‘Eye-Popping’: Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion

Source

Common Dreams

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

June 14, 2019

“The top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing.”

CEO and founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos participates in a discussion during a Milestone Celebration dinner September 13, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Adding to the mountain of statistical evidence showing the severity of U.S. inequality, an analysis published Friday found that the top one percent of Americans gained $21 trillion in wealth since 1989 while the bottom 50 percent lost $900 billion.

“We have the worst inequality in this country since the 1920s.”
—Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)

Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, broke down the Federal Reserve’s newly released “Distributive Financial Accounts” data series and found that, overall, “the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”

The growth of wealth inequality over the past 30 years, Bruenig found, is “eye-popping.”

“Between 1989 and 2018, the top one percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion,” Bruenig wrote. “The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.”

“Enormous crisis,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted in response to Bruenig’s analysis.

“We have the worst inequality in this country since the 1920s,” wrote Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Three wealthiest people in America have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent.”

WATCH: THE CRASH IS COMING: “IT’S NOT ‘DOOM AND GLOOM’; IT’S REALITY”

Source

SHTFplan.com

Mac Slavo
June 14th, 2019

Screen Capture: YouTube

Many Americans seem to think the alerting the public to the problems in the economy is “doom and gloom” and meant as “fear porn.” But regardless of your beliefs on the matter, the numbers show that a crash is coming, and that’s the reality, although a very grim one says Jeremiah Babe.

In a recent video, titled “THE CRASH IS COMING PREPARE – HOMELESSNESS CRISIS – LABOR FORCE WARNING – STOCK MARKET SURGES,” Jeremiah Babetalks about this very lackadaisical mentality much of the U.S. public is experiencing. Whether the public is unconcerned because of the mainstream media’s propaganda or political party blindness, it doesn’t much matter.

What does matter, is that you should be preparing yourself for an economic crash. Even if the crash is still years in the future, the cold hard fact is that it will happen, as all the numbers and evidence point to a failing economic debt-based system.

All the evidence is scary and even though it’s very much real, people still look down on those who have made preparations for the economic collapse.  And others, such as Jerimiah Babe, are often derided when he’s simply trying to warn of what’s coming.

“Bad things are already happening. The recession has begun,” says Babe to those who believe their world can never change and that the United States is somehow immune to the problems created by money printing and the easy money policies over the past few decades. “Zero percent interest rates are coming; QE4 is coming,” Babe continues.

“Economic hard times bring very dangerous social times,” Babe says as he prompts viewers to prepare or at least begin attempting to prepare now.

Preparations for an economic downturn do take time and this is exactly why some of us try to get out in front of recessions and economic collapses. Paying down your debts so the banks won’t take your stuff and stocking up on at least some precious metals and extra food and water will never hurt. But you should also be aware, as Babe mentioned, that a society that’s undergoing an economic hardship will, in turn, undergo a social one too.  If you don’t believe that, take a look at Venezuela. That means preparations should likely include self-defense of some kind.

It wouldn’t take much for this country to become radically impoverished and our very quality of life dramatically diminished. That’s why we prepare though, and doing so will at least give us an advantage should the SHTF.

Report: Prepare for the Climatic Collapse of Civilization

“The only humor that can be found amid all the dire and depressing warnings about impending societal collapse is the fact that among the first victims of rising sea levels will be Trump’s billionaires’ club estate at Mar-a-Lago, located on the barrier island of Palm Beach on Florida’s Atlantic coast.”

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Wayne Madsen

June 13, 2019

Two authoritative Australian experts, backed up by a retired admiral of the Royal Australian Navy, recently issued a dire report that warns of an impending collapse of civilization from human-caused climate change. The report, titled “Existential climate-related security risk:

A scenario approach,” is not the product of alarmists, but of two authors with expertise in their professional areas. Only one of the authors is an environmental expert. He is David Spratt, a Research Director at the Australian National Center for Climate Restoration in Melbourne. The other, Ian Dunlop. Is an unlikely harbinger of environmental doom. Dunlop comes out of the executive ranks of the coal, oil, and gas industries – the usual opponents of climate science. Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome and the former chairman of the Australian Coal Association, not places where one would normally discover climate change proponents.

