It’s hard to know which is more phony: John Kerry or The Science he touts. From Bill Bonner at bonnerprivateresearch.com:
John Kerry’s extraterrestrial delusions of grandeur, the middle-class gets whacked and more readings from the Church of “The Science”…
Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Normandy, France…
Mr. Kerry is in Davos, Switzerland with the rich and the famous. We will return to him in a minute. First, an update.
The middle class is getting crushed. It has only two major assets – time and houses. It earns its living by selling its time. It keeps its wealth at home, under its own roofs.
For the last 22 months, real wages have fallen. Over the last year, for example, the average working stiff got a 5% wage increase. But adjusted for inflation of 6.5%, the gain turned into a loss.
Meanwhile, his store of wealth – his house – is in the early stages of a sell-off. It goes like this: first, houses become too expensive, so the typical middle-class family can no longer afford the typical middle-class house. Then, naturally enough, sales fall. Builders stop building. And finally, prices drop. We are just in the beginning of the final stage. Here are the figures:
At the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, the median family spent 42% of its income on housing. Now the figure is 46%. And two years ago, you could get a 30-year mortgage at 2.77%. Today, the rate is more than twice as high.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 