Crack Shacks, Mansions, and Household Wealth

Dave Gonigam – July 23, 2012

• Are Canadians richer than Americans. Well, yes… but for how long?
• Professor Niall Ferguson pinpoints “the biggest trend in economics, and perhaps geopolitics, in our lifetime”
• Byron King on the “white sands” that will speed up a critical step in the mining of metals by 99%
• A Chinese gold scam that could drive investors toward physical metal… an honest, if bizarre, silver offering from a scammy U.S. company… the most vitriolic letter ever addressed to The 5… and more!

Here’s a Monday milestone: Your typical Canadian is now richer than your average American. On paper, at least.
“Over the past five years,” reports the Toronto Globe and Mail, “net worth per Canadian household has exceeded net worth per American household (total combined value of liquid and real estate assets minus debt) for the first time.”
The paper cites figures from Environics Analytics that say the average household net worth in Canada was $363,202 in 2011. That compares with a U.S. figure of $319,970. The greenback and the loonie are more or less at parity these days, so the numbers aren’t skewed by currency fluctuations.
But wait, you ask… Isn’t Canada in the midst of a housing bubble? Wouldn’t that skew the numbers?
If you plug the word “Canada” and then “housing” into Google, the first auto-fill suggestion that comes up is “bubble.” Before “market.” Before “price.”
The question is of more than passing interest to this editor, en route to Vancouver for this week’s Agora Financial Investment Symposium.
Vancouver is truly a lovely place. It is also one of the world’s most-expensive housing markets. This year, it supplanted Sydney as No. 2 on a list assembled by an outfit called Demographia; Hong Kong is still tops.
Indeed, Vancouver is the inspiration for a website called “Crack Shack or Mansion?” — in which you look at pictures of various homes and guess whether they’re crack shacks or a $1 million-plus properties.




This one’s a mansion, listed for $1,180,000
“Canadians hold more than twice as much real estate as Americans and, once mortgages are factored in, have almost four times as much remaining equity in their real estate,” the Globe and Mail story goes on.
The part about their equity is good… as long as prices hold up. Right?
To be sure, Vancouver is an outlier when it comes to Canadian real estate. Still, the average home price in Canada last month was C$369,339, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association.
In examining whether such a figure is sustainable, it’s worth asking how it compares with median household income — which in 2010 was C$69,860.
Ouch… The average house price is 5.2 times median household income — rather more than the 2 or 3 times the personal finance experts would tell you is prudent.
At the peak of the U.S. housing bubble in 2006, the average home price was $246,500. Meanwhile, median household income was $48,201. That works out to a multiple of… whaddya know, 5.1 times.
Hmmm….

Read More at Agora Financial: http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/crack-shacks-mansions-and-household-wealth/


Learn more how Rubicon Alliance can help you with your retirement planning...Call us at 719.785.3113

Driving an old car? You're not alone.

From CNBC....

Getty Images Mechanic Harrison Garcia works on a Ford Mustang at Brake and Wheel Service Center in San Francisco, California.

Feel like you're driving an old car? You're not alone. In fact, the average age of vehicles in the U.S. has hit a new all-time high. Experian Automotive says the average age of the 245 million vehicles registered in the U.S. in the first quarter of this year was 11 years.

That's an increase of just over 2 months compared the first quarter of last year.

What's behind the increase? Part of it is because the recession and sluggish recovery forced many people to put off buying or trading-in for a new or used car. Another factor is the fact cars and trucks are built to run longer. That quality improvement picked up momentum in the early '90s. Now, many of those cars and trucks are 13 to 22 years old, and yes there are millions of them still on the road.

In fact, Experian says more than 52 million cars and trucks in America are 16 years or older. (Related: What models will become collectibles?)