Backing up the authors is retired Admiral Chris Barrie, the Chief of the Australian Defense Force from 1998 to 2002. It is no longer unusual to find military services warning about the impending catastrophic effects of climate change. In January 2019, the US Department of Defense’s

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment issued a report to the US Congress, “Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense,” without the usual fanfare accompanying such an alarming finding. The Pentagon report, which forecasts US military bases susceptible to recurrent flooding, drought, desertification, wildfires, and thawing permafrost, was introduced in a low-key fashion due to the anti-science dogma of Donald Trump and key members of his administration. The Pentagon’s study sees 79 military bases to suffer from the effects of climate change. They include bases in Virginia, California, New Mexico, Utah, Florida, Colorado, Washington DC, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, Hawaii, Guam, and even the National Security Agency (NSA) complex in Maryland and the Pentagon building, itself, in Virginia.

Although the Pentagon report avoided the global aspects of climate change, the Australian report was stark in its predictions for the immediate future. British author Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel about a post-nuclear war planet, titled “On the Beach,” which was followed by a 1959 film by the same title and produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, saw Australia as the last holdout on the planet from deadly radiation. Eventually, the radiation from the northern hemisphere crept southward, eventually eradicating the last human life in Australia. Many Australians prepare for the inevitable end by committing mass suicide in a national euthanasia program. The picture painted by the recent Australian climate impact report presents an opposite scenario from “On the Beach,” one that points to Australia being among the first regions to succumb to civilization collapse from climate change.

Admiral Barrie presents an “On the Beach” scenario in his foreword to the climate change report: “In Australia recently we have seen and heard signals about the growing realization of the seriousness of our plight. For example, young women speak of their decisions to not have children, and climate scientists admitting to depression as they consider the ‘inevitable’ nature of a doomsday future and turn towards thinking more about family and relocation to ‘safer’ places, rather than working on more research.”

The Australian report’s conclusions are sobering. It states: “Climate change now represents a near-to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.” Predicting the advent of a “hothouse Earth” by 2050, the report’s authors foresee devastating weather extremes, including wildfires, heatwaves, drought, and massive flooding. The loss of the Asian monsoons, glacial and polar ice, slowing of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, and collapse of the Amazon and other eco-systems will result in massive population shifts. The report states that such conditions will result in “outright chaos” and the “end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it.”

Although the report calls for a “Marshall Plan” on a national security level to immediately deal with the threat of civilization collapse, we have seen critically important nations elect political buffoons, all climate change deniers, to their leadership. These include Mr. Trump in Washington; Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who disregards climate science and plans to massively develop the Amazon Basin, known as the “lungs of the planet;” Argentine President Mauricio Macri; and Australia’s recently- reelected Prime Minister Scott Morrison; with the possibility that either “Mr. Brexit,” Nigel Farage, or climate change erratic skeptic Boris Johnson ending up as British prime minister.

It is the collapse of food production that spells the onset of civilization collapse, according to the Australian report. The disruption of the human food supply will be brought about by heat waves, floods, storms, and the decline in beneficial insect populations. Food and water shortages will lead to social upheaval on a scale virtually unknown in modern times. Oceanic flooding of some of the world’s agriculturally-important river deltas – including, the Mekong, Ganges and Nile – will result in massive population movement to areas where there is food and clean water. Seawater inundation will also make major cities uninhabitable and Chennai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Lagos, Bangkok, and Manila will be abandoned. Even entire countries, like Bangladesh and small island-states, will lie empty.

The starkest prediction in the Australian report predicts that “even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and In high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end.” The report points to the beginnings of climatic collapse with the current loss of Arctic sea-ice, the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Shelf and Greenland and Himalayan Ice Sheets, and global destruction of and coral reefs.

