Important Takeaways:
- The U.S. economy has remained remarkably strong even amid persistent inflation and high interest rates.
- And yet, 59% of Americans falsely believe that the U.S. is currently in a recession, according to a recent survey of 2,000 adults by Affirm in June.
- Citing higher costs and difficulty making ends meet, most respondents said they think a recession started roughly 15 months ago, in March 2023, and could last until July 2025, Affirm found.
- Still, regardless of the country’s economic standing, many Americans are struggling in the face of sky-high prices for everyday items, and most have exhausted their savings and are now leaning on credit cards to make ends meet.
- Economists have wrestled with the growing disconnect between how the economy is doing and how people feel about their financial standing.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Even Americans earning more than six figures are worried about their finances
- A growing number of Americans making six-figure salaries are worried about paying their monthly bills, according to a new survey published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
- The survey shows that more than 30% of respondents earning between $100,000 and $149,999 are concerned about making ends meet within the next six months. That marks a sharp increase from one year ago, when 21.3% of individuals in that income bracket expressed concern about making ends meet.
- At the same time, about 32.5% of individuals earning more than $150,000 are worried about being able to pay their bills, which also marks an increase from the 21.7% figure reported one year ago.
- Interestingly, those more affluent Americans are actually more worried about their finances than many individuals who are earning less money. About 29.8% of individuals making between $40,000 and $69,999 said they are concerned, up from 23.9% last year.
- The typical U.S. household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation. Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 more compared with three years ago.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Americans are down on the economy (again), with inflation topping election concerns
- After a spurt of optimism, Americans are feeling a little more glum about the economy — again.
- Consumer sentiment, a gauge of Americans’ economic perceptions, is at a six-month low, according to a closely watched index by the University of Michigan. The measure notched its biggest drop since 2021, reflecting the persistent tug of inflation on household budgets and fueling fears that rising prices, unemployment and interest rates could all worsen in the coming months.
- That pessimism is altering consumers’ spending habits. McDonald’s, Home Depot, Under Armour and Starbucks all recently reported disappointing earnings, as people cut back on fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers and afternoon lattes. Retail sales were flat in April after decent pickups in February and March. Meanwhile, Walmart reported a strong first quarter this week, nudged upward by high-income shoppers, executives said.
- And gas prices, while easing in recent weeks, are up overall for the year, just ahead of the busy summer season.
- In recent weeks, some of the country’s largest companies have mentioned they are feeling the effects of inflation. At Starbucks, for example, customers are coming in less frequently.
- “We continue to feel the impact of a more cautious consumer,” Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said in an earnings call last month. “Many customers are being more exacting about where and how they choose to spend their money, particularly with stimulus savings mostly spent.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- A majority of Americans think that the U.S. economy is heading in the wrong direction, according to an exclusive poll for Newsweek, with many blaming Joe Biden’s economic agenda—Bidenomics—for it.
- But experts told Newsweek that the U.S. economy is doing relatively well, especially when compared to most other Western economies. The negative outlook on the economy that many Americans hold is likely linked to the fact that the economic picture is objectively complicated and hard to understand right now.
- Their widespread pessimism is reflected in the results of a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll conducted on behalf of Newsweek on April 11. According to the survey, some 50 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is heading in the wrong direction, while only 25 percent said it is going in the right direction.
- Americans are also negative about their own financial situation. Some 42 percent of respondents said their financial situation has worsened in the last year. Only 26 percent said it has improved, while 32 percent said it has stayed the same.
- Some 47 percent of Americans said they were now financially worse off than they were three years before, against 26 percent who said they were better off and 27 percent who said they were about the same. Some 45 percent said they were now worse off than before the pandemic, while 28 percent said they were better off and 27 percent were about the same.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- A significant number of small businesses across the nation are struggling to pay rent due to skyrocketing costs, a recent study by business networking platform Alignable found.
- The company’s latest Small Business Rent report, published on Friday, found that 43 percent of small business renters in the U.S. were unable to pay their rent in full and on time in the month of April. Such a high delinquency rate hasn’t been reported in the U.S. since March 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it reached 49 percent.
- The delinquency rate was also four percentage points higher than in March, making it the largest month-over-month surge in over a year, according to data analyzed by Alignable. Newsweek contacted Alignable for comment by email on Tuesday morning.
- The state with the highest delinquency rate in the country was Texas with 52 percent of small business owners unable to pay their rent in full and on time in April, followed by Massachusetts (47 percent), California (46 percent), Maryland (42 percent), New York and Washington State (39 percent). The lowest delinquency rate was in Colorado, with 26 percent.
- Troubles among small businesses is trouble for the entire country’s economy, as small businesses employ nearly half of the entire American workforce, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and represents 43.5 percent of American GDP.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Ahead of Easter rush, officials say drought must not put off Barcelona tourists
- Tourists arriving at Barcelona’s airport or gazing at its iconic Sagrada Familia basilica will this Easter holiday be met with large signs in English that read: “Drought alert. During your stay, save water”.
- Reservoir levels are only around 15% of their capacity, prompting curbs on water use by residents, visitors, agriculture and industry. Beach showers are shut and swimming pools cannot be filled with tap water, among other restrictions.
- Catalan officials have appealed for tourists to act responsibly, but are also adamant the drought should not put them off coming to the Spanish city and region most-visited by foreigners, where tourism accounts for 14.5% of the local economy.
- Barcelona’s hotel association warned in February the city could not afford to project an image abroad of hotels with empty pools. Hotels’ lobbying prompted the authorities to relax a total ban on filling pools, allowing desalinated water to be used instead.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs, according to a recent analysis of government data.
- Such figures underscore the financial squeeze many families continue to face even as the rate of U.S. inflation recedes and the economy by many measures remains strong, with the jobless rate at a two-decade low. The analysis, from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, taps government data such as the Consumer Price Index and Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the impact of inflation state by state.
