U.S. Retail Collapse Accelerates

via: LewRockwell
by: Jeff Nielson | SilverGoldBull
June 19, 2012

Less than two weeks ago I wrote “Crash Warning.” It outlined the current economic parameters of the global economy and explained that we were careening toward a particular form of economic Armageddon which I believe was first described by John Williams of Shadowstats.com, when he coined the phrase “hyperinflationary depression” nearly a decade ago.

The debt-laden, fraud-saturated paper Ponzi-schemes of Western bankers are now all about to implode in a deflationary (debt-default) collapse – most notably all their fraud-bonds. Simultaneously, the rabidly excessive money-printing of these reckless gamblers is causing (and will cause) the prices for hard assets (i.e. assets which actually have value) to spiral upward, with the most likely final destination being hyperinflation.

Because that previous commentary was describing a global economic paradigm, my analysis was necessarily abbreviated with respect to the apex of all economic ills: the United States. In particular, I spent less than a paragraph discussing the collapse of the retail sector in the world’s largest economy — a consumer economy.

Before we examine this train-wreck directly, let’s take a moment to define the backbone of this consumer economy: the American consumer. The two charts below should be very familiar to regular readers, and describe the American consumer in stark but precise terms: poor and/or unemployed.

Continue Reading At: LewRockwell.com