Saturday, June 9, 2012

10 terrifying facts about the economy

We rely on Business Insider for these. What's truly scary is that Business Insider offers 60 more terrifying facts about the economy. You can read them all here. But since it's Saturday we'll just mention 10:
  1. An average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day during 2010.
  2. 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be "low income" or are living in poverty.
  3. 63 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. economic model is broken.
  4. The middle class continues to shrink - 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.
  5. A Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
  6. America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
  7. 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
  8. Overall, there are more than 100 million working age Americans that do not currently have jobs.
  9. Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion.  That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
  10. Today, the 9 largest banks in the United States have a total of more than 200 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.  When the derivatives market completely collapses there won't be enough money in the entire world to fix it.