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?