THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Once again, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the key policy-making body, underscored that for all the talk in public about the need to bring down prices, the discussion behind closed doors was about suppressing a wages upsurge by the working class.
Minutes from the meeting of the Federal Reserve’s December meeting, released on Wednesday, make clear the US central bank will continue its interest rate tightening regime regardless of expectations it will be forced to pull back in the event that inflation comes down and unemployment rises.
Once again, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the key policy-making body, underscored that for all the talk in public about the need to bring down prices, the discussion behind closed doors was about suppressing a wages upsurge by the working class.
The staff review of the overall economic situation in the US declared in the very first paragraph that while labour market conditions had eased somewhat in October and November, they “remained quite tight.”
The second paragraph noted that the private sector jobs opening rate (the ratio of jobs available to the numbers seeking work) “moved back down in October but remained high.”
And the third paragraph stated: “Nominal wage growth continued to be elevated and remained above the level above the pace judged to be consistent with the FOMC’s 2 percent inflation objective.”
This was despite the fact that the review noted average hourly earnings rose by 5.1 percent in the 12 months ending in November, well below the rate of inflation, running at the highest rate in four decades. It underscored that the Fed’s key objective is to further cut the living standards of the working class in the interest of the corporate and financial elites it serves.
The Fed is seeking to enforce this program by inducing a slowdown in the economy and a recession if necessary.
According to the minutes: “With inflation remaining unacceptably high, participants expected that a sustained period of below-trend real GDP growth would be needed to bring aggregate supply into better balance and thereby reduce inflationary pressures.”
The key aggregates here are the supply of and the demand for labour.
Under conditions where the size of the labour force has been constricted due to COVID deaths, continued infection and the effects of Long COVID, as well as the reduction in the percentage of the population looking for work due to early retirement and reduced immigration, the only way to increase labour supply is by pushing up unemployment.
This is despite the fact, mentioned by “several participants” in their remarks, that “budgets were stretched for low-to-moderate income households and that many consumers were shifting their spending to less expensive alternatives.” Pain must be inflicted as Fed chair Jerome Powell said back in August.
Throughout the FOMC’s deliberations the real causes of inflation, including the failure of governments to deal with COVID, the ultra-easy monetary policies of the Fed, profit gouging by energy companies and other giant corporations and the effects of the US-led war against Russia, were passed over in almost total silence.
The almost exclusive focus on wages became clear in the discussion on the prices for core services, excluding shelter, which form the largest component of the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index which the Fed takes as its key measure of underlying inflationary pressures.
The minutes said this component of the PCE inflation rate was high and had “tended to be closely linked to nominal wage growth and therefore would likely remain persistently elevated if the labour market remained very tight.”
The bringing down of this component of inflation would “require some softening in the growth of labour demand [code for increased unemployment] to bring the labour market back into better balance.”
That is, everything must be done to prevent workers from taking advantage of present labour shortages to even claw back the losses they have suffered over the past year, let alone the real wage cuts inflicted on them for decades.
The minutes also indicated that the Fed is anxious to stamp out the expectation in some areas of finance capital that it will ease back on its interest rate hikes in view of some limited fall in the inflation rate and the growing prospect of recession.
“No participants,” the minutes record, “anticipated that it would be appropriate to begin reducing the federal funds rate in 2023.”
It was “generally observed that a restrictive policy stance would need to be maintained until the incoming data provided confidence that inflation was on a sustained downward path to 2 percent, which was likely to take some time.”
In fact, the restrictive policy may well remain indefinitely, imposing slower growth and recession, because, in the view of some economic analysts, inflation will continue to remain well above the supposed 2 percent target.
The FOMC was also anxious to quash any perception that the reduction in the rate hikes from 75 basis points (0.75 percentage points) to 50 basis points and their possible further reduction to 25 basis points was an indication the Fed was pulling back.
“A number of participants emphasised that it would be important to communicate that a slowing in the pace of rate increases was not an indication of the Committee’s resolve to achieve its price stability goal or a judgement that inflation was already on a persistent downward path,” the minutes said.
One of the effects of the rate tightening so far has been the increased turbulence in financial markets, of which the collapse of the crypto market has been a significant expression.
