{"id":1471187,"date":"2024-06-14T11:20:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T15:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1471187"},"modified":"2024-06-14T11:20:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T15:20:00","slug":"the-entire-system-is-crumbling-major-red-flags-are-popping-up-for-banks-small-businesses-and-retailers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/the-entire-system-is-crumbling-major-red-flags-are-popping-up-for-banks-small-businesses-and-retailers\/1471187\/","title":{"rendered":"The Entire System Is Crumbling! Major Red Flags Are Popping Up For Banks, Small Businesses And Retailers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Entire System Is Crumbling! Major Red Flags Are Popping Up For Banks, Small Businesses And Retailers<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

If the economy is fine, why are so many signs of trouble erupting all around us?\u00a0<\/strong> Those that keep insisting that the U.S. economy is heading in the right direction conveniently ignore the very troubling facts and figures that I regularly share with my readers.\u00a0 When you take an honest look at the cold, hard numbers that the economy keeps producing, there is only one logical conclusion.\u00a0 Our entire system is crumbling, and it appears that conditions will soon get significantly worse.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Just look at what is happening to our banks.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The FDIC\u2019s most recent report tells us that there are 63 \u201cproblem banks\u201d in the United States, and collectively our banks now have\u00a0517 billion dollars in unrealized losses<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation\u2019s first quarter report, the US banking system is sitting on a collective $517 billion in unrealized losses and has 63 \u201cproblem banks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those losses have been sparked primarily by a surge in interest rates over the past two years, which have driven down the price of fixed-income securities held by banks.<\/p>\n

Unrealized losses held by banks increased by $39 billion in the first quarter relative to the fourth quarter of 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cHigher unrealized losses on residential mortgage-backed securities, resulting from higher mortgage rates in the first quarter, drove the overall increase,\u201d the FDIC said.<\/p>\n

I would love to know what banks are on that list.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wouldn\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

But the FDIC will not tell us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Daisy Luther\u00a0has accurately noted<\/a>, the FDIC won\u2019t release that information because they are afraid of bank runs\u2026<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t get to know which banks are in trouble.<\/p>\n

It could be my bank. It could be yours. Or maybe it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

Are they big banks? Small ones?<\/p>\n

The list is confidential to inhibit the likelihood of bank runs finishing off these institutions.<\/p>\n

So we just don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

If Americans had the truth, there would be bank runs all over the country tomorrow morning.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is a rather comforting thought.<\/p>\n

And the condition of our banks just continues to deteriorate because mountains of commercial real estate loans are going bad.<\/p>\n

At this point, it has become clear that we have never faced a commercial real estate crisis\u00a0of this magnitude<\/a>\u00a0in our entire history\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

The CRE sector faces the triple whammy of\u00a0falling prices<\/em>,\u00a0falling demand<\/em>, and\u00a0rising interest rates<\/em>. The post-pandemic rise of telecommuting and work-at-home programs crushed demand for office space. Vacancy rates in commercial buildings have soared.<\/p>\n

This has put significant stress on commercial real estate companies. The biggest\u00a0bankruptcy in 2023<\/a>\u00a0was the failure of the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust. The company had loaded up with more than $1 billion in liabilities.<\/p>\n

The collapse of the commercial real estate market could easily spill over into the financial sector. That\u2019s because a lot of loans are coming due.<\/p>\n

According to the\u00a0Mortgage Bankers Association<\/a>,\u00a0around $1.2 trillion of commercial real estate debt in the United States will mature over the next two years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A lot of financial institutions will fail during the months and years that are ahead of us.<\/p>\n

Just hope that your money is not in one of them.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, one recent survey discovered that approximately two-thirds of all small businesses in the United States\u00a0are teetering on the brink of disaster<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

A new survey reveals that\u00a0over two-thirds of small business owners are terrified of the state of the economy under Joe Biden\u2019s watch,\u00a0<\/strong>fearing that current conditions and ongoing downward trends will lead to them having to close their businesses.<\/p>\n

As reported by the\u00a0Daily Caller<\/em><\/a>, the poll from the Job Creators Network Foundation (JCNF) shows that 67% of small business owners maintain such fears about the economy as it stands today, marking a 10-point increase from sentiments two years ago. In the same poll, participants\u2019 perceptions of economic conditions for their own businesses fell from 70.2 to 68.1.\u00a0Perception of national conditions fell even more drastically, from 53.2 to 50.4.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe you don\u2019t care about what is happening to our small businesses.<\/p>\n