With limited human life-sustainable resources available, the Australian report foresees wars on an unimaginable scale and the breakdown of political and social order the lead-in to civilization collapse. The report states: “The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible.” These scenarios are already beginning to play out, as Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia are already bickering over Ethiopia’s dam on the Blue Nile. The Nile is the lifeblood of Sudan and Egypt. For example, staking a newly-emergent claim for regional identity are the people of the Volta region of Ghana, who see the central government draining their water resources with the Akosombo Dam on the Volta river. Restive inhabitants of Argentina’s Patagonia region complain about foreign billionaires buying up property in their pristine homeland for the purpose of re-locating Jewish climate refugees from Israel, the United States, and Europe. Other emerging eco-separatist “go-it-alone” movements are springing up in Australia’s island state of Tasmania, the US state of Vermont, the Canadian region of Labrador, and the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda.

The breakdown of social order will see an increase in the kidnapping of foreign tourists in countries for the payment of ransom, piracy on the high seas, looting of stores and warehouses, bank robberies, and other law-breaking activities by people desperate to provide food and clean water for their families.

The authors of the Australian report believe that mid-21^stcentury is the “point of no return” for Earth’s climate. However, other scientists believe that we have already reached that point with extreme weather already resulting in massive crop losses and flooding now routine in Miami, Houston, Venice, Dhaka, and other major cities.

Report after report warning of the disastrous consequences of climate change are not coming from environmental activist groups, but from the intelligence, national security, and defense sectors. In November 2018, the Trump White House issued the Fourth National Climate Assessment, based on the research of 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies, including the Defense Department. The report concluded that climate change now poses a direct threat to human life, ecosystems and the US economy. Trump dismissed his administration’s own report. In January of this year, the US Intelligence Community’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment concluded that environmental degradation will “fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” And recently, the White House blocked the testimony before Congress of a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research expert who planned to warn of the immediate effects of rising sea levels and ocean acidification. The blocking came as Trump dismissed the climate change warnings of Britain’s Prince Charles after their meeting in London.

The only humor that can be found amid all the dire and depressing warnings about impending societal collapse is the fact that among the first victims of rising sea levels will be Trump’s billionaires’ club estate at Mar-a-Lago, located on the barrier island of Palm Beach on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Currently, king tide effects are causing some sewage and septic tank systems on the island to fail. The steady rise in sea levels means that within the next ten to fifteen years, Mr. Trump’s vacation Shangri-La will be inundated with sea water and raw sewage. For Trump, who withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, it will be a fitting end for his seaside playground.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Chris Hedges: The Collapse of the American Empire (28 min)

Paul Craig Roberts: “That America” is Gone

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

June 6, 2019

 

The story line is going out that the economic boom is weakening and the Federal Reserve has to get the printing press running again.  The Fed uses the money to purchase bonds, which drives up the prices of bonds and lowers the interest rate.  The theory is that the lower interest rate encourages consumer spending and business investment and that this increase in consumer and business spending results in more output and employment.

The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of England have been wedded to this policy for a decade, and the Japanese for longer, without stimulating business investment.  Rather than borrowing at low interest rates in order to invest more, corporations borrowed in order to buy back their stock.  In other words, some corporations after using all their profits to buy back their own stock went into debt in order to further reduce their market capitalization!

Far from stimulating business investment, the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve drove up stock and bond prices and spilled over into real estate.  The fact that corporations used their profits to buy back their shares rather than to invest in new capacity means that the corporations  did not experience a booming economy with good investment opportunities. It is a poor economy when the best investment for a company is to repurchase its own shares.

Consumers, devoid of real income growth, maintained their living standards by going deeper into debt.  This process was aided, for example, by stretching out car payments from three years to six and seven years, with the result that loan balances exceed the value of the vehicles.  Many households live on credit cards by paying the minimum amount, with the result that their indebtedness grows by the month. The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates are not reciprocated by the high credit card interest rate on outstanding balances.

