http://www.kitco.com/news/2016-09-09/Wake-Me-Up-When-September-Ends.html
Another good article on what's happening with currency.I'm torn on whether to make major purchases now, while the interest rates are down or wait to see if the FED holds off on rate hikes until December. Either way I'm bearish on the whole economy.

It's going to make US based production labor more competitive and imported stuff more costly. This's last holiday season saw some big flat screen TVs going so cheap that people didn't understand our charges for installation being sometimes over half the cost of the TV. Pretty good TVs on sale for $350-$400, but a good mount is around $100, labor to install $120 on up to $250. I ended up with so many trade-in TVs that I started to have to just start putting them in front of each other in my office.

right now, Portland real estate is still booming, but that's because of a major influx of outside money. The labor market is tightening up because of the local cost of living going up and people not quite getting how the "hookup" needs to work for a local working class. I kept raising rates as my rent stayed the same and built up my tool inventory, but eventually my landlord figured it was time to cash in on the rising house values. By the time I was looking for another place rents had gone way up. I got to the point where office space in the industrial side of town costs about what house space previously was in a decent hipster type neighborhood.

Issue is that since the hipster thing got internationally famous and fashionable, those prices went crazy.

Used motor homes got to be a hot market for a little while but what has gone crazy is the "van down by the river" situation. Holy crap. Camper vans and conversion vans going top dollar, and peoples renting driveway space for the same money, if not more, than renting a room.

Put it this way, a really nice used Itasca motorhome with slide outs can be $20,000, but although looking good might be past the age limit for being In a trailer park. A well set up VW camper van ten years older that can fit in the inner city gentrified neighborhoods goes for the same money. An older motorhome with some clunker issues like mine, south of $5,000 but mobile enough to relocate easily enough. Bus shoes, as often as not, "come take it for free because we need it off the property...must be towed".

The big thing I see though is in the ability to manufacture stuff locally. World currencies going up, dollar going down, means stuff you make locally starts getting compeititve. Earlier this year I bought a case of marinated asperigus from an Indian reservation farm. Their take on stuff, smart too, was to do everything on some products in house. They did everything from growing to wholesaling the processed food product.

I would say shopping the prices right and having well appointed workshops is going to be like what was being said about 3D printers being the return of the village blacksmith. Now though, it's not about that little plastic pencil holder making shit, which will probably be all over the place, but every town having some little industrial area where guys will fire up the CNC plasma table and their welder and fabrication shop to make you those fancy bumpers and lift kits like you see in the 4x4 magazines. The year of your rig not being the major factor unless it's brand new, but how much of the local economy you fed while fixing it up. Then the local motorcycle guy, and locally made fashion clothes,

White people are not so much on that, but everyone else seems to be. For example, there is no proper Mexican wedding without a locally made wedding dress, or prom, or other major event for a girls life.

People getting hosed and needing charity are going to be the elderly working poor. Getting well into their 60s, without much savings, limited income options and a rising cost of living. That's where the health issues can be devastating, and figh mandatory health insurance at several hundred a month, it wipes out people who even had figured they had a retirement plan.

That's who really got hit hard when the Soviet Union fell, and is really the final stage of economic warfare on the lower white working class in this country. People stuck with nothing and priced out of their own economy.

Former Reagan Administration Official Is Warning Of A Financial Collapse Some Time ‘Between August And November’

"The S&P 500 is going to drop by hundreds and hundreds of points sometime over the next few months as we drift into this unexpected crisis."

Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse - May 8, 2017

If a former Reagan administration official is correct, we are likely to see the next major financial collapse by the end of 2017.

According to Wikipedia, David Stockman “is an author, former businessman and U.S. politician who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan (1977–1981) and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985) under President Ronald Reagan.” He has been frequently interviewed by mainstream news outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg and PBS, and he is a highly respected voice in the financial community. Like other analysts, Stockman believes that the U.S. economy is in dire shape, and he told Greg Hunter during a recent interviewthat he is convinced that the S&P 500 could soon crash “by 40% or even more”…

The market is pricing itself for perfection for all of eternity. This is crazy. . . . I think the market could easily drop to 1,600 or 1,300. It could drop by 40% or even more once the fantasy ends. When the government shows its true colors, that it’s headed for a fiscal blood bath when this crazy notion that there is going to be some Trump fiscal stimulus is put to rest once and for all. I mean it’s not going to happen. They can’t pass a tax cut that big without a budget resolution that incorporated $10 trillion or $15 trillion in debt over the next decade. It’s just not going to pass Congress. . . . I think this is the greatest sucker’s rally we have ever seen.”

