American Economy Reality

~ American Economy - consumer spending ~

John Smith (American Citizen) started the day early having set his alarm clock

(MADE IN JAPAN)

for 6am.

While his coffeepot

(MADE IN CHINA)

was perking, he shaved with his

electric razor

(MADE IN HONG KONG .)

He put on a

Dress shirt

(MADE IN SRI LANKA ),

designer jeans

(MADE IN SINGAPORE )

and

tennis shoes

(MADE IN KOREA )

After cooking his breakfast in his new

electric skillet

(MADE IN INDIA)

he sat down with his

calculator

(MADE IN MEXICO)

to see how much he could spend today.

After setting his

watch

(MADE IN TAIWAN)

to the radio

(MADE IN CHINA)

he got in his car

(MADE IN GERMANY)

filled it with GAS

(from Saudi Arabia )

and continued his search

for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.

At the end of yet another discouraging

and fruitless day

checking his

Computer

(Made In Malaysia),

John decided to relax for a while.

He put on his sandals

(MADE IN BRAZIL )

poured himself a glass of

wine

(MADE IN FRANCE)

and turned on his

TV

(MADE IN INDONESIA),

and then wondered why he can't find

a good paying job

in AMERICA.

AND NOW HE'S HOPING HE CAN GET HELP FROM PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA

(MADE IN KENYA)

Hedge Fund Paid Summers $5.2 Million in Past Year
By JOHN D. MCKINNON and T.W. FARNAM
WASHINGTON -- Top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers received about $5.2 million over the past year in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financial institutions.

A financial disclosure form released by the White House Friday afternoon shows that Mr. Summers made frequent appearances before Wall Street firms including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. He also received significant income from Harvard University and from investments, the form shows.

In total, Mr. Summers made a total of about 40 speaking appearances to financial sector firms and other places, with fees totaling about $2.77 million. Fees ranged from $10,000 for a Yale University speech to $135,000 for an appearance paid for by Goldman Sachs & Co.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123879462053487927.html

TAX REVOLT (G.CELENTE ON FRIDAY)
http://www.netcastdaily.com/broadcast/fsn2009-0418-3b.mp3

Visual Foreclosure

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw

Budget deficit triples to $957 billion for year
March deficit hits $192 billion has receipts drop 28%, outlays rise 41%

The deficit is well on its way to the $1.75 trillion -- or 12.3% of gross domestic product -- that the White House has estimated for the full fiscal year, which ends in September.
The deficit through the first six months is more than three times higher than it was at this time last year. The government has borrowed $1 trillion from the public so far this fiscal year.

In March, the deficit widened to $192.3 billion from $48.2 billion in March 2008. Outlays rose 41% to $321.2 billion from $227 billion, while receipts dropped 28% to $129 billion from $178.8 billion.

__________________________



By the way, I thought one of the great headlines in the papers from those days was, "The deluge of panic selling overwhelms the market. 19 million shares changed hands." 19 million shares changing hands caused the crash in 1929! That's about a minute today. Okay, before the Great Depression, Coolidge was telling us, at the end of his presidency, that everything was cool, and then we got Hoovered. They tried to balance the budget, and they didn't really provide any stimulus. We got Smoot-Hawley. Given the massive implosion of capital and the closing of banks, there clearly was not enough growth in the money supply. Government and the Fed just did a lot of wrong things.

So at the height of the Depression, in 1933, as Roosevelt was coming into his first term, we had 25% total unemployment; 37% (!) of non-farm workers were unemployed; 4004 banks had failed; $3.6 billion in deposits was lost. That's like trillions in dog years, okay? At least in 2009 dog years. You end up with bread lines, and the stock market just keeps going down, down, down (with a few marvelous bear-market rallies – maybe like what we are seeing today?).

Roosevelt comes along and we get the New Deal. He applied massive stimulus. By the way, his stimulus hired people. He put them to work building parks and the Tennessee Valley Authority. They were building a lot of infrastructure. He didn't put it into Democratic wish lists and permanent wealth transfers and welfare and special-interest agendas to increase the overall budget beyond what we could ever hope to actually pay for (without even more radical tax increases), which the Obama Administration is clearly doing. We'll get to the effectiveness of current policies in a moment.