- Even so, many Americans say they aren’t feeling those gains, and this fall more people reported struggling financially than they did prior to the pandemic, according to CBS News polling. Inflation is the main reason Americans express pessimism about economy despite its bright points, which also include stronger wage gains in recent years.
- The Biden administration called the analysis “flawed.”
- Around the U.S., the state with the highest additional expenditures to afford the same standard of living compared with 2021 is Colorado, where a household must spend an extra $15,000 per year, the JEC analysis found. Residents in Arkansas, meanwhile, have to spend the least to maintain their standard of living, at about $8,500 on an annual basis.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- ‘Approaching Hoofbeats’: The Signs We Saw Decades Ago Pale In Comparison To What We See Today
- I purchased Billy Graham’s book, Approaching Hoofbeats, not long after its publication in 1983.
- As I recently skimmed its chapters, the stark differences between then and now leaped off the pages. Some of the signs that four decades ago seemed so indicative of the nearing Rapture pale by comparison to all that we see today.
- The Antichrist Rides
- By 1983, I had heard of a group called the “trilateralists” who were pushing for a one-world government at the time. Today, however, the emerging framework for the type of world domination that we read about in the book of Revelation is front and center for everyone to see, yet so few are paying attention to the nearness of the time when the white horse will ride across the earth.
- The Threat of Nuclear War
- In Approaching Hoofbeats, Evangelist Billy Graham wrote about the threat of a devastating nuclear war, which was a major concern at the time. Today, however, this danger has reached the point where most analysts believe it’s likely to occur in the next few years.
- Below is a quote from their latest press release under a section titled “The Many Dimensions of Nuclear Threat”:
- A durable end to Russia’s war in Ukraine seems distant, and the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in that conflict remains a serious possibility. In February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to “suspend” the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). In March, he announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. In June, Sergei Karaganov, an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, urged Moscow to consider launching limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe as a way to bring the war in Ukraine to a favorable conclusion.
- Economic Peril
- In 1983, the debt reached $1.377 trillion.
- In January of this year, the national debt level of the United States reached $34 trillion, and by the end of the month, it stood at an astounding 34.1 trillion. With the announcement came the prediction that by March, this number would exceed $35 trillion.
- The current debt level in America will surely bring economic catastrophe.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Most Americans cannot afford a $1K emergency expense
- A majority of Americans say a $1,000 emergency expense would be too great of a hit to their savings and that they could not afford it, according to new data released Wednesday.
- Bankrate’s latest survey results found 56% of U.S. adults lack the emergency funds to handle a $1,000 unexpected expense and one-third (35%) said they would have to borrow the money somehow to pay for it.
- Of those, 21% said they would likely put such an expense on a credit card, while 10% said they would borrow the funds from a family member or friend, and 4% said they would take out a personal loan. Sixteen percent said they would reduce their spending in other areas to cover the bill.
- “All too many Americans are playing with fire when it comes to their personal finances in the sense that they don’t have more in emergency savings,” said Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrich. “Inflation has been a key culprit standing in the way of further progress on the savings front.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- For a long time, many people had faith that the government would be able to keep society stable, but now that has changed. In fact, one recent survey discovered that a whopping 71.2 percent of all Americans “have no faith in the U.S. government to save them or prevent a doomsday event”…
- According to a survey of 6,200 Americans conducted by BonusFinder.com, 71.2 percent of Americans say they have no faith in the U.S. government to save them or prevent a doomsday event. Even more unnerving, many respondents believe Doomsday could come within the next year.
- If you actually believe that the government will be there to rescue you when things really start hitting the fan, you are just being delusional.
- Many Americans are realizing that they will be forced to rely on themselves as society collapses, and so an increasing percentage of the population is spending significant money on emergency preparedness…
- Last April, the financial-services firm Finder found that the number of Americans who said they’d recently spent money on emergency preparedness jumped from 20% in 2020 to 29% in 2023. They spent an average of $150 on items such as nonperishable food, medical supplies, and cases of water. Today you can’t turn on a streaming platform without catching recommendations for popular survivalist reality shows such as “Alone” or “Naked and Afraid,” and on social media, homesteading and disaster-prepping influencers have amassed millions of followers across various platforms.
- Disaster preparedness is on the rise, in large part, because disasters are as well: from the supply-chain shortages caused by COVID-19 lockdowns to the climate crisis, from wars in Ukraine and Gaza to tech-driven loneliness, from runaway disinformation to intractable political polarization. More people are asking: Am I better off being hyper dependent on the global industrial economy? Would it be safer to grow my own food, store my own water, and not depend on complex systems I don’t understand?
- Crime rates are already spiking all over the nation, and violent predators are seemingly everywhere. Earlier this week, Zero Hedge posted an excellent article about the vast hordes of psychopaths that are coming out of the woodwork these days…
- Discussions on collapse often turn to signs and signals – The economy, politics and social tensions have become increasingly unstable for many years now, and much like adding more and more weight to a man standing on a frozen lake, eventually the ice is going to break. The question is, how do we know when that moment will be?
- As cultural systems begin to dissolve due to political clashes and economic decline the real evil tends to slither out of the woodwork. It happens slowly at first, then all at once. A sure sign of accelerating collapse is the growing prevalence of psychopaths and psychopathic behavior in the open.
- US appears to have entered the middle stages of such a collapse with many sociopaths and psychopaths beginning to feel that they might be able to act out their worst impulses without consequences. They are beginning to test the waters to see what they can get away with.
- And I am entirely convinced that 2024 is going to be a historic turning point.
- This is not a game.
- The collapse of society really is coming, and most of the population will find themselves completely and utterly unprepared when it finally happens.
Read the original article by clicking here.
