.........I'm trying to spread some linky goodness over in 'Left Blogistan' about economics blogs and am using you as well as Angry Bear and some others.
Folks are woefully ignorant about economics and now seems a good teaching moment.
What's happening in financials is implosion. How that ripples through I have no idea though, but I posted some whines about bank failures and isn't that nice and scary.
point them over here and work on education. I agree, but that's what's great about the blogs is they can be used to discuss, debate, learn if properly used.
I heard over 4 million families will lose their homes (foreclosures) in 24 months. Then, on Cramer he was predicting, soon an entire banking meltdown as in failure.
In the Dot Con era, there were so many who just plain got away with it, walked away with millions, so I suspect we'll see the same thing here.
They cannot be saved. The only question is how much of the remaining good money is thrown after the bad.
For this particular "slow motion bust" Andrew Mellon may (partially) have had the right advice: "Liquidate! Liquidate! Liquidate!" the banks, and get new, properly capitalized and regulated ones in their place as soon as possible.
There is a ton of loaned money out there that could never be paid back and is never going to be paid back. It all needs to get written down and written off a.s.a.p. so that the hapless and hopeless debtors can get on with their lives.
But we need to put stakes through the hearts of the walking dead banks and investment houses.
Today on Mad Money (which he has been very wrong...often), but still he did hit the subprime disaster....anyway he announced a banking/financial meltdown like to 0, bank failure.
He did say our lovely Presidential candidates could stop talking about tax cuts and address this and the Fed could come up with a plan which would alleviate it but he clearly said soon, as in very soon, we're going to see bank failures.
Venom, I'm esp. interested in any shift of manufacturing abroad and that would include layoffs here and magically "new plant there" sorts of announcements.
McCain? My question is how does he stand there with a straight face and say more bad trade deals are his jobs program with the overwhelming statistics?
Do they honestly believe selling a lie like the truth will continue to work? (answer yes).
about us, this site and tell him to come on and get some support as well as vent and get politically involved. When someone tells me someone is in tears, well, I'm not surprised for this disposable worker motif has real dire consequences but let him know we need him around and to get involved....he's not alone.
He is 60 years old and sitting in my office in tears because he has been unemployed for almost two years and has no prospects in site. The education myth nails it to a tee. In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the greatest heist in history; and nobody will even see the inside of a court room let along the inside of a jail.
Thje main reason we have a negative savings rate is that the cards are stacked against saving
Too cheap and easy credit as espoused by "easy" Al Greedspan is the primary culprit - this encourages borrowing and the use of the home as an ATM - plus created the bubbles and contributes to the trade deficits as more and more is spent on imported consumer products bought on credit cards.
Interest on savings is taxed as income. So what meager interest you gain from a traditional savings account a good chunk is taken away - what is left rapidly evaporates due to inflation and dollar devaluation. The single digit interest paid by banks is also a result of the too cheap and easy credit policies of the Fed. These are major disincentives to saving
Middle and lower income savings interest should not be taxed. There should be a cap, above which a percentage of savings interest could be taxed, under should not, and only if you are a higher income bracket.
Ultimately getting the budget and trade deficits under control, and a Volker like return to sanity on Fed interest rate policy should create the conditions to encourage savings.
We have created an economy based around rampant consumption and materialism, while at the same time dismantling our means of production and wealth generation, without a restoration of balance we will continue to have an econmy mbased on shifting wealth around and upward.
All too often you will hear the lame excuse for higher energy costs by the fossil fuel apologists and the MSM - "The US is still lower than Europe"
what they fail to mention is that in Europe they have many viable alternatives to air and auto travel. The times I have spent in the UK, I used the trains to get pretty much anywhere I needed to go. Europeans tend to live much closer to their places of work and business. They walk, ride public transit, bicycles, motorbikes and mopeds.
Since the US largely does not have these alternatives of less fuel intensive travels and have built our cities around the suburbs, higher fuel costs while lower than other parts of the world have a greater impact and represent a higher percentage of ones income.
