Just like we witnessed during the last recession, major retailers are laying off tens of thousands of workers, and it looks like this will be the worst year for store closings in all of U.S. history.  Many are referring to this as “the retail apocalypse”, and without a doubt this is one of the toughest stretches for retailers that we have ever seen.  But many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.  After all, if retailers are struggling this much now, how bad will things be once the next recession really gets rolling?

Of course the truth is that things have been rocky for the retail industry for quite a few years, but the numbers are telling us that this crisis is really starting to accelerate.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, retail layoffs were up a whopping 92 percent in January and February compared to the same period a year ago.  The following comes from NBC News…

More than 41,000 people have lost their jobs in the retail industry so far this year — a 92 percent spike in layoffs since the same time last year, according to a new report.

And the layoffs continue to mount, with JCPenney announcing this week it would be closing 18 stores in addition to three previously announced closures, as part of a “standard annual review.”

Yes, competition from Internet commerce is hurting the traditional retail industry, but it certainly doesn’t explain a 92 percent increase.

And very few retailers have been able to avoid this downsizing trend.  At this point, even the largest retailer in the entire country has begun “quietly closing stores”…

Walmart is closing at least 11 US stores across eight states.

The stores include one Walmart Supercenter in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Walmart Neighborhood Market stores in Arizona, California, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.

For decades, Wal-Mart has been expanding extremely aggressively.

They have plenty of cash, and so the only way that it would make sense for them to close stores is if they anticipated that we are heading into a recession.

Here is a list of the addresses where Wal-Mart stores are closing…

6085 W. Chandler Blvd., Chandler, Arizona
3900 W. Ina Road, Tucson, Arizona
1600 Saratoga Ave., San Jose, California
712 N. Western Ave., Liberal, Kansas
1229 NE. Evangeline Trwy., Lafayette, Louisiana
3603 Broad River Road, Columbia, South Carolina
1757 W. Andrew Johnson Hwy., Morristown, Tennessee
2501 University Commons Way, Knoxville, Tennessee
7000 Iron Bridge Road, North Chesterfield, Virginia
2864 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach, Virginia
7809 NE. Vancouver Plaza Dr., Vancouver, Washington

Of course Wal-Mart is in far better shape than almost everyone else in the industry.

One of Wal-Mart’s key competitors, Shopko, has just announced that they will be shutting down all of their stores…

Shopko will liquidate its assets and close all of its remaining locations by mid-June.

The company was unable to find a buyer for the retail business and will begin winding down its operations beginning this week, the company said in statement released Monday. The decision to liquidate will bring an end to the brick-and-mortar business that began in 1962 with one location in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And personally I was very saddened to learn that Lifeway Christian Bookstores has also decided to close all their brick and mortar stores…

Lifeway Christian Bookstores announced last week it would be closing the doors of all 170 brick and mortar stores, in a pivot to focusing on digital and e-commerce.

“The decision to close our local stores is a difficult one,” said Lifeway Chief Executive Officer Brad Waggoner. “While we had hoped to keep some stores open, current market projections show this is no longer a viable option.”

Whenever I do an article like this, I always have some readers that try to convince me that this is only happening because of the growth of Internet retailing.

And yes, Internet retailing has been growing, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. retail sales.  In addition, it is important to point out that Internet retailers had a very disappointing holiday season just like brick and mortar retailers did.

Ultimately, the truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily slowing down in recent months.

During the months of December, January and February, the amount of stuff being moved around the country by truck, rail and air was lower than during all of those same months a year earlier.  The following comes from Wolf Richter…

Now it’s the third month in a row, and the red flag is getting more visible and a little harder to ignore about the goods-based economy: Freight shipment volume in the US across all modes of transportation – truck, rail, air, and barge – in February fell 2.1% from February a year ago, according to the Cass Freight Index, released today. The three months in a row of year-over-year declines are the first such declines since the transportation recession of 2015 and 2016.

I have a feeling that when we get the final numbers for March that they will show that this streak has now extended to four months.

