The US signs are stacking up

Sales of new single-family houses in January 2010 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 309,000, This is -11.2 percent below the revised December rate of 348,000.

Inventories of manufactured durable goods in January, down thirteen consecutive months, decreased $0.1 billion to $302.6 billion. This followed a 0.2 percent December decrease.

US Consumer Confidence have plunged from 56.5 to 46.0. This is the lowest since February 1983. Now this is statistics and as such shouldn’t necessarily be taken for face value, but still… this drop is massive, this is the sort of plunge you aspect to see when news about an appending asteroid is cabled out.

US Shipments of manufactured durable goods in January is down following four consecutive monthly increases (mainly thanks to increases in military spending). It decreased $0.3 billion or 0.2 percent to $180.7 billion.

The number of distressed banks in the U.S. rose to 702 in the fourth quarter of 2009, the highest level in sixteen years. And please remember, 125+ banks have already failed, poff, are gone. And even funnier, the number seems to increase for every quarter.

In the week ending Feb. 20, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims was 496,000, an increase of 22,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 474,000. The 4-week moving average was 473,750, an increase of 6,000 from the previous week's revised average of 467,750. The actual unemployment is today around 20% even though official numbers say 10% and as you can see the numbers are going up.

To all this we can add in calculations from several market economists saying that the US stock exchange is overvalued by as much as 50%. And why not throw in an enormous deficit that is still growing and how the USD is close to crashing as well?

Well, only based on these signs, what conclusion do you draw?

And if yours is the same as mine and you happen to not be an American, do you think you will be excluded from this disaster when the US is the world’s biggest economy and the USD is the world’s reserve currency?

Don’t kid yourself, this is the mother of all disasters and coming generations will look back at this as the greatest of all economic depressions ever seen on this planet.