Ford Runs Strong

In its analysis of vehicle registrations, Experian found more Ford Motor [F 10.01 --- UNCH (0) ] models on the road than other model. That shouldn't come as a surprise since the Ford F-Series truck has been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for 30 straight years. According to Experian Automotive, here the top 4 brands of vehicles in operation in the U.S.:

Ford: 17.2%
Chevrolet: 15.8%
Toyota: 10.4%
Honda: 7.3%

The four most popular models on the road in the U.S., according to Experian Automotive, are:

Ford F-150: 3.4%
Honda Accord: 2.6%
Toyota Camry: 2.6%
Chevy Silverado: 2.0%

One final note: For all the attention that's been given to hybrid and electric vehicles over the last decade, they are just 0.9 percent of the vehicles in operation in the U.S. That works out to a little over 2 million alternatively powered vehicles.

—By CNBC’s Phil LeBeau

Good Slideshow on the holders of U.S. debt...

The Federal Reserve

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29880401

The Ugly Jobs Report!

The following is the latest report from Agora Financial in which the jobs report is described as "Ugly" in fact..its worst than that...



A search of our archives reveals the last time the word “fugly” appeared in The 5 was on the first Friday of June last year… in which we used this borderline-vulgar portmanteau to describe the Labor Department’s May jobs report.
On this first Friday of June 2012, it’s deja vu…

As then, the statisticians at BLS could conjure only a five-figure number of new jobs in May. This time, it’s 69,000.

Whoops, the “expert consensus” was looking for 150,000. And 150,000 is no great shakes — barely enough to keep up with population growth.

Worse… the number would be negative were it not for the “birth-death model”… in which the statisticians guess at the number of jobs created by new business owners, who are too busy to respond to BLS surveys.

Worser… the already dismal figures for April and March were revised down. The “new jobs” number has now fallen every month since January.

January happens to be the last time we took a gander at the chart from Calculated Risk plotting job losses and recoveries in every postwar recession. The red line is what passes for recovery 4½ years after the “official” start of the recession in December 2007.






[Click to enlarge]


Meanwhile, U-3 unemployment ticked up to 8.2%. The U-6 figure, including “discouraged workers” and part-timers who want full-time work, moved up for the first time in three months, to 14.8%.

Throw in the discouraged workers who gave up looking for work more than a year ago and you get to 22.7%. That’s how the unemployment rate used to be measured during the Carter administration, and how ShadowStats’ John Williams figures it this morning.

This number is identical to a year ago.

Read Further!

http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/printrallycrashprintrally/

Greece, Spain, Illinois? What?

For the third day in a row, U.S. stocks began the trading day looking mighty sickly, and are in line to end the day looking… well, less sickly. As of this writing, the Dow is a bit below 12,900.
The “recovery” in each day’s activity appears to start with the close of the European stock markets at 11:30 a.m. EDT. Indeed, “Trading was much weaker when European bourses were open,” writes Fusion IQ chief Barry Ritholtz.
“There remains an underlying liquidity bid containing the downside so far,” he adds – and he hastens to point out he’s not saying that from the vantage point of a permabull; his own firm is down to 40-50% exposure to stocks. “I’d like to see lower prices,” he says, “to put some equity exposure back on.”
As with the previous two days this week, Europe is getting the blame for the “risk-off” trade.

• Spain is on the verge of nationalizing one of its big banks; yields on Spanish 10-year debt have crested 6%.
• The European Union and International Monetary Fund are making noises about not releasing the next round of bailout money for Greece as long as Greek politicians continue to make noises about rejecting the bailout terms
• Italy’s prime minister has issued a plea for European leaders “to go beyond the rigid focus on budget discipline demanded by Berlin,” as a Reuters dispatch put it

With today’s developments, Spain has crept back into the top 10 among the most likely default candidates, as judged by the credit default swap market…


Yes, Illinois is a higher risk than Spain; this is the first time we’ve seen a U.S. state back in the top 10 for months. The Prairie State still has $9 billion in unpaid bills, despite jacking up the state income tax last year by 66%.
http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/ditching-the-dollar/

Yes, Um, Your Gold Please...

From the Writers at Agora Financial...(with a twist of sarcasim)


There he goes again.

