The Great Credit Crash

A financial disaster is already afoot.

With so much attention focused on the Olympics and the Presidential election lies in wait the most sever financial crisis of our times. A financial crisis so sever 99% of all Americans will be financially devastated. They will in fact be far worse off than those who experienced  the Great Depression of the 1930's. And yet, even though some economists are sounding warnings about the impending financial catastrophe no one is even paying the slightest attention to the earthquake of economic doom. Not one presidential candidate or the media has even bothered to alert the public about a disaster of Titanic proportions unfolding right under our feet. 

 

We have to go back to January of this year when in just a few weeks into the new year US stocks dropped by more than 12% loosing over $3 trillion in value. We are being beguiled into thinking that our financial footing is all well and good when in fact the exact opposite happening. What is happening is our whole financial system is now just a house of cards where just one tiny cross breeze of inflation would send that whole house of cards tumbling down and with it wiping our practically everyone's financial means of support. To put it more bluntly just imagine waking up and going to get gas for your car. Your credit or debit card will not work because the banks have already frozen your account. And, what little cash you have on hand won't be enough to even buy a loaf of bread. Scary isn't it? A real imminent full blown financial crisis will soon be at our front door.

 

 To put this in perspective right now corporate debt is over $30 trillion and counting. American consumers are now holding over $733 billion in credit card debt. They hold over $1 trillion in auto loan debt. This while today student loan debt has reached over $1.4 trillion with more than 12% of these loans are in default or overdue by more than 90 days. All this debt is strangling the life blood of our whole economy. Compounding this problem is the fact that the economy in the United States has remained flat for over four decades. But wait their is good news if you happen to be in the 1%. Your net worth just keep growing by leaps and bounds. While the 1% dine on caviar and champagne the rest of us eat hot dogs and stale beer. Without a growing economy or having the "Williams Theory of Economic Evolution being fulfilled there is no possible way for the United States to ever be able to pay back all this accumulated debt. Simply put The U.S. economy is withering and dying on that vine of lost opportunities. This, despite the biggest stimulus of new cash, think of all those Qualitative Easing programs the Fed pumped out and the exorbitant amount of and credit available. Yet, we have far fewer real living wage jobs being filled or even being offered today than we did just 15 years ago. Thus, the typical household has even far less income. This while the cost of living keeps increasing. Too many are trapped into a cycle of having to rob Peter to pay Paul just to make it through one more day. There are a lot of people out there who know deep down that something’s not right in America. Could it be that with all this debt increasing every day a great credit crash is inevitable?

 

This is only part of the monumental credit and debt crisis facing the United States. The national debt of this nation has reached a level unprecedented in the history of our nation. The government has to keep borrowing just to keep meeting it's expenditures. But, with endless wars, and more people now than ever being relied of those meager safety nets just adds to the national debt. Yet, we still have our politicians offering band aid fixes to a monumental hemorrhaging society. With all this debt from our national to consumer debt the immediate problem we face is that there's not enough real money in our financial system. Between $958 billion to $1.5 trillion changes hands in the U.S. every month. People buy milk, pay babysitters. They pay their mortgages and their taxes. Consumer spending alone is $11.2 trillion annually. But here's the thing there's only $1.2 trillion worth of actual dollars " physical money in the entire world. We can't be sure how much of that is actually here in the U.S. Estimates are that some 50 percent to 75 percent of our money is in overseas bank accounts or held by foreign governments, and a lot of what is left in the states is called "dead money." It's stuffed in mattresses and safe-deposit boxes. In fact, the amount of U.S. dollars being hoarded this way that is to say the amount of dead money is now at an all-time high. Corporate America is by far the worst offender in hoarding cash. Think back to those QE1 and 2 bailouts by the fed with borrowed money to the financial sector. Instead of dolling out readily available cash to the public all they did was hoard it an let the public use credit to finance their daily expenditures. It was only recently that banks have put caps on all cash withdrawals. And you can see there really is a cash shortage.  

 

Since the 1970s, the credit system in America has grown to become our biggest and our most crucial asset. Credit, not real money, is what people spend. Since 1971, the real money has been taken out of the system. Credit is what we have now. And, every credit dollar has a dark side to it, debt. And there’s more debt outstanding now than twice the value of every single home in America put together, more than three times the value of every single U.S. bank's assets combined, more than 20 times the trillions of dollars the U.S. government collects in taxes every year. To put this in perspective let's say you have one physical dollar, the one with George Washington. It doesn't matter what other people think or what's happening on Wall Street; it's yours to spend as you like. But, with credit it is another ball game entirely. It can disappear before you spend it, because at some point all that credit can only exist if people believe they'll get paid back, that is if they believe there's enough money in America to pay back all that $60 trillion in outstanding credit. The sad fact there isn't. Our credit system is insolvent. And when it fails, which it surely will do, it could wipe out more wealth than any other crisis in history.

 

During the financial crisis of 2008 over $10 trillion vanished. This next crisis will wipe out six times that amount. What we are saying is that our whole financial system will collapse. An economic disaster unparallel in the history of the world. Today, our whole society relies on credit. And, when any one link in the chain of production through distribution in economies is broken the whole credit system will implode. Businesses can't run. Paychecks don't go out.  This credit crash not only destroys the mechanism that runs our economy, it shuts down our access to our own money. Just imagine what happens as lenders try to redeem $60 trillion worth of credit and there's only $250 billion to go around. You go to your ATM; you ask for cash, but there isn't any cash left. Suppose you have a $10,000 line of credit on your card. If the credit system doesn’t work, you might as well be flat broke. Dollars become ultra scarce. Prices skyrocket. Banks go under. In fact, it would only take about three hours for our entire country to shut down. 2008 was the last time our credit system came to the verge of collapse. But this next crisis watch out.

To stop this impending disaster will take much more than open mouth rhetoric by our politicians. It starts with educating the public to realize that drastic reforms are urgently needed to stave off a disaster that would wipe out our whole financial and economic system. The implications of not addressing this urgent crisis will have global ramifications that will lead to a world war. A war which in all likelihood would send humanity back into the caves of the Neanderthal. The need is apparent and urgent action is required. And it starts with implementation of National Economic Reform's Ten Articles of Confederation.

 

 

 

 

  

Reviews

[veck]

Deep stuff, man. Your writing style makes me want to read for hours on end. Keep up with your gift :)

[wordman]

world war three is at the door,