But even more alarming is what Stockman had to say about the potential timing of such a financial crash. According to Stockman, if he were to pick a time for the next major stock market plunge he would “target sometime between August and November”…

The S&P 500 is going to drop by hundreds and hundreds of points sometime over the next few months as we drift into this unexpected crisis. . . . I would target sometime between August and November because that’s when the rubber is going to meet the road on a debt ceiling increase when they are out of cash. Washington is going to end up in vicious political conflict over what to do about the debt ceiling. . . . It is going to be one giant fiscal bloodbath the likes of which we have never seen.

That really got my attention, because those are the exact months during which the events that I portrayed in The Beginning Of The End play out.

Without a doubt, the U.S. financial system is living on borrowed time, and we cannot keep going into so much debt indefinitely. In 2017, interest on the national debt will be more than half a trillion dollars for the first time ever, and it will be even higher next year because we are likely to add at least another trillion dollars to the debt during this fiscal year.

Meanwhile, the financial markets just keep becoming more absurd with each passing day.

Just look at Tesla. This is a company that somehow managed to lose 620 million dollars during the first quarter of 2017, and it has been consistently losing hundreds of millions of dollars quarter after quarter.

And yet somehow the market values Tesla at a staggering 48 billion dollars.

It is almost as if we are living in an “opposite world” where the more money you lose the more valuable investors think that you are. Companies like Tesla, Netflix and Twitter are burning through gigantic mountains of investor cash without ever making a profit, and nobody seems to care.

Commercial mortgage-backed securities are another red flag that is starting to get a lot of attention…

The percentage of commercial mortgage-backed security (MBS) loans in special servicing hit 6.6% to close April, Commercial Mortgage Alert reported, citing Trepp data. The five basis point move higher from March came as the past-due rate on Fitch-rated commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) climbed by nine basis points to end April at to 3.5%.

Both MBS and CMBS rates hit their highest levels since 2015.

During the crisis of 2008, regular mortgage-backed securities played a major role, and this time around it looks like securities that are backed by commercial mortgages could cause quite a bit of havoc.

One of the reasons for this is because mall owners are having such tremendous difficulties. The number of retail store closings in 2017 is on pace to shatter the all-time record by more than 20 percent, and Bloomberg is projecting that about a billion square feet of retail space will eventually close or be used for another purpose.

So needless to say this is putting an enormous amount of strain on those that are trying to rent space to retailers, and a lot of their debts are starting to go bad.

In 2007 and early 2008, a lot of the analysts that were loudly warning about mortgage-backed securities, a major stock market crash and an imminent recession were being mocked. People kept asking them when “the crisis” was finally going to arrive, and leaders such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke confidently assured the public that the U.S. economy was not going to experience a recession.

But of course then we got to the fall of 2008 and all hell broke loose. Investors suddenly lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs were lost, and the U.S. economy plunged into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Now we stand poised on the brink of an even worse disaster. The U.S. national debt has almost doubled since the last crisis, corporate debt has more than doubled, and all of our long-term economic fundamentals have continued to deteriorate.

The only thing that has saved us is our ability to go into enormous amounts of debt, and once that debt bubble finally bursts it will be the biggest standard of living adjustment that Americans have ever seen.

So I don’t know if Stockman’s timing will be 100% accurate or not, but that is not what is important.

What is important is that decades of exceedingly foolish decisions have made the greatest economic crisis in American history inevitable, and when it fully erupts the pain is going to be absolutely off the charts.

Is This The Generation That Is Going To Financially Destroy America?

Nobody can pretend that what we have today is the kind of limited federal government that our founders intended

Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse - July 13, 2017

Did you know that the federal government is going to spend more than 4 trillion dollars this year?