“A decent productive asset will kill an unproductive asset,” said Warren Buffett yesterday on CNBC.
The “unproductive asset,” as if you hadn’t guessed, is gold — which is once again in Buffett’s sights.
“When we took over Berkshire,” he prattled as Becky Quick looked on worshipfully, “Berkshire was selling at $15 a share and gold was selling at $20 an ounce. And gold is now $1,600 and Berkshire is $120,000.”
Ah, the old selective time frame trick. Almost makes us wonder if someone slipped the Oracle this piece of Addison’s from The Daily Reckoning — complete with the following chart…


Nor does the chart tell the whole story, for what would Berkshire be today without the $700 billion monstrosity known as TARP?
“Berkshire Hathaway firms in total received $95 billion in TARP money,” Addison writes in the most-recent Apogee Advisory. “Berkshire, you’ll recall, held stock in Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and American Express. Not only did these companies receive TARP funds… they also dipped into the FDIC’s treasury to back their debt. Total bailout: $130 billion. TARP-enabled companies accounted for 30% of the Oracle’s publicly disclosed stock portfolio.
“And to sharpen the sting, he even got a better deal to help ailing Goldman Sachs than our own government. Buffett got a 10% preferred dividend, while the Feds got all of 5%. He cleaned up with $500 million a year in dividends. Without the bailout, you can bet many of his stock holdings would have gone near-zero instead.”
“I think gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939,” added Buffett’s right-hand man Charlie Munger last week, “but I think civilized people don’t buy gold. They invest in productive businesses.”
That… or they suck on the taxpayer teat, while telling the rest of us to “suck it in.”
Recall it was Munger last fall who told a group of college students, “You should thank God” for bank bailouts, for the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. “Hit the economy with enough misery and enough disruption, destroy the currency, and God knows what happens.”
[Destroy the currency? Isn’t that why you keep gold? But we digress...]
“Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else,” Munger went on, “there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.
“At a certain place, you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.”
There, in a few outrageous sentences, you have the raw essence of what’s increasingly labeled the “extraction” culture.
“Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America,” writes economist Paul Craig Roberts. “The U.S. Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1%.”
Addison delves further into this theme in the next issue of Apogee — examining perhaps the mother of all “extraction” schemes. If you have an IRA or 401(k), you don’t want to miss this issue, only days away.

http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/did-he-just-call-you-uncivilized/

5 minutes of class warfare.

From Agora Financial...

 

What’s Really Behind “Income Inequality”

Dave Gonigam – May 3, 2012

• Worth screaming about: How the Fed drove a famous painting to a record price
• “Super-wealthy money shufflers” load up on art, while American workers produce more and earn less: Lessons from a chart that’s gone viral, and the story the chart doesn’t show
• The wisdom of the crowd? Americans’ choice for “safest” investment two years in a row
• Comeuppance continues, new pain for Spain: Bolivia adds insult to Argentina’s injury
• Sarnoff on “the little exceptions that get you”… an update on Addison’s documentary project… a poignant account of “family businesses that led to strong work ethics”… and more!

“When you create monetary inflation,” says the one and only Marc Faber, “it doesn’t touch everything at the same time.
“At certain times,” he tells the Financial Sense Newshour, “it may go into wages or it could go into commodities or it can go into consumer prices or it can go into real estate or it can go into equities or commodities or it can go into precious metals or art prices and so forth and so on — but not at the same time.”
The part about art came to mind as a CNN breaking news alert flashed across this editor’s iPad last night: “Edvard Munch’s The Scream sells for a record $119,922,500 at Sotheby’s in New York.”
“The Fed basically since 2008,” Dr. Faber goes on, “has expanded its balance sheet with the intention to stabilize the housing market and boost housing prices, but that is precisely the asset that hasn’t gone up.”
There are exceptions, of course: “in Aspen and from Madison Avenue and Park Avenue and so forth,” he says. “In prestigious locations around the world, real estate has continued to go up in value.”
The world’s “super-wealthy money shufflers,” Faber wrote in a recent Gloom Boom & Doom Report “have been the prime beneficiaries of the asset inflation we have experienced since the early 1980s.”
The U.S. working class… not so much.

Read More...

http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/whats-really-behind-income-inequality/

Like on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Rubicon-Alliance/103424536448581



 Which brings us to this chart; it’s making the Internet rounds this May Day week…

Loosing My Religion!

