The headline above would apply equally well to British, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek citizens. Only monetary ideologist fanatics like Schäuble, Draghi, Abe and the fortunately former UK Chancellor George Osborne think that financialised bourse ‘profits’ can give the majority a life of decency and fulfilment.
The data news
- The Wall Street estimates consensus for Q2 profits of the S&P 500 is a 5.6% fall (YOY). That is, the fifth quarter in a row of falling corporate profits. This is because…
- US retail sales fell 4%, deepening a 3% drop in April.
- More than 20% of Americans, can’t afford to shop, according to major US research group ARG
- 50% of Americans haven’t had a salary raise in five years.
- 47% of Americans couldn’t afford $400 for a gp’s visit without borrowing to pay the fee.
Why the data are old news
It would be ludicrous to describe this development as “unexpected”. Even here at the lowly Slog, the doom was predicted long ago. In November 2013, I wrote this:
In short, don’t ask people to consume more if they earn less. In May 2015, my contention was even more blunt:
In February this year, I summarised a long history of warnings:
It’s serial madness, but that observation doesn’t help UK SPA pension victims out of their black hole of destitution.
What we need to do to stop the insanity
- Get Governments that work for us – the people whose taxes fund their madcap ideas – by taking four simple steps
- Join in with the general movement towards devolution of power down to city, town and then community level.
- Reject all outdated and disproven ideologies in favour of new ideas: globalist neoliberalism and socialism hava a track record of failure, whereas mutualism had an unblemished reputation until Thatcher’s Big Bang replaced its Benthamite philanthropy with Beelzebub greed.
This has been a brief post….but, I hope, to the point. As S J Perelman once wrote in a letter, “I apologise for the length of this missive. If I’d had more time, it would’ve been much shorter”.
The Slog 