Right now, unsold goods are starting to pile up in U.S. warehouses at a rate that we haven’t seen since the last recession.  Many retailers that are barely clinging to life will simply not survive if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get rougher for the U.S. economy in the months ahead.

So more retail workers are going to get laid off, more stores are going to close, and there are going to be a lot more stories about our ongoing “retail apocalypse” in the mainstream media.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Last week we reported that the yield curve on US Treasurys had inverted after the yield on the 10-year fell below the yield on 3-year bonds for the first time since 2007 – the cusp of the Great Recession. This has historically been an early-warning sign signaling a recession.

Now we have some more bad news for bond markets – this time on a global scale. The amount of government debt with negative yields has vaulted back above the $10 trillion mark and now makes up a full one-fifth of the global bond market.

According to Bloomberg, the amount of debt trading at nominal yields below zero has hit $10.7 trillion. That’s nearly double from a low of $5.7 trillion in early 2018.

The Federal Reserve’s sudden policy reversal and the “Powell Pause” has pushed yields lower worldwide. According to the Financial Times, “The Federal Reserve’s unexpectedly downbeat outlook exacerbated concerns over the health of the global economy and sent investors scurrying for the apparent safety of sovereign bonds.”

Bond yields have sagged lower for much of 2019, as fixed-income investors have remained skeptical that growth will pick up again. With economic data still weak and inflation at bay, central banks have been forced to abandon moves to tighten monetary policy.”

It’s basically a function of supply and demand. As more people seek the “safety” of government bonds fearing economic turmoil, bond prices rise. Inversely, yields fall.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch senior strategist told the FT he found it puzzling that the Fed went even more dovish during the March FOMC meeting than it had been in January.

Investors are starting to ask what the Fed might know about the economy that the market does not?”

The Fed is not alone in its dovishness. In March, the European Central Bank relaunched a crisis-era bank lending program. Meanwhile, the yield on the German 10-year bond dropped below zero as the country’s economy appears to be on the cusp of a recession.

Late last year, the ECB announced the end of its QE program. The central bank’s QE purchases totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of  2.6 trillion euros. The bank also pushed interest rates below zero. So, what did the EU get for all this stimulus? Not a whole lot. We highlighted the “successes” of ECB QE. And now that the European Central Bank is winding down the stimulus, it already looks like Germany – and a lot of other EU countries – is slipping toward an economic downturn.

Here’s the $64,000 question: why are people pouring money into negative yielding bonds? At some point they are going to figure out losing money over time isn’t a great investing strategy. Perhaps at that point, they will turn to precious metals.

Pundits often knock gold because it is a “non-yielding” asset. And yet, gold actually outperformed the S&P 500 in 2018. Holding a “yielding” asset that is yielding a loss isn’t helping your portfolio.

The growing pile of negative yielding debt is yet another sign we are hurtling toward a crisis. At some point, people will figure it out.

As Peter Schiff has pointed out, given the enormity of the budget deficits and the ever-upward spiraling debt, the Fed had no choice but to call off the tightening. You can’t raise interest rates in an economy built on piles of debt. But the Fed can’t tell the markets that. They will have to figure it out on their own. So far, they seem pretty clueless. But eventually, they will and that’s when the bottom is really going to fall out of the dollar.

When the Fed has to go back to zero, which it will be doing relatively soon, when the Fed has to go back to quantitative easing, nobody is going to believe that it is temporary again. Nobody is going to buy the Fed’s BS about how interest rates are going to stay low only temporarily and then we’re going to normalize them, and we’re going to shrink our balance sheet. We’re not monetizing the debt. After the recession is over we’re going to shrink our balance sheet back down to where it was before the recession. No one’s going to believe that. They couldn’t shrink a $4 trillion balance sheet. They won’t be able to shrink an $8 trillion balance sheet. If they couldn’t raise rates when the national debt was $22 trillion, they sure as hell can’t raise them when the national debt is $30 trillion.”

The Federal Reserve is an often misunderstood entity, not only in the mainstream, but also in alternative economic circles. There is this ever pervasive fantasy on both sides of the divide that the central bank actually “cares” about forever protecting the US economy, or at least propping up the US economy in an endless game of “kick the can”. While this might be true at times, it is not true ALL the time. Things change, agendas change, and sometimes the Fed’s goal is not to maintain the economy, but to destroy it.

