Debt Levels: How Long Can This Keep Going?

Never before has the world faced such a serious debt crisis.  Yes, in the past there have certainly been nations that have gotten into trouble with debt, but we have never had a situation where virtually all of the major powers around the globe were all drowning in debt at the same time.  And what makes this crisis even more unprecedented is that everyone on the planet is using fiat currency that is backed up by nothing.  It is all just a bunch of paper and data points that people have faith in.  Right now, confidence in this system is being shaken as debt levels skyrocket to extremely dangerous levels.  Many are openly wondering how much longer this can possibly go on.

Just consider what is going on over in Europe right now.  Even the countries that have supposedly "tried austerity" continue to rack up debt at a mind blowing pace.  New numbers that have just been released show that government debt to GDP ratios for some of the most financially troubled nations in Europe are absolutely soaring...

• Euroarea: 92.2%, up from 88.2% a year ago
• Greece: 160.5%, up from 136.5% a year ago
• Italy: 130.3%; up from 123.8% a year ago
• Portugal: 127.2%, up from 112.3% a year ago
• Ireland: 125.1%, up from 106.8% a year ago
• Spain: 88.2%, up from 73.0% a year ago
• Netherlands: 72.0%, up from 66.7% a year ago

Meanwhile, the debt to GDP ratio in Japan is now well past the 200% mark and continues to march upward with no apparent end in sight.  The following is from a recent MSN article...

In Japan, the good news is that the nation's budget for the fiscal year, which started on April 1, will see the government raise a higher percentage of spending from tax revenue than at any other time in the past four years. The bad news is that the government will still cover 46.3% of its spending from borrowing. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that Japan's budget deficit for 2013 amounted to 10.3% of gross domestic product.

In China, the big problem is the absolutely stunning growth of private domestic debt.  According to a recent World Bank report, the total amount of credit in China has risen from 9 trillion dollars in 2008 to 23 trillion dollars today.

That increase is roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. commercial banking system.

According to financial journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the ratio of private domestic debt to GDP in China is now wildly out of control...

The 160pc debt ratio for China is based on a conservative measure of credit. Fitch says it is 200pc if you count all offshore vehicles, trusts, letters of credit etc.

This morning China Securities Journal – an arm of the regulators – said it may really be 221pc.

Well, what about the United States?

As I noted the other day, our ratio of federal government debt to GDP has shot up like a rocket since 2008...

At this point, the U.S. already has more government debt per capitathan Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain.  It is a giant mess, and yet our politicians continue to recklessly spend more money.

And of course state and local governments all over the nation are drowning in debt too.  The bankruptcy of Detroit is forcing people to come to grips with how bad things really are.  Sadly, as Meredith Whitney explained the other day, there are going to be a lot more municipal bankruptcies coming down the pipeline...

As jarring as the reality may be to accept, Detroit’s decision last week to declare bankruptcy should not be regarded as a one-off in the US municipal market – which is what the bond-peddlers are now telling their clients. The aftershocks of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history will be staggering, and Detroit will set important precedents.

Municipal bankruptcies have historically been rare for a number of reasons – including the states’ determination to preserve their credit ratings, their access to cheap funding and the stigma of bankruptcy. But, these days, things are very different in the world of municipal finance.

At the root of the problem is the incentive system that elected officials used to face. For decades, across the US, local leaders ran up tabs for future taxpayers; they promised pensions and other benefits for public employees that have strong legal protection. That has been a great source of patronage for elected officials: they can promise all sorts of future perks to loyal supporters (state and local workers) with very little accountability on the delivery of those promises.

And of course the overall debt level in the United States continues to grow much, much faster than our overall economy is growing.

The greatest debt bubble in the history of the planet is still expanding.

How long will it be before it bursts?

That is a very good question.  For now, our "leaders" appear to just be trying to keep the party going for as long as possible.  They know that if they suddenly change course hard times will hit almost immediately.  For example, just check out what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress last week...

With the economy still facing risks, especially from government spending cuts, Bernanke told a congressional panel on Wednesday the Fed is still planning to trim its quantitative easing stimulus, if growth continues at a steady pace.

But expectations that the Fed was poised to start tightening monetary policy, which have sent interest rates jumping and sparked turmoil in global markets, were unwarranted, he stressed.

"I don't think the Fed can get interest rates up very much, because the economy is weak, inflation rates are low," Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee.

