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Monday, June 30, 2014

Economic Stories of Relevance in Today's World -- June 29, 2014

The theme of this week's stories is DESTABILIZATION.

Report: Immigrant Job Growth Outstrips Natives – 5.7 Million Jobs Since 2000 - CNSNews - Penny Starr - June 27, 2014 - A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that legal and illegal immigrants had the greatest job growth since 2000, with 5.7 million jobs going to non-native working-age (16-65) people.                             “Although there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, fewer working-age natives held a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job rose 5.7 million above the 2000 level,” CIS announced.
The impetus for the report is S.744, sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and passed by the Senate.                            If Schumer-Rubio becomes law, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, the number of new legal immigrants allowed into the country will roughly double to 20 million over the next decade, adding to the 40 million immigrants (legal and illegal) already here.                               Rubio and Schumer said the law was needed to prevent “labor shortages” in the U.S.                              “With 58 million working-age natives not working, the Schumer-Rubio bill and similar House measures, which would substantially increase the number of foreign workers allowed in the country, seem entirely disconnected from the realities of the U.S. labor market,” Steven Camarota, co-author of the report and the Center's director of research, said in a statement.                             These statistics are particularly remarkable, the report states, given that native-born Americans account for two-thirds of the growth rate of the working-age population.                             CIS drew three conclusions from the data it studied and analyzed:
• The long-term decline in the employment for natives across age and education levels is a clear indication that there is no general labor shortage, a primary justification for the large increases in immigration (skilled and unskilled) in the Schumer-Rubio bill and similar House proposals.                      • The decline in work among the native-born over the last 14 years of high immigration is consistent with research showing that immigration reduces employment for natives.
• The trends since 2000 challenge the argument that immigration on balance increases job opportunities for natives. Over 17 million immigrants arrived in the country in the last 14 years, a time period in which native employment has deteriorated significantly.                        CIS describes its methodology for the report as follows:
“This analysis is based on the ‘household survey’ collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey, officially known as the Current Population Survey (CPS), is the nation’s primary source of information on the U.S. labor market.
“The CPS survey does not include those in institutions such as prisons. We concentrate in this analysis on the first quarter of each year 2000 to 2014 because comparing the same quarter over time controls for seasonality and the first quarter of 2014 is the most recent quarterly data available. We also emphasize the economic peaks in 2000 and 2007 as important points of comparison.
“We primarily focus on the share of working-age people holding a job, referred to by economists as the employment rate. The employment rate is a straightforward measure of who has a job and who does not. To a lesser extent we examine labor force participation, which is the share of people working or looking for work. Labor force participation and the employment rate are measures of labor force attachment that are less sensitive to the business cycle than the often-cited unemployment rate, which we also report.”


Stone Cold Proof That Government Economic Numbers Are Being Highly Manipulated - The Economic Collapse Blog - Michael Snyder - June 25th, 2014 - How in the world does the government expect us to trust the economic numbers that they give us anymore?  For a long time, many have suspected that they were being manipulated, and as you will see below we now have stone cold proof that this is indeed the case.  But first, let's talk about the revised GDP number for the first quarter of 2014 that was just released.  Initially, they told us that the U.S. economy only shrank by 0.1 percent in Q1.  Then that was revised down to a 1.0 percent contraction, and now we are being informed that the economy actually contracted by a whopping 2.9 percent during the first quarter.  So what are we actually supposed to believe?  Sometimes I almost get the feeling that government bureaucrats are just throwing darts at a dartboard in order to get these numbers.  Of course that is not actually true, but how do we know that we can actually trust the numbers that they give to us?
Over at shadowstats.com, John Williams publishes alternative economic statistics that he believes are much more realistic than the government numbers.  According to his figures, the U.S. economy has actually been continually contracting since 2005.  That would mean that we have been in a recession for the last nine years.                           Could it be possible that he is right and the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are wrong?                    Before you answer that question, read the rest of this article.
It just might change your thinking a bit.                         Another number that many have accused of being highly manipulated is the inflation rate.                      But we don't have to sit around and wonder if that figure is being manipulated.  The truth is that even those that work inside the Federal Reserve admit that it is being manipulated.                         As Robert Wenzel recently pointed out, Mike Bryan, a vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed's research department, has been very open about the fact that the way inflation is calculated has been changed almost every month at times...


Dr. Paul Craig Roberts -  King World News - June 28, 2014 - Former US Treasury Official, Co-Founder of Reaganomics, Economist & Acclaimed Author - King World News Interview - June 28, 2014 - Listen to the Interview Here
(Brief Summary) - Dr. Roberts gets fully into the fraud of the reported Government Statistics. We are going to have a negative second quarter ( a technical recession). It was not due to cold weather, because that would be offset by energy use -- heating. QE has not revived the economy. The deflator used to deflate Nominal GDP is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) - Inflation. The CPI (Inflation) has been understated for a long time. Reporting higher inflation means a lower GDP number. A reliable measure shows the current GDP is much lower than reported. The debt to GDP number is much higher. The consequences of this revenue means lower tax revenues and larger budget deficits and means the actual debt is rising more than has been reported. "An amazing crisis awaiting to happen.