“I’m not one of those religious believers in gold,” says Matthew Bishop, “but I guess I’ve become a bit of an agnostic/atheist about my faith in government-backed money, so I really think governments are in a position where they’re going to debase in a big way.”
Mr. Bishop is New York bureau chief of The Economist… and he’s penned a book called In Gold We Trust?: The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty. He has put us in a difficult position as we aim to stake out “fat tail” ideas.
We likewise have no faith in government-backed money. And we’re agnostic about gold, for that matter. “Just because you understand monetary policy, the Fed and the dangers of fiat currency,” Addison said by IM between meetings this morning, “doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a gold bug.”
In any event, Mr. Bishop is onto something. “People have lost faith in the 20th-century religion of government-backed fiat money,” Mr. Bishop tells The Wall Street Journal’s video unit, “and they’re saying at the moment, ‘We don’t trust governments with our money.’”
To wit: The blogosphere is buzzing this morning with word that the national debt under President Obama has grown by $5,027,761,476,484.56.
That’s now more than George W. Bush racked up in two terms.
Early in Bush’s second term, we were already concerned enough that Addison and Bill Bonner teamed up to write Empire of Debt. Then Addison devoted 2½ years to turn it into a film… before the current occupant of the White House was even part of the national conversation.
Then, few were alarmed that Bush racked up a debt total nearly equal to all his predecessors combined. Now, however, it appears the outrage threshold’s been reached.

Read more in Agora Financial! http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/fading-faith-in-fiat/

Sell in May and go away!!!!!

Evidence is mounting that "sell in May and go away" might be a good idea again in 2012.

CNBC.com Article: World Stock Markets Face 'Risk-Off' Road Ahead: Index

Global stocks are entering a potentially negative period, according to one index with a solid track record that is indicating there is more than European debt weighing on investors’ minds.

World Stock Markets Face 'Risk-Off' Road Ahead: Index

Published: Thursday, 12 Apr 2012 | 1:43 PM ET

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By: Jeff Cox
CNBC.com Senior Writer

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Global stocks are entering a potentially negative period, according to one index with a solid track record that is indicating there is more than European debt weighing on investors’ minds.

The Global Financial Stress Index, compiled by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has seen 10 of its 40 components rise to a level associated with risk-off mode in the financial markets, which means investors usually sell more volatile assets like stocks and move to the safety of fixed income.

The GFSI's Critical Stress Signal last flashed risk-off on July 12, 2011 and remained there until Jan. 4. While U.S. stocks, as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500 [.SPX 1377.44 -10.13 (-0.73%) ] , fell 2.7 percent during that period, global indexes tumbled 9 percent. BofA says the CSS has been accurate more than 60 percent of the time in predicting global stock drops.

Full Story:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47029609

2007 DEJA VU?????

Addison Wiggin – April 12, 2012

• Look out below: Three — no, make it 4 — reasons it feels like 2007-08 this morning…
• Subprime lending up (again… really?), private equity opting for IPO and a shocking fact you didn’t know about oil prices…
• “Normal market behavior”… Vancouver favorite cheers up gold holders who bought at the most recent top…
• Death, taxes and one grim statistic… still time to buy a house… muddy boots in South America… and more!

“Even I wouldn’t make a loan to me at this point,” says Annette Alejandro. Ms. Alejandro recently emerged from bankruptcy, her car was repossessed last year and she has no job.
But her mailbox is stuffed with offers for credit cards and car loans.
We begin today’s episode with “deja vu”-induced vertigo this morning. Three items flitted into our inbox in the last 24 hours. By themselves, the items might not mean much. Coagulated, they give us the same queasy feeling we had in 2007-08.
Credit card lenders issued 1.1 million new cards to subprime borrowers last month — up 12.3% from a year ago, according to the credit-reporting outfit Equifax.
“As financial institutions recover from the losses on loans made to troubled borrowers,” reports The New York Times, “some of the largest lenders to the less than creditworthy, including Capital One and GM Financial, are trying to woo them back, while HSBC and JPMorgan Chase are among those tiptoeing again into subprime lending.”
Plotted on a chart, it looks like this…




http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/feeling-the-2007-twitch/

Obamacare Will Bankrupt US: Rep. Paul Ryan

Don Lester of Rubicon Alliance

"Our country's fiscal fate seems sealed with the passage of Obamacare but out of control spending and Government debt levels were already on an unsustainable path long before America's version of socialized medicine was enacted."

