BY SRH
Why are so many businesses going bankrupt in the United States? It’s not because the economy is doing well. There are more and more news articles about firms that have collapsed every day, and the figures I’m about to show you show this plainly. This is the first time we’ve seen anything like this since the Great Recession. If our economic problems keep getting worse over the next several months, 2026 is going to be a very unpleasant year.
Court records reveal that a six-year-old government program that helps the tiniest American businesses get out of debt and start over has had the most cases filed.
According to Epiq Bankruptcy Analytics, more than 2,200 consumers and small businesses filed for bankruptcy this year under the so-called Subchapter V guidelines. These provisions make it easier and cheaper to get help with debts.
Carol Fox, a court-approved trustee who monitors more than two dozen cases in Southern Florida, said, “Creditors are just breathing down their necks.”
This is very awful news.
Small enterprises have always been the main source of new jobs in this country.
It’s not a good sign that so many of them are going out of business.
At the same time, big companies are going bankrupt at an alarming rate.
The number of businesses that went bankrupt in the US in the first seven months of this year was the greatest it has been since the early days of the epidemic.
A recent report says that corporate bankruptcy filings in the U.S. rose sharply in July, reaching a post-COVID peak and putting 2025 on track to beat last year’s total.
S&P Global Market Intelligence, the credit-rating agency’s research and analytics division, discovered that filings by big public and private corporations went up from 66 in June to 71 last month. This is the most filings in a month since July 2020. So far this year, there have been 446 bankruptcy filings, which is the most for this seven-month period since 2010.
When a lot of firms go out of business, hiring slows down and we usually see big layoffs all throughout the country.
And that is exactly what is going on.
Nikki Haley’s son told Fox News in a recent interview that none of his classmates who just graduated from college had been able to find work…
“All of my friends graduated from great schools with great degrees, but none of them have jobs.” It’s annoying since they did everything right. They spent time, money, and effort to earn an education, yet they still don’t have a job. They have to compete with foreign labor who are prepared to work for half their pay and AI, which is a supercomputer. How can we compete with that?
I was shocked when I read it.
I knew things weren’t good for our recent college graduates, but I didn’t know they were this awful.
The employment market is getting worse, especially for people who are just starting out.
AI is already performing a lot of the job that a lot of entry-level professionals used to do.
A new research from MIT found that existing AI technology may replace 20 million more American workers…
There has been a long argument over whether modern AI is really replacing people or merely giving businesses a reason to fire some of them and give their jobs to the ones who stay. This is happening in a job market that is already quite wet.
It’s not apparent what the answer is, but a new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is guaranteed to make things worse. The researchers looked at 151 million American workers and found that today’s AI systems are already advanced enough to handle the job of more than 20 million American workers, or 11.7 percent of the whole labor force, if they were completely deployed across the country.
What will happen when robots and AI can perform practically everything better than people can?
What will we need then?
It’s hard to understand how quickly our culture is changing.
Nine months later, one IT worker who was let go by Meta still hasn’t found job.
Getting a job at Meta in 2020 changed my life as a single parent. It was a safe and stable location to work hard and then retire from.
When I got fired in February as part of a layoff of “low-performers,” it felt like a hit in the gut.
Nine months later, my severance and savings are gone, I’m having trouble finding a tech job, and I think the “low-performer” moniker is part of the problem. I used to be a happy-go-lucky person who was excited to apply for jobs, but I’m not anymore.
A few years ago, it was not hard to obtain a job that paid well.
But suddenly everything has changed.
And even a lot of the people who do work don’t make enough to live a good life…
Redfin, a real estate agency, claimed in a statement on November 26 that an American retail worker makes 51.6 percent less than what it costs to rent a typical apartment.
“The average retail worker in the U.S. makes $34,436 a year,” the business added.
“A renter would need to make $71,172 to afford the average apartment, which costs $1,779 a month.”
What can you do if you don’t make enough money to pay rent on an apartment?
You could move in with your parents or live in a camper by the river, I guess.
There are millions of young Americans living in vehicles, vans, and RVs right now. I have talked about this a lot in other writings.
Our way of life is being destroyed.
At the same time, the people at the very top of the economic pyramid have more money than they know what to do with.
The wealth of the richest 1% has grown by 7% over the past year, or $4 trillion. In the second quarter, their wealth reached an all-time high of $52 trillion.
Over the last year, the wealth of the richest 0.1% grew by 10%. The richest 0.1%, or those having a net worth of at least $46 million, have almost doubled their fortune since the epidemic. Their total wealth is now over $23 trillion.
I keep trying to tell everyone that this is not going to end well.
No matter how hard they work, millions and millions of Americans can’t make a good life.
And the same thing is happening in many other countries throughout the world.
Young folks are more frustrated with the economy right now than I’ve ever seen them be.
They are angry just below the surface, and it won’t be long until it blows up. Source
