Total Madness: General Selected Writings by Various Authors.
The Coming Financial Collapse of America by Mike Adams, January 22, 2008
[Interesting bit of prophesy, quite accurate. Many astute writers have been aware and have been wise enough to see the writing on the wall.]
(and Why Today's Market Bloodbath is Only a Small Taste of Things to Come...)
(NaturalNews) Americans have always been fond of the idea of getting rich without effort by putting their money in things that produce no profits and then magically being able to ride those investments, milking them for spending cash that supports a drunken spending lifestyle. From 1998 - 2001, that profit vehicle was, of course, dot-com stocks. From 2001 to the present, it's been housing. Never mind the fact that a house produces nothing real, earns nothing real and actually loses utility with each successive year of its existence (roof repairs, anyone?) -- Americans have been convinced over the last seven years that housing prices would rise forever, allowing people to simply extract money from their home equity as if their house were some sort of giant ATM machine.
As the markets are finally demonstrating today, the "economic good times" spurred by a runaway housing price boom (and powered by astonishingly fraudulent lending practices by dishonest banks) are over. A day of reckoning has arrived, and the unwinding of this false wealth that has been propping up the U.S. economy for so many years is about to be unleashed upon the American people. (Today's stock market meltdown is only the beginning...)
That this day of economic reckoning would arrive has been obvious to me for years. On December 29, 2005, I published a two-part article series entitled, "Don't get caught in the housing bubble crash." Part two is available HERE.
In those articles, I stated:
There's no question whatsoever that this housing market will experience a correction. ...It's eventually going to come tumbling down. The only question is whether it's going to be a correction or a crash.
Friends, I believe it is time to take your money and exit the speculative real estate market. The average person doesn't understand anything about finances and never will. The average person can't even calculate a 15 percent tip at a restaurant, and he or she is buying real estate because he or she wants to double his or her money. Are you kidding me? Take your money and run; that's my advice. Run from the inflated real estate marketplace before you become another victim. These super hot, speculative housing bubbles and stock market bubbles cannot continue. They always correct. Gravity kicks in, and, eventually, things unwind. A lot of people get hurt. They lose their money. To some of those people, I say, "That's a really expensive education you just paid for." A lot of life's lessons are hard to learn, but some of them can be rather expensive.
So, it's December 2005. I'm going on the record as saying this bubble is going to pop, folks, and you can call me a pessimist or a doomsayer if you want. The fact is, if you understand math, you know I'm right. If you want to protect your own finances, you'd better take a good, hard look at this and make some decisions about what you're going to do. Do not leave yourself over-leveraged in speculative real estate. You thought you were going to retire on the beach, and it ends up you're flipping burgers as a second job to pay off what you owe the bank, and they garnish your wages on top of that. That's what happens to people who don't get out in time.
Two Years Later, the Housing Crash is On
I point out these predictions not to prove I was right, but rather to demonstrate how easy it was to see these things coming. The inevitable bursting of the housing bubble was a no brainer to any rationally-minded person, and yet everywhere I turned back in 2005, I kept hearing (from apparently intelligent folks) things like, "Housing prices have never fallen," or, "Buying a house is the best investment you can make!"
Nonsense. Any fool could see that while housing prices were rising 15 - 25% a year in some regions, there were no underlying fundamentals that would justify such an increase in the value of the property. The population, for example, wasn't increasing by 25% per year. Houses weren't becoming 25% more useful. Land wasn't becoming 25% more scarce. So what could possibly explain the rapid rise in housing prices? Easy money, of course.
That easy lending practices were being so aggressively pushed could only mean that more money was being artificially injected into the housing market, causing a fictitious rise in the value of homes based on the fact that there was too much money floating around in the hands of people who probably wouldn't qualify for such loans under normal, rigorous lending conditions. And once you realize that, it's not difficult to figure out that such lending practices will sooner or later backfire with a massive round of bankruptcies and bank repossessions.
And that, of course, will inevitably lead to a sustained drop in housing prices that, as I predicted, could ultimate see many homes drop to 50% of their peak values.
That's what's coming. I don't even have to offer a prediction of it: It's just a natural reaction to the economic practices that have been so unwisely pursued in this country for years.
The Domino Effect on the U.S. Economy
The U.S. economy, as any astute financial observer has noted for years, is running on artificial wealth that has been manufactured by the Federal Reserve and swallowed by gullible consumers chasing that pot of gold at the end of the easy money rainbow. An alarmingly large percentage of U.S. economic activity is driven by consumer spending and the taxation of such activities. So when housing prices plummet and consumer bankruptcies start piling up, here's what we're going to see next:
My prediction for 2008 - 2012 is a massive wave of municipal bankruptcies, state bankruptcies and escalating national debt. We are going to see cities and states go belly up, pension programs terminated (or watered down), and financial institutions teetering on the brink of disaster.
And the worst part of it all? The only way out of this financial mess is for the Federal Reserve to steal yet more money from the American people by printing more money and hyperinflating the currency.
This is the part where the late Aaron Russo and his film Freedom to Fascism comes into play. If you haven't already watched this documentary on the massive fraud of the Federal Reserve and the IRS, watch it now at Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid...
