Prices of housing, childcare, automobiles, health care, drugs and energy are skyrocketing! However, incomes for most Americans are stagnant or even falling. Yet, the economy is great, sales of nearly everything is running at record rates. Consumer purchases are nearly 70% of our entire GDP. How is that possible? The money is not coming from savings, as the household savings rate has been falling for the last 20 years, 10% in 1980, < 0% in 2005, first time since Depression (Bureau of Economic Statistics, 2004) The answer is that The Mammonites (greedy bankers) are stepping in to fill the gap, funding our lifestyles with debt. (Dracula donating blood!) Look at the astounding growth of debt over the last 20 years or so: Average Household Debt up 60% since 1980 to 80% GDP Mortgage Debt up 114% for bottom 80% of families between 1989 and 2001 Auto Debt up 34% 1997-2002 College Debt up 35% 1997-2002 (Consumer Credit Report of FRB, June 2004) Credit Cards $8,367 per household, up 251% vs 10 years ago (Smart Money.com June 2002) Half of all home mortgages outstanding were refinanced between 2001-2003. Forty five percent of those transactions were cash out, sucking $333 Billion in cash out of homes. Average equity dropped to record low of 55% (Joint Center for Housing Statistics, Harvard, 2004) A large percentage of this money went to keep the party going, cars, electronics, etc. Unwittingly, millions of homeowners put their homes in jeopardy to acquire these doodads, as best selling author Robert Kiyosaky calls consumer luxuries. They substituted unsecured debt, credit card and installment debt, that could be eliminated by bankruptcy; for mortgage debt, which is secured by their homes and cannot be eliminated with a bankruptcy! This is according to the banker's plans. Their script call for us to repay them with our blood (interest). Already, over 25% of low income families spent 40% of their after tax income on servicing debt (Household Debt Service and Financial Obligation Rates, FRB, 2004) At some point, they will swoop down and gobble up our assets when they engineer massive defaults by manipulating the interest rates and money supply. This is how the bankers operate, under the guise of the business cycle, more aptly termed, the bankers cycle. Banker created Panics have been a fixture of our economy for years. In the 1830s, British money, via US banks, poured into the US to finance the purchase of land for railroads, bridges, etc. Business boomed! When the hook was set, the bankers shut off the credit spigot, drying up the money supply so that borrowers could not pay their bills. Naturally, the creditors (predators!) had no choice but to take over the assets of the bankrupt businesses for pennies on the dollar! The same boom/bust model was employed in the 1980s as the real estate boom of the 80's was followed by the canabalization of the the small community Savings and Loan industry that dominated real estate lending by the national banks and the liquidation of Billions of dollars in real estate and mortgages held by them at fire-sale prices. The handwriting is already on the wall: Home foreclosures are up 250% from 1980-2001 (National Consumer Law Center) Personal bankruptcies were up 400% from 1980 to 2002 (American Bankruptcy Institute). Ninety percent were middle class families with children (Warren, in her book The Two Income Trap 2003) You are living on borrowed time and borrowed money! If you are to avoid disaster, you must get out of debt as fast as possible and make achieving financial independence a top priority! |
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