Note:
I’m here in San Diego County in my new/old 39 foot Chevy Motorhome. I can’t get
a signal for my Verizon LG smartphone (I’ll be taking a spin in my Ford
Explorer in search of a signal; my VOIP phone, magicjack requiring a broadband
connection, is currently not up except for voicemail). The radio reception is
also limited which led me to ‘sample’ some limited AM offerings which included
shallow sean hannity the hallmark of insanity, and ‘rush revere’ [limbaugh…
he’s totally burned out (the consequence of his being ‘tired of carrying the
water for the republican party’? - his own words), relegated now to authoring
children’s illustrated books of a simplistic nature]. Shallow sean’s latest
‘crusade’ (beyond the same note/key obvious debacle of wobamacare) was defense
of the indefensible mobster but friend of sean’s, donald trump (trump should be
in jail). In defense of t_rump, he offers up the itsy-bitsy, teeny weeny
wohlman skating rink project as evidence of t_rump’s contribution to NYC (too
small for high new york priority given the magnitude of New York substantial
problems, some largely the result of trumpish tastes, ie., solid gold trump
tower fixtures, etc., that trump’s ‘pre-packaged bankrupcies’ seem to fail to
touch, and which extravagance must be paid for by someone, but not him).
Shallow sean’s excoriation of new york city never seems to link the obviousness
of t_rump’s grandstanding responsibility for same. After all, someone
ultimately has to pay for trump’s disproportionate non-value-added livin’
large. No talk of trump’s ingratiating bribe strategy for protection ( ie.,
retainer’s to law firms linked to state attorney generals, viz., {kimmelman}
wolf and sampson, chris droney’s brother, his sister’s protection/corruption
and quid pro quo from the federal bench, etc., and as well, protection of
drug-money laundering through his now nominal only casinos … See, ie., http://www.albertpeia.com/112208opocoan/ricosummarytoFBIunderpenaltyofperjury.pdfhttp://www.albertpeia.com/112208opocoan/PeiavCoanetals.htmhttp://albertpeia.com/fbimartinezcongallard.htm.Trump’s a fraud! I won’t be listening to ‘rush revere’ or shallow sean
prospectively. They’re a waste of time and preposterous given their unbridled
support of war criminals bush, cheney, etc., and the failed debacles they
created, etc……
Which America Do You Live In? – 21
Hard To Believe Facts About “Wealthy America” And “Poor America”
By Michael
Snyder, on November 6th, 2013
Did you know that 40 percent of all American workers make
less than $20,000 a year before taxes? And 65 percent of all American workers make
less than $40,000 a year before taxes. If you work on Wall Street, or
have a cushy job with the federal government, or work for a big tech firm out
on the west coast, life is probably pretty good for you right now. But
the truth is that most Americans are not living the high life. In fact,
most Americans are just trying to figure out how to survive from month to
month. For many Americans, making a choice between buying food for your
family and paying the light bill is a common occurrence. But if you don't
live in that America, hearing that people actually live like that may sound
very strange to you. After all, if everyone around you has expensive
cars, the latest electronic gadgets and million dollar homes, the notion that
America is in the midst of a very serious "economic decline" may seem
very bizarre to you.
On Wednesday, the Dow hit a brand new record high, and Wall Street
celebrated. Since the financial crisis of 2008, stocks have been on an
unprecedented run. The top performers in the market have not just made
millions of dollars - they have made billions of dollars. Luxury
apartments in Manhattan and beachfront homes in the Hamptons are selling for
absolutely astronomical prices, and it seems like life in the good parts of New
York City is one gigantic endless party these days.Meanwhile, life is quite
good down in Washington D.C. as well. The wealth is spread more evenly,
but on average the D.C. region actually has the highest standard of living of
any major U.S. city. The reason for this is the obscene growth of the
federal government. Over the past couple of decades, the U.S. government
has ballooned in size and so have government salaries. During one recent
year, the average federal employee living in the Washington D.C. area received
total compensation worth more than
$126,000.Out in the San Francisco area, Internet money is flowing like wine
right now. As I wrote about yesterday, top employees of companies such as Facebook and
Twitter can make millions of dollars a year. And if you were lucky to get
a piece of the ownership of one of those companies at a very early stage, you
are essentially set for life.And with the Twitter IPO coming up, Internet
euphoria is once again reaching a fever pitch. For example, just check
out what a 56-year-old administrative assistant said this week about why
she is going to buy Twitter stock...“I’m just buying because everybody’s
talking about Twitter,” she said. “I’m just gonna take a chance.”Is that how we
should make our investment decisions from now on?Just buy a stock because
everybody's talking about it?That is the kind of insanity that is going on in
"wealthy America" right now.Unfortunately, the gap between
"wealthy America" and "poor America" is greater than ever before.If
you live in "wealthy America", what you are about to hear next will
probably sound very strange.CNN recently profiled a 44-year-old
overnight prison guard named Delores Gilmore. She works really hard, but
a lot of times she simply does not have enough money to pay all of her
bills..."The first of the month, I pay the rent," she said. "The
next check, I pay my light bills. Sometimes I won't pay my rent and I pay the
light bill from last month -- if they cut if it off. Then I pay the rent the
end of the month."Her life consists of going to work, taking care of her
children, going to sleep, and then getting back up and repeating that same
cycle once again...