According to the review of financial conditions contained in the minutes, the spillover effects from the debacles such as the FTX bankruptcy have been significant for other crypto lenders and exchanges but “the collapse was not seen as posing broader market risks to the financial system.”
But that assessment may well be changing because the day before the minutes were published the Fed, together with the Federal Deposit Institute and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, issued a joint statement on the risks posed by crypto assets to banking organisations.
It said contagion risk in the crypto asset sector arising from opaque lending, investing, funding, service, and operational arrangements “may also present concentration risks for banking organisations with exposure to the crypto-asset sector.”
It was important that “risks related to the crypto-asset sector that cannot be mitigated or controlled do not migrate to the banking system.”
The three agencies had to build knowledge about “the risks crypto assets may pose to banking organisations, their customers and the broader US financial system” and they had to take a “careful and cautious approach to current or proposed crypto-related activities and exposures at each banking organisation.”
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What I Saw as a Fake Billionaire | Fakes, Frauds and Scammers
However, for all this talk of supervision, a glaring omission from the statement was any explanation of how the Ponzi scheme operation of Sam Bankman-Fried, carried out in the plain sight of all the so-called regulatory agencies, brought no response until it collapsed.
Nor did they so much as mention that much of their description of the “opaque” and dangerous nature of the crypto market applies to the financial system more broadly.
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INSOLVENT BANKS FAILURE ANNOUNCEMENT COMING? FDIC PREPARING FOR PUBLIC STATEMENT
The U.S. retirement savings crisis is not on the horizon — it's already here, and the middle class is going to be decimated by it. The erosion of incomes in America is ultimately going to deteriorate the quality of life of millions of middle-class workers when they reach retirement age, and according to a new study, almost half of them are at risk of falling into or below the poverty line. Over the course of many decades, middle-class Americans have been induced to believe that our current retirement system can provide the security and stability they need when they reach their golden years, but that can’t be farther from the truth.
Just like food and housing, retirement is a necessity. Eventually, we’re all going to get to the point where we can’t work anymore, and society tells us that it is our duty to make arrangements for when that happens because, at some point, we will no longer be able to earn an income. However, the cost of retirement has risen exponentially, and middle-class Americans are going to be disproportionally impacted by this looming crisis. A new report released by Economic Policy Research found that the percentage of pay middle-income earners have to save to finance an adequate retirement has ballooned over the past two decades.
Research shows 31% of middle-income Americans are reportedly saving money for their future, of those only 9% of middle-income workers save 15% or more of their income for retirement, according to Pew Research Center data. At the same time, 42% are not currently saving for retirement. Meanwhile, 27% of middle-class workers have empty nest eggs. No wonder why a quarter of them expect to never retire, according to the Cuna Mutual Group 2022 Middle-Class Survey.
Against this background, a recent study by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School has uncovered that nearly half of middle-class Americans will face a slide into poverty as they enter their retirement. The paper exposed that roughly 40% of Americans who are considered middle-class will fall into poverty by the time they reach age 65, while an additional 8% are likely to fall below the poverty line.
Our society makes us believe that only through financial discipline and individual effort we will be able to enjoy our senior years without major concerns. But the retirement crisis in America is less due to personal failure than structural failures. At the end of the day, savings are not the root of the problem with our retirement system. The main problem is that our wages have been steadily dropping for decades.
Corporations have been largely hoarding profits, giving CEOs generous bonuses, and barely readjusting what they pay to their employees so that their salaries can keep pace with inflation. While corporate executives have seen their pay skyrocket by 876% in the past forty years, our salaries have increased by just 41% over that same span.
Government policies and the underfunding of Social Security are a clear demonstration that authorities aren’t taking care of people’s interests. Instead, they’re making life harder for many of us. The mere mention of the idea that corporations should be held responsible for the impact they have on the lives of the 99% can make the elites hysterically complain that this is an attack on “wealth creators.” But what does that make the rest of us? If only we could impose the same kind of financial discipline on corporate executives and government leaders as we do on the middle class, then we would have a real answer to the retirement problem.