But you should, because close to half of all workers in the United States\u00a0are employed by small businesses<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

Forbes\u00a0<\/em>estimates that at least 46% of all employees in the United States, around 61.6 million people in total, are employed by small businesses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that it is quite an ominous sign that the\u00a0household survey showed that the U.S. economy lost\u00a0a whopping 408,000 jobs<\/a>\u00a0last month.<\/p>\n

Sadly, I think that a lot more months like that are coming.<\/p>\n

Retailers are also really struggling right now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In fact, as\u00a0Mark B. Spiegel\u00a0recently discussed<\/a>, major retailer after major retailer has been reporting disappointing sales numbers\u2026<\/p>\n

The U.S. economy seems to finally be cracking. This month a slew of retailers (off the top of my head: Target, Lowe\u2019s, Macy\u2019s, Kohl\u2019s, Best Buy and Foot Locker) reported negative year-over-year sales comps, and that\u2019s before adjusting for the inflation that makes them 3% to 4% more negative in \u201creal\u201d terms. Others (Dollar General and Burlington) reported same-store sales comps in the +2% range, but that too was negative when adjusted for inflation, while Walmart and Nordstrom comps managed to roughly keep pace with inflation, but were unable to exceed it.<\/p>\n

At one time, Walmart was an unstoppable retail behemoth.<\/p>\n

But now even Walmart\u00a0is closing down stores<\/a>\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

WALMARTS are closing across the country \u2013 and retail experts say the cuts are signals of a bleak future for shoppers.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0multi-million dollar corporation<\/a>\u00a0has\u00a0closed nine stores so far<\/a>\u00a0this year, which could be a warning sign for other retail giants.<\/p>\n

Of course the stores that Walmart is shuttering are just a drop in the bucket compared to what other chains are doing.<\/p>\n

As I detailed\u00a0in an article that I posted last week<\/a>, we are on pace to lose 7,800 stores in 2024.<\/p>\n

When the Drudge Report used the term \u201cretail\u00a0apocalypse\u201d in one of their headlines on Monday morning, that was not an exaggeration at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We really are in the early stages of a historic meltdown.<\/p>\n

And the outlook for the months ahead is extremely bleak.<\/p>\n

In fact, Harry Dent just told Fox News that we should brace ourselves for\u00a0\u201ca bigger crash than we got in 2008 to \u201909\u201d<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

Speaking in an updated interview with Fox News Digital, Dent cautioned that the \u201ceverything\u201d bubble has still yet to burst, and it may be a bigger crash than the Great Recession.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1925 to \u201829, it was a natural bubble. There was no stimulus behind that, artificial stimulus per se. So this is new. This has never happened,\u201d Dent said on Tuesday. \u201cWhat do you do if you want to cure a hangover? You drink more. And that\u2019s what they\u2019ve been doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFlooding the economy with extra money forever might actually enhance the overall economy long-term. But we\u2019ll only see when we see this bubble burst,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd again, this bubble has been going 14 years. Instead of most bubbles [going] five to six, it\u2019s been stretched higher, longer. So you\u2019d have to expect a bigger crash than we got in 2008 to \u201909.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our leaders were able to keep the game going for years by pumping trillions upon trillions of dollars into the system.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But they didn\u2019t fix anything.<\/p>\n

Instead, they just delayed the inevitable.<\/p>\n

Our entire system really is crumbling all around us, and as it crumbles we are going to see chaos\u00a0on a scale that most people don\u2019t even want to imagine<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Already, major cities from coast to coast are being terrorized by theft, violence, drugs, homelessness, gangs and anarchy.<\/p>\n

If things are this bad already, what is America going to look like once our leaders completely lose control of the economy?<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

Michael\u2019s new book entitled\u00a0\u201cChaos\u201d<\/a>\u00a0is available\u00a0in paperback<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0for the Kindle<\/a>\u00a0on Amazon.com,\u00a0and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at\u00a0michaeltsnyder.substack.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nFri, 06\/14\/2024 – 07:20<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/personal-finance\/entire-system-crumbling-major-red-flags-are-popping-banks-small-businesses-and<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Entire System Is Crumbling! Major Red Flags Are Popping Up For Banks, Small Businesses And Retailers Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1471188,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1471187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1471187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1471188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1471187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1471187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1471187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}