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I think you are a special case. Very few people earn enough money to retire in the 40s or feel comfortable doing so. Many part timers want full time job and can't get it. My friend has been unemployed since 2001 as an engineer. I think he is now getting Social Security. He never ever held another job since. Yet the unemployment rate would not count people like him.
Is he looking for work? If he is then he would be included.
Recovery is an illusion, debt infused scam created by the Fed. We as a country are worse off today then back in 2008. We are actualy bankrupt and belong to Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
No, in early 80's Fed president Volker raised interest rates over 20% and that allowed us to have a real economic expansion that started in 1983 and lasted until 2001. That was a real economic expension, real growth and not a scam. We failed to start gradually raising interest rates in 2001 and that is where all our current problems started. The Fed knew growth was over in 2001. They should have begun raising interest rates then, slowly and steadily, until about now. When growth ends, then the illusion that lower rates will spur growth -- that illusion is dead. So they lie a little. They can't admit that growth is not perpetual, but cyclical. The party out of power will kill the party in power in anyone admits that. So, the FED lies to us by jacking down interest rates, and inflating debt. This kills the currency, but helps to avoid the depression that always accompanies periods of non-growth.
Greenspan understood he needed to raise rates. When the CRASH began in Nasdaq stocks at the end of the Business Cycle, Greenspan jacked down rates, because that is what the customary thinking is. Lower rates to spur growth. But when economic growth ends (periodically) you don't get growth with lower interest rates, you get cancer growths and asset bubbles. In 2003-5, Greenspan tries to make amends, by raising the FED Funds Rate. Clearly this was going to make him unpopular. He is the guy who appeared on Time Magazine with his cronies Larry Summers and R Rubin, who helped engineer the great giveaway to banks on Wall Street in 1998, giving banks and end to Depression-Era regulation against banking excess, both receiving huge payments for this little gift -- Time Magazine called the three "The Committee To Save the World". To go from the Savior to the Cretin who Destroyed the World would have been too much for Greenspan, so he retired and ran. Bernanke came in with a hairbrained scheme to replay the Great Depression and to change the past. Bernanke is mad, insane and an idiot; he is fixated with the Great Depression; he believed lower and lower interest rates would have avoided the Great Depression.
Nothing we could have done would have eliminated the Great Depression. If you get inflation, expansion (think of a balloon or bubble inflating), you get deflation. The two are married. So Bernanke embarked on this insane pilgrimmage to the 1930's. And everyone followed, rather than face the truth. So our debt climbed and climbed. We essentially have been stealing trillions of dollars from unborn generations to throw or waste into the Black Hole of Deflation to appease this Karmic God and avoid the retribution of Deflation, which is the spectre of another Great Depression.
The Fed is a source of all our problems. We haven't avoid Depression, we just bought few extra years and in the mean time we witnessed the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of this planet, massive theft of public money, criminals taking over our country, destruction of responsible and hardworking Americans or non-speculators, destruction of middle class, anyone who depends on fixed income, slaughter of the poor and etc.
And people still wonder why this recovery feels worse then recession for most citizens in this country, why is crime on the rise in most American cities, why homeless problem is increasing and etc. Its because this was never a real recovery, this was a massive theft of taxpayers money and transfer of wealth created by the Fed.
How much job growth can there be? Unemployment is about 5%. Unemployment for college level jobs has been 3% for a long time. There are not that many people left to hire and even less if we look at those jobs requiring college of other skilled workers.
I know right. April is a weird month as we start to see ramping up for summer hires. Also those trying to say that the (U-3) unemployment rate well neither does labor-participation rate. Wait, what? I know some of you talking up that one are scratching your heads but, it includes those purposely not looking for work or working in the not participating. So your retirees like Robert DeNiro's character in The Intern, stay-at-home parents or say college students focused on college are not included. No true method works except your local unemployment rates.
No, in early 80's Fed president Volker raised interest rates over 20% and that allowed us to have a real economic expansion that started in 1983 and lasted until 2001. That was a real economic expension, real growth and not a scam.
Not real, totally unsustainable. Most of the debt expansion was to pay for our trade deficit and to boost consumption, while consumer wages went nowhere.
HONEY WEVE BEEN IN A RECESSION SINCE THE LATE 1970s. Nothing has gone right in the balance of the economic factors every since. We've had periods of MOVEMENT and gradual shifts in employment but some of those people since the late 1970s never went back to work and died out. We have no real economic stimulus for the MIDDLE CLASS and COMMON MAN in over 40 years and the inflation rate is still at a staggering high compared to then. Inflation is never supposed to move in any given 50 year period. So all of the numbers the White House and the departments of state have been releasing on jobs reports over the last 40 years has been a lie. We may have gained up to 1 million jobs in the last 40 years thats it. That's the REAL number and that's because some people are being forced to work longer to pay their bills and all these INCREASING DEBTS AND LOANS that are pushing people into making agreements that take over 6 to 8 years to pay off. Back 40 years ago the average loan for a car was 48 months, Now its double that. Don't let me get started with the housing situation. Honey, people are moving into apartments at ALARMING RATES and into trailer manufactured homes as well at STAGGERING RATES. The only people who can afford to pay a 20 year fixed mortgage on a home are people who started investing or saving right after college and those are the ones who didn't have any INTEREST ROBBING LOANS they had to pay.
Can we move this to the prepper forum where it belongs?
No this thread belongs right here = Economics Forum. My continuing claim is that the Deflation Cycle that arrived on time in a year 2001 has been delayed by central bank thievery. ZIRP allows corporations to refinance debt for nothing, and allows corporations to buy their own shares, and retire shares from the market place, which drives up both share prices and the calculated earnings per share (NYSEARCA:EPS), not by increasing earnings but by reducing outstanding shares, another financial gimmick that is money in the pocket of the rich of the world. The rate of share buybacks has doubled in the last decade. I'm afraid that this is what capitalistic systems always come to and actually always live for: the BIG PAYDAY. They back their private trains up to the Public Wealth Depository, load their own trains with as much money as they can get, helped by the government they have bought off, and then make their get-aways before everything collapses.
The assumption in this is that the 'everything collapses' scenario is still to come.
The FED's investment in the present, at the cost of the future, still must be played out, as Japan, China and Europe lead the way, finally, into the black hole of deflation. The "ZIRP Recovery" -- the FED has spent trillions through the purchase of bad debt on overpriced assets and 'toxic' obligations -- and the "Viagra Economy" built on a weaker and weaker Dollar that exports inflation all over the world is a fraud.
There is no recovery. FED policies since 2001 are a miserable failure.
I can go on a record here and tell you that real economic growth is imposible to achieve until interest rates are raised, we go thru Deflation Cycle and all bad debt has been destroyed. Nothing else can work and will not work. So either we man up, go thru hard times and start from zero or we continue to live in denial, afraid to face the truth and try to come up with different gimmicks that won't work and can't work. Only Deflation can work and take us back to the next starting point of real economic growth and recovery, nothing else.
This is a year for the Fed to do the right thing and keep raising interest rates. It doesn't look like they have a stomach for it.
The labor force participation rate fell from March to April, partially wiping out the gains made since the beginning of this year.
Recovery is a lie, illusion created by the Fed.
It's ALL a conspiracy! Tell everyone!
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