The slump in the U.S. continues, says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning. There’s “blood in the street,” says Barron’s of America’s most famous street, located in lower Manhattan. Fortune tells us that the “next wave of mortgage defaults” is coming.

And down in Flawda, the Miami Herald reports that the unemployment rate has risen over 6% – its highest level in 13 years. Florida, along with California and Nevada, is where house prices are falling fastest. Many of the people who used to work in construction, or real estate, or installing granite countertops, or financing houses are now looking for work.

And here, we pause a moment to remember what a joke of an economy we Americans have created. We mentioned it last week. Fortune magazine reported a study that compared Germans to Americans. It found that Americans did not work more hours, after all. We work about the same number of hours as Europeans, generally. But Americans tend to do their work at low-skill, service jobs – like flipping hamburgers or cleaning driveways. Germans work at real careers, cook their own hamburgers and clean their own driveways. Germans put in fewer hours “on the job,” as a result.

But in the curious way in which statistics become confused with knowledge, the statistics on hamburger joint revenue get fed into the figures for GDP growth. Then, it looks like the U.S. economy is doing better than the German economy, even though both groups may be eating exactly the same number of hamburgers. And then, too, U.S. economists and politicians believe they have found the secret to economic success; because the US model puts people to work…and boosts GDP growth. Soon, they are giving advice to the Chinese and wagging their fingers at the Europeans. It’s only later, when the credit runs out and their service industries go broke…that they get the punch line – good and hard. Then, they have to cook their own hamburgers again.

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning

Source: The Word on the Street