Elaine Meinel Supkis
Always, if you want to see the truth, it pays to look at the raw data after it has been finalized by the army of faceless, nameless drones toiling away in windowless buildings in the heart of our capital cities! There lies the hard realities. And today, we look at the 1st quarter of 2007 and compare it with the previous 5 years.
Click here to see the raw numbers.
I hate the way they put this online with the PDF format. The pixels are set as if we have old computers that can barely handle even small data downloads. So I moved the nearly impossible to read numbers into Photoshop where I colorized several select sectors. Highlighting the red ink is very valuable because we can then see easily, how things are going downhill. In some of this data, it lets us see where we went the most into debt and how things are winding down already.
There is fierce debate over whether or not we are in a recession. This is a dumb argument with one side trying to push along a wheelbarrel load of cow droppings while a tiny minority points out the obvious. The aggregate numbers don't lie. Click on all images to enlarge otherwise it is nearly impossible, even after I worked hard to make it more legible.
First, I took some of the tables concerning our FOREX holdings, in this case, gold. All buyers of gold who read this news service, do note who is selling gold! Not just the European central banks! Starting in 2003, our government began to seriously sell off the left overs in Fort Knox. Might have to change it to 'Hard Knocks'. In 2005, when the Federal Reserve woke up from its 1% snooze and began raising rates, the biggest sell-off occured: -$14.3 billion. But every year since then, it has been flowing outwards at around $3-5 billion a year. Despite this, gold prices have climbed steeply since 2000 and for obvious reasons. If the central banks in the EU and US weren't selling off steadily, the price of gold would be around $800+ an ounce.
I suppose they are forced to do this in order to harrumph, 'Gold has no real value and can't keep up with inflation.' But this is because they are insuring it doesn't keep up with inflation. Gold, unlike infinite fiat currency, can't be sold off forever. There is a limit. And we are in a race where our leaders and the top dogs are deliberately killing off our fundamental basis of all currency. They really do want us to believe their infinite paper is infinitely valuable. At least, as far as they tell us.
If people are buying gold for their families and their grandchildren, have fun. Just remember, holding it is harder than buying it.
Now, US deposits in foreign lands: ouch. The worst period was the end of 2006. I bet the 3rd quarter of 2007 will look as bad, too! Just last November, it was -$194.3 billion. Last February, right when we had that bobble, that mini-panic, it was -$9.3 billion but looking at the numbers, I would suggest the market instability at the end of February when world stock markets fell very fast, was partially due to the sudden, serious deterioration of US funds overseas.
Note the net change in liabilities. -$508.7 in the first quarter of 2007. I think we can sniff the smell of a bad banking situation coming up in these numbers. Right now, all the funny money wizards are busy waving their wands, trying to convince us all is well, hahaha. They really didn't need a trillion bucks to save themselves. Hahaha. And besides, they have infinite wealth and they are going to party, dudes, and lose their Masserattis and lose their toupees and run amock laughing like gulls fighting over fish slop at the wake of a deep sea trawler.
Now let's look at some serious red ink. Awesome numbers, here. Gads. The trade between the US and its allies, friends, enemies and very deadly rivals:
OK: our trade has doubled with all other nations. And they are now doing over $3 trillion in trade a year. Gasp. This is huge, real huge. No other nation comes close. This puts us, a nation in debt up to our nose, at the center of wall world trade. We go down, the collapse will make the fall of the British Empire look minor in comparison.
Do note the worst year in red ink for us was from the end of 2005 to the middle of 2006! This exactly coincides with the end of the housing bubble.
This is why I stuck the REIT, the Real Estate Trusts numbers next to our trade deficit numbers. The two are intimately tied together. Oh, look! Right at the end of 2005, the REITS go in the red! The worst point was in the spring of 2006. Many of us back then were very loudly yelling that the housing bubble was completely dead. The media was yelling that is was minor, it was over and look, look, houses were selling. Even as we pointed out, the sales were firesales and prices were dropping, they ignored all this. Suddenly, last July, they began to howl about how we were going to have 'a soft landing.' It was -28.5 billion in the second quarter of 2006 but far from improving, it is still nearly as bad at -$22.4 billion the first quarter of 2007 and I bet it is much worse for this spring's numbers.
Stocks shot up, stupidly, today on news that houses sold last month. Whoopee. But closing is another story. We have no data at to prices or who will drop contracts and all the funny money stuff, the gifts and games used to push these houses will not come to light for a long, long time. The market is bad, we do know this for certain. How bad, we can't tell but the numbers here look very bad and getting no better over time.
Personal savings: remember the flim flam about how Americans were buying last Christmas? Boatloads of foreign-made goods especially flat-screen TVs and new video game systems as well as other electronic stuff not to mention a tsunami of poisonous Mattel toys for our children, poured in. And we paid for all this garbage by increasing our debts and our savings rate collapsed into a black hole. Then the world banking system went into first one crash two months later and then yet again, six months after that!
All these numbers have convinced me that free trade and easy money equals financial death for anyone big enough to get away with wild spending. There is much more to this story. Today, the very wealthy are openly boasting they have a super-big Sugar Daddy who will shower wealth upon them at all our expense. A serious topic indeed.
Culture of Life News Main Page
"not to mention a tsunami of poisonous Mattel toys for our children, poured in"
George Ure makes an excellent point that poisoned toys and pet food appeared only after Hank Paulson went to China to demand they take more US paper.
http://www.urbansurvival.com/week.htm
Posted by: Canuck | August 24, 2007 at 11:20 PM