This is also the part where Ron Paul comes in (www.RonPaul2008.com), since Ron Paul is the only Presidential candidate who understands the financial destruction being caused by the Federal Reserve and has pledged to end the Fed's control over the U.S. money supply. (The Fed, by the way, is a privately-owned corporation that isn't even controlled by U.S. lawmakers.)
But given that most Americans are still likely to vote for status quo candidates and not for the radical changes required to bring economic sanity to our nation, it seems inevitable that this nation won't learn its lessons about the laws of economics until the currency is near-worthless, the population is destitute, the banks are owned by wealthy foreigners and the neighborhoods are boarded up and abandoned due to a massive wave of foreclosures.
While all that's happening, of course, the Federal Reserve is going to be trying (in vain) to print its way out of the debt implosion by creating hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air -- an act that quietly steals money from the people due to the loss of purchasing power (inflation). The amount of money needed to bail the U.S. out of its impending financial crisis will be so large that the real value of saved money in U.S. currency (i.e. dollars) could be reduced anywhere from 30% to 80%. Imagine: One day you have $25,000 in the bank that buys a car, and the next year, that same $25,000 only buys half a car. Nobody stole dollars from your account, but the Federal Reserve stole your purchasing power by inflating the currency while trying to print its way out of a national debt crisis! This is what's coming next.
The mathematically-impaired American masses, largely unable to follow basic economics, are destined to watch all this unfold with bewilderment, not knowing why their dollars are becoming worthless, but being rightly outraged by the turn of events at the same time. The MSM (Mainstream Media) will be no help, of course, since it's in on the scam. It will likely find some foreign scapegoat like blaming China's currency or Middle East oil prices for the disastrous effects of stupid domestic economic policies that have been pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike. (Of course, nobody has put the U.S. more deeply into debt than George W., largely thanks to spending on war.)
There's little question that hard economic times are coming, and not one in a hundred people has any real clue what to do about it. Not even many mainstream investment professionals, by the way -- they're the same idiots who probably told you to buy into the housing bubble in the first place, am I right? (Remember, through 2006 and 2007 when I was urging everybody to get OUT of the housing market, many investment "professionals" were urging people to keep on buying and leveraging their money in yet more housing! We'll all get rich! [Insert Howard Dean scream here...] Yaaaargh!)
So what can YOU -- the intelligent reader -- do with all this information? You're the exception to the idiocy of the masses, as is evident by the very fact that you get at least part of your news and information from non-mainstream sources. So how can you protect yourself from these hard economic times?
Here are some sensible solutions:
Solutions for Surviving the Economic Downfall of America. (Read More)
(and Why Today's Market Bloodbath is Only a Small Taste of Things to Come...)
(NaturalNews) Americans have always been fond of the idea of getting rich without effort by putting their money in things that produce no profits and then magically being able to ride those investments, milking them for spending cash that supports a drunken spending lifestyle. From 1998 - 2001, that profit vehicle was, of course, dot-com stocks. From 2001 to the present, it's been housing. Never mind the fact that a house produces nothing real, earns nothing real and actually loses utility with each successive year of its existence (roof repairs, anyone?) -- Americans have been convinced over the last seven years that housing prices would rise forever, allowing people to simply extract money from their home equity as if their house were some sort of giant ATM machine.
As the markets are finally demonstrating today, the "economic good times" spurred by a runaway housing price boom (and powered by astonishingly fraudulent lending practices by dishonest banks) are over. A day of reckoning has arrived, and the unwinding of this false wealth that has been propping up the U.S. economy for so many years is about to be unleashed upon the American people. (Today's stock market meltdown is only the beginning...)
That this day of economic reckoning would arrive has been obvious to me for years. On December 29, 2005, I published a two-part article series entitled, "Don't get caught in the housing bubble crash." Part two is available HERE.
In those articles, I stated:
There's no question whatsoever that this housing market will experience a correction. ...It's eventually going to come tumbling down. The only question is whether it's going to be a correction or a crash.
Friends, I believe it is time to take your money and exit the speculative real estate market. The average person doesn't understand anything about finances and never will. The average person can't even calculate a 15 percent tip at a restaurant, and he or she is buying real estate because he or she wants to double his or her money. Are you kidding me? Take your money and run; that's my advice. Run from the inflated real estate marketplace before you become another victim. These super hot, speculative housing bubbles and stock market bubbles cannot continue. They always correct. Gravity kicks in, and, eventually, things unwind. A lot of people get hurt. They lose their money. To some of those people, I say, "That's a really expensive education you just paid for." A lot of life's lessons are hard to learn, but some of them can be rather expensive.
So, it's December 2005. I'm going on the record as saying this bubble is going to pop, folks, and you can call me a pessimist or a doomsayer if you want. The fact is, if you understand math, you know I'm right. If you want to protect your own finances, you'd better take a good, hard look at this and make some decisions about what you're going to do. Do not leave yourself over-leveraged in speculative real estate. You thought you were going to retire on the beach, and it ends up you're flipping burgers as a second job to pay off what you owe the bank, and they garnish your wages on top of that. That's what happens to people who don't get out in time.
