OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
THE RICH GET RICHER, BANKSTERS LOOT AND SUCK UP BAILOUTS, AND ILLEGALS GET OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN WELFARE!
"The decline in homeownership is one sign of
the deep social crisis in the United States. As
rents and housing costs have soared, spurred
on by financial speculation that has enriched
the ruling elites, incomes and jobs for most
Americans have shriveled."
US homeownership rate falls to lowest level in 51 years
US homeownership rate falls to lowest level in 51 years
By Gabriel Black
3 August 2016
The United States’ household home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in a half-century in the second quarter of 2016, according to statistics released by the US Census Bureau last week.
During the months of April, May and June, the percentage of American households that owned a home decreased by 0.6 percent, or about 750,000 households, down to 62.9 percent. This is the lowest percentage of home ownership since the Census Bureau began recording the home ownership rate in 1965. The 5l-year low comes despite record low interest rates for mortgages.
The home ownership rate in the US has been declining since June 2004, when it reached a peak of 69.2 percent. If Americans owned homes at the rate they did in 2004, then roughly 7.9 million American households who do not own homes would.
The decline in homeownership is one sign of
the deep social crisis in the United States. As
rents and housing costs have soared, spurred
on by financial speculation that has enriched
the ruling elites, incomes and jobs for most
Americans have shriveled.
This national phenomenon is bound up with a broader global housing crisis facing large sections of the world’s population, particularly workers and youth.
Rent and housing costs in most major cities around the world have skyrocketed since the financial crash of 2008, cuttingly deeply into workers’ standard of living and prompting concerns about an unsustainable global housing bubble. Amid economic stagnation, workers are being laid off and their wages and benefits cut. High costs and low wages put large sections of the population, particularly urban workers, youth and sections of the middle class, in an impossible position.
In the United States, housing prices increased by 5.2 percent between May 2015 and May 2016, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index. Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, told National Mortgage News, “One of the biggest hurdles now is affordability. Home prices are rising so much faster than incomes, so it’s hard for buyers to save for a down payment.”
Between 2001 and 2014, median household income dropped by nine percent in the US. At the same time rental prices have increased, on average, by seven percent, according to a Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University study published this year.
Young adults have been particularly hurt. The rate of homeownership for Americans aged 18 to 34 fell 0.7 percent in the second quarter of 2016, dropping to 34.1 percent. This is the lowest rate recorded for this age group going back to 1992. For the first time in 130 years, Americans in this age group are more likely to live with their parents than another living situation, according to a May 2016 Pew Research Center report.
This is part of a global trend. In the United Kingdom, home ownership rates are at the lowest level in 30 years. A little less than 64 percent of households own homes, a rate not seen since 1986. In Australia, less than half of all adults are expected to own homes in a few years, according to University of Melbourne Professor Roger Wilkin’s research. Ownership rates declined by 3.5 percentage points between 2002 and 2014, he found.
The Swiss bank UBS estimated earlier this year that the majority of the world’s urban real estate markets are now “significantly overvalued.” In London, the average home price has doubled since 2009, from about £300,000 ($437,600 USD) to £600,000 ($875,100). Hong Kong’s average home price more than tripled between 2004 and today.
Meanwhile, incomes have declined or stagnated for about two-thirds of the population in the advanced economies, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report released last month. The study found that between 540 million and 580 million people either saw their incomes stagnate or decline in 25 of the most advanced countries.
This trend is unprecedented. Historically, rent and housing costs have risen and fallen in accordance with wages and the interest rate. A higher interest rate, or higher wages, would tend to push housing costs up. Today, this trend has reversed. Despite a decade-long decline in wages, and interest rates at near zero in many countries, housing prices are increasing substantially.
Financial speculation is the cause of this reversal. As UBS noted in its 2015 Global Real Estate Bubble Index, “Loose monetary policy has prevented a normalization of housing markets and encouraged local bubble risks to grow.” According to the report, much of the “overvaluation” in the global housing market comes from a “dependence on low interest rates.”
Due to low interest rates, banks and other
financial institutions are receiving billions in
virtually interest-free loans from the world’s
central banks, only further encouraging them
to invest in the stock market and real estate. It
is these purchases of real estate by financial
speculators that drive up the cost of rent and
housing when the large majority of the
population is losing its income.
Sen. Tom Cotton: Obama’s $400m ‘Ransom to the Ayatollahs’
661
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by JOEL B. POLLAK3 Aug 20161,220
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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called the $400 million airlifted to the Iranian regime in hard foreign currency in January “ransom to the ayatollahs.”
Details of the transaction were reported Tuesday evening by the Wall Street Journal:
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
VIDEO: KERRY SOOTHES EU BANKS OVER IRAN TRADE
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Cotton and other lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, have long accused the administration of paying a “ransom” to the regime, contravening long-standing U.S. practice since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Wars.
