Important Takeaways:
- ‘Approaching Hoofbeats’: The Signs We Saw Decades Ago Pale In Comparison To What We See Today
- I purchased Billy Graham’s book, Approaching Hoofbeats, not long after its publication in 1983.
- As I recently skimmed its chapters, the stark differences between then and now leaped off the pages. Some of the signs that four decades ago seemed so indicative of the nearing Rapture pale by comparison to all that we see today.
- The Antichrist Rides
- By 1983, I had heard of a group called the “trilateralists” who were pushing for a one-world government at the time. Today, however, the emerging framework for the type of world domination that we read about in the book of Revelation is front and center for everyone to see, yet so few are paying attention to the nearness of the time when the white horse will ride across the earth.
- The Threat of Nuclear War
- In Approaching Hoofbeats, Evangelist Billy Graham wrote about the threat of a devastating nuclear war, which was a major concern at the time. Today, however, this danger has reached the point where most analysts believe it’s likely to occur in the next few years.
- Below is a quote from their latest press release under a section titled “The Many Dimensions of Nuclear Threat”:
- A durable end to Russia’s war in Ukraine seems distant, and the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in that conflict remains a serious possibility. In February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to “suspend” the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). In March, he announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. In June, Sergei Karaganov, an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, urged Moscow to consider launching limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe as a way to bring the war in Ukraine to a favorable conclusion.
- Economic Peril
- In 1983, the debt reached $1.377 trillion.
- In January of this year, the national debt level of the United States reached $34 trillion, and by the end of the month, it stood at an astounding 34.1 trillion. With the announcement came the prediction that by March, this number would exceed $35 trillion.
- The current debt level in America will surely bring economic catastrophe.
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Important Takeaways:
- Most Americans cannot afford a $1K emergency expense
- A majority of Americans say a $1,000 emergency expense would be too great of a hit to their savings and that they could not afford it, according to new data released Wednesday.
- Bankrate’s latest survey results found 56% of U.S. adults lack the emergency funds to handle a $1,000 unexpected expense and one-third (35%) said they would have to borrow the money somehow to pay for it.
- Of those, 21% said they would likely put such an expense on a credit card, while 10% said they would borrow the funds from a family member or friend, and 4% said they would take out a personal loan. Sixteen percent said they would reduce their spending in other areas to cover the bill.
- “All too many Americans are playing with fire when it comes to their personal finances in the sense that they don’t have more in emergency savings,” said Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrich. “Inflation has been a key culprit standing in the way of further progress on the savings front.”
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Important Takeaways:
- For a long time, many people had faith that the government would be able to keep society stable, but now that has changed. In fact, one recent survey discovered that a whopping 71.2 percent of all Americans “have no faith in the U.S. government to save them or prevent a doomsday event”…
- According to a survey of 6,200 Americans conducted by BonusFinder.com, 71.2 percent of Americans say they have no faith in the U.S. government to save them or prevent a doomsday event. Even more unnerving, many respondents believe Doomsday could come within the next year.
- If you actually believe that the government will be there to rescue you when things really start hitting the fan, you are just being delusional.
- Many Americans are realizing that they will be forced to rely on themselves as society collapses, and so an increasing percentage of the population is spending significant money on emergency preparedness…
- Last April, the financial-services firm Finder found that the number of Americans who said they’d recently spent money on emergency preparedness jumped from 20% in 2020 to 29% in 2023. They spent an average of $150 on items such as nonperishable food, medical supplies, and cases of water. Today you can’t turn on a streaming platform without catching recommendations for popular survivalist reality shows such as “Alone” or “Naked and Afraid,” and on social media, homesteading and disaster-prepping influencers have amassed millions of followers across various platforms.
- Disaster preparedness is on the rise, in large part, because disasters are as well: from the supply-chain shortages caused by COVID-19 lockdowns to the climate crisis, from wars in Ukraine and Gaza to tech-driven loneliness, from runaway disinformation to intractable political polarization. More people are asking: Am I better off being hyper dependent on the global industrial economy? Would it be safer to grow my own food, store my own water, and not depend on complex systems I don’t understand?
- Crime rates are already spiking all over the nation, and violent predators are seemingly everywhere. Earlier this week, Zero Hedge posted an excellent article about the vast hordes of psychopaths that are coming out of the woodwork these days…
- Discussions on collapse often turn to signs and signals – The economy, politics and social tensions have become increasingly unstable for many years now, and much like adding more and more weight to a man standing on a frozen lake, eventually the ice is going to break. The question is, how do we know when that moment will be?