"I'm
not fooling anybody," she told me. "I don't have any friends. And
that's sad. ... I go to work, come home, take them where they gotta go, if they
gotta go somewhere, come back home, lay down, go to work.
"That's what I do. All
day, that's what I do."
Sadly, the truth is that tens of millions of Americans can
identify with what she is going through on a daily basis. In millions of
families, both the husband and the wife work multiple jobs and it is still not
enough.If we truly did have a free market capitalist system, the entire country
would be a land of opportunity and things would be getting better for
everybody. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. The
following are 21 facts about "wealthy America" and "poor
America" that are hard to believe...
#1
The lowest earning 23,303,064 Americans combined make 36 percent less than the highest earning 2,915
Americans do.
#2
40 percent of all American workers (39.6 percent to be precise) make less
than $20,000 a year.
#3
According to the Pew Research Center, the top 7 percent of all U.S. households
own 63 percent of all the wealth in the
country.
#4
On average, households in the top 7 percent have 24 times as much wealth as
households in the bottom 93 percent.
#5
According to numbers that were just released this week, 49.7 million Americans are
living in poverty. That is a brand new all-time record high.
#7
Household incomes have actually been declining for five years in a row and total consumer
credit has risen by a whopping 22 percent over the past three years.
#8
According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the
bottom 150 million Americans combined.
#9
The homeownership rate in the United States is at an 18 year low.
#10
The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom
one-third of all Americans combined.
#11 18 percent of all food stamp dollars are
spent at Wal-Mart.
#12
According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than
has ever been recorded before.
#13
It is hard to believe, but right now 1.2 million students that
attend public schools in America are homeless. That number has risen by
72 percent since the start of the last recession.
#14
One recent study discovered that nearly half of all public students in
the United States come from low income homes.
#15
In 1980, CEOs at S&P 500 companies made 42 times as much as their employees
did on average. Today, CEOs at S&P 500 companies make 354 times as much as their employees do
on average. In fact, there are many CEOs that make more than 1000 times what the average
employees in their companies make.
#16
U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a
poverty rate of 37 percent.
#17
At this point, one out of every four
American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.
#18
Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers
doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
#20
The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than
47 million today.
#21
At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5 percent of all the wealth in the
United States.
So which America do you live in? Please feel free to tell
us what is going on in your neck of the woods by posting a comment below...
Why Preppers Should Be THRILLED
That The Stock Market Has Hit An All-Time High
By Michael Snyder,
on November 6th, 2013
I am a prepper and I LOVE the fact that the stock
market is at an all-time high. In fact, I
hope that it keeps going up for as long as possible. Why? Because
it gives me more time to prepare for the inevitable collapse that is
coming. As I will discuss extensively below, anyone with half a brain
should be able to see that a great financial disaster is coming to this
nation. If you still doubt this after reading this article, please go check out The
Economic Collapse Blog where I have posted nearly 1000 articles that break
this down in excruciating detail. Unfortunately, a lot of preppers out
there are being really, really stupid right now. Over the past six
months, I have noticed a tremendous amount of apathy among the prepper community.
A lot of preppers were doing really well for a while, but now a lot of them
have apparently decided that we are no longer in imminent danger of an economic
collapse and that instead of preparing it is time to party. This is a
critical mistake. We should be thankful that this stock market bubble has
given us a few more months to prepare. Sadly, so many people out there
are wasting this precious opportunity.
It is almost as if most people have forgotten what happened
during the last financial crisis. 2008 may as well be ancient history for
most Americans.None of the underlying problems that plagued the U.S. economy
back then have been fixed.For example, the problem of having “too big to fail”
banks has not been addressed. In fact, “too big to fail” is now bigger
than ever.Over the past five years, the six largest banks in the United States
(JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley)
have gotten 37 percent larger.
