Mister, Tell Me About The [Next] Great Depression

Or, "The Three-Dot Monte of ~~Malaise~~ Recovery Summer!"....

Retail sales fell in June for the second straight month, more evidence that the recovery will slow in the second half of the year.

Retail spending dropped 0.5% in June, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. That followed a 1.1% fall in May. Excluding autos, spending was down 0.1% in June. …

The June decline in retail sales was larger than the 0.2% fall that economists had expected.

Well, that is progress of a sort - Obamaconomists are finally expecting declines, at least.

***In May job openings declined and layoffs increased:

Job openings dropped in May from the previous month and layoffs edged up, fresh evidence that employers are reluctant to add workers.

The decline in job openings comes after a sharp rise the previous two months, driven by temporary government hiring for the 2010 census and more openings in the private sector. As a result, the number of available jobs has rebounded since the depths of the recession but remains well below pre-recession levels.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that job openings fell to 3.2 million in May from 3.3 million in the previous month. April’s upwardly revised figure was the highest in eighteen months.

The department’s report, known as the Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, illustrates how competitive the job market is. There were about 4.7 unemployed people, on average, for each job opening in May. That’s down from the peak of 6.3 last November, but is much higher than the 1.8 unemployed per opening when the recession began in December 2007.

Dammit, if only those lazy slugs in the Senate had rammed through ObamaCare sooner, and cripple & tax at all, jobs could have been falling from the sky like manna!

***Mortgage applications have plunged to their lowest level since 1997:

Demand for loans to purchase U.S. homes sank to a thirteen-year low last week, and refinancing demand also slid despite near record-low mortgage rates, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Wednesday.

Requests for loans to buy homes dropped 3.1% in the week ended July 9, after adjusting for the Independence Day holiday, to the lowest level since December 1996, the industry group said.

Refinancing applications fell 2.9%, and the mortgage market index that reflects total loan demand also fell 2.9%.

Average 30-year mortgage rates edged up 0.01 percentage point to 4.69%, but were near the record low of 4.61% set in March 2009, based on MBA records dating back to 1990.

Quick! Blow up the bubble again before it completely deflates and we have to be honest about how we sabotaged the real estate and financial sectors for ill-gotten political gain! The idiot public might not have figured it out yet!

***2010 foreclosures will exceed the record total from 2009:

More than 1 million American households are likely to lose their homes to foreclosure this year, as lenders work their way through a huge backlog of borrowers who have fallen behind on their loans.

Nearly 528,000 homes were taken over by lenders in the first six months of the year, a rate that is on track to eclipse the more than 900,000 homes repossessed in 2009, according to data released Thursday by RealtyTrac Inc., a foreclosure listing service.

“That would be unprecedented,” said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac.

By comparison, lenders have historically taken over about 100,000 homes a year, Sharga said.

Wow. Just, wow. TEN TIMES the usual foreclosure rate. Call Red Barry back when it reaches a thousand times that rate - which should effectively make The One the landlord of every American.

What do we need to stop the foreclosure epidemic? Jobs? NO! We'd already have them up to our eyeballs if the Senate wasn't so damned right-wing. Economic growth? NO! We'd already be drowning in GDP if Robert Gibbs wasn't such a putz. Tax cuts? NO! That's pure Nazism, and leads to everybody wearing red ties. Deregulation? And let those criminal capitalist running dog pigs out of the gulag? NO!

Enact another "emergency" futile sales-shuffling tax credit and bully what few banks the feds haven't annexed yet into writing another blizzard of bad mortgages, and whatever other intervention we can think of that purposely ignores the real cause of the foreclosure problem while making it exponentially worse? YES, WE CAN!

***Consumer confidence has plunged back to its early-2009 nadir:

Gallup Daily tracking finds Americans’ confidence in the economy significantly lower so far in July than in June. And confidence in June was, in turn, down from May. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index for July 1-13, at -35, is lower than any monthly average in more than a year. …

The decline in confidence seen in recent months is owing primarily to mounting public skepticism with the economy’s direction. Thus far in July, 30% of Americans, on average, have said the economy is getting better and 65% have said it is getting worse, for a net -35 economic outlook score. This is down sharply from -13 in April.

By contrast, the net percentage of Americans calling current economic conditions “excellent” or “good” rather than “poor” is averaging -36 so far this month. This is only slightly below the -30 recorded in April and is comparable to the level seen for much of 2009 and early 2010.

Now why would consumer confidence be dropping faster than Fat Albert's drawers before a horrified masseuse? Could it be because when Americans look into the future, they see not tax cuts, not smaller, kinder, gentler government, not the springtime of freedom, liberty, and opportunity after a long winter of Obamunist misery, but....signs, signs, everywhere signs?:

Yes, it's blatant taxpayer-funded propaganda, only a year past the point when anybody outside the fever swamps would buy it. At best, it'll elicit an eyeroll or a cynical chuckle. More likely it'll keep more and more voters in a state of pissed-offedness the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Left collectively popped its pressure valve following the aforementioned Algore's failed 2000 coup attempt.

But they have their Narrative and they're gonna stick to it, and we're gonna like it....OR ELSE.

Or else what? Or else you'll be in the same rubber room with....Nancy Pelosi.

What? You thought I was kidding about that threat?

***And what of the man whose fault all this is? Who has replaced Jimmy Carter as the poster-beast of malaise? Who has indellibly established himself in the American psyche as the enemy of prosperity, enemy of growth, enemy of wealth, enemy of liberty, enemy of freedom, annnnnnd enemy of the people? What does he have to say for himself?

Do you really have to ask?:

Americans, Obama said Thursday, don’t have a “selective memory.”

“They’re going remember the policies that got us into this mess as well,” Obama said, referring to the previous Republican administration. “And they sure as heck don’t want to go back to those.”…

“It’s hard because you don’t see immediate gratification,” the president acknowledged Thursday. He said his message to people out of work was that his administration was doing everything possible to create an environment in which private sector jobs could expand.

“But I’m not any more satisfied than they are,” Obama said. “And until they can find a job, I expect to be held accountable.”

We don't want to go back to the days when the annual deficit was a tenth of what it is now? We don't want to go back to a roaring economy generating millions of REAL jobs every year? We don't want to go back (for starters) to a level of federal spending over a trillion bucks less a year than it is now? We don't want to go back to an "official" unemployment rate of (as of Election Day 2008) 6.1%? To get back the 2.4 million jobs he's destroyed over the past year and a half, to say nothing of the millions more that haven't been created because of Obamanomics?

Really? Is that why False Messiah's approval numbers are cratering? Because we're just too dimwitted to realize how awesomely "successful" he is?

Well, you know what? Barack Obama has, indeed, been very successful in bulldozing his domestic communization agenda into law. That's why we're mired in the current malaise, headed for the depressionary cliff. It's the only way to "transform" - i.e. destroy - the United States of America.

And a majority of Americans have, indeed, figured that out. They just don't want to go "forward" where Red Barry is trying to drag them.

How's this for a 2010 slogan?: "Hope and change....back!"

It just might be our last chance.