Do you want to see what a “Summer of Recovery” looks like?
As the summer of recovery rolls on let’s take a look at the government’s short term memory hole. To begin our journey through the land of make believe we will start with the 1st time unemployment number that was being hailed as showing a drop. However, what the government failed to mention, and their media arms in the mainstream must have missed, is that the week of the 4th of July is a shortened week which lowered claims. Additionally, if the number was not seasonally adjusted there is a gain in the number.
“The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 463,560 in the week ending July 3, an increase of 22,560 from the previous week.”
With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932
The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation.
“The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession,” said Robert Reich, former US labour secretary. “All the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing.”
“Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year. So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing,” he said.
Why We Are Totally Finished, In A Nutshell: Corporatocracy Has Replaced Capitalism
Capitalism Fixes Problems & Preserves Democracy: Capitalism is what we should be relying on to fix our problems. Capitalism has it’s own ecosystem, just like biology’s ecosystem. An economic ecosystem that weeds out the weak, has parasites that eat the failures and new bacteria that evolves and grows replacements for that which failed. A system that keeps everything in balance.
The problem is we are no longer a capitalistic society. What we were taught in school is now utter and absolute nonsense. Capitalism is a thing of the past.
As outlined in “It’s Not A Financial Crisis – It’s A Stupidity Crisis”, we created two back to back bubbles. The air out of the Tech Bubble was sucked up for fuel by our next stupidity crisis: The Housing Bubble.
Now, after the second Stupidity Crisis there isn’t a third bubble to inflate. If we still lived in a capitalistic environment the banks and financial institutions that created loans for folks who should have remained renters and then sold those loans as investments to pensions and countries would have been cleansed by capitalism’s ecosystem.
But that isn’t what happened.
Weak economic data suggest recovery is fizzling
WASHINGTON (AP) — Fears that the economic recovery is fizzling grew Thursday after the government and private sector issued weak reports on a number of fronts.
Unemployment claims are up, home sales are plunging without government incentives and manufacturing growth is slowing.
Meanwhile, 1.3 million people are without federal jobless benefits now that Congress adjourned for a weeklong Independence Day recess without passing an extension. That number could grow to 3.3 million by the end of the month if lawmakers can’t resolve the issue when they return.
DOOM!
DOOM is an appropriate title for this post. With the Dow tumbling to the lowest point of the year there is no shortage of changing sentiment about this so called “Jobless Recovery”. As Joe Biden rides around all over the country in Ben Bernanke’s helicopter pitching the idea of a “Recovery Summer” or maybe even the “Summer of Magic Leprechauns with Pots of Gold” these days, it might be worthwhile to see what the actual financial community is saying about the direction we are headed.
The best stimulus? Spend less, borrow less
FORTUNE — Of all the highlights of Allan Meltzer’s half-century as a distinguished monetarist — advising Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, producing celebrated books on John Maynard Keynes and the history of the Federal Reserve — none proved more memorable than a crisis session at 10 Downing Street in mid-1980.
A group of 346 noted economists had just written a scathing open letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, predicting that her tough fiscal policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base, and threaten social stability.” Thatcher wanted to make absolutely certain her unpopular attack on huge deficits and rampant spending, in the face of high unemployment and a weak economy, was the right one.
Deutsche Bank: U.S. Financial Conditions Just Collapsed Back To Crisis Levels
Deutsche Bank has a new and improved index of U.S. financial conditions, and this index just slumped back towards the lows of our recent crisis.
Deutsche Bank’s Peter Hooper:
Financial conditions appear to have worsened substantially in recent quarters based on our update of the broad index of US financial variables presented earlier this year at the US Monetary Policy Forum. In the wake of recent developments in Europe, increased stress in financial markets has pushed that index halfway back to its immediate post- Lehman crisis lows.
A Busted ‘Bailout and Stimulate’ Formula
Author: Eric Sprott 
There’s nothing wrong with throwing a little money at a problem to make it go away. There’s equally nothing wrong with throwing a little borrowed money at a problem to make it disappear, as long as you have the means to pay that borrowed money back.
But what happens if you throw a lot of borrowed money at a problem, and the problem doesn’t go away? If you’ve ever experienced a situation like that you can probably understand how Europe feels right now. It just unleashed a magnificent $1 trillion euro bailout and the market responded with a selloff by the end of the week! So what happened? That money was supposed to make the problem go away, after all. And it was a lot of money. Why did the market respond to it with such disdain?
Bernanke Puzzled by Gold Rally
Ben Bernanke, otherwise known as Helicopter Ben today states that he is puzzled by the continued climb of gold.
“I don’t fully understand movements in the gold price,” Mr. Bernanke admitted.
What Mr. Bernanke does not seem to recognize is the extraordinary inflation pressures already in the system. The fact that asset prices are being artificially held up is price fixing and is accomplished through inflation. Gold is not reflecting immediate price inflation so much as mid to long term inflation concerns. Simply put, gold is recognizing the effects of quantitative easing on the monetary base. The Federal Reserve and central planners generally have no ability to think long term as a pool of collective consumers without coercion otherwise known as a free market do. It is debatable if manipulation of gold prices by central banks occurs or to what extent. It is definite that bailouts to preferred corporations and banks constitute economic fascism and inflate the asset value of the company receiving the infusion. This is turn coerces investors into preferred asset classes of the political class, mainly the paper equities of the otherwise failing institutions. This misallocation of capital only prolongs the misery and delays the day of reckoning. An economy can not be endlessly built on a pyramid of debt and be driven mainly by consumption. There is a point that consumers leave the game, even if employed. Households have to budget and plan; governments seem to believe they do not. Bernanke in his narrow Keynesian economic view think the only measure and indicators of inflation are bond yields or the manipulated CPI numbers.
The Bright Side of Hyperinflation
by Tom Franklin
Despite encouraging words from politicians and the establishment media’s talking heads, it is clear to me, and I believe most Americans who do not live in a regime ivory tower, that we are not coming out of the recession. In fact, things appear to be getting worse as unemployment continues to rise and businesses cut salaries or shut down. The fears that this recession could turn into another Great Depression are very real, as we have lost so much of our capacity to create wealth and the federal government seems determined to use up any remaining capital fighting endless wars, funding endless entitlement programs, and spending trillions of dollars on non-wealth-creating “stimulus” programs while handing out even more trillions to their bankster buddies and corporate cronies. However, another 1930s-style depression is not what keeps me up at night with worry.
America could survive another Great Depression if it was like the last one. Sure, it would be extremely painful, but it would be manageable, as it was before, and eventually we would come out of it, despite the fact that the government would most certainly make all the wrong moves along the way. However, what really terrifies me is a hyperinflationary depression.
According to John Williams at ShadowStats.com, in an article titled Hyperinflation Special Report, hyperinflation is not only possible, but inevitable due to the overspending of the federal government, and the printing press of the Federal Reserve, which as Congressman Ron Paul continuously reminds us, prints money out of thin air. Williams’ report is a truly terrifying read that insists that the coming hyperinflation could get so bad that we will have to resort to the barter system as the dollar will become nothing more than very rough toilet paper. He cautions that electronic banking will cease to work and for a time no one will have any money at all, not even inflated currency. You can certainly imagine the type of Hell on earth this will create for the American people.
sherry: 
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