“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures,” said Cotton, according to the Journal.
In a March letter to Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the State Department defended the $1.7 billion deal, including $400 million in principal and an agreed $1.3 billion in interest, as a means of settling claims that Iran had brought before an international tribunal at The Hague in the midst of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. (That tribunal was established in 1981 as part of the original Carter administration deal to release U.S. hostages from Iran.)
The money, the State Department said, was the balance left in a Foreign Military Sales Trust Fund to resolve outstanding claims. The department argued that the deal was actually a “good settlement for the American taxpayer”: “If Iran’s claim for the Trust Fund balance and interest had gone to decision in the Tribunal, the United States could well have faced significant exposure in the billions of dollars … We were able to secure a favorable resolution on the interest owed to Iran … “.
However, given the timing of the settlement, which coincided both with the release of four captive Americans and the larger Iran deal, questions were immediately raised about whether the U.S. had, in fact, paid a ransom. The four Americans were traded for 7 Iranians who had been convicted in the U.S. of violating sanctions, as charges were dropped against 14 others. The flow of cash alongside that deal immediately raised suspicions.
The secretive manner in which the cash was transferred to Iran, avoiding U.S. dollars and traditional banks, in accordance with existing sanctions, has reinforced those suspicions.
Cotton was the lone member of the Senate to vote against the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, also known as the “Corker bill,” which theoretically insisted on the Senate’s constitutional authority to review the Iran deal, but in practice made it easier for the deal to pass simply through a presidential veto of a resolution of congressional disapproval.
Ultimately, Senate Democrats filibustered a vote on the Iran deal.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: You were wondering how many jobs went to illegals and how well Obama’s crony banksters have done???
By PAUL BEDARD
The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.
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Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2016/08/obama-clintonomics-serving-super-rich.html
AMERICA'S ROAD TO REVOLUTION
…..will pass right through Hillary Clinton’s
Mansion door!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/03/drift-to-revolution-or-civil-
war-this.html
"This dangerous power vacuum has fueled frustration and created an entirely new breed of disenfranchised voters who are fed up with the status quo. These are real people, their anger is palpable, and it’s not going away anytime soon."
Slowdown in US, global economy
Slowdown in US, global economy
By Tom Eley
1 August 2016
New data for the United States and the eurozone released late last week reveal that the global economy is sinking deeper into stagnation, driven by cash-rich corporations that refuse to make productive investments even as central banks and governments continue to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial markets. Just last week, the US Federal Reserve reassured the financial elite that it had no plans to raise interest rates from their historic lows any time soon.
Gross domestic product (GDP) both in the US and Europe grew at a snail’s pace in the second quarter. In the case of the US, the 1.2 percent growth rate fell well short of economists’ predictions of a 2.5 percent rebound from the miserable 0.8 percent recorded for the first three months of the year. In the first six months of 2016, the US economy grew at an annualized rate of only 1.0 percent.
Over the same period, despite extreme volatility at the start of the year and a sell-off in the immediate aftermath of the British vote to exit the European Union, stocks in the US and in much of the rest of the world have soared to new record highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stands at more than 18,400 and the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index increased by over 5 percent just in the month of July.
The most significant statistic in the report by the US Commerce Department was the sharp fall—minus 9.7 percent—in business investment, the third straight quarterly decline. The second-quarter fall was the biggest since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009.
These developments underscore the fact that there has been no recovery in the real economy since the financial crash of September 2008. The policies of the Obama administration and the Fed, as well as those of their counterparts in Europe, have facilitated an even greater redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top and a further impoverishment of the working class.
What has recovered and soared to new
heights is the parasitism that increasingly
dominates the world capitalist economy,
particularly in the United States. The manic
expansion of the wealth of the rich and the
super-rich is being achieved on the basis of
an ongoing deterioration in society’s productive infrastructure on the one hand and a further inflation of financial assets and buildup of debt on the other.
The stagnation in the US economy has taken on historic proportions. The so-called “recovery” touted by the Obama administration is, a Wall Street Journal analysis notes, “by far the weakest of any since 1949.” Since the recession officially ended in June of 2009, the US economy has grown at a rate of just 2.1 percent per year. No other nominal recovery on record has seen annualized growth rates of less than 3 percent, with the notable exception of the last recovery—that which lasted from 2001 to 2007.
In over seven years of tepid economic growth, corresponding to the two terms of the Obama administration, the US economy has expanded by just 15.5 percent. By way of comparison, the recovery from the late 1950s recession, which lasted from 1961 to 1969, the years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saw the economy grow by 52 percent.
The situation is even more sharply expressed in Europe, where the economy grew at a rate of just 0.3 percent in the second quarter, completing the eurozone’s worst six-month performance in two years. France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy, recorded zero growth in the second quarter. Italy, the third-largest, now anticipates growth of less than 1 percent for the year, while fears mount that the country’s banking sector, buried under a mountain of bad debt, could crack and precipitate a new global financial crisis. Second-quarter data for Germany, the largest eurozone economy, has not yet been released.
