EconomicCrisis.US

Michael Snyder: The Federal Reserve says that everything is going to be okay.  The Fed says that unemployment is going to go down, inflation is going to remain low and economic growth is going to steadily increase.  Do you believe them this time?  As you will see later in this article, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been dead wrong about the economy over and over again.  But the mainstream media and many Americans still seem to have a lot of faith in the Federal Reserve.  It doesn’t seem to matter that Bernanke and other Fed officials have been telling the American people lies for years.  As I always say, most people believe what they want to believe, and many people seem to want to have blind faith in the Federal Reserve even when logic and reason would dictate otherwise.  The truth is that things are not going to be getting much better than they are right now.  When the next wave of the financial crisis hits, the U.S. economy is going to fall back into recession, financial markets are going to crash and unemployment is going to absolutely skyrocket.  But you will never hear any of that from the Federal Reserve.
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While America claims to be a class-free society, the opposite often seems to be the case. Americans are obsessed with social status in all its forms whether based on celebrity, artistic or athletic accomplishment, or just plain money. Although royalty is not legal in America, our economic royalty including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are as highly regarded as any English duke or earl.

When it comes to status, we don’t look just at the size of one’s bank account, we make distinctions based on the nexus of money and social standing. This leads to contrasts such as “old money” and “new money” with the former connoting generations of life on country estates and Ivy League credentials while the latter is something flashier. The Astor family have been wealthy for over 200 years and practically define old money in America.
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Since around 1870 the United States has had the largest economy in the world. In security matters, however, particularly in Europe, the US still played a limited role until the Second World War. In 1945, at the end of the war, the United States was clearly the strongest power the world had ever seen. It produced almost as much as the rest of the world put together. Its military lead was significant; its “soft power” even more dominant.

After the Second World War the American share of world production rapidly declined to 40 percent in 1950, 30 percent in 1960, and 25 percent in 1975. Soon predictions were made, not only by the Soviet leaders, that the Soviet Union would come to surpass the United States. The problems of the 1970s — Vietnam, Watergate, and the partial collapse of the Bretton Woods-system — indicated that the United States was in decline. In the 1980s predictions were made again; this time that Japan would come to surpass America. And, despite the 1990s being a very strong decade for the US, the many successes of the European Union soon made many observers predict that the future belonged to the EU.
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How can we ease Americans’ financial pain and help “return the nation to a “full employment economy”? That’s a question with no easy answers, notes former President Bill Clinton — but government and business leaders can start truly addressing the economic crisis by “building a world of shared prosperity and shared responsibility,” he said during a speech at the National Retail Federation’s annual convention in New York Monday.

In his speech, Clinton offered up some wide-ranging prescriptions for curing the nation’s ailing economy, among them investing in new sectors for job growth — for example, retrofitting buildings so that they’re energy-efficient — supporting high-end manufacturing in the U.S., lowering the tax rate for businesses so they can reinvest in job creation, and “accelerating the resolution of the mortgage crisis” by helping people who owe more on their homes than they’re worth. One way would be to lower the principals on those loans to the value of the homes, he said.
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