Some European countries now have negative interest rates, which means that the bank does not pay you interest on your deposit, but charges you a fee for holding your money.  In other words, you are charged an interest rate for having money in a bank.  One reason for this is the belief of neoliberal economists that consumers would prefer to spend their money than to watch it gradually wither away and that the spending will drive the economy to higher growth.

What is the growth rate of the economy?  It is difficult to know, because the measures of inflation have been tampered with in order to avoid cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients and the payment of COLA adjustments in contracts. The consumer price index is a basket of goods that represents an average household’s expenditures.  The weights of the items in the index are estimates of the percentage of the household budget that is spent on those items.  A rise in the prices of items in the index would raise the index by the weight of those items, and this was the measure of inflation.

Changes were made that reduced the inflation that the index measured.  One change was to substitute a lower price alternative when an item in the index rose in price.  Another was to designate a rise in price of an item as a quality improvement and not count it as inflation.

Something similar was done to the producer price index which is used to deflate nominal GDP in order to measure real economic growth.  GDP is measured in terms of money, and some of the growth in the measure is due to price increases rather than to more output of goods and services.  In order to have a good estimate of how much real output has increased, it is necessary to deflate the nominal measure of GDP by taking out the price rises.  If inflation is underestimated, then real GDP will be overestimated. When John Williams of Shadowstats adjusts the real GDP measure for what he calculates is a two-percentage point understatement of annual inflation, there has been very little economic growth since 2009 when a recovery allegedly began, and the economy remains far below its pre-recession level in 2008.

In other words, the belief that the US has had a decade long economic recovery is likely to be an illusion produced by underestimating  inflation.  Indeed, every day experience with the prices of food, clothing, household goods, and services indicates a higher rate of inflation than is officially reported.

The low unemployment rate that is reported is also an illusion.  The government achieves the low rate by not counting the unemployed.  The economic and psychological cost of searching for a job are high.  There are the economic costs of a presentable appearance and transport to the interview. For a person without a pay check, these costs rapidly mount.  The psychological costs of failure to find a job time after time also mount.  People become discouraged and cease looking.  The government treats discouraged workers who cannot find jobs as no longer being in the work force and omits them from the measure of unemployment.  John Williams estimates that the real rate of US unemployment is 20%, not 3.5%

The decline in the labor force participation rate supports Williams’ conclusion.  Normally, a booming economy, which is what 3.5% unemployment represents, would have a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the employment opportunities.  However, during the alleged ten year boom, the participation rate has fallen, an indication of poor job opportunities.

The government measures jobs in two ways: the payroll jobs report that seeks to measure the new jobs created each month (which is not a measure of employment as a person may hold two or more jobs)  and the household survey that seeks to measure employment. The results are usually at odds and cannot be reconciled. What does seem to emerge is that the new jobs reported are for the most part low productivity, low value-added, lowly paid jobs. Another conclusion is that the number of full time jobs with benefits are declining and the number of part-time jobs are rising.

A case could be made that US living standards have declined since the 1950s when one income was sufficient to support a family.  The husband took the slings and arrows of the work experience, and the wife provided household services such as home cooked nutritious meals, child care, clean clothes, and an orderly existence.  Today most households require two earners to make ends meet and then only barely.  Saving is a declining option.  A Federal Reserve report a couple of years ago concluded that about half of American households could not produce $400 cash unless personal possessions were sold.

As the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy has not served ordinary Americans or spurred investment in new plant and equipment, who has it served? The answer is corporate executives and shareholders.  As the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve has gone mainly into the prices of financial assets, it is the owners of these assets who have benefited from the Federal Reserve’s policy.  Years ago Congress in its unwisdom capped the amount of executive pay that could be deducted as a business expense at one million dollars unless performance related.  What “performance related” means is a rise in profits and share price.  Corporate boards and executives achieved “performance” by reducing labor costs by moving jobs offshore and by using profits and borrowing in order to buy back the company’s shares, thus driving up the price.