We need to go on a crash infrastructure revitalization program and bring back rail travel - high speed, regional and light rail - would be very price and time competitve with current modes of transport and will have a much less environmental footprint.
We also should be strongly considering nationalizing oil reserves and a ATT style break up of big oil in addition to alternative energies
see raised then is, if we can outsource it to someplace in Indiana and have it work fine, why can't we get someone at a quarter the cost in India?
One of the big advantages of having you consumer contact, production, and engineers close is that you can do rapid change orders to offer what people want now.
When you've got outsourced production, you expand the lead time before you can implement a change in production, this being even more true where production occurs through an outsourced vendor rather than company owned facilities. Even more, having customer contact in the same place allows for informal contact that lets problems with products float to the engineers without putting it on paper.
have meetings in person on an as needed basis. There are now many web conferencing products out there where literally someone's entire desktop can be shared or shown. I think it's a control thing frankly of corporations must have people on site. I'll have to dig around for productivity studies for I have a belief it's more corporations just don't know how to manage remote teams or distributed teams. I'll bet the productivity numbers are there to justify it.
some group proposed taking post offices, and adding workspaces in them. Basically cubicles with broadband and space for a computer, and using them as telecommuting centers in smaller towns. Matched with a plan to rebuild a government owned internet backbone that has trunk lines between major cities and connections out to local post offices. (Even better if matched with Wi-Max towers for rural areas) You could do a lot to help business create distributed offices, where much of the back office work currently the target of offshoring to India is contracted out to small towns.
to get around town, but at times it's irritating. Like when you have people in cars whiz pass you and shout things. And as far as sidewalks and bike lanes? Nonexistent in many neighborhoods. We need a better pedestrian infrastructure that includes sidewalks on at least one side of the street, and street design to slow cars down on city streets.
The real killer for me though is neighborhood groceries, which don't really exist in much of the Midwest.
When you have to drive 10 miles round trip to get groceries then a car becomes a necessity and adds to the cost of living.
There needs to be better urban planning codes that require that new commercial construction demonstrate need before being given a permit for large stores.
Parking is another huge issue. Imagine the benefit of limiting the parking lot requirements for new business, but requiring that they pay for additional slots in city owned parking structures that could then serve as loci for new mass transit connections. Anything over a half mile, and most people will refuse to walk. And better yet, require a 1 for 1 match between new commercial construction and housing that matches the income spectrum of a neighborhood over commercial floor space.
Instead of having corporations herd in a select series of areas, how about if they spread out with a lot of satellite offices? I mean for Tech, there are only certain cities which really have tech jobs and those areas are traffic jams, housing prices through the roof and commutes from hell, even when someone wants to rent "close to work", depending on whether they are offshore outsourcing the jobs or not of course, but these corporations "huddle" into some areas, Silicon valley, Boston, Redmond WA and so on, except of course for their expansions in India and China!
I have no idea, in this day and age of 24/7 communications, corporations require people to drive in and sit in some cube, every day, but they do.
Then, because people simply cannot afford the housing prices, often they buy far away, so their commute ends up being sometimes 3 hours each way. This is especially true in Silicon valley. Then, roads are congested, so people end up sitting in traffic, stuck in their cars....burning gas.
There are a lot of factors here but to me the obvious culprit is once again...the corporation with their stuck in the last century 8-6 (that's the truth, who works 9-5 these days?) five day work week, insisting people sit in cubes when the workplace is really more mobile. Staggering work hours as well would help cut down on congestion.
Then, of course the politically incorrect thing, the US population is growing like crazy and that of course puts pressure on resources, including roads and gas, prices.
.........I'm trying to spread some linky goodness over in 'Left Blogistan' about economics blogs and am using you as well as Angry Bear and some others.
Folks are woefully ignorant about economics and now seems a good teaching moment.
Heh....
...'securitization' contains within it it's own 'cure' as it were.