For more info, find us on: https://www.epiceconomist.com/
Shocking New Data Shows Economy is Crashing Faster Than We Thought and Headed Towards a Hard Landing
So Democrats in Congress helped Democrats in the White House smuggle roughly 2.2 million southern migrants over the southern border, and also to supercharge the transfer of legal migrants and visa workers into U.S. jobs. “The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” labor secretary Marty Walsh said in December. NEIL MUNRO
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35 Signs That Prove That The Working Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out
Joe Biden’s media supporters keep assuring us that things are getting better with the economy. However, Joe Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, wrote on New Year’s Day of the reality—we are in a recession. Stop drinking the “we’re OK” Kool-Aid.
Biden, with help from the Federal Reserve and Congress, wiped out $10 trillion in American wealth in 2022. This is record-breaking destruction.
Steve Bannon at War Room rolled out a Financial Times chart from earlier in the week showing what an outlier 2022 was when compared to prior years.
The US should be in the right upper quadrant of the chart, but 2022 put the US in the left lower quadrant. The 2022 situation doesn’t even factor in the effect of the 1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill. The data point on the chart reflects the value of assets in stocks and bonds, with no effort to measure other assets like real estate. It might be worse if other economic measures are considered.
Just the other day, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Branch, relying on multiple indicators, declared that we have a recession. This information is no surprise, but it raises questions about what’s happening at the rest of the Fed’s branches.
In the real world, loss of asset value is a measure of prosperity or recession. While we once asked whether we could trust public health authorities (the answer is “no,” in case you were wondering), this year’s question is whether you can trust the financial “authorities” when they talk about mild recessions and point to job numbers that are buffed up by double counting people with more than one job, even as they ignore that workforce participation has declined. The workforce participation number is down because of the economy and because people are living on government handouts.
Only the impaired and dysfunctional would not be aware of the economic downturn—people with no connection to the economy and no savings who don’t even shop for food or buy goods and services, don’t have a car, and don’t travel. No wonder Americans are walking around wondering what happened to their net worth.
A country in decline usually suffers from self-inflicted wounds, and those wounds may be severe, even fatal.
LAYOFFS SWEEP ACROSS THE NATION! BED BATH & BANKRUPT, STOCKS SELL-OFF, CONSUMER BROKE, REALITY CHECK
'credit card' joe biden has always been wall street and the banksters' rent boy.
45. The American ruling class responded to the 2008 economic and financial meltdown with a bailout of Wall Street. The national debt was doubled virtually overnight to finance the purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars in speculative assets by the Federal Reserve. This was repeated on an even greater scale in 2020 during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, propelling share values to record levels amidst mass death and social misery.
ALL TECH BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMS FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. Is it working???
Tech Layoffs Continue: Woke Software Giant Salesforce to Lay Off 8,000 Employees
Salesforce, a software giant with a notoriously woke CEO, plans to lay off around 10 percent of its workforce, which would come to about 8,000 employees. It is the latest layoff by one of the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe.
Salesforce, the largest private employer in San Francisco, has decided to shut down a number of offices, saying the company has grown too much during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, according to a regulatory filing obtained by San Francisco Chronicle.
Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” the notoriously left-wing CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, wrote in a letter to employees.
“The environment remains challenging and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions,” Benioff added.
The job cuts are “another blow to the city’s struggling downtown core and office market, where vacancy is a record high 27%,” San Francisco Chronicle noted.
The cloud computing giant laid off hundreds of salespeople late last year. Additionally, some top executives are also leaving, such as co-CEO Bret Taylor, who will resign at the end of the month. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield is also leaving Salesforce this month.
In September, Benioff threatened to pull his software company’s operations out of Republican-run states if their policies do not align with his liberal worldview, specifically regarding abortion.
Last year, following the events of January 6, 2021, Salesforce — which was also the company behind the RNC’s email provider — had prevented then-President Donald Trump and Republicans from using “our services in any way that could lead to violence.” The Trump campaign was then banned from being able to send emails.
In 2020, Benioff stood in stunned silence for ten seconds after being asked a question about his company’s lack of policy on political tolerance and viewpoint discrimination at Salesforce’s annual investor meeting.