- As cultural systems begin to dissolve due to political clashes and economic decline the real evil tends to slither out of the woodwork. It happens slowly at first, then all at once. A sure sign of accelerating collapse is the growing prevalence of psychopaths and psychopathic behavior in the open.
- US appears to have entered the middle stages of such a collapse with many sociopaths and psychopaths beginning to feel that they might be able to act out their worst impulses without consequences. They are beginning to test the waters to see what they can get away with.
- And I am entirely convinced that 2024 is going to be a historic turning point.
- This is not a game.
- The collapse of society really is coming, and most of the population will find themselves completely and utterly unprepared when it finally happens.
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Important Takeaways:
- What Is Going To Happen To Our Society As AI And Robots Take Most Of Our Jobs?
- For years we have been warned that AI and robots would revolutionize the workforce, and now that day has officially arrived.
- For example, Amazon has been using various types of simple robots to perform certain tasks for years, and now highly sophisticated humanoid robots are being deployed right alongside normal human workers…
- Designed by Agility Robotics, which Amazon has invested in as part of its Industrial Innovation Fund, Digit is only the latest of a string of warehouse robots the company has introduced over the last several years. However, most of the other warehouse robots have been cart-shaped or robotic arms, not humanoid like Digit.
- Digit costs about $10 to $12 an hour to operate right now, based on its price and lifespan, but the company predicts that cost to drop to $2 to $3 an hour plus overhead software costs as production ramps up, Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton told Bloomberg.
- So this trend is only going to accelerate during the years ahead.
- In fact, Goldman Sachs is projecting that AI could take as many as 300 million full-time jobs during the years ahead, and most of them will be white collar jobs…
- As many as 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the newest wave of artificial intelligence that has spawned platforms like ChatGPT, according to Goldman Sachs economists.
- They predicted in a report Sunday that 18% of work globally could be computerized, with the effects felt more deeply in advanced economies than emerging markets.
- That’s partly because white-collar workers are seen to be more at risk than manual laborers. Administrative workers and lawyers are expected to be most affected, the economists said, compared to the “little effect” seen on physically demanding or outdoor occupations, such as construction and repair work.
- On Friday, the BLS told us that the Establishment Survey indicated that the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs last month, but historically the Household Survey has been much more accurate, and it showed that the U.S. economy actually lost 683,000 jobs last month…
- And as I shared with my paid subscribers a few days ago, the BLS report also showed that the number of full-time jobs in the U.S. dropped by 1.531 million during the month of December…
- Meanwhile, bankruptcies are surging all over the country.
- In fact, the number of bankruptcy filings in the United States in 2023 was 18 percent higher than it was in 2022…
- But what we are experiencing at this moment is not even worth comparing to what is coming.
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Important Takeaways:
- 99% of Americans will be financially worse-off than they were pre-pandemic by mid-2024, JPMorgan says
- The majority of Americans have burned through their excess savings piled up during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the coming months, JPMorgan says it is likely that almost everyone will be worse off financially than they were in 2019.
- In a Thursday note, the bank’s top stock strategist Marko Kolanovic said 80% of consumers, a group that accounts for nearly two-thirds of consumption, has already depleted any savings cushion they may have built during lockdowns.
- “It is likely that only the top 1% of consumers by income will be better off than before the pandemic,” Kolanovic wrote, pointing to the growing signs of credit card and auto loan delinquencies, as well as Chapter 11 filings.
- JPMorgan estimated previously that excess savings had peaked in August 2021 at $2.1 trillion, boosted by government stimulus checks. That’s since been whittled down to below $148 billion, per the firm’s calculations as of October.
- As Bank of America wrote in a recent note, the plight of elder millennials is particularly difficult.
- Older millennials — a demographic of Americans born in the 1980s that holds significant influence on the US economy — have had to navigate the 2008 financial crisis in addition to the pandemic during critical working years of their lives.
- The two economic storms, as well as mounting childcare costs and sticky inflation, have made it difficult for the sizable cohort to own a house, save for retirement, and comfortably spend money within their means.
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Important Takeaways:
- Warren Buffett Selling $28.7 Billion in Stock Rings Alarm Bell Over Economy
- Warren Buffett’s firm Berkshire Hathaway sold $28.7 billion of stock in the first three quarters of 2023 in a move that some economists have interpreted as ringing alarm bells for the American economy.
