How inflation is purposely underreported as a justification to maintain low interest rates: Two specific examples with housing and college tuition.
Inflation is largely misunderstood by the public at large. People for the most part think that inflation is the natural economic order and that prices go up naturally. Official inflation figures play a much bigger role influencing cost-of-living adjustments for things like Social Security but also serve as cover to maintain low interest rates. The […]
The Middle Class in America has just become a minority: For the first time in over 50 years low-income and high-income Americans outnumber the middle class.
It was only a matter of time but we can now officially say that the middle class in America has reached minority status designation. Recent figures show that there are more low-income and high-income Americans versus those in the middle class. Most of the growth has been fueled by the trend in adding low wage […]
We have traded building cars for mixing drinks: This year the US added nearly 300,000 waiters and bartenders, and zero manufacturing workers. Manufacturing was once 33 percent of all jobs and now it is below 10 percent.
While the Federal Reserve now looks to have the green light on raising interest rates after many head fakes, the employment report isn’t so clear. Sure, we are adding jobs but we are adding a large number of jobs in the low wage segment of our economy. Case and point? Since the start of the […]
Unable to afford homes, Americans dive into subprime auto debt to purchase cars: Auto debt getting riskier with extended terms and chasing borrowers with lower credit scores.
The word “subprime†was synonymous with the toxic loans that were made during the credit bubble. Some tend to think that those days are long gone but we simply have shifted the form in which toxic debt is filtered into the system. Instead of making no-doc no-income loans on houses, we are now offering no-income […]