The delusion that the Fed is seeking to kick the can is highly present today after the latest Fed meeting in which the central bank indicated there would be a pause in interest rate hikes in 2019. As I have noted in numerous articles over the past year, the mainstream media and the Fed have made interest rates the focus of every economic discussion, and I believe this was quite deliberate. In the meantime, the Fed balance sheet and its strange relationship to the stock market bubble is mostly ignored.

The word “capitulation” is getting thrown around quite haphazardly in reference to the Fed’s tightening policy. And yet, even now after all the pundits have declared the Fed “in retreat” or “trapped in a Catch-22”, the Fed continues to tighten, and is set to cut balance sheet assets straight through until the end of September. Perhaps my definition of capitulation is different from some people’s.

One would think that if the Fed was in retreat in terms of tightening, that they would actually STOP tightening. This has not happened. Also, one might also expect that if the Fed is going full “dovish” that they would have cut interest rates in March instead of holding them steady at their neutral rate of inflation. This has not happened either. In fact, I’m not exactly sure how anyone can claim with a straight face that the Fed has given up on Quantitative Tightening (QT).  Despite the many assumptions out there that the Fed is going to reverse on interest rates, I believe this is wishful thinking and that the Fed will not reverse rates in 2019.

What I do see is the Fed using rhetoric and head fakes to give the impression that they plan to go dovish in the future. And, this is being wrongly interpreted as the Fed being dovish now. But why is the Fed doing this while also continuing to dump its balance sheet? In my view, it is because they are almost finished with the task they set out to accomplish with QT in the first place, and they now have to make it appear as though they want to accommodate as the system breaks down.

In my article ‘Party While You Can – Central Bank Ready To Pop The Everything Bubble’, I outlined a process or tactic which the Fed has used on many occasions in the past: The creation of economic bubbles through inflation and artificially low interest rates, followed by abrupt tightening and higher interest rates into economic weakness. This tactic is highly effective in accomplishing ONE GOAL – financial collapse.

It is the same strategy the Fed used at the beginning of the Great Depression. It is also what the Fed used to trigger the crash of 2008. And, in 2018-2019, the Fed is doing it again.

For over two years now the Fed has been instituting tightening measures after inflating perhaps the largest economic bubble in modern history, also known as “the everything bubble”. The Fed did this despite extreme weakness in economic fundamentals, and is continuing forward until the fourth quarter of this year despite nearly every sector of the economy showing steep declines or a greatly reduced pace of growth.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Fed announced it would be cutting assets until September just as the Treasury Yield curve inverted for the first time since 2007.  The same thing happened just before the crash and recession that started in 2008. An inverted yield curve is generally a sure sign of a decelerating economy or recession/depression.

What bewilders me are the numerous claims in the mainstream and alternative media that the Fed is somehow oblivious to what it is doing. This is simply not true. Jerome Powell in his statements in the Fed Minutes of October 2012 explains plainly exactly what would happen if and when the Fed tightened policy into weakness. He essentially admits that a crash will occur.

Four years later in the wake of the Trump presidency, Powell somehow conveniently finds himself the Chairman of the Fed, and what does he do? He tightens policy into economic weakness fully aware of what would happen next. I’ll repeat this point again because I don’t think some analysts out there get it: The central bankers KNOW that they are causing a crash.  They are doing it deliberately. The question we need to ask is, why?

Over the past ten years the Fed may have acted as a crutch for markets, but this was not their true goal. Rather, the 2008 credit bubble collapse was used by the bankers as a rationale to create an even bigger bubble; a bubble that now encompasses every aspect of our financial structure. QT was needed to pop this bubble, and so the Fed tightened.

For many months now the Fed has stated that the US economy is “strong” and “in recovery” despite the evidence at hand. In March, they did not reverse tightening; they only admitted in an indirect way that the economy is not in recovery. They have until September to finish using QT for a controlled demolition of the Everything Bubble. This is more than enough time.