~Don Lester

The following article is written by Michelle Fox

Obama’s federal health care law, which is now front of the U.S. Supreme Court, will bankrupt the U.S. and destroy the country’s health care system, Rep. Paul Ryan, (R) Wis., told CNBC Tuesday. “It vastly underestimates how many employers will actually drop their employer health insurance and dump people into the government exchange,” Ryan said.

In fact, he said private sector actuaries have told him that within a couple of years, about two-thirds of employers will “wash their hands” of offering health insurance to employees.

“Just about everybody will be in the [government] exchange,” Ryan said.

President Obama's health care law, now in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, will cause an implosion of the health care system and an implosion of our public debt, Ryan told Larry Kudlow.

Full Story:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/46872408

"QE3 is coming in one form or another despite what the political pundits say."

"QE3 is coming in one form or another despite what the political pundits say to the media and Joe Public. America's credit rating is looking worse with each passing year as our liabilities keep exponentially increasing without any signs of slowing in government spending or borrowing. The Fed will become the buyer of last resort when no one else is left that is willing to buy the debt of a bankrupt nation."

Don Lester...Rubicon Alliance

CNBC.com Article: Third Round of Bond Buying Not Needed: Fed's Bullard
A third round of Treasurys purchase is not necessary unless the U.S. economy deteriorates further, according to James Bullard, president of St Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

Full Story:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46862674

Are carbon credits just around the corner?

CNBC.com Article: US to Propose First Climate Limits on Power Plants


The Obama administration will propose as soon as Tuesday the first ever standards to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, sources involved in talks on the matter said—a move that is likely to be hotly contested by Republicans and industry in an election year.
Full Story:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46864413

US Inches Toward Goal of Energy Independence

Published: Friday, 23 Mar 2012 | 6:00 AM ET

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By: Clifford Krauss and Eric Lipton
The New York Times

• The desolate stretch of West Texas desert known as the Permian Basin is still the lonely domain of scurrying roadrunners by day and howling coyotes by night. But the roar of scores of new oil rigs and the distinctive acrid fumes of drilling equipment are unmistakable signs that crude is gushing again.

And not just here. Across the country, the oil and gas industry is vastly increasing production, reversing two decades of decline. Using new technology and spurred by rising oil prices since the mid-2000s, the industry is extracting millions of barrels more a week, from the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the prairies of North Dakota.

At the same time, Americans are pumping significantly less gasoline. While that is partly a result of the recession and higher gasoline prices, people are also driving fewer miles and replacing older cars with more fuel-efficient vehicles at a greater clip, federal data show.

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

“There is no question that many national security policy makers will believe they have much more flexibility and will think about the world differently if the United States is importing a lot less oil,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environmental senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For decades, consumption rose, production fell and imports increased, and now every one of those trends is going the other way.”

How the country made this turnabout is a story of industry-friendly policies started by President Bush and largely continued by President Obama — many over the objections of environmental advocates — as well as technological advances that have allowed the extraction of oil and gas once considered too difficult and too expensive to reach. But mainly it is a story of the complex economics of energy, which sometimes seems to operate by its own rules of supply and demand.

With gasoline prices now approaching record highs and politicians mud-wrestling about the causes and solutions, the effects of the longer-term rise in production can be difficult to see.

Full article : http://www.cnbc.com/id/46831786

 Rubicon Alliance doesn't endorse any suggestion or recommendation of products that may be in in this article rather as a general discussion piece about current trends in the market place and a general topic for our followers

Hard assets that produce income, he's just preaching to the choir!