To put that into perspective, U.S. GDP for the entire year of 2017 is going to be somewhere between 18 and 19 trillion dollars. So when you are talking about 4 trillion dollars you are talking about a huge chunk of our economy. But of course the federal government doesn’t bring in 4 trillion dollars a year. At the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term, we were 10.6 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt. That means that we have been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt. When you break that down, that means that we have essentially been stealing more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day to pay for our debt-fueled lifestyle. Even Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is warning that this is not sustainable, and yet we just keep on doing it.

Nobody can pretend that what we have today is the kind of limited federal government that our founders intended. When federal spending accounts for more than 20 percent of GDP, it is hard to argue that we haven’t moved very far down the road toward socialism. As I mentioned above, total federal spending will surpass 4 trillion dollars for the first time ever in 2017…

Both the Congressional Budget Office and the White House Office of Management and Budget project that federal spending will top $4 trillion for the first time in fiscal 2017, which began on Oct. 1, 2016 and will end on Sept. 30.

In its “Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2017 to 2027” published last week, CBO projected that total federal spending in fiscal 2017 will hit $4,008,000,000,000.

I was recently asked how we are going to pay for a 4 trillion dollar government if we abolish the income tax like I am proposing.

Well, the truth is that we would have to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Our founders always intended for the individual state governments to be much stronger than they are right now, and it is time for us to restore that constitutional balance.

Something desperately needs to be done, because we have a federal government that is completely and totally out of control. Even the Congressional Budget Officeagrees that we are headed toward absolute disaster if our leaders in Washington don’t start displaying some fiscal responsibility…

A large and continuously growing federal debt would increase the chance of a fiscal crisis in the United States. Specifically, investors might become less willing to finance federal borrowing unless they were compensated with high returns. If so, interest rates on federal debt would rise abruptly, dramatically increasing the cost of government borrowing. That increase would reduce the market value of outstanding government securities, and investors could lose money. The resulting losses for mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and other holders of government debt might be large enough to cause some financial institutions to fail, creating a fiscal crisis. An additional result would be a higher cost for private-sector borrowing because uncertainty about the government’s responses could reduce confidence in the viability of private-sector enterprises.

It is impossible for anyone to accurately predict whether or when such a fiscal crisis might occur in the United States. In particular, the debt-to-GDP ratio has no identifiable tipping point to indicate that a crisis is likely or imminent. All else being equal, however, the larger a government’s debt, the greater the risk of a fiscal crisis.

The likelihood of such a crisis also depends on conditions in the economy. If investors expect continued growth, they are generally less concerned about the government’s debt burden. Conversely, substantial debt can reinforce more generalized concern about an economy. Thus, fiscal crises around the world often have begun during recessions and, in turn, have exacerbated them.

I get so frustrated with Republicans in Congress, because they are supposed to be watching out for us.

During the 2010 elections, one of the biggest mid-term landslides of all time gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives and they have had it ever since. One of the pillars of the “Tea Party revolution” was fiscal responsibility, but the national debt has just continued to explode.

When the Republicans took control of the House in early 2011, we were about 14 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.

We have been betrayed, and those that have done this to us need to be held accountable.

Of course the big reason why our politicians never want to control spending is because they know what it will do to our economy.

During the Obama years, we spent more than 9 trillion dollars that we didn’t have. If we could somehow go back and take 9 trillion dollars out of the economy over those 8 years, we would be in the worst depression in U.S. history right now.

Nobody in Washington wants to be responsible for plunging us into an economic depression, and so they just keep stealing from the future in order to prop things up in the short-term.

And a similar thing could be said about central bank intervention. If the Federal Reserve and other global central banks had not pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into the financial system over the past 8 years, we would be in the midst of a horrific economic nightmare right now.

But now all of that “hot money” has created epic financial bubbles all over the planet, and when they finally burst the ensuing crisis will be far, far worse than if they had never intervened in the first place.

Global central banks now have more than 20 trillion dollars in assets on their balance sheets and the world is more than 217 trillion dollars in debt. The desperate measures that national governments and central banks have been taking have delayed the coming crisis, but they have also guaranteed that it will be far worse than it could have otherwise been.

The stage is set for the worst financial crisis in world history, and the only way that it can continue to be delayed is for our leaders to continue to inflate the bubbles larger and larger and larger.

But of course no bubble can last forever, and the bigger they become the harder they burst.