What's happening in financials is implosion. How that ripples through I have no idea though, but I posted some whines about bank failures and isn't that nice and scary.
point them over here and work on education. I agree, but that's what's great about the blogs is they can be used to discuss, debate, learn if properly used.
people have no idea what's going on. And not only that they don't have the lexicon to even talk about it.
I'm pretty worried because I just woke up last month and realized that most people are functional morons in understanding how our government works.
I mean really works.
We are a nasty combo of Hitler's Germany and 1970s Japan.
I'm still hoping for the best but when I list the name of the actual people who are supposedly 'leading' us I have an overwhelming urge to vomit.
I heard over 4 million families will lose their homes (foreclosures) in 24 months. Then, on Cramer he was predicting, soon an entire banking meltdown as in failure.
In the Dot Con era, there were so many who just plain got away with it, walked away with millions, so I suspect we'll see the same thing here.
Is to follow the money- the ones who are still afloat when this all ends were probably gaming the system to their own advantage.
They cannot be saved. The only question is how much of the remaining good money is thrown after the bad.
For this particular "slow motion bust" Andrew Mellon may (partially) have had the right advice: "Liquidate! Liquidate! Liquidate!" the banks, and get new, properly capitalized and regulated ones in their place as soon as possible.
There is a ton of loaned money out there that could never be paid back and is never going to be paid back. It all needs to get written down and written off a.s.a.p. so that the hapless and hopeless debtors can get on with their lives.
But we need to put stakes through the hearts of the walking dead banks and investment houses.
Today on Mad Money (which he has been very wrong...often), but still he did hit the subprime disaster....anyway he announced a banking/financial meltdown like to 0, bank failure.
He did say our lovely Presidential candidates could stop talking about tax cuts and address this and the Fed could come up with a plan which would alleviate it but he clearly said soon, as in very soon, we're going to see bank failures.
Ouch.
Venom, I'm esp. interested in any shift of manufacturing abroad and that would include layoffs here and magically "new plant there" sorts of announcements.
McCain? My question is how does he stand there with a straight face and say more bad trade deals are his jobs program with the overwhelming statistics?
Do they honestly believe selling a lie like the truth will continue to work? (answer yes).
about us, this site and tell him to come on and get some support as well as vent and get politically involved. When someone tells me someone is in tears, well, I'm not surprised for this disposable worker motif has real dire consequences but let him know we need him around and to get involved....he's not alone.
He is 60 years old and sitting in my office in tears because he has been unemployed for almost two years and has no prospects in site. The education myth nails it to a tee. In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the greatest heist in history; and nobody will even see the inside of a court room let along the inside of a jail.
Thje main reason we have a negative savings rate is that the cards are stacked against saving
Too cheap and easy credit as espoused by "easy" Al Greedspan is the primary culprit - this encourages borrowing and the use of the home as an ATM - plus created the bubbles and contributes to the trade deficits as more and more is spent on imported consumer products bought on credit cards.
Interest on savings is taxed as income. So what meager interest you gain from a traditional savings account a good chunk is taken away - what is left rapidly evaporates due to inflation and dollar devaluation. The single digit interest paid by banks is also a result of the too cheap and easy credit policies of the Fed. These are major disincentives to saving
Middle and lower income savings interest should not be taxed. There should be a cap, above which a percentage of savings interest could be taxed, under should not, and only if you are a higher income bracket.
Ultimately getting the budget and trade deficits under control, and a Volker like return to sanity on Fed interest rate policy should create the conditions to encourage savings.
We have created an economy based around rampant consumption and materialism, while at the same time dismantling our means of production and wealth generation, without a restoration of balance we will continue to have an econmy mbased on shifting wealth around and upward.
All too often you will hear the lame excuse for higher energy costs by the fossil fuel apologists and the MSM - "The US is still lower than Europe"
what they fail to mention is that in Europe they have many viable alternatives to air and auto travel. The times I have spent in the UK, I used the trains to get pretty much anywhere I needed to go. Europeans tend to live much closer to their places of work and business. They walk, ride public transit, bicycles, motorbikes and mopeds.
