congradulations on your initiative to blaze your own small business path !

however as you should know, it is not required that every business grow for the overall economy to grow. in any given month you have winners and losers.

certainly GDP is subject to contrivance, estimation and whathaveyou, but its generally consistant. while the rules may change over time they do not change wildly one month to the next to mask this hiccup or that.

Or, they're merely trying to keep us afloat so as to protect their own economies from being sucked down.

Meanwhile, the world slowly but surely is shifting away from using the dollar as the exclusive international reserve currency. I'd say the writing's on the wall.

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Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

--Hunter S. Thompson

How can an illusion hold up something else?

This too comes in cycles (rather lengthy ones), it is just that this is the first time in a very long time that the dollar has had a cyclical decline that there has been another currency of sufficiency to be an alternative reserve currency.

My guess is that the dollar will bottom out in the next year or two and will once again rebound over the next 3-10 years, all the while, our economy will continue to outperform the rest of the developed world as it has for the better part of the last 30 years.

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Dude.....this will be the worst Worst June in DOW's history since 1960

That's 48 years..... I think it is safe for all of us to say that the economy is not good. Anyone else - well their nuts.

small business??...hardly.

as for the rest of your post...well, not to be a smart-ass, but thanks for the "Mister Obvious" points there.

Oh...and General Motors is having it's worst sales in 34 years....

General Motors has been hemoraging money for well over a decade, were times horrible that whole time, or is GM (like most of the other U.S. automakers) just been badly run, and run into the ground?

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Come on, the worst one month in 40 years is really something to worry about? Its up 4000 points in the last decade.

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http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

Auto sales are pretty stable, so Id say they are doing something wrong, rather than being a victim of the economy.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

OK Mr Gates, not small. I thought I'd present the obvious as you seem to have forgotten it.

Is it possible that they're doing something wrong AND they're victims of the economy? GM and Ford have relied heavily on their SUV sales, which I've long suspected was a mistake on their part - but, hey, you can't blame them, they were just giving buyers what they wanted. But now with the quick jump in gas prices, SUVs are sitting on the lots, and GM has little to offer in fuel-efficient vehicles... or less than the competition, anyway.

Just my 2 cents - I admitedly don't know much about this stuff.

Where are you getting your information???
U.S. auto sales are at their worst sales YTD in 15 years...geesh.

I don't know if you are googling between post or what...
jviehe - what we are experiencing this year is the RESULT of heavily overstated stock numbers, false double booking, false sales reporting, overstated bottom-lines, overstated futures....etc etc etc
As I stated 10 times now - Bear Sterns was rated 'AA' investment portfoilo THE DAY THE COMPANY COLLAPSED.
The market has been insanely over-bloated for years.

Not impossible, but the question is whether the investors are private individuals abroad in large numbers, or foreign governments. I had understood it to be foreign governments, and the following will be predicated on that.

A healthy, stable economy is one in which wages are high enough that workers can buy the bulk of the products produced. Failing this, consumer buying power will be inadequate to purchase the goods and services offered, profits decline, businesses fail, and the economy goes into recession. However, there are some ways to temporarily shore up consumer demand even if real wages are inadequate. One way to do this is by the extension of easy credit to consumers, which allows them to make purchases that they can't really afford to make, and as long as they are able to keep up the payments on the loans, the economy will hum along. This was done in the 1920s, and it is also being done today. However, it depends on keeping interest rates low.

The way things are being done now can be illustrated with an oversimplified example using only China and the U.S. (although actually it includes more than those two countries of course).

China wants to attract industrial investment so as to enable the development of its economy. In order to do this, it cracks down on workers' rights so as to keep Chinese industrial wages very, very low. Industry takes advantage of this, and of "free-trade" agreements which encourage investment in China, and builds factories in China employing low-wage Chinese labor, thus producing goods at substantial cost savings. The workers in China are not able to buy the goods produced (because they are so badly underpaid), so the plan from the beginning has been to market the goods in the U.S., where people are paid more.

However, the loss of all the good industrial jobs has affected the job market in the U.S., driving median real wages down. As a result, the U.S. consumers are not able to absorb the goods produced in this way (even at the lower prices allowed by the cost savings) without borrowing. China wishes to keep this situation going as long as possible, so as to reap the greatest benefit in terms of industrialization and development before it comes crashing down, and so is willing to float loans to the U.S. to keep American interest rates down and the market able to support the Chinese factories.

At some point, however, it will become obvious that the system is not sustainable any longer, and China will withdraw her support.

I was mistaken.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.