New Poll Finds Nearly 70% Of Us Think The American Dream Is Dead, And The Month Of September Is Typically The Worst Month Of The Year For The Stock Market

I kept warning about what would happen to our economy if we stayed on the path that we were on.  For decades, our leaders have been making unbelievably bad decisions, and now the consequences are really starting to catch up with us.  The cost of living has become incredibly painful, a larger housing bubble than the one that we faced just prior to the Great Recession is beginning to burst, and large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over the country.  We were handed the keys to the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen, and our leaders have completely wrecked it.  As a result, economic pessimism has soared to unprecedented heights.

If you don’t believe me, consider what a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll just discovered.

Almost 70 percent of us now believe that the American Dream is dead, and only 25 percent of Americans think that they “have a good chance of improving their standard of living”…

America is becoming a nation of economic pessimists.

A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.

Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys.

Those numbers are absolutely dismal.

But things didn’t have to turn out this way.

Following the Great Recession, many of us laid out plans for fundamentally transforming the system.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, our leaders simply patched up the old system and started inflating bubbles that ended up becoming much larger than the bubbles that burst the last time around.

Now we are on the verge of another global financial crisis, and throughout our history the month of September has typically been the worst month of the year for the stock market…

History shows that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has generated an average monthly decline of 1.1% in September and finished higher only 42.2% of the time dating back to 1897, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

September has also been the worst month of the year for the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite which have averaged monthly declines of 1.1% and 0.9%, respectively. The S&P 500 has finished higher only 44.9% of the time since 1928, while the Nasdaq has registered positive monthly returns 51.9% of the time dating back to 1971, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

“The financial markets often shift gears in September, moving away from the quiet summer months marked by low trading volumes and limited volatility, and entering a period historically associated with seasonal weakness and increased market instability,” said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial.

But if you are waiting for the next big stock market crash, you might want to closely watch the month of October.

9 of the 20 biggest single day percentage losses for the Dow Jones Industrial Average have occurred in October.  That includes “Black Monday” on October 28th, 1929 and “Black Monday” on October 19th, 1987.

The stage has certainly been set for financial turmoil in 2025.

Economic activity has been slowing down all over the nation, and economist Mark Zandi is warning that the economy “feels like it’s on the brink” of a recession…

But to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, the warning signs—or “red indicators”—are showing up in every corner, from housing to employment to consumer prices. In an interview with Newsweek, Zandi said that his monthslong fears of a major economic downturn may soon come to a head, and that the U.S. economy could slip into a recession by the end of 2025.

“I don’t think the economy is in a recession, at least not at this point,” he said, “but it feels like it’s on the brink, it’s on the precipice of this recession.”

This year, large companies have been going bankrupt at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last global financial crisis.

And we have just learned that the delinquency rate on office mortgages that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities has now risen to the highest level ever…

The office and multifamily sectors of commercial real estate loans got further bludgeoned in August, despite large-scale extend-and-pretend and forbearance deals executed in the hopes for better times and lower interest rates and more demand so that lenders don’t end up with the property and a huge loss.

The delinquency rate of office mortgages that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) spiked to 11.7% in August, the worst ever, a full percentage point above even the peak meltdown rate of the Financial Crisis (10.7%), according to data by Trepp , which tracks and analyzes CMBS.

Back in December 2022, the office CMBS delinquency rate was still 1.6%. Since then, it has exploded by over 10 percentage points.

This is a major league red flag.

It would be very difficult to overstate how serious this is.

Our financial institutions are going to get burned so badly as these mortgages go bad.

Meanwhile, residential real estate is in a depressed state and home prices are starting to crash in many parts of the nation.

Many young adults are actually quite eager for home prices to crash, because the vast majority of them have been completely priced out of the market…

The chart above was posted by Nathan Halberstadt on Twitter, and it is very powerful evidence that the middle class is dying.

As older middle class Americans die off, they aren’t being replaced by sufficient numbers of young adults because a middle class lifestyle is simply out of reach for most of them.

And the cost of living just continues to go higher with each passing day.

Just look at the price of beef.  It has risen to absolutely absurd levels, and that is because the size of the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen since 1951…

This year, the U.S. cattle inventory dropped to around 86 million heads. That represents the herd’s smallest size since 1951, and things are going to get worse before they get better.

One of the primary reasons why the U.S. cattle herd has gotten so small is due to the long-term drought in the western half of the country…

A lot of it has to do with a prolonged three-year drought that’s hit America’s key cattle regions hard. This has led to increased feed costs, which has pushed a lot of ranchers to liquidate breeding cattle.

As you can imagine, these short-term decisions have long-term impacts on the supply cycle.

It doesn’t take a hardened ranch hand to know that livestock operates on long production cycles. A lot of producers operate on a 10-year cycle — and because it takes at least two years for new calves to reach butcher weight, USDA forecasts reckon that herd numbers won’t catch up with demand until 2031.

How many times over the past several years have I written about that drought and the implications that it would have?

But a lot of people didn’t want to take me seriously.

Consequences don’t always show up immediately, but they always show up eventually.

And if we don’t reverse course, there are some extremely severe consequences that will soon be heading our way.

If we choose to do what is right, we will be blessed as a nation.

But if we choose a different path, we will get much different results.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

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