Then let's look at what he did in 1937. With the economy somewhat on the mend, he tried to balance the budget, raise taxes, reduce deficit spending. And what happened? We had another deep recession and unemployment jumped back up to 20%. It was hard to pull that stimulus back out. And it's particularly dangerous to raise taxes in a weak economy.

Most of the people in this room are old enough to remember the Blue Screen of Death. Remember, you would be typing along on your computer and all of a sudden you would get this screen, saying, "You have an impossible error." (Okay, what's an "impossible" error? Clearly something happened that was possible.)

And the only thing you could do was just unplug the thing. You couldn't even turn it off -- you just had to unplug the computer. It was the Blue Screen of Death. Well, that is kind of what World War II was for the world. We unplugged the world economy, and then we started from a new base. We hit the reset button. We were at lows everywhere in the world; places were in a mess. So we began to grow from there. The bebt supercycle started. For all the recessions and bear markets, a new stability ensued, and debt and leverage began to grow.

We'll revisit that point in a moment. We are doing just what I do in my regular e-letter: I'm going to take three or four ideas, and at the end I'm going to try and tie them all together. Let's see how successful I am.

What Is Money?



Let's talk about what money is. For some people it's M-1 or M-2, and they worry that the money supply is growing too much. For some people it's gold; gold is the only real currency. I think those ideas each have their place, and there's some truths to them, but they focus us on the wrong thing.

It's a bit misleading to talk about money supply, because what money really is is roughly $2 trillion of cash and then $50 trillion in credit. Because what do the banks do? They take deposits in and then they borrow money to leverage them up. I take my credit card and I spend with it. I borrow against a house. I have an asset that rises, and I borrow against it.

We have two trillion dollars of actual cash propping up $50 trillion in credit. If we all decided to settle and pay off everything, we couldn't do it because there is not enough cash. There would be massive asset deflation. We, as a nation, are levered 25 to 1, or we were. Now, that $50 trillion is in a real sense the money supply because that is what we are all pretending is real money. I lend you money and you pretend you are going to pay me back. Then you pretend he [pointing at another attendee] is not going to call your debt for cash, and we are all going to keep the system going. Because if we all try to pay each other back at once, we are all collectively -- and this is a technical economic term -- screwed.

So we keep the system going. Now, where are we today? We are at the Great Deleveraging. We are seeing massive losses and destruction of assets, on a scale that is unprecedented. There was massive destruction of assets during the Great Depression, which caused a lot of problems, and we are seeing the same thing today. We are watching trillions simply being poofed (another technical economics term – which will drive my poor Chinese translator crazy!). We are watching people pay down their credit lines, which is one way of saying the supply of money and credit is shrinking.

This is not just in the US, but all over the world. Because when you start adding European cash-to-credit, and Japanese cash-to-credit, and Indonesian and Chinese cash-to-credit, it becomes multiple tens of trillions, and we are watching a goodly portion of that credit be vaporized. So we -- individuals and businesses -- are trying to find that $2 trillion in real cash and get some of it to pay down our debts. We are reducing that massive leveraged money supply down to some smaller number. We are hitting the Blue Screen of Death. We don't know what it is going to reset to, but we have permanently seared the psyche of the American consumer, and it is going to get reset to some lower number, about which I will speculate in a minute.

Now to give you some idea of how important credit was in our recent period of economic growth – and I keep using this slide, but it is an important slide because it shows you what would have happened in the economy without mortgage equity withdrawals. The red lines are what GDP would have been without MEWs. Notice that in 2001 and 2002 we would have had negative GDP for two years, that's 24 months. It would have been as long as or longer than the current recession. Not quite as deep, because we had the Bush stimulus and Bush tax cuts at the time. The Bush tax cuts were very important in keeping the economy rolling over in 2001 and 2002.