Meanwhile, 1,400 smaller banks have quietly disappeared from
the U.S. banking industry.So we are far more vulnerable to a collapse of those
banks in 2013 than we were in 2008.And those banks continue to become even more
reckless with their money and our money.Right now, there are 4 U.S. banks that each have more than
40 TRILLION dollars worth of
total exposure to derivatives…
———-
JPMorgan
Chase
Total Assets: $1,948,150,000,000 (just over 1.9 trillion
dollars)Total Exposure To Derivatives: $70,287,894,000,000 (more than 70
trillion dollars)
Citibank
Total Assets: $1,306,258,000,000 (a bit more than 1.3 trillion
dollars)Total Exposure To Derivatives: $58,471,038,000,000 (more than 58
trillion dollars)
Bank
Of America
Total Assets: $1,458,091,000,000 (a bit more than 1.4 trillion
dollars)Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,543,003,000,000 (more than 44
trillion dollars)
Goldman
Sachs
Total Assets: $113,743,000,000 (a bit more than 113 billion
dollars – yes, you read that correctly)Total Exposure To Derivatives:
$42,251,600,000,000 (more than 42 trillion dollars)———-And the biggest chunk of
those derivatives are interest rate derivatives.According to the Bank for
International Settlements, the global financial system has a total of 441 TRILLION dollars worth of
exposure to interest rate derivatives.Wall Street has been transformed into the
largest and wildest casino the world has ever seen, and at some point all of
this reckless gambling is going to end very, very badly.Meanwhile, the U.S. government
and national governments all over the planet continue to indulge in the
greatest debt binge in the history of mankind.As the Telegraph recently discussed, even the Bank
for International Settlements is warning that government debt levels are way
too high right now. According to the BIS, total public and private debt
levels are now
30 percent higher than they were
in 2008…
“This looks like to me like 2007 all over again, but even
worse,” said William White, the BIS’s former chief economist, famous for
flagging the wild behavior in the debt markets before the global storm hit in
2008.“All the previous imbalances are still there. Total public and private
debt levels are 30pc higher as a share of GDP in the advanced economies than
they were then, and we have added a whole new problem with bubbles in emerging
markets that are ending in a boom-bust cycle,” said Mr White, now chairman of
the OECD’s Economic Development and Review Committee.Just consider what the
United States has done since the last crisis.We are on pace to more than double
the national debt during the Obama years.In other words, the U.S. government
will take on more new debt during the 8 years of Obama than it did under all of
the other presidents in U.S. history combined.Oh yeah, this is going to end
really well, isn’t it?And the warnings are there. Very smart people that
have been consistently right in the past are warning that utter disaster is
ahead. For example, consider what Marc Faber is saying…Marc
Faber, the noted Swiss economist and investor, has voiced his concerns for the
U.S. economy numerous times during recent media appearances, stating, “I think
somewhere down the line we will have a massive wealth destruction. I would say
that well-to-do people may lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth.”When he
was asked what sort of odds he put on a global recession happening, the
economist famous for his ominous predictions quickly answered . . . “100
percent.”And Peter Schiff (who I have a tremendous
amount of respect for) has issued a similar warning…Faber’s pessimism is
matched by well-respected economist and investor Peter Schiff, the CEO of Euro
Pacific Capital. Schiff remarks that the stock market collapse we experienced
in 2008 “wasn’t the real crash. The real crash is coming.”Now is
not the time to be apathetic.
The next major wave of the economic collapse will not arrive
until the next great financial panic strikes.Since the stock market is sitting
at a brand new all-time high at the moment, that probably means that we have a
little bit of time.Please use that time to prepare.And is there anyone out
there who can honestly say that they are “fully prepared” for what is coming?I
do know a few “extreme preppers” that I would say that about, but personally my
wife and I are very thankful that we have more time to make our own personal
preparations stronger.Once upon a time, someone gave me the following piece of
advice: “Don’t be stupid.”And that is the encouragement that I would give the
prepper community today. Just because we haven’t gone off the edge of the
cliff financially yet does not mean that everything is okay. In fact, we
are steamrolling toward the edge of the cliff more rapidly than ever. It
would take a miracle of Biblical proportions to keep us from the fate that we
are heading for.So if you are a prepper, don’t be disappointed that the economy
has not collapsed yet and certainly do not be apathetic.Instead, be thankful
that you have been given a little bit more time to prepare, because the times
that are coming are going to be more horrifying than almost any of us can
imagine.
14 Facts About The Absolutely
Crazy Internet Stock Bubble That Could Crash And Burn In 2014
By
Michael Snyder, on November 5th, 2013
Shouldn't Internet
companies actually "make a profit" at some point before being
considered worth billions of dollars? A lot of investors laugh when they
look back at the foolishness of the "Dotcom bubble" of the late
1990s, but the tech bubble that is inflating right in front of our eyes today
is actually far worse. For example, what would you say if I told you that
a seven-year-old company that has a long history of not being profitable and
that actually
lost 64 million dollars last
quarter is worth more than 13 billion dollars? You would probably say
that I was insane, but the company that I have just described is Twitter and
Wall Street is going crazy for it right now. Please don't get me wrong -
I actually love Twitter. On my Twitter account I have sent
out thousands of "tweets". Twitter is a lot of fun, and it has had
a huge impact on the entire planet. But is it worth 13 billion
dollars? Of course not.
