^{Originally published on Paul Craig Roberts website}

Jobs offshoring, financial deregulation, and 10 years of wars have severely damaged the US economy and the economic prospects of 90% of the American population. The signs are everywhere in front of our eyes. They are in the income distribution data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs data, the Census data, the poverty figures, and the high number of food stamp recipients. 

The signs are in the foreclosed and boarded-up homes and the accompanying homelessness. They are in closed strip malls; in office building, warehouse, and shopping mall vacancies, and in the huge population losses of America's manufacturing cities.

The New Economy was a hoax, like Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" and the "war on terror." Americans were deceived by "their" corrupt government, by greed-driven corporations, and by corporate shills among economists and the pundit class into believing that they were trading middle class "dirty fingernail" jobs in manufacturing for better middle class "clean fingernail" high-tech service jobs. Instead, reasonably paid manufacturing and professional skill jobs, such as software engineering and information technology, were traded for lowly paid jobs as waitresses and bartenders and for jobs in ambulatory health care. 

^{Originally published on OpEdNews}

Economic policy in the United States and Europe has failed, and people are suffering.

Economic policy failed for three reasons:

1. Policymakers focused on enabling off-shoring corporations to move middle class jobs, and the consumer demand, tax base, GDP, and careers associated with the jobs, to foreign countries, such as China and India, where labor is inexpensive.
2. Policymakers permitted financial deregulation that unleashed fraud and debt leverage on a scale previously unimaginable.
3. Policymakers responded to the resulting financial crisis by imposing austerity on the population and running the printing press in order to bail out banks and prevent nny losses to the banks regardless of the cost to national economies and innocent parties.

Originally published in a collection of opinions on the question Is Financial Globalization Beginning A Process of Reversal? (pdf) The collection notes The European Banking Sector is 65% of all global banking.

Globalism is a conspiracy against First World jobs. It is the process by which capital extracts surplus and appropriates the earnings of labor. By moving offshore the production of goods and services for the home market, corporations benefit from labor arbitrage. Because of large excess supplies of labor, corporations can hire employees in China, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere at wages below the value of the marginal product of labor, thus raising the returns to capital.

^{Source: OECD, Economic Outlook 2011}

^{Originally published by OpEd News}.

On Friday, August 5, the credit rating agency, Standard & Poor's, downgraded US debt from AAA to AA+.

Gerald Celente's view that S&P's downgrade of the US Treasury's credit rating reflects a loss of confidence in the political system was confirmed by the rating agency itself. S&P explained the downgrade as the result of heightened political risks, not economic ones. The game of chicken over the debt ceiling increase and the GOP's ability to block tax increases indicate that "America's governance and policymaking is becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable"

The reduction in the government's credit rating to AA+ from AAA is a cosmetic change. It remains a very high investment grade rating and is unlikely to have any effect on interest rates. It is revealing that despite the downgrade, US bond prices rose. It was stocks that fell. The financial press is blaming the stock market decline on the bond downgrade. However, stocks are falling because the economy is falling. Too many jobs have been moved offshore.

^{Originally published on OpEdNews}

The United States Government and its presstitute media have wasted time and energy creating hysteria over a non-existent debt ceiling crisis. After reading the news in the Ministry of Propaganda and witnessing the stupidity of the US government, the rest of the world is struck dumbfounded by the immaturity of the world's only superpower.

What kind of superpower is it, the world wonders, that is willing to go to the eleventh hour to convince the world, which holds its banking reserves in US Treasury debt, that the US government will default on the debt?

Every country in the world now worries about the judgment and sanity of the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

This is the achievement of the Republicans, who took an ordinary commonplace increase in the debt-ceiling limit, an event that has occurred routinely many times over the course of my life, and turned it into a crisis threatening the world financial system.

To be clear, there was never any risk whatsoever of US default, as President Obama has power established by President George W. Bush's Presidential Directive 51 to declare default a National Emergency and to set aside the debt-ceiling limit and Congress' power of the purse, and to continue to issue the debt necessary to fund the US government and its wars.

That the American press ever took this highly-hyped "crisis" seriously merely demonstrates their prostitute status.

Originally published by OpEdNews.com
by Paul Craig Roberts

Recently, the bond rating agencies that gave junk derivatives triple-A ratings threatened to downgrade US Treasury bonds if the White House and Congress did not reach a deficit reduction deal and debt ceiling increase. The downgrade threat is not credible, and neither is the default threat. Both are make-believe crises that are being hyped in order to force cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

If the rating agencies downgraded Treasuries, the company executives would be arrested for the fraudulent ratings that they gave to the junk that Wall Street peddled to the rest of the world. The companies would be destroyed and their ratings discredited. The US government will never default on its bonds, because the bonds, unlike those of Greece, Spain, and Ireland, are payable in its own currency. Regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury's debt. If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, then so is the US government.

By paul craig roberts

The free trade theory set out by David Ricardo at the beginning of the 19th century is merely a special case, not a general theory.

These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs off-shoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans. (Image: fisserman)

To add to the amazement, their research report, "The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge,"was published by the very establishment Council on Foreign Relations.

For a decade I have warned that US corporations, pressed by Wall Street and large retailers such as Wal-Mart, to move offshore their production for US consumer markets, were simultaneously moving offshore US GDP, US tax base, US consumer income, and irreplaceable career opportunities for American citizens.

paul craig roberts

Today the Swiss franc made yet another new high against the super dollar, as it has been doing for 120 days. What you are reading in the graphs is less and less of the foreign currency that one dollar can buy. Of course, gold and silver also consistently hit new highs. Swiss franc:

As did the Australian dollar: