There are 51 million American households that cannot make ends meet. This means that 43% of American households can’t afford a basic middle class life. Of these, 35 million are dubbed ALICE which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed with a further 16 million households living in poverty.
It is absolutely remarkable that in the world’s biggest and “richest”country, just under 50% of the households are struggling to afford a basic middle class life and that 50 million people live in poverty. And this is after decades of prosperity and economic growth. What it proves is that the average person in the US is seeing no prosperity at all. All the official figures of employment, production, growth, GDP etc are just humbug. They are fake data which is completely misleading and paints a totally false picture. The official unemployment figure is 4% but the real figure is 22%. There are 95 million Americans capable of working who are not in the labour force.
The US economy consists of a small minority which has benefitted dramatically from the credit expansion and money printing. And then there is the big majority on low income with enormous debts who struggle to make interest payments on debts that they can never repay. Real median hourly wages have not increased in the US for 50 years! Today, 66% of Americans earn less than $20 per hour. ALICE IN HORRORLAND
Trump was of course aware of the situation of the average American during the election campaign. And by appealing to this group, he won the election. But sadly, making promises is a lot easier than solving an insoluble debt problem. The US and global economies are soon going to be crushed by the massive global debt situation as I outlined in my article last week about “Alice in Horrorland”. Since 1/3 of Americans have less than $5,000 in savings, they have nothing to fall back on when they lose their jobs and hit hard times. At that point, the government will default and there will be no social security net. They will of course print unlimited amounts of money, which will be totally worthless and thus have no effect except for causing hyperinflation. CORPORATE DEBT WARNS OF IMMINENT ECONOMIC CRISIS
It is not just the personal debt situation in the US that is cause for concern. Corporate debt is now at an extreme and in a similar position as before the 1990, 2000, 2008 economic crises and stock market collapses. As the graph below shows, corporate debt to GDP is currently giving a warning that the the next economic and market decline is imminent. The fact that US national debt has doubled since 2009 is certainly not going to make the situation easier.
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