Sunday, June 2, 2013

Is this the Change that you Hoped for?


Wealth of Most Americans down 55%

So reports CBS News Money Watch despite the fact that the Fed  calculated Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses based on aggregate household-net-worth data.

Two-thirds of the increase in aggregate household wealth is due to rising stock prices. This has disproportionately benefited the richest households: About 80 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.

The False Recovery 

Many economists point to the increased savings rate (4.8%) as a good economic indicator,  the Harvard Business Review presents a different opinion. that it’s not reflecting an imminent recovery but rather a drawn-out malaise that will soon become something like a lost decade.

The reality is, households are using their savings to pay off the massive amounts of debt they accumulated even before their net worth declined... The money is not going under mattresses or into bank accounts, from where it will emerge one day to jump-start the economy. It’s actually subsidizing the previous boom, which was built on debt and the presumption that assets would always cover that debt.

'Real' Jobless Rate Still Above 10% 

Though employment has risen by 1.3 million over the past year, unemployment that counts the discouraged and underemployed, as well as the jobless (often called the "real" unemployment rate) has remained stubbornly high, at 13.8 percent of the workforce, according to the most recent count. 

"The fact is that the U.S. economy isn't growing fast enough to significantly increase the revenue to the government, but our debt is still soaring," 

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