The Yield Curve Has Not Been This Flat In 10 Years, And Many Believe This Is A Sign That A Recession Is Imminent - Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG

The Yield Curve Has Not Been This Flat In 10 Years, And Many Believe This Is A Sign That A Recession Is Imminent Posted: 19 Nov 2017   Michael Snyder  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG Whenever we see an inverted yield curve, a recession almost always follows, and that is why many analysts are deeply concerned that the yield curve is currently the flattest that it has been in about a decade.  In other words, according to one of the most reliable indicators that we have, we are closer to another recession than we have been at any point since the last financial crisis.   And when you combine this with all of the other indicators that are screaming that a new crisis is on the horizon, a very troubling picture emerges.  Hopefully this will turn out to be a false alarm, but it is looking more and more like big economic trouble is coming in 2018. The professionals on Wall Street take the yield curve very, very seriously, and the fact that it has gotten so flat has many of them extremely concerned.  The following comes from Business Insider… In the past, including before the Great Recession of 2007-2009, an inverted yield curve, where long-term interest rates fall below their short-term counterparts, has been a reliable predictor of recessions. The bond market is not there yet, but a sharp recent flattening of the yield curve has many in the markets watchful and concerned. The US yield curve is now at its flattest in about 10 years — in other words, since around the time a major credit crunch of was gaining steam. The gap between two-year note yields and their 10-year counterparts has shrunk to just 0.63 percentage point, the narrowest since November 2007. If the yield curve continues to get even flatter, it will spark widespread selling on Wall Street, and if it actually inverts that will set off total panic. And with each passing day, even more of the “experts” are warning of imminent market trouble.  For example, just consider what Art Cashin told CNBC the other day… Investors may want to take cover soon. Art Cashin, UBS’ director of floor operations at the New York Stock Exchange, says a “split personality” is manifesting itself in the stock market, and it could hit Wall Street where it hurts at any moment. “We’ve been setting record new highs, and often the breadth has been negative. We’ve had more declines than advances,” Cashin said Thursday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.” When the financial markets finally do crash, it won’t exactly be a surprise. In fact, we are way, way overdue for financial disaster. Since the last financial crisis, we have been on the greatest debt binge in human history.  U.S. government debt has gone from $10 trillion to $20 trillion, corporate debt has doubled, and U.S. consumer debt has now risen to nearly $13 trillion. Debt brings consumption from the future into the present, and so it increases short-term economic activity at the expense of long-term financial health. But we simply cannot continue to grow debt much, much faster than the overall economy is growing.  I have never talked to anyone that believes that our debt binge is sustainable, and I doubt that I ever will. The only reason why we have even gotten this far is because interest rates have been pushed to historically low levels.  If the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt even returned to the long-term average, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year in interest on the national debt and the game would be over.  Unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve and other global central banks has pushed interest rates way below the real rate of inflation, and that has bought us extra time. But now the Federal Reserve and other global central banks are reversing course in unison, and global financial markets are already starting to decline. The only way we can keep putting off the next financial crisis is if we continue our unprecedented debt binge and if global central banks continue to artificially prop up the financial markets. Of course more debt and more central bank manipulation would just make the eventual financial disaster even worse, but that is what we are faced with at this point. Most people simply don’t understand the gravity of the situation.  Nothing was ever fixed after the last financial crisis.  Instead, we went on the greatest debt binge that humanity has ever seen, and central banks started creating trillions of dollars out of thin air and recklessly injected that hot money into the financial system. So now we are in the terminal phase of the largest financial bubble in human history, and there is no easy way out. We basically have two choices.  