As noted in recent articles, US housing, autos, credit, retail, and even employment are faltering, while prices in most necessities remain high or are climbing. All that is left is for stock markets to follow the fundamental indicators down (as they usually do).  This trend started at the same time as the Fed’s tightening began.  All that was needed to set the avalanche in motion were moderate rate hikes and asset cuts.

The timing of the current crash is perfect for the banking elites for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they now have a scapegoat to pin the crash on in the form of “populist movements”. I warned about this ploy way back in early 2016 before the Brexit vote and the presidential elections. It is the reason why I predicted the Brexit vote would succeed and that Donald Trump would be president. The elites needed someone to blame for the collapse of the everything bubble they have been planning for the past 10 years.

The Brexit has turned into a three ring circus, a major distraction from the ultimate intended end game which I have long believed will be a “no deal” scenario. A no deal event is being painted in the mainstream media as a kind of economic doomsday for Europe, and I believe it will be, but not for the reasons they describe. Europe has been set up for a fall, just like the US, for many years now. Government and corporate debt levels are at extreme highs and major banks in Germany and Italy are on the verge of implosion.

A hard Brexit is useful to the elites as a scapegoat for a crash that was going to happen anyway. The bankers don’t plan on facing the music, they want “populist” groups to get the blame.

Trump has been a very effective ally to the banking class. After loading his cabinet with these “swamp creatures”, he then went on to take full credit for the very stock market rally he originally criticized during his campaign as a fraudulent bubble created by central bank stimulus. Then, he started a trade war which has dragged on for many months. It has shown no signs of slowing, and, is providing excellent cover for the Fed as it pulls the plug on life support for the economy.

Trump’s exoneration in terms of the Mueller probe and the Russiagate farce was easy to see coming.  I have been saying for the past two years that Trump will never be impeached (or never impeached successfully) exactly because the banking elites WANT him right where he is.  Russiagate was meant to drive leftists even further into extremism, it was NOT meant to unseat Trump.

If the markets were to tank this year (in January I predicted they would retest December lows starting at the end of March through April), then Trump would get total credit in the mainstream for the crisis and the Fed would avoid the majority of the blame.

Once again, lets consider the timing of current events – The Fed is tightening until September but pretending as if it is backing off. The yield curve has inverted. Major fundamentals are dropping exponentially. At the same time, we have Europe on the verge of a fabricated crisis in the form of a potential no deal Brexit, and we have US trade negotiations which have been delayed once again, perhaps until June, maybe longer.

I don’t believe in the “perfect storm” as a matter of coincidence, but I do believe according to the evidence that perfect storms can be deliberately engineered. Bottom line, no matter what the mainstream says in the coming months, the Fed knew what it was doing.

There are many advantages to an engineered crash. As noted, it was going to happen eventually anyway. It is simply delusion to think that the central bank can prop up the system forever. We sometimes hear the claim that this was done in Japan, but the Fed increased its balance sheet to $4.5 Trillion dollars in the span of two years – it took the Bank of Japan decades to get to the same level. There comes a point in which stimulus and increased debt provides diminishing returns when trying to hide economic weakness, and the Fed has already hit that point.

The Fed is crashing the system now because they have sovereignty activists and nationalists to point the finger at. They are also crashing the system now because the everything bubble is at its peak. Corporate and consumer debt are at historic highs, and the bankers are looking to cause maximum damage. Finally, the banking establishment has loyalties to certain agendas which are far outside national interests, including the often mentioned Agenda 2030 and the “global economic reset”. These agendas call for greatly increased global centralization of economic power as well as geopolitical power; in other words, global governance.

With chaos comes opportunity for those in power. They don’t let a good crisis go to waste, especially when they created the crisis. I have written extensively about this issue in past articles such as ‘The Economic End Game Explained’ and ‘IMF Reveals Cryptocurrency Is The New World Order End Game’.

No matter what the mainstream media says over the course of this year, I want readers to remember that this was a disaster at least ten years in the making. It is not something that suddenly fell out of the sky. It was not something that was unexpected or unpredictable. It was highly predictable to those with the eyes to see. It was NOT a mistake.

