Monthly archives "June 2011"

The Economy, Recession, Depression, or bump in the road

admin 50 Comments

Currently, the unemployment rate is at 9.1%. However, the official unemployment rate doesn’t include the underemployed, part time workers looking for full time work, and people who have voluntarily left the work force, because they’re unable to find work. An Under employed worker is one that’s working a job which is below his or her skill set.

People are saying last month’s job report is just a hiccup on the road to recovery, and it is only natural that a disappointing jobs report would follow after such a positive one in April. But April’s job report wasn’t really as positive as the media portrayed it.

Regardless of what the mainstream press tells you, things are not looking good. Right now our economy is based upon consumer spending, with a consumer that’s broke. Student loan debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, state and local government debt, as well as federal government debt is astronomically high. This economy can’t sustain itself, we are broke, we can’t spend anymore money.

In order to turn around this economy, we need to fundamentally restructure it back to a goods producing economy, like what we use to have.

Unfortunately in order to do that, things have to get worse before they get better. The service sector, particularly finance, the public sector, higher education, and the retail sector have to contract first, in order to have a real recovery take place. After these sectors contract, we then have to create goods producing jobs such as mining, Oil and gas, Manufacturing, etc. That’s what we need to do to turn around this economy, and it can’t be done overnight without some pain.

What people fail to realize is that, Jobs per say don’t grow an economy, its goods producing, productive jobs that grow an economy.

What I think this means for the stock market is that the free market forces are calling for an economic contraction, and deflation, but unfortunately Ben Bernanke thinks deflation is evil, and wants to fight it. According to Bernanke cheaper prices at the store are bad, but 4 dollar a gallon gas prices are just awesome. So I don’t think a 2008 stock market crash is likely, because at any sign of deflation, I think the Federal Reserve will inject as much liquidity into the market as possible to keep the stock market afloat.

But the market has a weird way of doing things, and some say that the credit contraction is going to be much greater than the money supply increase. I don’t believe so, but just in case you’re worried about a 2008 crash happening again, I would recommend you hedge yourself with these two inverse ETF’s.

I recommend the inverse financial etf (symbol FAZ), because I think the financials are going to be the first sector to go bankrupt due to inevitable higher interest rates, and the inverse small cap ETF (symbol TZA), because generally speaking, the small caps get hit harder than the large caps during a market crash, so you would make more money off these ETF’s in a crash.

In closing, here’s some statistics for you about the US economy. Over 500 wealthy Americans have become expats in the first quarter of this year. Over 70% of Wealthy Americans have moved 1/3 of their money out of the US and say they will be investing in China, India, and or brick countries.
When a country has a system with high taxes, and high regulations, this is what happens, the wealthy leave and go to where they are welcomed. Capital goes to were its treated the best, and Obama is downright hostile towards it.