E-commerce giant Amazon has revealed that it will be laying off more than 18,000 employees in the coming months, the largest headcount reduction at a tech firm in the past year. The layoffs will impact about five percent of the company’s corporate workforce.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in a recent announcement, Amazon stated that it will lay off more than 18,000 employees in the coming weeks, representing the highest number of layoffs at a major technology company in the past year. The layoffs will primarily affect the company’s corporate ranks, impacting about five percent of that workforce and 1.2 percent of Amazon’s overall workforce of 1.5 million as of September. The cuts will be concentrated in the company’s devices business, recruiting, and retail operations.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In a blog post addressing the layoffs, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said, “Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so.” He added that most of the cuts will be in the retail and recruiting areas of the company.
Many tech companies have had to make job cuts as the economy has soured, with Amazon’s layoffs of over 18,000 employees representing the largest number of people laid off by a tech company in recent months, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks such events as they surface in media reports and company releases. Other companies that have announced layoffs include Facebook, which is cutting more than 11,000 workers or 13 percent of its staff, and Lyft, HP, and Salesforce.
Amazon enjoyed massive growth during the coronavirus pandemic, with customers flocking to online shopping and pushing the company’s various businesses, including e-commerce, groceries, and cloud computing, forward by years. Amazon doubled its logistics network and added hundreds of thousands of employees in order to keep up with demand.
However, as demand began to wane and customers started to return to in-store shopping, Amazon initiated a cost-cutting review to pare back on unprofitable units. This included targeted cuts in the spring and summer, such as shutting physical stores and business units like Amazon Care, as well as a company-wide hiring freeze.
The news of the layoffs sent Amazon’s stock down 1.1 percent in Thursday morning trading to $84.19, with the stock down 49 percent over the past 12 months. Despite the current economic uncertainty, Amazon’s CEO remains confident in the company’s ability to weather the storm, stating in his blog post, “We will continue to invest in the things that drive long-term growth.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
DEPORT MAYORKAS BACK TO CUBA AND DROP OFF JOE AT GITMO!
AZ official's dire prediction on Cartels as border container wall is dismantled.
Rents are rising because real estate companies are trying to please investors, says a Washington Post report that ignores the economic impact of President Joe Biden’s open borders policy.
The January 2 article focused on rising rents at apartments owned by Starwood Capital Group:
At Starwood’s Estates at Wellington Green in Palm Beach County, Fla., the company raised some rents by as much as 52 percent in 2022; at the Griffin Apartments in Scottsdale, Ariz., it increased them by 35 percent over the same period. At the Cove at Boynton Beach in Florida, it boosted rents on some units by as much as 93 percent in 2022.
…
Edgar Enrique, a pool cleaner from Guatemala who shares with his wife a one-bedroom at Starwood’s Reserve at Ashley Lake, said his rent jumped from $1,600 to $2,000. “For me, it’s not good,” Enrique said. “Why does it cost $400 more now?”
The rents are rising fast because investment executives are pushing to maximize their companies’ profits, the Post reported:
Some families said they were forced into difficult downsizings: Couples with children moved from two-bedroom to one-bedroom apartments even though, as one father said, “we’re tripping over each other.” Another family with three children had a two-bedroom at the Reserve at Ashley Lake. A few months ago, they got a notice that the rent would be rising from $1,600 to $2,000 per month, they said. They moved in with a family member. “We’re trying to save to get out of the cycle,” said the father, an immigrant from Haiti who sells life insurance.
The article downplayed the impact of Biden’s border policy and instead sought to focus all the blame on real-estate companies.
Since January 2021, Biden’s migration has added at least 4 million southern migrants to the United States population, not counting at least two million legal immigrants and visa workers. Assuming six people per apartment, that’s an extra demand for roughly 700,000 apartments in two years when only 800,000 new apartments were completed.
Housing industry groups recognize — but downplay — the link between migration and rents.
“Rising rents are largely a byproduct of limited supply and high demand across the rental market,” said a July 2022 op-ed in the Washington Post by Robert Pinnegar, the president and CEO of the National Apartment Association in Arlington, Va.
