Khross wrote:
15% of U.S. mortgages are currently in foreclosure.
27% of U.S. mortgages have negative equity.
Housing prices have reached 40 year lows when adjusted to 1958 dollars.
Housing prices continue to decline. Mainstream economists have started throwing around the "D-word" with regard to the house market, although it's following a fairly predictable pattern and isn't going to normalize any time soon.
By the end of the year, some of the outlying estimates have 60% of mortgages reaching the negative equity point. I'm more inclined to put that number in the 40% range, because it's going to take at least a decade for the housing market to actually bottom out, if it does.
There's a little over 600,000 acres of unfinished or abandoned residential development according to some conservative estimates; some of these developments have been idle since the Stagflation Recession of the 1970s.
Employment gains are nominal, most likely even fabricated because the current Department of Labor shifts goalposts faster than they put out reports. The safe estimate on discouraged workers (that is people who have stopped looking for work or who will never be employable again) is 16-18 million Americas between 18 and 50.
Real inflation is by all accounts in the double digits as food prices and energy costs continue to rise almost solely because of government imposed shifts in the pricing curves. In fact, the so-called volatile markets have been pushed so far away from their natural supply/demand relationships that it probably doesn't even make sense to study them anymore: they are not natural markets.
All of this should be easily referenced.
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And, yet, we have people screaming up and down that people are Doom Sayers and Naysayers ...
Regardless of where "reality" actually falls between "all is hunky dory" and "all is lost", there will be tons of people on either side of the line. There will always be folks overly pessimistic, and there will always be folks overly optimisitic.
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But, I'll just repeat what I've been saying for the last six months.
1. The United States government has a vested interest in lying to you about the economy.
2. Agents of the United States government have a vested interest in lying to you about the economy.
They are way too incompetent to pull off a grand conspiracy about this.
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3. The market manipulations, intrusions, and other financial fiascoes of the U.S. Government during the last part of the Bush Administration and all of the Obama Administration would be criminal if performed by any private citizen.
So would a great many things performed legitimately by the government. Printing money, for example. That does not necessarily mean it is bad for the economy.