This report was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse Blog
Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.
Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that. But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing. But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there. The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly…
#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.
#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December.
#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores.
#4 Victoria’s Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores.
#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years.
#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores.
#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online.
#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to “millions of dollars in severance pay”.
#9 The Baltic Dry Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.
#10 This is the worst slump for core U.S. factory orders in three years.
#11 We just witnessed the largest decline in the Philly Fed Business Index in more than 7 years.
#12 In January, sales of existing homes fell 8.9 percent from a year earlier. That was the third month in a row that we have seen a decline of at least 8 percent. This is an absolutely catastrophic trend for the real estate industry.
#13 U.S. housing starts were down 11.2 percent in December compared to the previous month.
#14 Compared to a year earlier, home sales in southern California were down 17 percent in January.
#15 In December, home sales in Sacramento County fell a whopping 22.5 percentcompared to a year earlier.
#16 Pending home sales in the United States have now fallen on a year over year basis for 13 months in a row.
#17 More than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is now “seriously delinquent”. That is an all-time record.
#18 More than 7 million Americans are behind on their auto loan payments. That is also a new all-time record, and it is far higher than anything that we witnessed during the last recession.
It appears that “the recovery” has finally come to an end. After seeing all of those numbers, there is no way that anyone can possibly claim that economic conditions are “getting better”.
And even though the official government numbers are highly manipulated, we never even had one “boom year” throughout the entire “recovery”.
The final numbers for 2018 are now in, and last year was the 13th year in a rowwhen U.S. GDP growth was below 3 percent.
The last time we had a “boom year” when economic growth was above 3 percent was all the way back in 2005. That was in the middle of the Bush administration.
We have never seen a bad streak like this before in modern American history. The following comes from CNS News…
But prior to the current 13-year period when real GDP has failed to grow by 3.0 percent in any year, there has been no stretch (in the years since 1930) when the United States went as long as five straight years with real GDP failing to grow by at least 3 percent.
Even though the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system over the last decade, and even though we added nearly 12 trillion dollars to the national debt, the best that the authorities have been able to do is to stabilize the system for a while. Now it is starting to sputter once again, and many believe that the next crisis will be far worse than the last one.
By contrast, the Great Depression of the 1930s featured some really bad years, but following those bad years the U.S. experienced a tremendous economic boom…
By contrast, after the stock market crash in 1929, the United States saw four years of negative annual GDP—1930 (-8.5), 1931 (-6.4), 1932 (-12.9) and 1933 (-1.2). But then in the nine full years from 1934 through 1942, real GDP grew by an average of 9.75 percent.
We should have had some boom years too, but we didn’t, and now things are going to get bad again.
The Democrats are going to blame the Republicans and the Republicans are going to blame the Democrats, but all of that arguing isn’t going to solve anything.
What is coming next has been a central focus of my work for a very long time. The last recession was very painful, but it did not fundamentally alter life in America.
This next crisis will.
The “Everything Bubble” is bursting, the “Perfect Storm” is coming, and all of our lives will never be the same again.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope. In fact, once things really start getting crazy hope is going to be one of the major themes in my work because people are really going to need it.
There will be great challenges, and life will be very different, but that doesn’t mean that life is over.
America is about to experience the consequences of decades of exceedingly foolish decisions, and the pain will be extreme. But difficult times also offer an opportunity for dramatic change, and that is something that we will need to embrace.
This article originally appeared on The Economic Collapse Blog. About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.
Not seeing the big economic boom here in Arkansas. Very hardscrabble. Even in 2019.
Not to dispute the overall tone of this article, but items #2 through 7 represent a fundamental change in retail buying habits by American consumers.
Retailers and manufacturers are responding to that efficiency opportunity to sell direct, cut costs, and increase profits. 🙂
Stores and industries have been closing down ever since the first man voted Democrat.
We are in the beginning, on the way to a multi-hundredtrillion national debt, and of course DOW 100,000 and S&P 20,000.
Stop posting these COLLAPSE IS COMING stories until the government starts actually cutting its budget for real.
And that ain’t going to happen — as half the population is cashing free monthly check(s), compliments of the legal full time working [sucker] taxpayer.
You people focus too much on this, you ought to focus on “the 800lb obese American woman in the room.”
in other words,
the American collapse
won’t ever occur
until AFTER
THE ENTIRE WORLD
can’t print new money out of thin air.
Got it?
Bert,
Yup. They can just keep kicking the can down the road.
It’s all funny money that the sheep will always accept. 🙁
I’ve been expecting “The collapse” to happen for over 2 decades. Ain’t happened yet.