In other words, corporate leaders and owners benefited by harming the US economy, the careers and livelihoods of the American work force, and their own companies.

This is the reason for the extraordinary worsening of the income and wealth distribution in the United States that is polarizing the US into a handful of mega-rich and a multitude of have-nots.

The America I grew up in was an opportunity society.  There were ladders of upward mobility that could be climbed on merit alone without requiring family status or social and political connections.  Instate college tuition was low.  Most families could manage it, and the students of those families that could not afford the cost worked their way through university with part time jobs. Student loans were unknown.

That America is gone.

The few economists capable of thought wonder about the high price/earnings ratios of US stocks and the 26,000 Dow Jones when stock buy-backs indicate that US corporations see no investment opportunities.  How can stock prices be so high when corporations see no growth in US consumer income that would justify investment in the US? 

When President Reagan’s supply-side economic policy got the Dow Jones up to 1,000 the US still had a real economy. How can it be that today with America’s economy hollowed out the Dow Jones is 25 or 26 times higher?  Manipulation plays a role in the answer. In Reagan’s last year in office, the George H.W. Bush forces created the Working Group on Financial Markets, otherwise known as the “plunge protection team,” the purpose of which was to prevent a stock market fall that would deny Bush the Republican nomination and the presidency as Reagan’s successor.  The Bush people did not want any replay of October 1987.

The plunge protection team brought together the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Securities and Exchange Commission in a format that could intervene in the stock market to prevent a fall. The easiest way to do this is, when faced with falling stock prices, to step in and purchase S&P futures. Hedge funds follow the leader and the market decline is arrested.

The Federal Reserve now has the ability to intervene in any financial market.  Dave Kranzler and I have shown repeatedly how the Federal Reserve or its proxies intervene in the gold market to support the value of the excessively-supplied US dollar by printing naked gold contracts to drop on the gold futures market in order to knock down the price of gold. A rising gold price would show that the dollar support arrangements that the Federal Reserve has with other central banks to maintain the illusion of a strong dollar is a contrived arrangement rejected by the gold market.

What few, if any, economists and financial market commentators understand is that today all markets are rigged by the plunge protection team.  For at least a decade it has not been possible to evaluate the financial situation by relying on traditional thinking and methods.  Rigged markets do not respond in the way that competitive markets respond.  This is the explanation why companies that see no investment opportunities for their profits better than the repurchase of their own shares can have high price/earnings ratios.  This is the explanation why the market’s effort to bring stock prices in line with realistic price/earnings ratios is unsuccessful.

As far as I can surmise, the Federal Reserve and plunge protection team can continue to rig the financial markets for the mega-rich until the US dollar loses its role as world reserve currency.

*  *  *

We live in a Matrix of Lies in which our awareness is controlled by the explanations we are given.  The control exercised over our awareness is universal.  It applies to every aspect of our existence.  In the article above I showed that not only is our understanding of the economy controlled by manipulation of our minds, but also the markets themselves are controlled by official intervention. In brief, you can believe nothing that you are officially told.  If you desire truth, you must support the websites that are committed to truth.

Countdown to zero: Russia continues dumping US debt

This move from Russia, which started a while back, along with China dumping US Treasury bonds, does not bode well for the USA. Many of us were wondering when this would happen, as the USA is fuelled by the fake money printed out by the Federal Reserve, the biggest scam artist on the planet. 

Source

http://www.rt.com

16 May, 2019

A protester dressed as a panhandling Uncle Sam stands in New York’s Time Square © Reuters / Brendan McDermid

Foreign investors have accelerated the reduction of US debt securities, selling $21.7 billion of their holdings in March, according to data released on Wednesday by the US Treasury Department.

Russia, which is no longer a leading creditor of the US, after an unprecedented dumping of the US Treasury bonds in April and May, has slashed its stockpile by almost $800 million in March to $13.716 billion.

