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Are You Ready For The Great Depression Of The 2020s? For those of you that were expecting just a “deep recession”, I am afraid that you are going to be very disappointed. It took years for the U.S. economy to fully unravel in the 1930s, but now we have witnessed a similar level of economic devastation in just a matter of weeks. More than 26 million Americans have already lost their jobs, economic activity has come to a standstill, people are lining up for miles at food banks all over the nation, and businesses are being permanently shuttered at a staggering pace. But the good news is that some states will attempt to “reopen” their economies in the weeks ahead. In most instances, there will be several stages before all of the restrictions are finally lifted, and that means that economic suffering will be stretched out for an extended period of time. And of course if cases and deaths start spiking again we could see another wave of strict lockdowns all over the country, and needless to say that would greatly escalate this economic downturn. At this moment, so many hard working people all over America are deeply hurting. I personally know people that have lost their jobs, and you probably do too. And because virtually nobody is hiring right now, it is going to be exceedingly difficult for newly unemployed workers to find other jobs. Because it has an economy that is so dependent on the entertainment industry, Nevada is being hit particularly hard by this downturn. The New York Times spoke to one Nevada resident named Valicia Anderson, and she hardly knows anyone that is still actually working…
It has been estimated that the current unemployment rate in the state is “about 25 percent”, and that number is almost certainly going to go higher in the months ahead. Down in Texas, they are also dealing with an oil crash at the same time that they are wrestling with this coronavirus pandemic, and this has created the worst budget crisis that the city of Houston has ever seen…
The high paying energy industry jobs that fueled an incredible real estate boom in Texas are now disappearing by the thousands, and it is being reported that many of those that are being laid off are learning the news “during painful Zoom sessions from home”…
By the way, when did Zoom become such a big thing? It seems like so many people are using it now, and I don’t understand why it is so popular. Perhaps my readers will help me to understand this. Getting back to the economy, at this point even the Trump administration is admitting that the unemployment rate will soon be approaching levels that “we saw during the Great Depression”…
Let’s put that into perspective for a moment. During the last recession, we thought that things were really, really bad when the unemployment rate got up to about 10 percent. But back in 1933 the unemployment rate peaked at 25 percent, and now we are being told that we should expect something similar here in 2020. Wow. And of course low income Americans are being hit harder than anyone else. Just check out these numbers…
Hopefully as some states attempt “reopenings” it will help to slow down this enormous tsunami of unemployment. But as I pointed out the other day, millions of Americans are now making much more money being unemployed than they did when they were working, and so that is going to provide an incentive for millions of Americans to stay unemployed for the foreseeable future. And even if all of the coronavirus restrictions in the entire country were lifted tomorrow, fear of the coronavirus would cause economic activity to be greatly depressed for many months to come. As I discussed yesterday, the meat processing industry is a perfect example of this. Meat processing facilities are being shut down all over the nation, and one expert just told NBC News that we should expect shortages of meat in our grocery stores “around May 1″…
So many of the things that we have been warning about for a long time are starting to happen, but most Americans still do not grasp the seriousness of this crisis. All of the economic dominoes are starting to fall, and even if the remainder of this pandemic goes much more smoothly than anticipated, it will not fundamentally alter our current economic trajectory. The “Everything Bubble” lasted far longer than it should have, but now that it has burst the pain is going to be absolutely immense. And it is those at the bottom of the economic food chain that are going to be hit the hardest.
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