ago. These are some of the findings of a new survey conducted between July 24 and August 3, 2014 by the Heldrich Center with a nationally representative sample of 1,153 Americans.
Venezuela is covering its deficit with money printing. There is more to be gained in foreign exchange than importing goods that will be paid in yet more worthless paper. Therefore, the grocery stores are increasingly empty.
Mexico went through the same in the 70’s and 90’s, dumping pesos for dollars, which screwed the bottom 98% who could not afford to buy dollars as an inflation hedge.
The Maduro government is issuing ration cards and fingerprint verification for grocery store shoppers.
Why aren’t they spending? Because the gold’s all gone.
A Great Song On Gold And The Fed (free streaming and download)
The Gold’s All Gone (lyrics)
The poor live on credit cards and food stamps
electronic benefit cards
The rich are getting richer and driving fancy cars
Congress spends every penny it can borrow
our budget is self-destructing
They’ll spend and they’ll spend ‘till our money’s worth nothing
The greenback ain’t no standard
ain’t no standard at all
The greenback’s a funny money government standard
The gold’s all gone, the gold’s all gone, the gold’s all gone, yeah the gold’s all gone.
Well … one thing the US could do would be to bring in single payer health care. Sure it would hurt the insurance industrial complex, but the economy would become more efficient. You would see a saving of about 5% of GDP annually.
Once everyone had decent medical coverage all companies would be competing on a more even playing filed. Small companies would no longer be at a disadvantage. Entrepreneurs would not be scared of getting killed with medical bills. You could see a real revitalization of the economy and a whole lot fewer people going bankrupt for medical bills … though a lot more insurance industry execs on the unemployment line.
I am doing a translate of this and I am not aware of some of using abbreviates. Could you tell me what is MSM is?
Sergey
MSM stands for Mainstream Media
Comment from ebear on ZH:
“You have to have money or credit to spend money”
Very true, but even if you do have money, good luck finding anything worthwhile to spend it on.
Restaurants? Don’t trust the food or the people handling it, and my wife and sister-in-law are better cooks than you’ll find in any restaurant, so friends and family are now the ‘dining out” experience in our little group.
Movies? Forget it. Nothing to Hollywood, nothing from Hollywood. Burn Hollywood, Burn.
Bars & Nightclubs? Overpriced watered down drinks, deafening sound levels, overcrowding, and the ever present chance of death by fire or stampede brought to you courtesy of organized crime. Pass.
New car? What for? Our 13 year old Corolla runs as good as new. Likewise our 16 year old Jeep. Repairs? I can do most of that myself.
Computers? Between my 10 year old Mac and my wife’s 5 year old laptop, we have enough computing power for a manned mission to Mars. Repairs and upgrades? As with cars.
Clothes? Only what we need, and that isn’t much. We shop for quality, as it tends to last longer. We are modest people who make things last.
Cell phones? The only angry birds around here are the chickadees when I forget to put out seeds. It’s a fucking telephone. When it breaks I’ll get a new one.
Travel? Only for family and friends and NEVER through US territory. I’ve seen enough of the world to know I don’t want to see any more. Happy where I am.
Stocks and other “investments” Right. As with Hollywood, so with Wall St.
What’s left? Coffee and the occasional chocolate bar I guess. Can’t think of anything else.
We’re not rich, but neither are we poor. What we are is sensible and well aware of how dicey the current situation is becoming. So, we conserve, we prepare, but most of all we enjoy the simple things in life such as friends, family, and the great outdoors.
We’re not alone either. Everyone I know is in this mode to one degree or another, and they’re not poor either – just sensible*.
* sensible is a requirement in our circle – we don’t tolerate fools
We are born into banker bondage as surely as sparks fly upward (Job 5:7). Most of us were born poor and before we were barely dry behind the ears, we were drafted, married and fathers in debt for a car, education and a house. Then our job left the United States, our kids went to college and our feminist wife divorced us. Many began to see the Bankster problem but few there were who could escape to the country and become self reliant. The modern Elite Masters use a whip that leaves no physical mark in a system that binds their slaves with pen and ink to their Plantation as surely as chains.
May I have Administrator’s permission to use some of this info in radio commercial ads for MN state offices?
Kate U
You have my permission to use anything on the site.
Thank you! Excellent, concise collection.
Johnny Rapid Orgasm
I am Admin’s assistant. He is busy right now, so let me help you.
The theme is from a web site called http://www.Fuck-Off-And-Blow-Me.org
Share croppers paid 50% of their income (crops) to landlords but modern rat race slaves (wage earners) typically pay 99% (or more) to their masters (banksters, big food Inc, insurance, oil, medical, taxes, education, car etc) and the sharecroppers probably had more time off. The kicker is the chosen modern masters got their instant fiat money without ever having to work for it; not born on third base but born owners of the farms, banks, teams, etc. Also, we can’t breed cars, live in a shack with an outhouse without utilities, avoid high property taxes, keep some hens and rabbits or plant a garden in our yard (if we have one) and I hear they want to tax farts…