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

With global tensions spiking, thousands of Americans are moving their IRA or 401(k) into an IRA backed by physical gold. Now, thanks to a little-known IRS Tax Law, you can too. Learn how with a free info kit on gold from Birch Gold Group. It reveals how physical precious metals can protect your savings, and how to open a Gold IRA. Click here to get your free Info Kit on Gold.

The United States is on a path to financial ruin, and everyone can see what is happening, but nobody can seem to come up with a way to stop it.  According to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government is currently 22 trillion dollars in debt, and that represents the single largest debt in the history of the planet.  Over the past decade, we have been adding to that debt at a rate of about 1.1 trillion dollars a year, and we will add more than a trillion dollars to that total once again this year.  But when you add in our unfunded liabilities, our long-term financial outlook as a nation looks downright apocalyptic.  According to Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff, the U.S. is currently facing 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, and when you add that number to our 22 trillion dollar debt, you get a grand total of 222 trillion dollars.

Of course we are never going to pay back all of this debt.

The truth is that we are just going to keep accumulating more debt until the system completely and utterly collapses.

And even though the federal government is the biggest offender, there are also others to blame for the mess that we find ourselves in.  State and local governments are more than 3 trillion dollars in debt, corporate debt has more than doubled since the last financial crisis, and U.S. consumers are more than 13 trillion dollars in debt.

When you add it all together, the total amount of debt in our society is well above 300 percent of GDP, and it keeps rising with each passing year.

But for the moment, let’s just focus on the giant mountain of debt that the federal government has piled up.  The U.S. budget deficit for last month was 234 billion dollars, and that was an all-time record for a single month.  Our exploding debt is an existential threat to our nation, and we are literally destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.

And it isn’t just a 22 trillion dollar debt that we are leaving them with.  We have also made tens of trillions of dollars worth of future promises that we expect future generations to keep.  These are called “unfunded liabilities” because we do not currently have the money to fulfill those obligations.

According to official government projections, the Social Security Administration is facing a 13 trillion dollar unfunded liability over the next 75 years, and Medicare is facing a 37 trillion dollar unfunded liability over the same time frame.

Adding those two numbers together, we get a grand total of 50 trillion dollars.

Where in the world would we ever be able to get so much money when we are already drowning in debt?

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with government projections, those unfunded liability numbers are actually wildly optimistic.

Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been studying our unfunded liability crisis for many years, and according to him the real number is 200 trillion dollars…

Consumers will largely bear the brunt of the country’s financial ruin, according to Kotlikoff, which is why it is crucial to give them the power to make better financial decisions.

While the United States’ official debt is $20 trillion, the fiscal gap is really 10 times larger — $200 trillion. That comes from adding in off-the-book liabilities, including debt that’s in the Federal Reserve’s hands, Kotlikoff said.

If Kotlikoff is correct, that means that the true size of the financial obligation that we are imposing upon future generations is 222 trillion dollars, and that number just keeps rising month after month.

Many pundits speak of a day when America will be bankrupt in the future, but according to Kotlikoff we are bankrupt “right now”…

But Kotlikoff’s dire prognosis for the United States is enough to wake anyone out of even the deepest summer slumber.

“The evidence is in front of our eyes that we’re bankrupt,” Kotlikoff said. “It’s not bankrupt in the future. It’s bankrupt right now.”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an easy way out.  Any politician that would be foolish enough to even threaten to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits would be immediately voted out of office.  America’s population is rapidly aging, and about half of America’s seniors don’t have anything saved for retirement…

The bad news is that almost half of Americans approaching retirement have nothing saved in a 401(k) or other individual account. The good news is that the new estimate, from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, is slightly better than a few years earlier.

Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday.

America’s seniors are counting on us to keep the promises that we have made to them.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that we are going to be able to do that for too much longer.

In the end, we are going to have to make some very tough choices.  One Democrat actually started a petition to sell the state of Montana to Canada for a trillion dollars, and so far it has over 18,000 signatures.  Of course we aren’t ever going to sell off pieces of our country, but we are going to have to find some way to come up with an enormous mountain of money.