- According to the company’s earnings, the Nebraska-based firm of the legendary investor and billionaire, known as the Oracle of Omaha, sold a net $10.4 billion of stock in the first quarter of the year. In the second quarter, it sold close to $13 billion of shares and bought less than $5 billion. In the third quarter, it sold about $5.3 billion worth of stocks.
- But it’s also, crucially, a sign “that a recession is right around the corner,” Hanke told Newsweek.
- “The money supply of the United States, broadly measured [M2], started contracting in July 2022, and has been falling like a stone,” Hanke said. “Since last year, the U.S. money supply has contracted by 3.3 percent.”
- According to Hanke, there have been only four periods in U.S. history—in 1920-21, 1929-33, 1937-38 and 1948-49—in which the money supply has had significant contractions.
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Important Takeaways:
- Asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit why perceptions of the economy are poor in recent polling, despite some positive indicators, Dimon said inflation and other issues are holding it back, and again at the expense of lower earners.
- “If you look at the U.S., yes, you know, almost all-time low unemployment, but inflation is hurting people,” he said. “The bottom third, I kind of think they have a right to be p—ed off. I would probably be a little p—ed off if I were them.”
- “You’re all wealthy and have money and stuff like that, but their average wages are $15 to $20 [an hour]. They’re the ones who lost their jobs in COVID,” he said. “They’re dying five or six years younger than the rest of us. They’re the ones who don’t have medical insurance. They’re the ones where their schools don’t work. They’re the ones dealing with crime. What the hell have we done as a nation?”
- “Yeah, corporate profits are up because people are spending a lot of money. Where do they get the money? The government gave it to them. Well, of course, profits are up,” he added. “So, I’m quite cautious about the economy… I would just be a little careful about that just because it feels pretty good today.”
- The Biden administration has repeatedly touted low unemployment and declining rates of inflation, but a majority of Americans say they’re living paycheck to paycheck, and the economy is viewed as a place of vulnerability for the White House going into 2024.
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Important Takeaways:
- Nobody wants U.S. Treasury bonds
- Elementary economic forces — too much supply and not enough demand — have collided to create the worst stretch for U.S. government bonds since the Civil War. The government keeps borrowing to cover its budget deficits, while once-reliable buyers of that debt, both at home and abroad, have pulled back.
- The result: Investors are demanding the steepest yields since 2007. Auctions of fresh bonds that were once routine are now going terribly. And bond portfolios are getting absolutely hammered. The longest-dated Treasury bonds are in a bear market worse than the dot-com bust and almost as bad as 2008.
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Important Takeaways:
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- Hunger in America is unabating, and in 2023, safety nets meant to catch people at their most vulnerable are seeing spikes in visits compared to last year.
- Food bank leaders from all corners of the country tell USA TODAY their neighborhood pantries are serving more people while using less resources, as economic pressures continue to ravage the budgets of low-income Americans and service providers alike.
- Since pandemic-era boosts to government food aid ended earlier this year in many states, families are turning to food banks to close a gap in need that feels like it has no end in sight. The level of hunger is so great, some food bank CEOs compare the current moment to past economic recessions.
- Food bank budgets have been buckling under inflation in 2023, causing some nonprofits to buy less food and cut back on services.
- “This is the worst rate of hunger in my career,” said Morgan, who has worked at food banks in Boston, San Francisco and Anchorage, Alaska.
- This year across Milwaukee County, food pantries saw a 50% increase in visits after extra pandemic-era SNAP allotments ended in Wisconsin in March.
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Important Takeaways:
- 80% Of American Households Are In A Worse Financial Position Now Than They Were Before The COVID Pandemic Hit — What You Can Do To Keep Your Head Above Water
- Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have depleted their extra savings and have less liquid assets than they had before the pandemic began. If this is you, consider speaking to a financial advisor.
- As of June, the bottom 80% of households by income, when adjusted for inflation, had lower bank deposits and other liquid assets compared to their status in March 2020. The decline marks a significant shift from the initial phases of the pandemic, where various factors, including government financial support and restricted spending opportunities during lockdowns, led to an accumulation of excess savings.
- The wealthiest one-fifth of households still have cash savings approximately 8% above their pre-COVID levels. In stark contrast, the poorest two-fifths have witnessed an 8% decrease, and the next 40% — broadly representing the middle class — have seen their cash savings fall below pre-pandemic levels.
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