Housing (still dropping and stalling)Unemployment (starting to inch up again)Consumer Spending (stagnant)Consumer Confidence (fickle)Auto IndustryTradeBudget (Hah!)National Debt (Double Hah!)Stock Market (not acting realistically in this economy... can you say "bubble"?)Banking (will more banks fail in 2011?)Interest Rates
• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
Consumer confidence unexpectedly deteriorated in December, while prices of single-family homes fell almost double the expected pace in October, tempering growing optimism on the economy's recovery.
The regulators said one reason for the increase in foreclosures is that banks have "exhausted" options for keeping many delinquent borrowers in their homes through programs such as loan modifications.
Newly-initiated foreclosures increased to 382,000 in the third quarter, a 31.2 percent jump over the previous quarter and a 3.7 percent rise from the same quarter a year ago, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) said in a quarterly mortgage report.
The number of foreclosures in process increased to 1.2 million, a 4.5 percent increase from the second quarter and a 10.1 percent increase from a year ago, according to the regulators.
A blizzard in the U.S. Northeast this weekend postponed about $1 billion in holiday retail sales by keeping shoppers out of stores in the days after Christmas, research firm ShopperTrak said on Wednesday.
The snowstorm shut roads and canceled flights in New York City and created havoc across the Northeast, where shopper traffic was 11.2 percent below ShopperTrak's expectations for Sunday December 26 and off 13.9 percent on Monday December 27.
The total, based on an analysis of third-quarter financial results by The Wall Street Journal, is up from 86 in the second quarter, reflecting eroding capital levels, a pileup of bad loans and warnings from regulators. The 98 banks in shaky condition got more than $4.2 billion in infusions from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The United States is stepping up security at “soft targets” like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday.
It takes a level of 90 to indicate a healthy economy, which hasn't been approached since the recession began in December 2007.
Employers added a net total of only 39,000 jobs last month, a sharp decline from the 172,000 created in October, the Labor Department said Friday. The weakness was widespread. Retailers, factories, construction companies, financial firms and the government all cut jobs.
The disappointing figures caught economists off guard. They had predicted the addition of 150,000 jobs, based on a raft of positive reports that showed busier factories, rising auto sales and a good start to the holiday shopping season in November. Yet all that failed to translate into mass hiring.
One of the big surprises was the loss of 28,100 retail jobs last month despite signs of a busy holiday shopping season.
These numbers show an economy in stagnation, with no real momentum in any direction.
Excluding food and energy costs, prices were flat for a third straight month and the increase from a year ago of 0.6 percent was the smallest since records started in 1957.
US housing starts plunged to a near-record low in October while building permits were flat amid a depressed real-estate market, official data showed Wednesday.
Construction on new homes dropped nearly 12 percent from September, to an annual rate of 519,000 units, the Commerce Department reported.
The pace of construction was the weakest since April 2009, when a record low of 477,000 was reported in the data series that began in 1959.
The list of ObamaCare exemptions grows:
A few weeks later, McDonald's finagled its own Obamacare waiver after warning federal regulators that it could be forced to drop its affordable health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 restaurant workers unless it got a pass.
In early October, the Obama administration announced it had granted waivers not only to McDonald’s, but also to several other firms and labor unions.
Now comes word that Torquemada HHS Secretay Kathleen Sebelius has approved a whopping 111 waivers for businesses of all sizes, along with more unions and other providers of health insurance.
This doesn't include the growing list of companies that are already planning to drop healthcare coverage all together, since they figured out it's cheaper to pay Uncle Sam the per-employee fine than to continue proving health insurance.
The new round of cash the Federal Reserve is pumping into the U.S. economy to spur job growth could create bubbles that do the very opposite, some Fed officials are warning.
Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher suggested this week that a bubble is already forming in private equity, with cheap debt fueling high-priced deals in an echo of the torrid days of leveraged buyouts before the subprime credit crisis cut off financing in 2007.
Fisher, who argued against the U.S. central bank's decision earlier this month to buy $600 billion in Treasuries to boost the recovery, told a San Antonio audience on Monday he is concerned about signs of "speculative activity" in buyouts, along with stocks, bonds and commodities.
The U.S. Postal Service more than doubled its losses in fiscal year 2010, despite cutting billions of dollars in expenses and trimming its staff.
The Postal Service said its net loss totaled $8.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That compares to a loss of $3.8 billion the prior year.