The British economy, the world’s fifth-largest, grew by 0.6 percent in the second quarter lead-up to the Brexit vote. In the wake of the referendum, the International Monetary Fund cut its 2017 growth forecast for the UK from 2.2 to just 1.3 percent. The European Commission has predicted that British growth could contract by 0.3 percent next year.
In Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, new concerns over deflation had investors hoping that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) would conclude its Friday policy meeting with an announcement of an even deeper descent into negative interest rates or larger “quantitative easing”
bond purchases. The BOJ’s announcement that it would maintain its overnight lending rate at negative 1.0 percent disappointed markets and sent the yen climbing against the dollar, weakening Japan’s export industries.
The dollar was simultaneously driven downward by investors who were reassured that the poor second-quarter growth data would prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at near-zero. In response to the data, trading in federal funds futures lowered yields on two-year Treasury notes. According to Bloomberg, the betting odds on a Federal rate hike fell from 50 percent on Tuesday to 37.3 percent on Friday.
The latest data demonstrate, once again, the incapacity of capitalist governments and institutions to address the economic crisis.
With roughly $2 trillion on hand, US corporations are awash in cash, as are the bank accounts and stock portfolios of the wealthiest Americans. Yet none of this wealth is finding an outlet in productive investment.
Likewise, Japan’s negative interest rate policy, which aims to “force companies to invest money rather than hoard it” in the words of the New York Times, has failed to generate significant growth. Nor has its policy of “buying government bonds at a rate of 80 trillion yen, or $770 billion, a year to keep banks flush with cash to lend.”
The refusal of corporations to invest is not some sort of business mistake. It reflects the capitalists’ conclusion that they will not realize adequate profit returns from the production of commodities. It is a manifestation of a deepening crisis lodged in the very heart of the capitalist economy.
In the US and Canada, according to Bank for International Settlements data, business fixed capital investment is still 20 percent lower than the figures recorded in 2007. In Italy, the corresponding figure is down 27 percent; and in Japan, down 22 percent.
“[W]hat US businesses have done to increase profits and decrease the volatility of profits is, among other things, cutting back on investment spending, stock buybacks, and not hiring,” notes economist Nick Perna. “They buy back shares in order to keep per-share profits up rather than use the money to invest in plant and equipment.”
The continuing economic stagnation shows that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the expression of a systemic crisis and breakdown in the world capitalist system. As in the 1930s, economic crisis fuels the growth of social tensions and geopolitical conflicts, leading to the alternatives of world war or socialist revolution.
Report: Worst economic
recovery since 1930s, salaries fall $17,000 short
By PAUL BEDARD (@SECRETSBEDARD)
The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.
Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.
"Obama's economic policies," said the report from the Heartland Institute, "produced the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression, worse than what every other president faced with a recession has achieved since the 1930s."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-worst-economic-recovery-since-1930s-salaries-fall-17000-short/article/2598311
THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION… FUNDED BY OBAMA’S
CRONY BANKSTERS, MUSLIM DICTATORS, CRIMINAL
BILLIONAIRES….
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-road-to-revolution-will-go-through.html
THE SAVE CHELSEA CLINTON
MOVEMENT
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2016/07/chelsea-clinton-living-off-sins-of-her.html
Chelsea lives in a $11 million dollar New York City condo her parents bought with their bribes for speeches money.
The Clinton phony charity foundation has paid out less than $9 million out of the hundreds of millions they have sucked in from Obama’s crony banksters, Muslim dictators whom Hillary served as Secretary of State and criminal billionaires Billary has long known on a first name basis.
Let’s work together to save this nation from these three low-life scumbag parasites!
DANCING WITH DICTATORS.... BOTH THE CLINTONS ARE EXPERT DANCERS!
Hillary’s Russian connection
By Thomas Lifson
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2016/08/sucking-in-bribes-hillary-clinton-phony.html
“Facilitating strategic technology transfer in return for money is an old Clinton game. The Chinese bought their way to access of considerable space technology when Bill Clinton was president. Remember Charlie Trie, Loral, and the rest of the crew?”\
OBAMA’S GIFT TO HILLARIA:
OPEN BORDERS AND A MILLION MEXICAN CRIMINAL LINNING UP TO VOTE FOR MORE LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/07/child-rapist-carlos-esparaza-was-only.html
Most Americans (legals) would be appalled to know that from day one the Obomb has funded the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” with U.S. tax dollars and this racist party has operated out of the white house under LA RAZA V.P. Cecilia Munoz.
30 REASONS FOR 30 YEARS IN PRISON FOR HILLARY!
THE UGLY, SORDID, CORRUPT AND
SLEAZY LIFE OF BILLARY AND HILLARY
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