Since the US largely does not have these alternatives of less fuel intensive travels and have built our cities around the suburbs, higher fuel costs while lower than other parts of the world have a greater impact and represent a higher percentage of ones income.
We need to go on a crash infrastructure revitalization program and bring back rail travel - high speed, regional and light rail - would be very price and time competitve with current modes of transport and will have a much less environmental footprint.
We also should be strongly considering nationalizing oil reserves and a ATT style break up of big oil in addition to alternative energies
see raised then is, if we can outsource it to someplace in Indiana and have it work fine, why can't we get someone at a quarter the cost in India?
One of the big advantages of having you consumer contact, production, and engineers close is that you can do rapid change orders to offer what people want now.
When you've got outsourced production, you expand the lead time before you can implement a change in production, this being even more true where production occurs through an outsourced vendor rather than company owned facilities. Even more, having customer contact in the same place allows for informal contact that lets problems with products float to the engineers without putting it on paper.
have meetings in person on an as needed basis. There are now many web conferencing products out there where literally someone's entire desktop can be shared or shown. I think it's a control thing frankly of corporations must have people on site. I'll have to dig around for productivity studies for I have a belief it's more corporations just don't know how to manage remote teams or distributed teams. I'll bet the productivity numbers are there to justify it.
some group proposed taking post offices, and adding workspaces in them. Basically cubicles with broadband and space for a computer, and using them as telecommuting centers in smaller towns. Matched with a plan to rebuild a government owned internet backbone that has trunk lines between major cities and connections out to local post offices. (Even better if matched with Wi-Max towers for rural areas) You could do a lot to help business create distributed offices, where much of the back office work currently the target of offshoring to India is contracted out to small towns.
to get around town, but at times it's irritating. Like when you have people in cars whiz pass you and shout things. And as far as sidewalks and bike lanes? Nonexistent in many neighborhoods. We need a better pedestrian infrastructure that includes sidewalks on at least one side of the street, and street design to slow cars down on city streets.
The real killer for me though is neighborhood groceries, which don't really exist in much of the Midwest.
When you have to drive 10 miles round trip to get groceries then a car becomes a necessity and adds to the cost of living.
There needs to be better urban planning codes that require that new commercial construction demonstrate need before being given a permit for large stores.
Parking is another huge issue. Imagine the benefit of limiting the parking lot requirements for new business, but requiring that they pay for additional slots in city owned parking structures that could then serve as loci for new mass transit connections. Anything over a half mile, and most people will refuse to walk. And better yet, require a 1 for 1 match between new commercial construction and housing that matches the income spectrum of a neighborhood over commercial floor space.
Instead of having corporations herd in a select series of areas, how about if they spread out with a lot of satellite offices? I mean for Tech, there are only certain cities which really have tech jobs and those areas are traffic jams, housing prices through the roof and commutes from hell, even when someone wants to rent "close to work", depending on whether they are offshore outsourcing the jobs or not of course, but these corporations "huddle" into some areas, Silicon valley, Boston, Redmond WA and so on, except of course for their expansions in India and China!
I have no idea, in this day and age of 24/7 communications, corporations require people to drive in and sit in some cube, every day, but they do.
Then, because people simply cannot afford the housing prices, often they buy far away, so their commute ends up being sometimes 3 hours each way. This is especially true in Silicon valley. Then, roads are congested, so people end up sitting in traffic, stuck in their cars....burning gas.
There are a lot of factors here but to me the obvious culprit is once again...the corporation with their stuck in the last century 8-6 (that's the truth, who works 9-5 these days?) five day work week, insisting people sit in cubes when the workplace is really more mobile. Staggering work hours as well would help cut down on congestion.
Then, of course the politically incorrect thing, the US population is growing like crazy and that of course puts pressure on resources, including roads and gas, prices.
Nice analysis.
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