When it comes to the Internet, what is hot today will probably
not be hot tomorrow.Do you remember MySpace?At one time, MySpace was considered
to be the undisputed king of social media. But then something better came
along (Facebook) and killed it.It is important to keep in mind that Facebook
did not even exist ten years
ago. Yes, almost everybody is using it today, but will everybody still be
using it a decade from now?
Maybe.But the way that the financial markets are valuing these
firms can only be justified if they are going to make absolutely massive
profits for many decades to come.Will Twitter eventually make a little bit of
money?Probably, as long as they get their act together.In fact, Twitter
should be making significant
amounts of money right now if it was being run correctly.
But will Twitter ever make 13 billion dollars?No, that simply
is not going to happen. But that is what Wall Street says that Twitter is
worth.The utter foolishness that we are witnessing on Wall Street right now is
so similar to what we saw back in the late 1990s. It is almost as if we
have learned nothing from our past mistakes.These days I keep having flashbacks
of the Pets.com sock puppet. For those too young to remember, the
following is a brief summary from Investopedia about what happened to Pets.com...It's
impossible to think of the first Internet era without thinking of the Pets.com
sock puppet. He was everywhere and was nearly as well-known as the Geico gecko
is today.That familiarity, in part, persuaded many investors to lay down money
in the company's February 2000 IPO (which was backed by Amazon.com). Pets.com
raised $82.5 million – but nine months later it folded, due to major recurring
losses. Part of the reason for that was aggressive advertising, but the company
also lost money on virtually every item it sold. In the third quarter of 2000,
Pets.com reported negative gross margins of $277,000. (The second quarter had
seen a $1.7 million margin loss.) That same quarter (its last full quarter as
an operating entity), the company lost $21.7 million on $9.4 million in
revenue.As for the puppet, he went on to shill for BarNone, which helps people
with bad credit histories get car loans. He's still there today, front and
center on that website.Everyone loves to laugh at the poor little sock puppet,
but the truth is that the tech bubble that is inflating right now is far worse
than the Dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. The following are 14 facts
about the current tech bubble that will blow your mind...
#2
It is being projected that after the IPO Twitter could have a market valuation
of more than 13 billion
dollars.
#3
Twitter is not expected to make a profit until 2015 at the earliest.
#4
According to CNBC, Pinterest is currently valued at 3.8 billion dollars even though it has never
earned a profit.
#5
Yahoo paid more than a billion dollars for Tumblr even though Tumblr's revenues
are so small that Yahoo is not even required
to report them on financial statements.
#6
Snapchat, an Internet service that allows people to send out messages that
"self-destruct", is supposedly worth 4 billion dollars. But it actually has zero revenue coming in, and many
believe that it is essentially worthless as a money making enterprise.
For one extensive analysis by a tech blogger, please see this article.
#7
The stock of Rocket Fuel, an online advertising company, is trading at about 60
dollars a share and it has a market valuation of about 2 billion dollars even though it
has never made a profit.
#8
The stock of local business review website Yelp is up 241 percent this year even though it
has never earned a quarterly profit.
#9
Fab.com just raised 165 million dollars from
investors even though it recently laid off 44o employees.
#12
Facebook's VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, earned 24.4 million dollars in 2011.
#13
Office rents in San Francisco (where many of these tech companies are based)
are now 23 percent higher than they were
at the peak of the real estate market in 2008.
And I am certainly not the only one that is concerned
that we are repeating the mistakes of the late 1990s...“When you look at
valuations and look at the lack of earnings and revenue, it seems to me much
like the dot-com bubble,” said Matt McCormick, a money manager at
Cincinnati-based Bahl & Gaynor Inc. who helps oversee $10.2 billion. “This
market looks a little frothy and Twitter is the personification of a risky
trade.”In fact, as the Wall Street
Journal recently noted, we have seen some of these tech stocks crash more
than once during the Internet age..."It's fascinating to me that today's
mini-mania includes shares of Amazon, Netflix and Priceline that have
previously peaked and crashed before—in some cases they've peaked and crashed
twice before," says Darren Pollock, portfolio manager at Cheviot Value
Management. "Stocks like these have again captured the imagination of
speculators. We're skeptical that there is enough underlying intrinsic value to
many of the highfliers to support today's prices."So how long will it be
until the current tech bubble implodes?That is a very good question.
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below...
By
Michael Snyder, on November 5th, 2013 
Shouldn't Internet
companies actually "make a profit" at some point before being
considered worth billions of dollars? A lot of investors laugh when they
look back at the foolishness of the "Dotcom bubble" of the late
1990s, but the tech bubble that is inflating right in front of our eyes today
is actually far worse. For example, what would you say if I told you that
a seven-year-old company that has a long history of not being profitable and
that actually