What Janet knows is that a 1% increase in interest rates would increase the interest on the National Debt from $400 billion per year to $600 billion per year, a 50% increase. Interest rates back at NORMAL historical rates that we had as recently as 2007 would increase the interest on the National Debt to $1 trillion per year, a 150% increase. Plus, the National Debt increases by $1.5 billion per day, so our interest bill goes up by $35 million per day already. Do you really think Yellen is going to be increasing interest rates?
This is the elephant in the room the media never talks about. It makes you wonder what goes through them minds of those at the Fed?
They KNOW rates will eventually revert to the mean, as everything in life does, and they also know what this will do to the federal budget. And yet every morning they report to work and end their day knowing they’ve perpetrated yet another day of “The Big Lie.”
History won’t be kind to The Fed or Janet Yellen
“Oh God, please please please don’t let it all crash until I get out and have all my graft cash safe and sound”.
Every fed governor and politician
The Federal government actually has the authority to just issue non interest bearing notes from the Treasury and pay off all the debt it has.
Lincoln with his greenbacks and Kennedy with his red seals both started doing this, but for some reason those programs both came to an early end before they had any real effect.
Are you sure about that? Would interest on the existing debt actually go up? Or is the existing debt all locked in at its original rates? I can definitely see how ADDITIONAL borrowing would cost more, though. Yeah, we’d have to get the U.S. gov in a position where it wasn’t borrowing a trillion every year. Like THAT’s gonna happen.
Pirate Jo
The average maturity on the National debt is 5 years. Our dear leaders are rolling the debt over on a short term basis. They did not lock it in for 30 years at below 3%.
21 Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America That Will Blow Your Mind:
#1 The U.S. Census Bureau says that nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
#2 Other numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau are also very disturbing. For example, in 2007 about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
#3 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.
#4 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
#5 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.
#6 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.
#7 Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.
#8 If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.
#9 According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.
#10 According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.
#11 When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations” that UNICEF looked at.
#12 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.
#13 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.
#14 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.
#15 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.
#16 There are simply not enough good jobs to go around anymore. It may be hard to believe, but 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#17 There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.
#18 Owning a home has traditionally been a signal that you belong to the middle class. That is why it is so alarming that the rate of homeownership in the United States has been falling for eight years in a row.
#19 According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.
#20 At this point, 25 percent of all Americans have a negative net worth. That means that the value of what they owe is greater than the value of everything that they own.
#21 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.
If we truly are “the greatest nation on the planet”, then why can’t we even take care of our own people?
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/21-facts-about-the-explosive-growth-of-poverty-in-america-that-will-blow-your-mind
KaD….your stats must be wrong; didn’t you get the memo – the unemployment rate dropped down to 5%, so our economy must be booming.
@Admin: Your piece is mid-page right now on ZH. Congrats.
Yeah, given the way they report it, the BLS will reach the magic day when it can announce “0% unemployment!”…and no one will be work working. Completely bogus.
Gotta love Big Government.
Yellen has built /inheirited a mess, a century in the making (since 1913). She has no chance of fixing it (the Congress decides how much is spent, and no collective understanding of the problem they have created), no tools to fix it (manipulating interest rates to zero was a last-mistake step) and quite probably no real understanding of it (Volcker understood and fixed it temporarily, Greenspan understood it and failed to fix it for expedience, Bernanke didn’t understand it and Yellen has demonstrated no understanding). Until the Congress CUTS ALL SPENDING and keeps cutting it (relieving the need for government debt issuance), the problem will grow. Until we get an Executive who can say no to the MIC / welfare state and make it stick, the demands will grow.
A complex system is failing into fragments: a gear flies off here, a pipe breaks there, unpredictably. All we see are symptoms: high unemployment, high taxes (ObamaCare) and getting higher, endless regulations and losses. When the machine finally fails the results will be painful, ugly and dangerous.