Mr. King asks about the German Gold situation. The U.S. does not have the gold and Germany has to come to terms with this. Behind the scenes, the U.S. and Federal reserve have made a deal to get the Germans to stop asking for their gold. He goes further into the fraud involving naked shorts and how the Fed has manipulated Gold prices to protect the dollar.

Mr. King asks about Iraq? Problems created by artificial borders by the British and French in the Middle East. The United States has destroyed the secular governments that kept control. The new regimes are redrawing religious (Islamic) boundaries.

Gerald Celente - King World News - June 29, 2014 - Founder & Director, Publisher, the Trends Journal® - Gerald Celente will show you the future. Forecasting trends since 1980, Mr. Celente, Founder & Director of the Trends Research Institute, is author of the highly acclaimed and best selling books, Trend Tracking and Trends 2000 (Warner Books) and publisher of the Trends Journal®. - Listen to the Interview Here
(Brief Summary) - GDP revision downward... it was the worst winter of Celente's life... he does believe it was bad weather to a certain extent, but not to the extent reported. Fed's downgrading the second quarter. Consumer spending is flat. Very weak numbers. Growth at slowest pace in five years. Greatest revision in GDP since 1976. James Bullard of the Fed says expect a rise in interest rates. They are average person of their future with these artificially low interest rates (QE)... Benefitting the people lying about the statistics. Mergers and Acquisitions are at all time highs comparable to 2007, before the crash. We have seen an interest rate recovery.

Chinese Gold missing... Real story is the paper squeeze coming comparable to 1968 and 1971 when Nixon was forced to take us off the dollar. No way to cover the paper gold. When interest rates go up the economy will go down. China - the money flowing out of Hong Kong and into the International markets. There isn't any physical gold to make delivery with. The Central Banks know that the gold isn't there. There are a lot of investors in the market compared to back in the 1980 run up. The physical gold does not exist to cover all the paper on the market.

Something will happen to take/keep people's minds off of this. All things are connected. Tension will not defuse in Ukraine, Iraq... Destabilization. Perfect recipe for economic panic and war.


Food prices + gas prices = Stressed consumers - CNBC - Jackie DeAngelis and Max Gorden - June 27, 2014 - At the grocery store, meat, dairy and fruit prices are all up substantially. People are even paying more for lattes at their local coffee shops. And it's not just food—gas prices have jumped sharply on geopolitical unrest, and at the moment there's no relief in sight.                         As demand for beef, poultry and pork increases globally, prices have risen nearly 4 percent since February, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The futures market has reflected the strong demand, as live cattle futures are up more than 11 percent in the last month alone, while lean hogs have seen a 10 percent spike in the same time period...                           Beef and pork supplies—the latter especially—have been hit by disease, and alternatives have been unable to fill the gap.                   
It's even trickling down the filter to that cup of morning Joe. Starbucks raised its prices on coffee drinks this week by between 5 and 20 cents, while prices of its packaged coffee at the grocery store will increase by $1. The fast-coffee chain passed on its higher costs to consumers after coffee futures spiked more than 60 percent year-to-date.                           If it's not tough enough at the grocery store, there's also plenty of pain at the pump. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is now up to $3.68, according to AAA. That's up 14 cents from the same time a year ago, a jump of roughly 4 percent.                      Retail gas prices are rising as crude oil prices rise due to tensions in global hot spots like Russia, Ukraine and Iraq. Brent crude, the international benchmark, has risen almost 6 percent in the last three months, while West Texas Intermediate, the domestic product, is up about 5 percent in the same period...                      Traders are cautiously reading the headlines out of the Middle East, and crude prices have dipped slightly the last few days, but the real concern is that a supply disruption out of Iraq will send prices sharply higher...                        But in a struggling economy, every penny counts. Deutsche Bank says that every 1 cent increase in retail gas prices represents an additional $1 billion in energy consumption. The fear is that at a certain point, consumers will not be able to absorb the additional cost, and will spend less elsewhere in the economy.                           To make matters worse, there is a link between fuel prices and food...
                    

Corporate Empire Created Failed Global Economic System-John Perkins - USA Watchdog - Greg Hunter - June 23, 2014 - John Perkins, best-selling author of “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” says corporations, not governments, run the world.  Perkins explains, “We are in a world situation unlike anybody has ever known before.  We have a global corporate empire.  It’s a corporate empire and not a United States empire.  It’s the first time in history it’s really not a national empire.  It’s the corporatocracy, the heads of corporations, which control everything in the world.  This is not a conspiracy theory.  The corporations don’t get together and confer with each other secretly, but they are all driven by one motive, which is to maximize profits regardless of the social and environmental costs.  Let’s face it, the economy of China, the economy of Russia and the economy of the United States is very dependent on these big corporations.  China has done a lot to create its own economic growth, but it could not have happened without the big multinationals.  So, they play an incredibly important roll today; and, in fact, this has created a failed global economic system.  Just one statistic that is really telling is less than 5% of us live in the United States and we consume almost 30% of the world’s resources, while half the world is starving or on the verge of starvation.  That is not a model.  China can’t do that.  Russia can’t do that.  Africa can’t do that.  You can’t repeat that, but they are trying to repeat it . . . but they can’t.”...

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