"If we were to tighten policy, the economy would tank."

Nobody wants the economy to "tank", but the truth is that the more debt that we run up, the larger our long-term economic problems become.

And a growing percentage of Americans realize that something has seriously gone wrong.  According to a recent Pew Research survey, 44% of all Americans believe that an economic recovery is still "a long way off".

Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we are already living in the "economic recovery".

This is about as good as it is going to get.

The truth is that the real storm has not even hit yet.

Total Debt Growth vs. GDP Growth

Quality Of Jobs In the U.S. Is Going Downhill Really Fast

Trying to find a job in America today can be an incredibly frustrating experience.  Most of the jobs that are available seem to pay very little, and there is intense competition for just about any job that is open.  But it wasn't always like this.  When I was in high school, I was immediately hired when I applied for a job at McDonalds because they were so desperate for workers that they would hire just about anyone that could flip a burger.  But in this economic environment, a single nationwide hiring event conducted by McDonalds resulted in a million job applications, and only a small percentage of those applicants were actually hired.  

Our economy simply does not produce enough jobs for everyone anymore, and the percentage of "good jobs" continues to decline.  That means that it is getting really hard to find a job that will enable you to support a family, and a lot of people end up doing jobs that they are massively overqualified for.  But when times are tough, people are going to do what they have to do in order to survive.

One thing that we have seen in recent years is an explosion in the number of "temp workers" in America.  Even some of the largest companies in America are using them.  They like the flexibility of being able to bring in workers when they need them and of being able to dump them the moment they don't need them anymore.  Sadly, those that work in the "temp industry" often work in deplorable conditions for very little pay.  The following is a brief excerpt from an absolutely outstanding Pro Publica article...

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

But these are the types of jobs the U.S. economy is "creating" these days.  Low paying part-time jobs are continually becoming a bigger part of the economy.  This is one of the primary reasons why the middle class in America is shrinking.

You can't support a family on what most of these part-time jobs pay.  But our economy is not producing many high quality full-time jobs these days.  The average quality of American jobs just continues to sink.

The following are 15 signs that the quality of jobs in America is going downhill really fast...

#1 The number of part-time workers in the United States has just hit a brand new all-time high, but the number of full-time workers is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.

#2 In America today, only 47 percent of adults have a full-time job.

#3 Even though the U.S. economy created nearly 200,000 jobs in June, the number of full-time jobs actually decreased.

#4 There are now 2.7 million temp workers in the United States - a new all-time high.

#5 One out of every ten jobs in the United States is now filled through a temp agency.

#6 The U.S. economy has actually lost manufacturing jobs for four consecutive months.

#7 The official unemployment rate has been at 7.5 percent or higher for54 months in a row.  That is the longest stretch in U.S. history.

#8 According to one recent survey, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

#9 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

#10 High paying manufacturing jobs continue to be shipped overseas.  Sadly, there are fewer Americans employed in manufacturing now than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then.

#11 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

#12 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs.  60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

#13 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#14 At this point, an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#15 According to a study that was released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States qualify as "good jobs" at this point.  In a previous article, I detailed the three criteria that they used to define what a "good job" is….

#1 The job must pay at least $18.50 an hour.  According to the authors, that is the equivalent of the median hourly pay for American workers back in 1979 after you adjust for inflation.

#2 The job must provide access to employer-sponsored health insurance, and the employer must pay at least some portion of the cost of that insurance.

#3 The job must provide access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.

Persistently High Unemployment and Skyrocketing Bond Yields

The mainstream media is heralding today's "fantastic" employment numbers as evidence that the U.S. economy is steadily recovering.  But is that really true?  The number of jobs created in June was just a little bit more than what is required to keep up with population growth, and the official unemployment rate remained at 7.6 percent.  And if you look deeper in the numbers, they don't look very good at all.  

The percentage of low paying part-time jobs in the economy continues to rise, the number of full-time jobs actually decreased and the U-6 unemployment number jumped from 13.8% in May to 14.3% in June.  That is a stunning increase.  And if the labor participation rate in this country was at the level it was at prior to the last recession, the official unemployment rate would be sitting at 11.1%.  But according to the mainstream media, all of this is wonderful news.  It is like we are in some sort of economic bizarro world where bad is good and down is up.

When the jobs numbers were released on Friday, Business Insiderbreathlessly declared that it "was jobs day in America, and America crushed expectations."

