Here's some cheerful news.

American Economy: R.I.P.

The US economy continues its slow death before our eyes, but economists, policymakers, and most of the public are blind to the tottering fabled land of opportunity.

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Body of Missing Blonde White Girl Found! (and in other news….)

We are witnessing the foundation of the global economy collapsing in front of our eyes, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the news. Newspapers and television around the world are fixated on the trivial. The BBC cannot resist front-page stories about the death of little Madeleine McCann, and the prospect that her parents may be charged in her murder. This story also features prominently in the U.S., but this morning it has been superseded by the one headline that trumps all others – a missing blonde, white girl’s body has been found!

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Leading lender likens US credit crisis to Great Depression

The US financial industry displayed fresh signs of distress from the credit crunch afflicting global money markets yesterday, with one mortgage provider describing lending conditions as the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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The Coming U.S. Hard Landing

The utterly ugly employment figures for August (a fall in jobs for the first time in four years, downward revisions to previous months’ data, a fall in the labor participation rate, and an even weaker employment picture based on the household survey compared to the establishments survey) confirm what few of us have been predicting since the beginning of 2007: the U.S. is headed towards a hard landing.

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U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel

By now, you’ve probably seen the photos of the angry customers queued up outside of Northern Rock Bank waiting to withdraw their money. This is the first big run on a British bank in over a century. It’s lost an eighth of its deposits in three days. The pictures are headline news in the U.K. but have been stuck on the back pages of U.S. newspapers. The reason for this is obvious. The same Force 5 economic-hurricane that just touched ground in Great Britain is headed for America and gaining strength on the way.

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