Florida Unemployment Indicates 10 is the new 5
Wed Jun 24, 2009 by Oppenheim Law on Florida Foreclosures
Is 10 percent the new five percent when it comes to unemployment rates just like 50 is the new 30 in age? Roy Oppenheim says, maybe so.
As the index of leading economic indicators shows signs of life, including an increase in new housing starts and in Florida an increase in residential housing sales, it seems odd that no one is noticing that 10 is the new five.
The unemployment rate in the state of Florida just last week hit 10 percent. This is also the number of people in the United States who are at least one month behind on their mortgage payments. And in Florida, 10 percent is the number of people that are actually in the process of foreclosure.
Only just a few short years ago all of these percentages were at five. Five percent unemployment and less than five percent of households that held mortgages were behind in payments. Not even five percent of the population was in foreclosure.
Well that was then and now is now.
The last time the United States had a 10 percent unemployment rate was in 1982; the year I was graduating from college. That is along time ago.
The trouble is that with increasing unemployment, banks will not consider loan modifications if the borrower does not have a job or income. That may come as a surprise to many since a lot of homeowners got their mortgages without showing any income to the bank. However, this time around is more like a ‘bate and switch.’ The rules have changed and guess who ends up holding the bag: YOU!
So lets all hope that if 10 really is the new five that we all have enough time to dig our selves out of these holes and pray that 50 is truly the new 30, since many of us will be working till we are in our 70s!
From the trenches,
Roy Oppenheim
Forgive me if this comes from a little way passed the fringe of objectivity, but a little research on those outskirts will gleam the information that the data about the 10% is gravely understated. A factoid that I even heard on TV one night is that the people that have exhausted their unemployment benefits and still don’t have a job are not factored in when doing the official unemployment rate computation, and that’s a whole lotta people! The numbers, if properly dissected, presumably show a total unemployment rate of ABOVE 20%… Sorry for the partypoopin’ – Now, if that’s fringy, or marginal if you will, I’m not sure. But I do have eyes to see and ears to hear, and that number looks/sounds about right to me. Some people on the fringes are really, literally screaming towards the core, begging us here in the nucleus to wake up, to step out onto the fringe for just one moment and consider what they say. They present a point of view that perhaps doesn’t align with “rational” thinking in the way mainstream society understands it, because it is completely different from what we are fed daily through our corporate owned media channels. I’ve looked at a lot of the data from the fringe objectively, and have found innumerable ridiculous claims from some very eccentrics (politically correct for “wacky people) but I’ve got to tell you one thing, I read something that got me thinking, and I dug a little, and if I were writing this into a summary for a fiction novel or a screenplay of “The Producers II” it would read something like this: It looks like a few banks are bent on changing the present paradigm and establish a privately owned government all for themselves, and that our politicians, for whatever reason $$$ – are aiding a privately owned global bank cartel that has effectively taken over the US. – After that we throw in a couple of lairs securely hidden in inactive volcanos and a plan to destabilize the weather and implement a “carbon tax,” a couple of wars, a pandemic and a twist of lime, and we all sing “:Springtime for Hitler and The New World Order.” Freaky? I know, I know. I might need therapy if 10% of that is true.