But… On a side note, I tested a still sealed 1 lb. bag of yeast that has been in the freezer since 2012 with a best by date of June 2013. I did the 1 cup of warm sugar water (1 teaspoon sugar and 2 1/4 teaspoons yeast)@ 105 deg. for 10 minutes. At the end of 10 minutes, The head (foam) was running over the cup.
Still good. 🙂
Y’all play nice.
Walk into any large mall and count how many female clothing stores there are. Convince me we wouldn’t be better off if 80% closed. I can count at least 5 $3 a cup coffee shops in a little over a mile on one of our streets. Retail junk is so overbuilt who cares?
Add to that a generation of unskilled layabouts demanding welfare and socialism of YOUR money…. A completely immoral and unethical country of lawless “citizens/invaders”….. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
Be debt free and have your money close at hand. I’ve been and still am pulling my IRA out as fast as I can without paying any federal or state taxes. Planning on keeping as much as I can very close at hand or in preps. Remember that most of your preps should be able to be eaten whether things go South or not.
In other words, the ancient law of economics no longer applies.
So true, and I don’t understand the new rules?
One of these days Micheal will be right
I need to run out get buy something on credit so I can then be delinquent on it.
Being debt free I feel left out.
Good idea! Get a card or 2 and max them out on physical silver!
Well…..I guess that Michael is bound to be right someday.
When it happens, brake out your skills boys and girls.
There are two schools of thought. They being a fast collapse and a slow collapse.
I am of the opinion that it will be both.
We are in the process of seeing a world wide slow collapse and this will gain in momentum over the coming years until it reaches a breaking point – Then boom the fast collapse begins.
The boom could be many things that happen at once or very close to each other.
– Actual economic world collapse – all currency worthless
– EMP’s
– Wars-
– Martial Law
– Pandemic
ITS the WHEN that is critical knowledge
Western Civilization has been in slow collapse mode for over a century now. Once our people are bled out, the facade known as “the economy”, will end. Probably will happen in your lifetime.
There there will be this to face.
ht tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6T61tG90As
This vid wraps up all that is discussed here in 20 minutes.
Yahooie, I just watched that video. It’s a good summation of why the “USA Collapse will be FAR WORSE Than You Think”.
One poster said: “Good Analogy… people in Penthouses have farther to fall…..” I remember reading that people who were poor during the Great Depression said that they were unaware of any economic disturbance.
However, we will be extremely lucky if things are only as bad as the Great Depression. Because we will most likely also have a currency collapse as they roll-out the “Worldo”.
I looked over the list.
Other than the farm info,
I see don’t anything I really GAS about.
The farm problem is more due to new
government regulations destroying
small farmers than any economics
problems. Nailbanger, if he is still
on this site, could elaborate on
that better than I.
So, I give this post a Meh!
In a world of historic debt INTEREST RATES are king. The effects of the multiple FED rate hikes are just NOW hitting the real economy.
These rate hikes have set in motion the collapse of the World Economy. IT IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE WILL REALLY START AND SHOW UP OVERSEAS FIRST. The only question is how fast will everything collapse? I hope and pray that it is slow. Because, as certain support structures collapse/break-down I can get additional resources allocated towards prepping/physical tangible assets.
From 2009 on I was convinced that they had propped up the system and bought time. I stopped prepping FOOD and focused on big ticket non-perishable items (e.g Solar, Nugs, Omma).
I am back to prepping FOOD, FOOD and more FOOD. Just like I did in 2006 and 2007. And it’s canned food not the long-term freeze dried/Dehydrated stuff (I already prepped that stuff). So I am betting we are closer to things collapsing than we have been since 2006.
The five figures that show that I am falling apart are my systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, weight, age, and number of hours it takes for me to run a mile. Will I outlive the USA?
But, but, but I thought Trump was gonna MAGA!!!!!
Silly Rabbit, like Mark Steyn once said, “Republicans are often in office but never in power”.
It’s almost impossible to “Make America Great Again” as long as it’s being run under Democrat policy initiatives of the last 60 years, none of which are ever rolled back, reformed, or curtailed in any way.
There’s only one way to reform the system now and, unfortunately, there isn’t enough political will in the
Republican Party to do it.
I went to a link given in the article that referenced real estate.
ht tps://wolfstreet.com/2019/02/21/the-us-housing-market-begins-to-feel-the-pain/
There is a paragraph beneath the last graph that says it all.
“When nominal wages rise 2% to 3% and home prices surge 5% to 12% year after year, as they have done, sooner or later something has to give. Home prices cannot forever outrun wages – because it eliminates layer after layer of buyers.”
And food prices will be rising more quickly because of crop failures around the globe due to crazy weather all of which translates to less exports. See ht tp://www.oilseedcrops.org/ for numerous articles. The man who writes these is a coffee buyer and he watches other crops around the world.
