Synthesis Time

After exploring more in depth the reasons behind the collapse of the United States economy I obtained more of a grasp on why our economy went into the gutter again and somewhat the affect it will have on college students.  I have concluded after comparing the sources I utilized that the reasons behind the collapse of the economy reach way beyond the normal view that most Americans have of its collapse being because of the bailouts of major companies and the housing crisis, as well as the outlook on how this crisis is going to affect college students in general it’s going to be pretty tough to say the least unless we can somehow miraculously pull ourselves out of the recession.  There of course are many other factors that contributed to the fall such as the couple very expensive wars we’ve got into, the inflation rate our dollar has, the actions of our politicians and there mentality of do anything no matter what the effect to get votes, and the massive loss of jobs and revenue to over sea super powers such as China.  I believe that with these problems facing the country that the future we have as college students is going to be tough.  With the amount of jobs going overseas and the amount lost every day in the U.S. due to bankruptcies and things of that nature the job market for anyone is going to be tough so were going to  have to do something to separate ourselves from the crowd.  It’s going to take putting yourself through college and getting a degree in something that will be useful later on, and then it will take dedication and hard work to achieve success.  It is going to take this because of oversea competition and the world population is only getting bigger which means there are that many more people to compete with and we as a country are going to have to rise above them once again. If we can manage to do this maybe in the near future the economy will feel the affect and begin to rise again.

It's not looking so good for the ol' US economy......

Continuing my research on the current situation of the U.S. economy is stumbled upon a couple more interesting articles on the recession.  The first one being, “It's official: Recession since Dec. '07” a piece by Chris Isidore a senior CNN money writer.  Throughout this article he is just stating the facts of why we are in a depression and how it’s officially a depression since 2007 declared by a group called The National Bureau of Economic Research (“The NBER is a private group of leading economists charged with dating the start and end of economic downturns”) http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/01/news/economy/recession/index.htm.  Their thinking to the main reason of the recession is the huge collapse of the housing market and other factors of how the Gross Domestic Product has been adequate enough to support the country.  This article along with the many other articles I have been reading and researching just made me realize how may problems the U.S.A. with its economy and how bad it really is. There are so many issues that go into it where would we even start to try and get onto the road of recovery for this nation from the wars to the foreclosures it seems like there is no solution or end in sight.  

                Through more research I did I discovered another article that revealed my fears about the economy even more.  The article was, “Jobs Increase Slightly But Unemployment Remains High” by Karl Rusnak. Through his article he shows that although 100,000+ jobs, within the last month, our unemployment rate is at 9.1% which is extremely high.  He states that since the unemployment rate is that high the jobs created within the last month don’t even matter because how high the unemployment rate it cancels it out pretty much.  All of these articles I have been reading are really just depressing because of the sad reality of what’s happening to us as a country.  Will there be any jobs in 10 years?  Is our country going to crumble like Spain is?  How much does this affect the world’s economy?  Is China the only one who seems to be a prosperous country? 

So many problems

After reading an article written by Dana Rohrabacher a whole new aspect of the current U.S. economic crisis dawned on me that I knew about but didn’t put that much thought into because of all the turmoil that has been happening within the country.  The U.S. has been outsourcing jobs and lots of money to China.  In this article Dana points out the massive amounts of money that U.S. gives to China, stating our trade deficit with Beijing alone in 2011 is about 300 billion dollars so far, as well as the massive amounts of jobs lost overseas being about 10 million over the last decade. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/5/china-undermining-economic-recovery-and-us-securit/.  All of the information I got from this article was very shocking and disturbing to say the least.  It makes you think what is it going to be like in five to ten years if we keep up this kind of pace with China?  Are there going to be any jobs left for us when we graduate?  Can the U.S. rebound from this massive mistake and bring the money and jobs back home?

Another article I was interested in was on the topic of wars and the decline of the U.S. economy.  I chose to go this path because I was listening to NPR radio (National Public Radio) and heard a very intriguing story of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.  A statistic caught my attention when they stated that the U.S. alone in a month spends roughly 320 million dollars in aid to help the people of that country, and that doesn’t include what we spend on the war itself. I found this article to be very astounding in the way that the facts were just unbelievable.  Throughout the article they compare the amount of money spent in 2007 and 2008 in what it could be spent on helping the U.S. It was all really mind blowing making me think how many problems does this economy really have?http://www.alternet.org/world/79988/

Over spending a problem for U.S.citizens?

While doing research on the U.S. economy and why it failed I stumbled upon a couple intriguing web sites.  The first being http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-03/pimco-s-gross-says-global-recession-risk-is-overtaking-new-normal-forecast.html which was an article done by a gentleman named Bill Gross, who is a manager at the world’s largest bond fund, over the subject of if the U.S. economy today is going to relapse into another recession maybe even worse this time.  Throughout the article he argues for if politicians and higher ups started working together instead of everyone for themselves things might start looking better instead of everyone pretty much shooting themselves in the foot.  This article was interesting to me because it gave me a little insight on different peoples’ views about the current economic situation which are similar to mine because I think as well that politicians and the higher ups are pretty much doing whatever they can to get votes and have no awareness on the overall effect of the actions they take.

                The second interesting site I found was http://www.lilith-ezine.com/articles/politics/American-Economy-Collapsing.html. Through this article they go into inflation on the US dollar and why our economy is the way it is.  This page had some very interesting and controversial facts such as, “The American dollar is becoming worthless, and unlike a normal recession the US economy is still growing in GDP; The result is that that the American dollar isn't actually worth much when you think about it. It is just paper after all. For decades its value has been boosted by strong demand overseas as banks used it as backup currency because it was stable and strong.”  These quotes along with many others through the article gave me a better look and a more understanding of what’s really happening with the money situation in the U.S.. Looking through these sources it brings up the question in my mind of why mortgage were so lenient with borrowers and why do all of our job’s go overseas now and no one seems to care?

Why?

Why did the US economy go into such a recession and are we still in a recession? These are a couple very significant questions that affect pretty much everyone in this wonderful country of ours. The first one really affects us as college kids who are looking forward to the bright futures that lie ahead of us in which we need a solid economy that isn’t failing in order for us to have a solid chance in job placement.  It affects all of our peers not in college and everyone else in the job market and or unemployed workers in hopes of a good job with high wages and a better life to look forward to.  Which leads into the second question of are we still in a recession which obliviously affects everyone looking forward to what it’s going to entail for the country to pull ourselves out of it and be on better grounds and how long we’re going to have to wait till it’s over.

I think there are a couple factors that I know of but have to be many more that have to be contributors to the failing economy.  One of the factors being that the insurance companies outstanding and unreal loans and mortgages they gave out to people knowing they were going to default on their payments and end up being foreclosed on.  This ended up causing tons of companies to close in which put many workers out of a job.  Once big companies started failing (not just in insurance companies but many other types of companies ex. Banks) it caused a domino effect of other problems throughout the economy causing it to collapse. 

I plan to go in depth to why all of these companies started to go bankrupt which in turn leads me to why the economy started failing.  Also this will hopefully give me a clearer view on if or when this economy might have a brighter future in its sights.