The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Almost 10,000 U.S. Banks Have Disappeared Since 1985, Leaving 4 Mega Banks Controlling 39 Percent of Bank Assets By  Pam Martens and  Russ Martens According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) data, there were 14,417 federally-insured banking institutions in the U.S. in 1985. As of December 31, 2023, the  FDIC reports there are only 4,587 remaining . The vast majority of the 9,830 banks that have disappeared since 1985 did not fail – they were merged with other banks. Today, just four banks control $9.3  trillion  in consolidated bank assets or 39 percent of all bank assets. Those four banks are JPMorgan Chase with $3.395 trillion in consolidated assets; Bank of America with $2.540 trillion; Wells Fargo with $1.7 trillion; and Citigroup’s Citibank with $1.685 trillion. (All asset figures are as of December 31, 2023 and come from  the Federal Reserve’s statistical release of the largest banks .) The political clout of these mega banks is s...

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... 2024: Too Many Things Going Wrong by   Gail Tverberg It will be an interesting year. We know that the age of peak performance for humans varies, depending upon the activity. Peak performance for an athlete tends to come between ages 20 and 30, while peak performance for a person writing academic papers seems to come between  ages 40 and 50 years . By the time people are 80 years old, they have a strong suspicion that health and other aspects of performance will deteriorate in the next 20 years. Economies, in physics terms, are similar to human beings. Both are dissipative structures. They require energy of the appropriate kinds to keep their systems growing and operating normally. For humans, the main source of this energy is food. For an economy, it is a mixture of energy that the economy is specifically adapted to. Today’s economy requires a certain mixture of energy directly from the sun, plus e...

You Must Be In 'The Six-Figure Club' To Afford A House The latest housing data shows soaring mortgage rates, elevated prices, and limited inventory continue to worsen the affordability crisis.  New data from real estate brokerage Redfin Corp. indicates homebuyers now need a whopping $114,000 salary to afford a median-priced home of $412,000 in September - assuming a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 7.2% with 20% down. This is a near doubling in salary needed to afford a home since Covid, and since inflation wiped out real wages for two years, more Americans than ever can no longer afford the 'American Dream' of a single-family house with a white picket fence, instead, trapped in a cycle of renting. Redfin's next report, for this month, will likely show another jump in the salary needed to afford an average home because the 30-year fixed mortgage rate has risen   80 percentage points to 8% . In 2012, the salary Americans needed to afford the average home was about $38,...

    This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at   Birch Gold Group In July of last year as the hype surrounding the covid pandemic was finally dying out   I published an article   about a barely publicized project called the “Council For Inclusive Capitalism.” The group, headed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild who now seems to be the public face of the notorious Rothschild dynasty, is the culmination of decades of various globalist agendas combined to represent the ultimate proof of “New World Order” conspiracy. Remember when people used to say that global governance by elitists was a paranoid fantasy? Well, now the plan is an openly admitted reality. The CIC is intimately tied to institutions like the World Economic Forum, the UN and the IMF, but it is primarily an attempt to link all these organizations more closely to the corporate world in an open display of collusion. The group pushes the spread of what they call “Stakeholder Capital...

  The loss of Ukraine is the beginning of the end “On the eve of the collapse of the Roman Empire, silver coins were so impure and depreciated that whole bags of it were used in circulation.” laughlyn (johan eddebo) All of this is about energy and resources. Capital is nothing but a proxy for goods, services, and the fundamentals of our means of production. Depreciation of the currency is a short-term solution to resource scarcities by externalizing them through exploiting the perceived value of a trusted medium of exchange. This is exactly why we have runaway inflation right now. Energy is the single most important resource, bar none. All forms of economic activity is predicated on available surplus energy as per the laws of thermodynamics. Before the covid situation, Europe and the US each consumed about 20 million barrels of oil per day, totaling around 40 million barrels of oil. Every single day. The shortfall in petroleum production before the Ukraine war was about six million...