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.pdf  http://www.albertpeia.com/112208opocoan/PeiavCoanetals.htm  http://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.

#6 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#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.

#19 Approximately one out of every five households in the United States is now on food stamps.

#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

 

 

     

TwitterShouldn'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...

#1 In just a few days, the Twitter IPO is expected to raise close to 2 billion dollars even though Twitter actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter and has a long history of not being profitable.

#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.

#10 LinkedIn stock has risen in price by 136 percent since the 2011 IPO, and it is now supposedly worth more than 18 billion dollars.

#11 The head of engineering at Twitter, Chris Fry, got a 10.3 million dollar pay package when he joined Twitter last year.

#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.

#14 Facebook stock is up close to 140 percent over the past 12 months and the company is now worth more than 120 billion dollars.

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...

 

 

U.S. Structural Jobs Paradigm