When I ran for Congress last year, I made doing something about the national debt one of my top issues.  Unfortunately, concern about the national debt is not a priority for either political party right now, and that is a huge mistake.

You can spend more money than you are bringing in for quite a while, but eventually a day of reckoning arrives.  Anyone that has ever gone into too much credit card debt knows exactly what I am talking about.  We have been on the biggest debt binge in the history of the world, and it has allowed us to enjoy a standard of living that is far beyond what we actually deserve, but the price that we will pay for such utter foolishness will be extremely painful indeed.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The federal government set an all-time record budget deficit in February. And this is with a Republican in the White House. The GOP is supposed to be the fiscally responsible party. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey offers some interesting analysis that reveals spending money in Washington DC is really a bipartisan sport. He also talks about Thursday’s selloff in gold and silver, explains why dollar strength is something of an illusion and illustrates how the way “the market” thinks is often pretty dumb.

The SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap podcast combines a succinct summary of the week’s precious metals news coupled with thoughtful analysis. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Tune in to the Friday Gold Wrap each week for a recap of the week’s economic and political news as it relates to gold and silver, along with some insightful commentary.

A new alarming parallel between today’s eviction crisis and the sub-prime mortgage crisis which helped spur the Great Recession has surfaced. The economy is sending warning signs to those who choose to take heed.

The eviction crisis is worsening to the point that Georgia State University authors feel that protections should be put in place to safeguard renters, such as longer eviction notices and legal protection, according to Market Watch. However, that could make the crisis much worse by homeowners simply refusing to rent their properties out at all. More government intervention (whether it’s designed to protect people or not) will only make a very bad situation worse.

Evictions have become a real visible effect of the volatility in today’s economy. Stable housing is increasingly out of reach for many Americans, as both rentals and homes to own grow more expensive, options dwindle, and wages remain stagnant. But some scholars at Georgia State University, in conjunction with a ProPublica journalist, completed a new study which shows that not all evictions are created equal.

The researchers who conducted the study examined “serial” eviction filings (those done repeatedly by a landlord against a tenant). By comparing serial evictions to ordinary ones, the researchers found patterns of landlord “behavior and intentions”, some of which are reminiscent of the worst of the housing crisis a decade ago.

As of right now, nearly half of Americans are “rent-burdened,” (0ften known as “house poor”) which means that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, according to Market Watch‘s statistics. Homelessness is also on the rise and has been for quite some time. When it comes to children who have experienced eviction in the last decade in the United States, the numbers could be as high as one in seven.

Similarly to the foreclosure crisis that foreshadowed the Great Recession in 2009, there appears to be a race element that needs to be discussed. Evictions are currently disproportionately hitting African-Americans. Black women in Milwaukee, for example, were evicted at a rate three times their share of the population, and black renters in metro Seattle were evicted four times as frequently as whites there, according to earlier research. This data bears mentioning, but keep in mind, that there’s no reasoning behind the whys of these evictions.  If people aren’t paying rent, they will and should be evicted especially if a contract is signed.

“Filings can be the beginning of a forced removal process, but they are also frequently a tool used to enforce the collection of rent and fees,” the researchers noted. Which is incredibly fair, when taking emotion out of the equation. A contract is a contract, but this eviction crisis is a symptom of the larger problems with the economy rather than the media hyped narrative of “the rich are keeping the poor down” which was basically the conclusion of the Georgia State University study.

Protecting oneself and one’s family against eviction is usually as simple as having an emergency fund.  If you can, save up three to six months worth of expenses so that in the event of an emergency or decrease in income, you will not be breaking your contract (which is your word you signed off on) with a homeowner who has agreed to let you live in a home they own in exchange for a monthly fee (called rent.)

Saving can seem like a daunting task, but if you buckle down when times are good, a catastrophic emergency becomes nothing more than an inconvenience.

Financially Prepped: The Importance of an Emergency Fund

Every time the folks at the Federal Reserve talk about the “Powell Pause,” they assure us that the US economy is still strong. The president assures us that the US economy is still strong. The pundits on the financial news networks assure us that the US economy is still strong. But the US consumer doesn’t seem to be buying it.