USA Today ran an article on the jobs numbers with the following headline: "First Take: As job gains grow, optimism rises".

But should we really be celebrating?

Posted below is a chart that shows the percentage of working age Americans with a job since the beginning of the year 2000.  This chart does include the jobs numbers that were released on Friday...

Can you see a "recovery" in there somewhere?

Am I missing something?

Let me look again.  This time I will squint really hard.

Nope - I still can't see a recovery.

For three and a half years we have been stuck in a range between 58 percent and 59 percent.  We are way, way below where we were before the recession.

So can we please not even begin to use the word "recovery" until we at least get above the 59 percent level?

And most of the jobs that are being created are of very poor quality.  As I mentioned above, the figures show that the number of full-time jobs actually decreased last month.  And as Zero Hedge pointed out, manufacturing employment has actually declined for four months in a row...

Even as the manufacturing jobs continue to collapse, posting their fourth consecutive monthly drop in June to 11.964 million jobs, minimum wage waiters and bartenders have never been happier. In June Restaurant and Bar employees just hit a new all time high of 10,339,800 workers, increasing by a whopping 51,700 in one month.

Things are pretty good in America right now if you want to flip burgers or wait tables.  But if you want a good job that you can support a family with, things are getting even worse.

Meanwhile, bond yields soaring into the stratosphere.

The yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries absolutely exploded today.  It opened at 2.50% and closed at 2.71%.  When I saw what had happened I could hardly believe it.

If bond yields continue to climb like this, it is going to cause some massive problems in the financial markets.  The following is from an article by John Rubino...

A few things to look for: recalculations of the deficit in light of spiking interest costs, comparisons of US and Japanese yields and speculation about what this means for Japanese rates — followed by dire analyses of Japan’s future borrowing costs — and last but not least, a growing concern for the hundreds of trillions of dollars of interest rate derivatives that now have one counterparty deeply in the red.

Most Americans don't think too much about bond yields, but if they keep spiking it is going to dramatically affect every man, woman and child in the entire country.

Yesterday, I described some of the consequences that rapidly rising bond yields would have...

And if interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds start to rise to rational levels, the U.S. government is going to have to pay more to borrow money, state and local governments are going to have to pay more to borrow money, junk bonds will crash, the market for home mortgages will shrivel up and economic activity in this country will slow down substantially.

Plus, as I am fond of reminding everyone, there is a 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives time bomb sitting out there that rapidly rising interest rates could set off.

Never before have we had anything like the gigantic derivatives bubble that is hanging over global financial markets like a sword of Damocles.

As interest rates continue to go up, the derivatives bubble could burst at any time.  When it does, we are going to see financial carnage unlike anything we have ever seen before.

2008 was just the warm up act.  What is coming next is going to be the main event.

But in the economic bizarro world that we are living in, the mainstream media insists that skyrocketing interest rates are nothing to worry about.

Today, USA Today ran a headline that declared the following: "Investors: Don't panic over bond yield spike".

And Yahoo actually ran a story entitled "Why higher U.S. yields should cheer investors".  Needless to say, the arguments in that story are not very convincing.

And in that story they even admit that record amounts of money were being pulled out of bond funds in June...

Capital is already flowing out of low-yielding bonds. PIMCO Total Return fund, the world's largest bond fund, suffered record outflows of $9.6 billion in June, in a second straight month of withdrawals.

Mutual and exchange-traded bond funds lost a record $79.8 billion in June, according to TrimTabs Investment Research.

The rush for the exits in the bond market is threatening to become an avalanche.

I hope that this is not the beginning of a financial panic.  I hope that we have more time before the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes.

But I certainly cannot guarantee that things will remain stable.  Once fear starts to sweep through financial markets, things can change very, very quickly.

Wall Street Banks Extract Huge Fees from Paychecks of American Workers

Would you be angry if you had to pay a big Wall Street bank a fee before you could get the money that you worked so hard to earn?  Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation that millions of American workers find themselves in today. 

An increasing number of U.S. companies are paying their workers using payroll cards that are issued by large financial institutions.  Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Walgreens and Taco Bell are just some of the well known employers that are doing this.  Today, there are 4.6 million active payroll cards in the United States, and some of the largest banks in the country are issuing them.  The list includes JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.  The big problem with these cards is that there is often a fee for just about everything that you do with them. 