Ya,
“ht tp://www.oilseedcrops.org/ ”
is an interesting site. Personally Moslems
in the Philippines, or Coms in China
starving don’t really worry me.
Cycle of life sort of thing.
What is interesting is the mention of
our sun’s output affecting the earth.
That is an all too often not discussed
subject in Democrat ruled America.
Thanks for the reference.
Well I made it back in one piece.
Sat morning woke up bout 430 am.
And loaded my truck with a wooden sled the stove of course.
Weapons: .22/.410 12ga with alternating
Buck000 and hollow point slug first round being a slug.
.44 mag mod 29 240gr hollow points.
Few knives
Tomahawk
Brought some bacon some eggs potatoes few groceries from home.
After I got my pickup loaded poured coffee and hit the road drove for about an hour south and bout 45 min west into the bush as far as I could make it. Parked my truck off to the side and loaded the sled.
Strapped on my snowshoes and pulling harness.
Out on my hardware and started walking into the treeline till I came to the cutline I intended to follow. About 3/4 of a mile. Wasn’t even to cold. Once I got to the cutline I figured it would be a bit easier. Going across the bush was a bit tougher then I thought.
The next 2 km was pretty uneventful.
About 500 yards from my intented camp spot I picked up a particularly cheeky squirrel
(America grey) he bitched me out all the way to the river bank. Getting that sled up the opposite bank was not fun.
The river was frozen over enough to cross.
I was in the the summer before and dropped a tree across it the sequatima river is maybe 12 meters wide 8-12 feet deep.
I finally got the sled up the other bank after I unloaded the sled and carried my lighter stuff by hand the last 20 yards or so. The stove alone was pretty easy to get
Up on its own.
I set up camp right by the trees I cut last year. Got a fire going. From the truck to getting a fire going took about 7 hours 2:00 pm. Set up a small quick leantoo frame and put a tarp over it pretty cozy.
Bout 430 I was getting hungry. Still 2 hours daylight Time enough to set a few traps and auger an hole in the ice to drop a line.
I ended up having chicken and potatoes for supper. After I ate I had me a big ol’ shot of whiskey rolled a big fat joint.
And listened to the wolves seranade me to sleep. If you’ve ever heard timber wolves talking across a valley. It’s really something special.
Day2 ?????
Anyone interested?
AB,
I’m interested… 🙂
The life of a Back woodsman, a hard but satisfying life. I am assuming you are close to the mountains in SnowLand? If I can ever get away from Texas and find a place to sit legally for a while I would be there.
Welcome back Angry Beaver.
I am interested…….sounds great…..away from everything….what could be better
Compliments of the 1933 gold heist.
I made it home.
Yes I did observe the 9 minutes mArch 1 11 pm.
I see that link I posted finally showed up.
I hope you folks made use of those manuals.
Interesting trip into the bush I posted details. I think it got caught up in moderation ; if it don’t show up by tomorrow I’ll repost the details for anyone interested.
Pretty quiet and peaceful round here now.
Ahhhhh so nice.
So watch out fur dem Bulls, dem Bars, n dem hogs!
(sorry, just couldn’t resist)
Cherry Picked Info. Is Sacramento County home sales really a national indicator? Get real!
Abandoning God DOES have its consequences.
Ancient Israel started off as a nation whose Constitution was literally the Word of God.
As the nation became prosperous, as Israel’s battle to survive lessened, and most importantly, as the nation began abandoning God and tolerating, accepting, and eventually adopting the practices and “values” of the pagan nations that surrounded the country, Israel’s government, it’s religious leaders, and the common folk slid into apostasy, perversion, idol worship, greed, gross immorality, and human sacrifice.
There were those (the prophets) who loudly warned Israel’s people (and their leadership) that utter and complete destruction would come upon their nation as a result of their abandonment of the Lord, but few listened.
Moses, before the Hebrews even entered the Promised Land, told the people that they would eventually abandon God.
He told the ancient Hebrews that they had a choice: to either choose God and receive all of His many blessings, or to choose evil and receive the curses that go along with that evil.
America is following in the footsteps of ancient Israel, and we are at that crossroad today.
It may be too late to turn this nation around, but as individuals we must take a stand, hold our ground, and choose this day whom we will serve.
Read Deuteronomy 28, the Blessings and the Curses.
When I was a little kid and learned the story of Israel, I wondered why people would give up doing what God commands and lose the promised blessings. Now I understand. People come along with what seems to be a harmless thing but it actually is not. It spreads like the one bad apple.
California is about to collapse any day now. A once great state turned into a cesspool of immorality and illegality.
I live in upstate south Carolina, and the place is booming.
There are new housing developments and apartments going up all over the place.