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Moving back with mom and dad…at 52

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 16th, 2008

Learn to tell them “no” at a very young age:

After being laid off from her job as an events planner at an upscale resort, Jo Ann Bauer struggled financially. She worked at several lower-paying jobs, relocated to a new city and even declared bankruptcy.

Then in December, she finally accepted her parents’ invitation to move into their home — at age 52. “I’m back living in the bedroom that I grew up in,” she said.

Taking shelter with parents isn’t uncommon for young people in their 20s, especially when the job market is poor. But now the slumping economy and the credit crunch are forcing some children to do so later in life — even in middle age.

Financial planners report receiving many calls from parents seeking advice about taking in their grown children following divorces and layoffs.

Kim Foss Erickson, a financial planner in Roseville, Calif., north of Sacramento, said she has never seen older children, even those in their 50s, depending so much on their parents as in the last six months.

“This is not like, ‘OK, my son just graduated from college and needs to move back in’ type of thing,” she said. “These are 40- and 50-year-old children of my clients that they’re helping out.”

Parents “jeopardize their financial freedom by continuing to subsidize their children,” said Karin Maloney Stifler, a financial planner in Hudson, Ohio, and a board member of the Financial Planning Association. “We have a hard time saying no as a culture to our children, and they keep asking for more.”

IMF says US crisis is ‘largest financial shock since Great Depression’

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 10th, 2008

More “no kidding!” reporting from the Guardian: 

America’s mortgage crisis has spiralled into “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression” and there is now a one-in-four chance of a full-blown global recession over the next 12 months, the International Monetary Fund warned today.

The US is already sliding into what the IMF predicts will be a “mild recession” but there is mounting pessimism about the ability of the rest of the world to escape unscathed, the IMF said in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. Britain is particularly vulnerable, it warned, as it slashed its growth targets for both the US and the UK.

The report made it clear that there will be no early resolution to the global financial crisis.

More…

3rd World Status: A Pink Slip Away

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 10th, 2008

Thanks for the hard work…YOU’RE FIRED!

The U.S. is on life support from foreign nations. The Chinese, Arabs, East Indians, Japanese et al, loan us approximately $3 Billion per day in an attempt to keep us treading water. More than 3 Million jobs have been lost in industry and farming continues its slide to corporate ownership.

There are between 12 and 15 million known illegals in the U.S.. Medicare is slated to fail within 10 years. Personal savings remain negative for the third consecutive year (never before seen in our history). The first of 78,000,000 baby boomers became eligible for social security in January.

The national debt has increased by 1000% in the last 25 years to $9 Trillion and we have become the largest debtor nation on earth. Middle America is being selectively wiped out by our own countries trade policies. What have we done?

Some how, some way, Middle America has to awaken to these and other discouraging facts; life as we know it for this class of Americans is in the balance. Not one of our current presidential candidates has a viable plan for saving Middle America. They are totally and completely beholden to special interests…rich special interests.

Continued…

Greenspan, on CNBC: U.S. in recession

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 9th, 2008

Thank, Alan for the heads up. I wonder if he knows that people are already calling it the “Greenspan Recession”:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday the U.S. economy was in recession, and said it would be appropriate to tap public funds to resolve the mortgage-related crisis that has helped pull the economy under.  

In an interview with CNBC television in which he defended his chairmanship of the U.S. central bank against charges that his policy missteps had laid the groundwork for the current crisis, Greenspan said Fed decisions on his watch were rationally constructed based on evidence at the time.

“I have no regrets on any of the Federal Reserve policies that we initiated back then because I think they were very professionally done,” Greenspan said.

It is unfair to hold his Fed to task for the housing bubble or the current crisis in credit markets, because global market forces were at work to keep long-term interest rates low, not just Fed policies that brought short-term U.S. interest rates down to multi-decade lows, he said.

“Clearly, certain of our anticipations of what would happen as a consequence of those policies were off but there’s no way of avoiding that,” he said.

Translation: “its not my fault!”

Confidential Document Said To Warn of Conflict or Revolution Ahead for America

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 4th, 2008

Conflict and Revolution 

Wars and rumors of war, anyone? 

WMR (waynemadsenreport) has learned from knowledgeable sources within the US financial community that an alarming confidential and limited distribution document is circulating among senior members of Congress and their senior staff members that is warning of a bleak future for the United States if it does not quickly get its financial house in order. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have reportedly read the document.

The document is being called the “C & R” document because it reportedly states that if the United States defaults on loans and debt underwriting from China, Japan, and Russia, all of which are propping up the United States government financially, and the United States unilaterally cancels the debts, America can expect a war that will have disastrous results for the United States and the world. “Conflict” is the “C word” in the document.

The other scenario is that the federal government will be forced to drastically raise taxes in order to pay off debts to foreign countries to the point that the American people will react with a popular revolution against the government. “Revolution” is the document’s “R word.” The origin of the document is not known, however, its alarming content matches up with previous warnings from former Comptroller General David Walker who abruptly resigned as head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in February of this year after repeatedly publicly warning of a “financial meltdown” disaster if America’s $9 trillion debt was not addressed quickly. Financial experts have warned that the national debt, corrected for inflation, could reach $46 trillion in the next 20 years. A month earlier, Walker warned the Senate Banking Committee about the reaction of creditor nations in Asia and Europe if the U.S. did not address its debt problem.

USA 2008: The Great Depression

Posted by Charlie Kilo on March 31st, 2008

The Independent, one of the UK’s largest papers, has declared that the United States is in a “depression”! They report:

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

The increase – from 26.5 million in 2007 – is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards. But above all it is the pressures being exerted on ordinary Americans by an economy that is suddenly beset by troubles. Housing foreclosures, accelerating jobs losses and fast-rising prices all add to the squeeze.

Emblematic of the downturn until now has been the parades of houses seized in foreclosure all across the country, and myriad families separated from their homes. But now the crisis is starting to hit the country in its gut. Getting food on the table is a challenge many Americans are finding harder to meet. As a barometer of the country’s economic health, food stamp usage may not be perfect, but can certainly tell a story.

The story also reports a 5% increase in unemployment in March. The plot thickens…

Update. Here’s additional coverage from the New York Times: As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record

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