I Have No Choice but to Own Stocks: 'Black Swan' Author

BLACK SWAN, NO CHOICE BUT TO OWN STOCKS, NASSIM TALEB, MARGO D. BELLER, CNBC, CNBC.COM, U.S. ECONOMY, RON PAUL, U.S. ECONOMY, DEFICIT, UNEMPLOYMENT, FEDERAL RESERVE

Posted By: Margo D. Beller | Special to CNBC.com

CNBC.com

| 13 Mar 2012 | 11:54 AM ET

The U.S. economic situation is so bad, the author of "The Black Swan" said he has "no choice but to own stocks" to "preserve my financial situation."

"I own stocks," Nassim Taleb told CNBC Tuesday. "I don’t trust Treasury bonds. I’d rather have a dividend than a coupon. I am afraid of hyperinflation. So I have no choice but to own stock and some real estate to preserve my financial situation."

He also has "some euros," because despite the bad press, "they know the problems in Europe" but the U.S. does not.

Taleb, who is in the process of updating his 2007 book, considers a "black swan" event to be something undirected and unpredicted. But he said the current U.S. economic problems have been years in the making, causing him to distrust the Obama administration, the Republicans in Congress and all the Republican presidential challengers — except Texas congressman Ron Paul.

"Only one candidate, Ron Paul, is saying the right things for the issues we are facing," Taleb said. "I’m a risk-based person. From my vantage point there's only one candidate representing the right policies."

Taleb said he believes in an America that is resilient. "You don't achieve that through bailouts," he said. "You need the economy to stay vital. You need a rate of failure. What is fragile should break early."

He said Paul's plans, including making drastic cuts in government, ending corporate bailouts and abolishing the Federal Reserve can "cure the fundamental issues. He’s against the issue of novocaine. If you have a severe problem, you do root canal. That’s the only choice you have. You have to start with a government budget that is in control. You don’t gamble with future generations' money."

Can America live with austerity? "We are doing it to the Greeks," he said. "We should do it to ourselves. We want jobs, we want a healthy economy. I want to live in a country that has the energy to rebuild things. This is gone. We have a metastatic government...You need to do something drastic."

The whole system "is rotten," he added. "The advisers around [President] Obama who were part of the problem were friends with the bankers. I don’t trust the Republicans with deficits. Look at what we had under the Republican administrations including George [W.] Bush. I want the main problems to be addressed and I want a major cleanup.

"I don’t care about [Ron Paul's] chances. I support him. We have no other solutions. It is my duty as a citizen and as a taxpayer who doesn’t want to be hoodwinked in the long term by bureaucrats."

© 2012 CNBC.com

URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/46718912/

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© 2012 CNBC.com



 Rubicon Alliance doesn't endorse any suggestion or recommendation of products that may be in in this article rather as a general discussion piece about current trends in the market place and a general topic for our followers.

Good Selection on Private Equity

This is a great article by Reihan Salam about Private Equity.  Rubicon Alliance doesn't endorse any suggestion or recommendation of products that may be in in this article rather as a general discussion piece about current trends in the market place and a general topic for our followers.

Every presidential candidate has to defend himself against accusations of wrongdoing — an affair, abuse of office, campaign-finance impropriety, and so forth. Mitt Romney finds himself in a predictable defensive crouch, too, but the allegation against him is extraordinary: He stands accused of doing his job too well.

As the founder and CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, Romney was a turnaround artist. In that role, the GOP frontrunner says, he restored failing firms to health, usually with great success. He claims to have helped create thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new wealth.

Some of Romney’s Republican rivals, particularly Newt Gingrich, haven’t framed Romney’s record in such generous terms. They say Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who used financial chicanery to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of helpless workers. President Obama and his allies will surely make the same case in the months to come. Indeed, a recent memo from Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, accuses Romney of having sought “profit at any cost,” and of believing in “an economy where the wealthy and powerful can rig the game at the expense of working Americans.” Romney’s verbal gaffes, including an ill-considered soundbite professing his love of “being able to fire people,” have made him vulnerable to more demonization still.

After his victory in New Hampshire’s primary, Romney fought back with unusually strong words. “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” he said, adding that “we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him.” But Romney was only partly right. The plaintiffs against free enterprise are not just a handful of politicians, but a growing number of American voters who think corporate elites have jeopardized a social contract that once guaranteed, as Bill Clinton put it, that “if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one.”

Link to Rest of Article