EconomicCrisis.US

The nation’s economy gained some much-needed strength in the third quarter, as the pace of growth nearly doubled compared to the previous three months.

The nation’s gross domestic product, the broadest measure of its economic health, grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the quarter after adjusting for inflation. That’s up from the disappointing 1.3 percent growth in the second quarter and the anemic 0.4 percent pace in the first three months of the year.
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Three Nobel economists share their thoughts on America’s future, what went wrong, and what can be done to fix things.

Coming home from my Italian vacation this year was an abrupt transition. From the calm waters of southern Sardinia, I was plunged into the global economy’s stormy seas. Financial markets were plummeting, driven by pessimistic growth forecasts in Europe and America. Investors were fleeing for safety pretty much everywhere. Systemic risk—the statistical likelihood of outright economic collapse—was rising. Yields on Italian and Spanish sovereign debt were climbing into the danger zone, threatening to fly out of control. America was on the verge of a technical default on its sovereign debt.
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Oliver Wyman Group has released a very interesting piece about the potential for a future financial crisis. They make the case that the next great financial crisis will occur around 2015 and will be the result of a massive bubble in commodity markets that results in widespread economic collapse and sovereign defaults.

I’ve described in recent reports how the financialization of the USA is helping to drive commodity prices higher and generate economic instability. This, combined with the other two major structural imbalances in the global economy (China’s flawed economic policy and the inherently flawed single currency system in Europe) are creating an environment that is ripe for disequilibrium and turmoil. The potential for bubbles is not only likely, but now appears like a near certainty.
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Despite the best efforts by the American mainstream financial media, the eager PR division of the United States Dollar Ponzi Scheme, to paint the rosiest of rosy pictures for blindly optimistic readers, the stubborn image of a debt-swollen jobless behemoth economy slowly toppling persists. No matter how much U.S. departmental data is primped, polished, and primed, no amount of lipstick is going to transform this fat pig into a princess.

This week’s top harbinger headline points to the fact that the United States is once again bumping its fat head on the ceiling of its spectacularly stratospheric debt ceiling of $14.3 TRILLION dollars. That means an act of congress is once again necessary to lift that limit. The alternative is either a) a revaluation of the U.S. Dollar to reflect the depreciation inherent in Quantitative Sleazing as part of a debt restructuring, or b) default.
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