ALSO ON RT.COMChina’s nuclear option of dumping US bonds would cause absolute chaos in global markets – expert

Russia has cut nearly 85 percent of its US Treasury holdings from $96.9 billion in January 2018. The drop is even more significant from 2012, when Russia held over $170 billion in US debt bonds.

UST holdings by Russia: Once a top holder of US Gov debt, Russia reduced its UST holdings to less than $15bn from $100bn, chart @businesshttps://t.co/zJqUyYTd3dpic.twitter.com/90nOIfSuzO

— ACEMAXX ANALYTICS (@acemaxx) December 20, 2018

The largest US creditor China sold $20.45 billion in Treasuries in March, the most since October 2016, following $1.08 billion in purchases the month before.

READ MORE: Phasing out the dollar: Russia significantly increases ruble share in export settlements with BRICS

“The decline this month brings China essentially flat to where they were in February, erasing the increases from December through February,” Jefferies LLC’s senior money market economist Tom Simons told Reuters.

Japan, the second largest US debt holder, raised its Treasuries holdings to $1.078 trillion, the highest since November 2017, from $1.072 trillion in February.

ALSO ON RT.COMHistory made: US national debt tops $22 trillion

However, another set of Treasury data shows Japan sold $11.07 billion in US government debt in March, the most since February 2018.

The US national debt has climbed above $22 trillion this year and is projected to continue rising by a trillion each year over the next decade.

RECESSION ALERT: CREDIT CARD DELINQUENCIES REACH 8-YEAR HIGHS

Recession Alert: Credit Card Delinquencies Reach 8-Year Highs

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

May 10th, 2019

When the average everyday American begins to have trouble paying their bills, it’s most often a sign that the economy is not doing that well and we’ve reached that point.  Credit card delinquencies have now reached and 8-year high, with no reprieve in sight.

As Michael Snyder pointed out at The Most Important News, the truth is that you can’t say that we have a booming economy until we have a year when the U.S. economy grows by at least 3 percent, and at this point, we haven’t had that since the middle of the Bush administration. There are all kinds of warning signs and red flags about this manipulated economy, but none are quite as telling as delinquencies.

When people can no longer afford to pay their credit cards or car payments because they have to eat instead, we are staring a recession in the face. In fact, the level of credit card charge-offs has risen to the highest level since 2012., according toAmerican Banker. A charge-off is the amount of debt a company believes they can no longer collect.

Red flags are flying in the credit-card industry after a key gauge of bad debt jumped to the highest level in almost seven years.

The charge-off rate — the percentage of loans companies have decided they’ll never collect — rose to 3.82% in the first three months of 2019, the highest since the second quarter of 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. And loans 30 days past due, a harbinger of future write-offs, increased at all seven of the largest U.S. card issuers. –American Banker

At the 4 biggest U.S. banks, credit card charge-offs now account for a whopping 80 percent of all consumer credit costs. And the rising delinquencies will inevitably lead to even more charge-offs. U.S. consumers are being stretched financially to a degree that we haven’t seen since the last recession, and all the numbers indicate that this trend is only going to accelerate in the months ahead.  And, the way credit card issuers are beginning to behave indicates that they know a recession is coming.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported in December that an increasing number of consumers were rejected when they applied for credit cards in 2018. The researchers said rejection rates were also up on applications to refinance mortgages. At the same time, credit card delinquencies were also rising.

It now appears that credit card companies saw the troubling trend by mid-2018 and were taking steps to limit their losses. The New York Fed report showed a sharp rise in the number of people who said a lender unilaterally closed one of their credit accounts — in most cases, a credit card or a store charge card. –Consumer Affairs

The time to prepare yourself for a recession is now.  The credit card companies are preparing themselves, and there are red flags everywhere if eyes are opened. It is not the time to take on more debt, rather, get rid of as much credit card debt as you can.  You don’t want to be harassed during an economic recession for the money you borrowed when times were good.