Economic Depression Likely
The majority of Americans believe the U.S. economy is headed for an economic depression, according to a new survey by Housing Predictor.
Destin, FL - February 25, 2008 -- A majority of Americans surveyed believe the U.S. economy will fall into an economic depression, according to a new opinion poll conducted by Housing Predictor.
The online survey found that a slight majority surveyed expect the nation's economy to develop into a depression. Housing Predictor regularly surveys visitors to its web site on real estate related issues, including the economy, and provides more than 250 local housing market forecasts in all 50 U.S. states.
The survey comes at a time when the majority of the nation's housing markets are in the midst of the worst slowdown since the Great Depression. Sales of homes and other properties are at the slowest volume in years in what has developed into a national real estate recession.
Foreclosures have reached all-time record levels as a result of the credit crunch and increasing signs that the nation has fallen into a full-fledged recession, including higher unemployment and worsening consumer confidence.
More than two million homes throughout the nation have already been foreclosed as a result of the nation's financial crisis, and higher mortgage payments home owners are unable to afford. The foreclosure rate has doubled and is forecast to worsen over the next few years.
The real estate crisis has sent shock waves through Wall Street and other financial markets, sending the nation's economy on a downward spiral. The White House and Congress are working on plans to help some home owners, but are clearly unable to act fast enough to help many consumers.
Housing Predictor forecasts that foreclosures will top 5.6 million units through 2011.
The crisis has broad implications for the national economy. Consumers are already feeling the pinch at the grocery store with higher prices for food and other products and at the gas station with higher fuel prices. Economists are growing with increasing concern over the economy, which could see the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
To find out more about the survey, check your markets real estate forecast and search foreclosures visit http://www.housingpredictor.com
Press Contact: Mike Colpitts
Company Name: Housing Predictor
Phone: 850 622-1016
Website: http://www.housingpredictor.com
posted by (hris @ 11:28 PM
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Here is an article about the fed chairman during the time of the Great Depression and what he thought caused it. The same thing is happening again for the same reasons. Please read:
In Review: America's Most Egalitarian Banker
Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
At the start of the Great Depression, Marriner Eccles hardly seemed someone who might lead a charge against the economic orthodoxies that justified grand hoards of private fortune. By the early 1930s, after all, the Utah-born Eccles had become the top banker in the Mountain West, the organizer of the first multibank holding company in the United States.
But Eccles had also come to understand, after watching the great speculative bubbles of the 1920s pop into massive misery, that prosperity — to endure — needs to be shared. Eccles began speaking out on that theme, shortly after the Great Depression began, and soon caught the attention of the early New Dealers.
In 1933, Eccles would become an assistant secretary of the treasury. A year later, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint him to the Federal Reserve Board. He would become Board chair in 1935 and remain in that central position for the next 13 years. No one individual, over those years, had more of an impact on economic policy in the United States.
Looking back on those years, in his 1951 memoir Beckoning Frontiers, Eccles would do his best to explain the impact he set out to make. Mass production, he noted at the outset, demands mass consumption, but people can’t afford to consume if the wealth an economy generates is concentrating at the top.
In the years leading up to the Great Depression, that concentrating was accelerating. A “giant suction pump,” charged Eccles, “had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.”
“In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Eccles observed, “the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
Sound familiar? The decade of the 1920s that Eccles describes in his 1951 memoir comes across today as eerily familiar. Then as now, the U.S. economy was floating on a sea of debt.
Then as now, inequality was hollowing out the nation. Eccles put the matter bluntly: “Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy.”
How would Eccles have reacted to our current debt-ridden, war-torn economy? We can’t, of course, know for sure what Eccles would do. But we do know what he did. In 1942, during World War II, a high-powered team of New Deal officials that included Eccles proposed to President Roosevelt that “a ceiling of fifty thousand dollars after taxes should be placed on individual incomes.”
In our current dollars, this $50,000 ceiling would equal about $700,000. What did FDR do with the Eccles proposal? He turned around and asked Congress to place a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000.
Congress would eventually set the nation’s top tax rate at 94 percent on all income over $200,000, and that top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the greatest period of middle class prosperity in U.S. economic history.
In 2005, the latest year with statistics available, America’s leading hedge fund managers and the rest of the nation’s top 400 income-earners faced a top tax rate of 35 percent. They actually paid, after loopholes, just 18.2 percent of their incomes in tax.
Marriner Eccles would not approve.
Stat of the Week
In the two decades between 1986 and 2005, America’s top 1 percent of taxpayers saw their share of the nation’s income jump from 11.3 to 21.2 percent. Over those same years, the federal income taxes the top 1 percent paid dropped by an equally stunning margin, from 33.13 percent of total personal income in 1986 to 23.13 percent in 2005, the most current year with IRS stats available. Taxpayers needed to report at least $364,657 in 2005 to enter the top 1 percent.
About Too Much
Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group founded in 1954. Office: Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org
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