We can have a horrific financial crisis now, or we can have one a little bit later. Usually the choice is “later”, and that is why our leaders have been piling on the debt and global central banks have been recklessly creating money. But it is inevitable that our bad choices will catch up with us eventually, and when that happens the pain that we are going to experience is going to be absolutely off the charts. Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Obamacare Rage: One Family Of 4 In Virginia Is Faced With Paying $3,000 A Month For Health Insurance Posted: 19 Nov 2017 07:51 PM PST Could you afford to pay $3000 a month for health insurance?  Previously, Ian Dixon had been paying $900 a month for health insurance for his family of four, but thanks to changes in the Charlottesville insurance market, a similar plan will now cost him more than $3,000 a month.   When I first came across this story on Zero Hedge, I have to admit that I got angry.  I was angry at the Democrats for destroying our healthcare system in the first place, and I was angry at Republicans for failing to repeal Obamacare even though they have had almost a full year to do so.  Obamacare is financially destroying hard working families all over the nation, and Congress must take action immediately. Originally, Ian Dixon was excited about Obamacare because he thought that it would mean that he could continue to provide health insurance for his family once he left his full-time job.  But now that he is facing a bill of more than $3,000 a month, all he is feeling is “rage”… Ian Dixon, who left his full-time job in 2016 to pursue an app-development business, did so because the ACA guaranteed that he could still have quality coverage for his young family, he said. But when the 38-year-old Charlottesville husband and father of a 3- and a 1-year-old went to re-enroll this month, his only choice for coverage would cost him more than $3,000 a month for his family of four, which amounted to an increase of more than 300 percent over the $900 he paid the year before. And this is for the second-cheapest option, with a deductible of $9,200. “Helpless is definitely a good word for it,” Dixon said. “Rage is also a good word for it.” The Democrats are certainly to blame for getting us into this mess, but if the Republicans don’t take action soon they will end up with full ownership of this debacle. Only the exceedingly wealthy could afford these astronomical health insurance rates, and they certainly aren’t the ones purchasing health insurance on the exchanges. Let’s look at another example.  A 55-year-old woman living in Charlottesville named Shawn Marie Cossette is horrified that she will now be paying $1,859 a month for a silver plan… Among them was Shawn Marie Cossette, 55, who runs her own event and floral design business in Charlottesville. Last year, she purchased an Anthem silver plan for $550 a month for herself. This year, under Optima, a silver plan would cost her $1,859 monthly. “It’s a huge percentage of my income,” she said. “I really believed in the ACA. I really feel everyone deserves the right to health insurance, but who can afford those prices if you don’t qualify for subsidies?” The truth is that nobody can afford these rates, and silver plan premiums are projected to rise nationally by an average of 37 percent for 2018. And that is on top of all of the other huge yearly increases that we have seen so far. According to CNN, the average 27-year-old is now going to be paying almost $5,000 a year for a silver plan… The steep rate hike means a 27-year-old will pay nearly $5,000 a year, on average, for the benchmark silver plan, upon which premium subsides are based. That’s up from $2,600 when the Obamacare exchanges opened in 2014. This is before subsidies are factored in, however. Premiums are skyrocketing for a second year in a row. Rates rose 24% this year in the states using healthcare.gov. How much pain does Obamacare have to cause before Congress finally does something? Obamacare should have been repealed day one of the Trump administration, but the RINOs in Congress won’t let that happen.  We need to kick those RINOs out, and we need to send a new generation of leaders to Washington that will get things done. Repealing Obamacare is the first step, but it won’t solve all of our problems.  We pay far more for healthcare than anyone else does by a very wide margin, and we desperately need to get healthcare costs down. We also need to get health insurance premiums back to reasonable levels.  One way to do this would be to legalize the association buying plans that Rand Paul has been proposing.  By allowing large groups of people (the NRA would be one example) to band together to buy health insurance, that would give average citizens much more negotiating power with the health insurance companies. I also very much like models such as direct primary care that cut health insurance companies out of the equation entirely. Our healthcare system is deeply, deeply broken, and we need to get back to a system that is centered primarily on doctors and patients. Because what we have right now does not work, and the rest of the world is laughing at our ineptitude. Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.