An August 22 report by the apartment association lamented the slowdown of migration by President Donald Trump:
Immigration was already on the decline prior to the pandemic, noticeably tapering off in 2017. By 2019, immigration was nearly half the level of 2016 when it was over 1 million persons. The pandemic further crushed that figure, and in 2021, just 245,000 immigrants entered the U.S. Although the new administration has put several policies in place to improve immigration, it has been slow to return …
…
In the upside scenario, … immigration rates increase to recent highs, or about 1.2 million per year. This would provide both a higher level of minorities and younger people to the population base. In this scenario … the strong population growth leads to demand for 4.8 million units, or about 344,000 per year.
“I think this is the strongest real estate market I’ve seen in 30 years, 35 years,” Starwood founder Barry Sternlicht said in early 2022.
“We’re in a position now where occupancy is extremely strong and we are pushing rents,” a Starwood executive told a real-estate event, the Post reported.
Starwood rejected the Post‘s investor-focused blame, saying in a statement that: “We would not have been able to grow and maintain our portfolio at this size if we acted differently than any other landlord in this space.”
A view of houses in Los Angeles, California, on July 5, 2022. While two years of a booming U.S. housing market brought wealth to many, a shortage of housing is making home ownership unaffordable for millions of Americans with prices up more than 30% over the past few years and interest rates rising. (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
Academic research says immigration drives up rents — and also spikes housing prices in nearby locations as Americans flee from the civic impact of the new migrants.
“Using data that span from 2002–2012, we find, as have others, that immigration inflows are associated with rising rents and prices,” according to a March 2017 study of almost 300 “Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), titled “Immigration and housing: A spatial econometric analysis.” The summary reported:
An increase in the number of immigrants equal to 1 percent of an MSA’s total population was linked with a 0.8 percent increase in rents and a 0.8 percent increase in home prices.
This same increase in immigrants was associated with a 1.6 percent rise in rents and a 9.6 percent rise in home prices in surrounding MSAs.
As immigrants move into an MSA, natives tend to move to surrounding MSAs, indicating that the spillover effects may be driven by native-population movements.
Immigrants now comprise roughly 14 percent — or one-in-sex — of all residents in the United States. That inflow has helped to spike rents and housing costs in California and other coastal states, especially when politicians and builders jointly roll back suburban zoning rules.
“Rents are simply about supply and demand,” said Andrew Good, a director at NumbersUSA. He added:
Not only is it not a secret, but industry reports say the truth out loud: It is beyond dispute that today’s demand is driven by our loose borders … Rent-raising companies are just following the market that Congress created. It will continue until voters put their foot down.
The combination of rising housing costs and decades of flatlined wages is also pushing many people to crowd into overcrowded housing. The New York Timesreported in August 2020 about poor migrants trying to live near their service-sector jobs in California’s Silicon Valley during the coronavirus crash:
There were 12 people in three bedrooms, with a bathroom whose door frequently required a knock and a kitchen where dinnertime shifts extended from 5 p.m. well into the evening.
Karla Lorenzo, a Guatemalan immigrant who cleaned houses in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, lived in the big room along the driveway. Big is a relative term when a room has five people in it. She and her partner, Abel, slept in a queen-size bed along the wall. There was a crib for the baby at the foot, with the older children’s bunk bed next to that. The other housemates had similar layouts.
The rising rents and shrinking salaries are also helping to spike the number of homeless Americans.
Since 1990, the federal policy of Extraction Migration is pulling in more migrant renters, workers, and consumers, and has repeatedly been defended by the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of the Amazon retail empire.
This open-borders policy reverses the low-migration, high-wage policies set by President Donald Trump — and the reversal helped cause a massive run-up in stock prices when Biden was elected.
For example, Mid-America Apartment Communities Inc. was worth $134 per share in January 2021 when Biden was inaugurated. It spiked to $229 per share 12 months later, before falling to $156 in January 2022 amid rising interest rates. But the company’s January 2021 to January 2022 rise-and-fall still left it up by 16 percent amid two years of high migration.
Similarly, Starwood’s stock value doubled from October 2020 to June 2021 — but then dropped by 27 percent in January 2022 amid higher interest rates. That rise and fall back to January 2021 levels matched other apartment investors, such as Avalon Bay, and Equity Residential.
“Increased immigration will be key to sustaining apartment demand in these areas over the coming decades,” said the report by the apartment association.