US consumer confidence declined for the fourth month out of five in February, surprising economists who expected an increase in optimism.

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell from 131.4 to 124.1. This missed every economist’s estimate in a Bloomberg survey. They were expecting a rise to 132.5. Meanwhile, consumers’ views on the present situation fell to the lowest level in almost a year, and the expectations index weakened as well.

The consumer confidence numbers come even as a major recession warning sign is flashing. Last week, the yield curve inverted. The yield on 10-year Treasurys fell below the yield on 3-year bonds for the first time since 2007 – the cusp of the Great Recession.

Peter Schiff has been saying a recession is a done deal for quite some time. Economist Marc Faber says we’re probably already in a recession. Perhaps American consumers are figuring it out. As Bloomberg put it “dimmer assessments of present conditions suggest that weak first-quarter growth and slower job gains in February are weighing on attitudes and potentially spending.”

According to Bloomberg, the weak February jobs report likely shook consumer confidence. The economy added just 20,000 jobs last month. There are also concerns about rising gasoline prices “leaving Americans with less power to spend on other goods and services.”

There are other gloomy numbers out there that we’ve reported, including rising wholesale inventories, high levels of consumer debt, and skyrocketing federal budget deficits.

Interestingly, the economists Bloomberg quoted tried to slap some lipstick on the pig, saying that consumers are overreacting.

“While economic conditions are likely to moderate this year –- meaning we’ve passed peak confidence for the cycle — this month’s slump is too severe when measured against underlying conditions.”

This underscores a point Peter made in his podcast earlier this week. The markets and the pundits still haven’t caught on to what’s going on. The Fed is giving us every signal we need. It has done a complete 180 on monetary policy. But it’s not telling the truth about why. It’s making excuses. It’s talking about a global slowdown and muted inflation. The truth is given the enormity of these deficits and the ever-upward spiraling debt, the Fed has no choice but to call off the tightening. You can’t raise interest rates in an economy built on piles of debt. But the Fed can’t tell the markets that, and at this point, the markets haven’t figured it out. Peter said they don’t really want to.

They don’t want to admit I was right from the beginning – that the Fed checked us into a monetary roach motel and there’s no way to ever check out. But I do believe the markets are going to figure this out, whether the Fed admits it or not – during the next recession.”

The recent drop in consumer confidence indicates the American public might just be a step ahead of the markets.

Consumer confidence plummetted in March shocking the mainstream media. But to those who have been following the economy, this wasn’t as shocking as some pundits are declaring.

According to Investing, consumer confidence is at a 16-month low. Although this isn’t that surprising, as wages remain stagnant, elections go on the rise, and Americans default on their record levels of consumer debt. Whether the average consumer is just overburdened with their already immense debt load or they have decided to begin saving instead of spending, this is not a positive sign for the economy.

U.S. economic growth has already slowed beginning toward the end of 2018. The start of 2019 appeared to be off to a weak one too. Financial markets have focused on the slowdown in the broader global economy, particularly in China and Europe, while ongoing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing add to concerns.

“[Consumer] confidence has been somewhat volatile over the past few months, as consumers have had to weather volatility in the financial markets, a partial government shutdown and a very weak February jobs report,” Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at The Conference Board, said in the report. And the government’s report shows a mere 20,000 jobs were created in February – not nearly enough.

Other data released on Tuesday revealed that housing starts and building permits declined sharply in February. The weakness in the American real estate sector, along with the sputtering strength of consumer confidence, may foreshadow the loss of economic momentum.

Reflecting the more pessimistic outlook for a labor market that is losing momentum, the CB survey showed that the proportion expecting more jobs in the months ahead decreased to 16.4% from 19%, while those anticipating fewer jobs increased to 13.4% from 12.3%. –Investing

This decline in consumer confidence is just one more nail in the economy’s coffin. If the economy is so great, as many in the media would have us believe. then why are so many drowning in debt, buried by stagnant wages, and merely one paycheck away from economic annihilation?