Do you want to use an ATM machine?  You must pay a fee.  Do you want to check your balance?  You must pay a fee.  Do you want a paper statement?  You must pay a fee.  Did you lose your card?  You must pay a big fee.  Has your card been inactive for a while?  You must pay a huge fee.  The big Wall Street banks are systematically extracting enormous fees from the working poor, and someone needs to do something to stop this.

The truth is that most American families need every penny that they earn.  In America today, 53 percent of all workers make less than $30,000 a year.

It is hard to do everything that you need to do on less than $2,500 a month.  If you doubt this, you should try it some time.

That is one reason why the fees that the big Wall Street banks hit payroll card users with are so insidious.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent CNBC article about this phenomenon...

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.'s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

Devonte Yates, 21, who earns $7.25 an hour working a drive-through station at a McDonald's in Milwaukee, says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card.

If you are just barely scraping by every month, can you really afford to be paying $50 a month in fees to the fatcats at JPMorgan Chase?

Of course not.

But JPMorgan Chase is far from alone.  Just check out all of the fees that another large financial institution is hitting users with...

On some of its payroll cards, NetSpend charges $2.25 for out-of-network A.T.M. withdrawals, 50 cents for balance inquiries via a representative, 50 cents for a purchase using the card, $5 for statement reprints, $10 to close an account, $25 for a balance-protection program and $7.50 after 60 days of inactivity, according to an April presentation by the company reviewed by The Times.

They are taking advantage of extremely vulnerable people and they know it.

And we see this kind of thing happening with other types of cards as well.  For example, in some states unemployment benefits are now deposited on prepaid debit cards, and the banks that issue these cards are more than happy to extract huge fees from unemployed people...

Shawana Busby does not seem like the sort of customer who would be at the center of a major bank's business plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds. She could visit a Bank of America ATM free of charge. But this small community in the state's rural center, her hometown, does not have a Bank of America branch. Neither do the surrounding towns where she drops off her kids at school and attends church.

She could drive north to Columbia, the state capital, and use a Bank of America ATM there. But that entails a 50 mile drive, cutting into her gas budget. So Busby visits the ATMs in her area and begrudgingly accepts the fees, which reach as high as five dollars per transaction. She estimates that she has paid at least $350 in fees to tap her unemployment benefits.

There is something that is so greedy about all of this.

When the financial crisis hit back in 2008, the big banks had no problem begging the entire nation for mercy.

But when it comes time to show mercy to the poor, they tell us that it is "just business".

In America today, there are tens of millions of families that are just barely surviving from month to month.  The big banks should not be preying on them like this.

With each passing year, the ranks of the working poor in this country continue to get larger.  The following statistics are from one of my previous articles entitled "35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind"...

#1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income".

#2 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 57 percent of all American children live in a home that is either "poor" or "low income".

#3 Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among "the working poor".  Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.

#4 Back in 2007, 21 million U.S. children lived in "working poor" homes.  Today, that number is up to 23.5 million.

#5 In Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico, more than 40 percentall of working families are considered to be "low income".

#6 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#7 Half of all American workers earn $505 or less per week.

#8 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

#9 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

#10 Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.

#11 Median household income for families with children dropped by a whopping $6,300 between 2001 and 2011.

#12 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs.  60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

#13 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#14 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.

#15 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing.  That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#16 Low income families spend about 8.6 percent of their incomes on gasoline.  Other families spend about 2.1 percent.

#17 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance.  Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

#18 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

#19 Millions of working poor families in America end up taking on debt in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, but before too long they find themselves in a debt trap that they can never escape.  According to a recent article in the New York Times, the average debt burden for U.S. households that earn $20,000 a year or less "more than doubled to $26,000 between 2001 and 2010".

#20 In 1989, the debt to income ratio of the average American family was about 58 percent.  Today it is up to 154 percent.

The working poor simply cannot afford to be paying hundreds of dollars in fees to the big banks each year just to use the money that they worked so very hard to earn.

Unfortunately, we seem to be living during a time when the big financial institutions will squeeze every nickel that they possibly can out of average Americans no matter how high the human cost is.

New EU Plan Will Make Every Bank Account Vulnerable to Cyprus-Style Wealth Confiscation

Did you actually believe that they were not going to use the precedent that they set in Cyprus?  On Thursday, EU finance ministers agreed to a shocking new plan that will make every bank account in Europe vulnerable to Cyprus-style bail-ins. 