Two Years Later, the Housing Crash is On
I point out these predictions not to prove I was right, but rather to demonstrate how easy it was to see these things coming. The inevitable bursting of the housing bubble was a no brainer to any rationally-minded person, and yet everywhere I turned back in 2005, I kept hearing (from apparently intelligent folks) things like, "Housing prices have never fallen," or, "Buying a house is the best investment you can make!"
Nonsense. Any fool could see that while housing prices were rising 15 - 25% a year in some regions, there were no underlying fundamentals that would justify such an increase in the value of the property. The population, for example, wasn't increasing by 25% per year. Houses weren't becoming 25% more useful. Land wasn't becoming 25% more scarce. So what could possibly explain the rapid rise in housing prices? Easy money, of course.
That easy lending practices were being so aggressively pushed could only mean that more money was being artificially injected into the housing market, causing a fictitious rise in the value of homes based on the fact that there was too much money floating around in the hands of people who probably wouldn't qualify for such loans under normal, rigorous lending conditions. And once you realize that, it's not difficult to figure out that such lending practices will sooner or later backfire with a massive round of bankruptcies and bank repossessions.
And that, of course, will inevitably lead to a sustained drop in housing prices that, as I predicted, could ultimate see many homes drop to 50% of their peak values.
That's what's coming. I don't even have to offer a prediction of it: It's just a natural reaction to the economic practices that have been so unwisely pursued in this country for years.
The Domino Effect on the U.S. Economy
The U.S. economy, as any astute financial observer has noted for years, is running on artificial wealth that has been manufactured by the Federal Reserve and swallowed by gullible consumers chasing that pot of gold at the end of the easy money rainbow. An alarmingly large percentage of U.S. economic activity is driven by consumer spending and the taxation of such activities. So when housing prices plummet and consumer bankruptcies start piling up, here's what we're going to see next:
My prediction for 2008 - 2012 is a massive wave of municipal bankruptcies, state bankruptcies and escalating national debt. We are going to see cities and states go belly up, pension programs terminated (or watered down), and financial institutions teetering on the brink of disaster.
And the worst part of it all? The only way out of this financial mess is for the Federal Reserve to steal yet more money from the American people by printing more money and hyperinflating the currency.
This is the part where the late Aaron Russo and his film Freedom to Fascism comes into play. If you haven't already watched this documentary on the massive fraud of the Federal Reserve and the IRS, watch it now at Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid...
This is also the part where Ron Paul comes in (www.RonPaul2008.com), since Ron Paul is the only Presidential candidate who understands the financial destruction being caused by the Federal Reserve and has pledged to end the Fed's control over the U.S. money supply. (The Fed, by the way, is a privately-owned corporation that isn't even controlled by U.S. lawmakers.)
But given that most Americans are still likely to vote for status quo candidates and not for the radical changes required to bring economic sanity to our nation, it seems inevitable that this nation won't learn its lessons about the laws of economics until the currency is near-worthless, the population is destitute, the banks are owned by wealthy foreigners and the neighborhoods are boarded up and abandoned due to a massive wave of foreclosures.
While all that's happening, of course, the Federal Reserve is going to be trying (in vain) to print its way out of the debt implosion by creating hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air -- an act that quietly steals money from the people due to the loss of purchasing power (inflation). The amount of money needed to bail the U.S. out of its impending financial crisis will be so large that the real value of saved money in U.S. currency (i.e. dollars) could be reduced anywhere from 30% to 80%. Imagine: One day you have $25,000 in the bank that buys a car, and the next year, that same $25,000 only buys half a car. Nobody stole dollars from your account, but the Federal Reserve stole your purchasing power by inflating the currency while trying to print its way out of a national debt crisis! This is what's coming next.
The mathematically-impaired American masses, largely unable to follow basic economics, are destined to watch all this unfold with bewilderment, not knowing why their dollars are becoming worthless, but being rightly outraged by the turn of events at the same time. The MSM (Mainstream Media) will be no help, of course, since it's in on the scam. It will likely find some foreign scapegoat like blaming China's currency or Middle East oil prices for the disastrous effects of stupid domestic economic policies that have been pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike. (Of course, nobody has put the U.S. more deeply into debt than George W., largely thanks to spending on war.)
There's little question that hard economic times are coming, and not one in a hundred people has any real clue what to do about it. Not even many mainstream investment professionals, by the way -- they're the same idiots who probably told you to buy into the housing bubble in the first place, am I right? (Remember, through 2006 and 2007 when I was urging everybody to get OUT of the housing market, many investment "professionals" were urging people to keep on buying and leveraging their money in yet more housing! We'll all get rich! [Insert Howard Dean scream here...] Yaaaargh!)
So what can YOU -- the intelligent reader -- do with all this information? You're the exception to the idiocy of the masses, as is evident by the very fact that you get at least part of your news and information from non-mainstream sources. So how can you protect yourself from these hard economic times?
Here are some sensible solutions:
Solutions for Surviving the Economic Downfall of America. (Read More)
posted by Jeseppi Trade Wildfeather at 5:07 AM
0 comments