In other words, the wealth confiscation that we just witnessed in Cyprus will now be used as a template for future bank failures all over Europe.  That means that if you have a bank account in Europe, you could wake up some morning and every penny in that account over 100,000 euros could be gone.  That is exactly what happened in Cyprus, and now EU officials plan to do the same thing all over Europe.  

For quite a while EU officials insisted that Cyprus was a "special case", but now we see that was a lie.  International outrage over what happened in Cyprus has died down, and now they are pushing forward with what they probably had planned all along.  But why have they chosen this specific moment to implement such a plan?  Are they anticipating that we will see a wave of bank failures soon?  Do they know something that they aren't telling us?

Amazingly, this announcement received very little notice in the international media.  The fact that bank account confiscation will now be a permanent part of the plan to bail out troubled banks in Europe should have made headline news all over the globe.  The following is how CNNdescribed the plan...

European Union finance ministers approved a plan Thursday for dealing with future bank bailouts, forcing bondholders and shareholders to take the hit for bank rescues ahead of taxpayers.

The new framework requires bondholders, shareholders and large depositors with over 100,000 euros to be first to suffer losses when banks fail. Depositors with less than 100,000 euros will be protected. Taxpayer funds would be used only as a last resort.

According to this new plan, bondholders will be the first to be required to "contribute" when a bank bailout is necessary.

Do you want to guess what that is going to do to the price of European bank bonds?

Shareholders of the bank will be the next in line to get hit when a bank bailout happens.

After that, they will go after those that have more than 100,000 euros in their bank accounts.

EU officials say that such a plan is needed because bailing out banks with taxpayer money was creating too many problems...

The European Union spent the equivalent of a third of its economic output on saving its banks between 2008 and 2011, using taxpayer cash but struggling to contain the crisis and - in the case of Ireland - almost bankrupting the country.

But a bailout of Cyprus in March that forced losses on depositors marked a harsher approach that can now, following Thursday's agreement, be replicated elsewhere.

Oh wonderful - the "Cyprus solution" can now be "replicated" everywhere in Europe.

This plan will now be submitted to the European Parliament for final approval.  The goal is to have this plan finalized by the end of this year.

If you have a bank account in Europe with over 100,000 euros in it, get your money out now.

I am not sure how else to say it.

In Cyprus, there were retirees and small businesses that lost hundreds of thousands of euros overnight.

Do not let that happen to you.

And without a doubt, we are going to see a lot of banks fail in Europe over the next few years.  This will especially be true once the next great financial crisis strikes.

But even though we haven't even gotten to the next great financial crisis yet, the economic depression in Europe just continues to get even worse.  Just consider these facts...

-Car sales in Europe have hit a 20 year low.

-Overall, the unemployment rate in the eurozone is sitting at 12.2 percent.  That is a brand new all-time record high.

-An average of 134 retail outlets are shutting down in Italy every single day.  Overall, 224,000 retail establishments have closed down in Italy since 2008.

-It is being projected that Italy will need to ask for an EU bailout within 6 months.

-Consumer confidence in France has dropped to an all-time low.

-The unemployment rate in France is up to 10.4 percent.  That is the highest that it has been in 15 years.

-Government is now responsible for 57 percent of all economic output in France.

-In May, household lending in Europe declined at the fastest pace in 11 months.

-During the first quarter, disposable income in the UK declined at the fastest pace in 25 years.

-It is being projected that the unemployment rate in Spain will hit 28.5 percent next year.

-Just a few years ago, the percentage of bad loans in Spain was under 2 percent.  Now it is sitting at 10.87 percent.

-The national debt in Spain has grown by 19.1 percent over the past 12 months alone.

-The Greek government says that the Greek economy will shrink by 4.5 percent this year.

-It is being projected that the unemployment rate in Greece will rise to 30 percent in 2014.

And it certainly does not help that China has essentially declared a trade war on Europe.  That is not going to help struggling European industries at all.

I hope that more Americans will start paying attention to what is happening in Europe.  The crippling economic problems that are sweeping across that continent will come here too.

And at some point there is a very good chance that we will also see Cyprus-style bank account confiscation in this country.

So don't put all of your eggs in one basket.  It is good to have your assets spread around a bunch of different places.  That makes it much harder for them to be wiped out all at once.

What we are watching in Europe right now is really unprecedented in modern times.  They are declaring open season on large bank deposits.  In the end, a lot of people in Europe are going to lose a lot of money.

Make sure that you are not one of them.