The Economic Populist
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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The war on the middle class
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Wow! 243,000 New Jobs Created in January
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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What Makes a Jobs Bil Work? (A Job Insurance Supplement)
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 183869 reads
The war on the middle class
- 315165 reads
Wow! 243,000 New Jobs Created in January
- 50102 reads
New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
- 949830 reads
What Makes a Jobs Bil Work? (A Job Insurance Supplement)
- 75958 reads
The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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Hey Robert - It is too easy to say "Gimme". You feed them.
Finally a little brighter light, Ford just announced 7,000 new jobs (USA jobs) by the end of 2012. Most are in Michigan, but of course at the new low wages for factory (plant) workers.
Still, how many other large companies are announcing they are creating American jobs when they clearly should be?
Should we let people starve? Would you like hunger and famine over not having money next?
What is wrong with some of you people? Don't you realize you could need food stamps and your neighbor is probably having to use food stamps?
Wow, talk about bailouts. I wonder when all these people getting a fee ride are going to start paying back the taxpayers for this bailout.
I hope that's ok, but the plan is to "revive" beyond the meta data tags, some of the older posts.
Some of the writings on EP are more like reference articles. While search engines pick them up well, especially google and places like Business Week and so on reference them, I want to add better navigation for some of these older posts which really are great reference and educational pieces.
The traditional is "archive", but I could just create a new page or even subdomain that lists posts by information and quality (not reads, these would have to be hand selected)and do a reordering by that first, then the subject matter being written about.
Due to trying to better manage the size of the site, comments on posts will be closed after a period of time. I'm still playing around with this, but rest assured the time out will be a good year from the publication date.
This is the new plan to also create archives of posts over two years old. Many are actually great references, explaining what a CDS is, a CDO is, choice facts from hearings, but I think they will be easier to even locate if eventually they are moved to a static archive and also offload additional database queries by disabling further comments on these.
Anyone upset about not being able to write a comment on a post that's over a year old, let me know.
As site owner, admin and moderator, I would have removed a Conspiracy Theory post from the site and indeed I have in the past and will continue to do so. So, this entire "CT" thing is "CT".
As far as EP goes, good chat using real numbers is always nice but whatever this stuff and these attacks are, I just plain don't care. This site is not here for me to have to deal with other people's "issues" outside the topic at hand and this site is definitely not being read because someone writes their "personal issues" in the comments. If anything they are a huge distraction from the topic at hand, which is just one reason personal attacks are not allowed.
If you want to discuss economics, current policy, bills, statistics and theory, hey great.
I admit to CRITICIZING you Robert, but I am definitely NOT "personally attacking" you. There is a difference but I wonder whether you can objectively appreciate it.
Anyway, I mean you no ill will and I concur that you have NEVER OVERTLY censored anyone, to my knowledge. I am also pleased that 100k reads exceeds your expectations, or at least makes you feel a sense of accomplishment. But I have to ask whether that is what your goal was when you started EP? If not at inception, has it changed now?
"Economic Populism" is after all, in the mind's eye of the writer, not the reader. Your criticism of the writer's perspective as "CT" (and therefore taboo), imposes a de facto censorship which naturally becomes confrontational, and therefore personal. Perhaps you should rename the site and then us "populists" will take our proper place in the scheme of things.
I think we should stay away from this topic. I just saw the blogs and even cable noise and even the AZ Sheriff. It looks like the latest psycho with a gun who went on a mass killing spree, 18 people out of a couple of dozen shot, 6 so far dead, including a 9 year old child, is being turned into everyone's latest political issue.
Psychos with guns might be the only political issue worth talking about, but we've seen psychos with guns way too often in the U.S., appears this time instead of a school, or an ex-wife and everybody she works with or the post office, it's a politician.
Firstly, James was personally attacking me, which you are now. Secondly, none of his posts were censored and this one is particular fantastic, which I've said. There are rules on page load, formatting for site purposes, cross posting rules for SEO and Google purposes, but most sites have that.
Finally, this site has grown in readers consistently. November hit 100k and we literally had to move to more powerful server due to the reads and hits. James is more than welcome to write here, but he cannot just insult and attack me personally.
You might be aware of what is going on EP before just writing assumptions that are not true.
This is an excellent post by James, as most all of his earlier posts are. I always looked forward to his comments and insights at this blog.
It has been a long time since I have written or commented here. I almost never check in anymore either. Reading this comment thread, I find that what James has layed out in terms of research and background, is both exhilarating and depressing at the same time.
Robert, can't you see that despite all your hard work and dedication, you have silenced important voices and thoughtful inquiries in the condemnation of "Conspiracy Theories"? Look around you and tell me what is CT and what is perversion! Look at the AZ shooting today, in the light of campaign rhetoric and right wing propaganda (a la Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Breitbart, Savage, Coulter, Bachman, Ingraham, Drudge, Palin, Armey, Koch Brothers, Peterson, et al, ad nauseum) and tell me WTF is "conspiracy theory" in today's hologram that is called AMERICA!
I know that when I look at AMERICA, I see class warfare and it is way too close to James Wooley's explanatons to dismiss off hand as CT.
I recently was made aware of a Native American fable:
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Your censorship of content over the years has more or less relinquished you website to irrelevancy. Do you not see this?
This is what you get. It's up to the banks in my view to unravel their mess. I mean this is people's homes, they shouldn't be traded like baseball cards in the first place, consumer debt just shouldn't be turned into these derivative nightmares...it's just like the tranches of various CDOs, which I went through in gory detail on a few posts on here, you cannot even accurately calculate their values because of the computational complexity and you also cannot prove they are rigged.
Financial reform completely failed on derivatives and the banks lobbied heavily for that failure, so I think if a few people get a free home out of it, so much the better to stop this nightmare.
In terms of actual foreclosures, I guess we need to analyze what happens (or take someone else's) and write it up. I've got from Q3 2010 a foreclosure rate of about 15.3% but that can't be right, in terms of all of the mortgages out there.
In other words, if this stops banks from foreclosing, what's the real financial cost and effect on the overall housing market.
The article just said there would be some kind of financial settlement to the AG's. I wonder if it will be enough because this problem is very big. At some point these mortgages will fail even if they are not in foreclosure, because they often can not get through any kind of court case: divorce, bankruptcy, etc. They are being tossed out of some courts when ownership of the mortgage can not be proved and/or there is no chain of title.
Supposedly she was shot "point blank" in the head, FAUX reporting "not mortally wounded"....but assuredly this can change. I'm not sure what this has to do with economics, beyond the outrage might be boiling over. If we get anything related to "motive" or something more related to economics/politics, we can talk about it.
If anyone wants an open thread on this, I can create one.
You are surely right you do have every idiot and their brother writing up nonsense on economic statistics. Even some Academics!
Just because this site is a layman's economics blog, doesn't mean it's nonsense. One of the rules is no economic fiction and it's so easy to make a mistake, hopefully if they are made, someone is out there pointing them out.
Just yesterday I made some typos and I low balled the real number of jobs we need instead of really calculating them out.
On the mathematics of things, we know people's eyes glaze over when even a number if written, they really glaze over on any mathematical concept....
Trying to translate those to layman's concepts, to pound home the fact the data is showing the U.S. is in huge trouble...is a goal.
Any multimedia, graphs, jokes, text, whatever is useful to that goal.
What I've been doing periodically is taking very boiled down equations and putting all sorts of other things, from text to graphs and even funny cartoons, videos....
to try to illustrate the underlying concept. Some better than others...
I haven't read any of this in connection to foreclosuregate, do you mean trying to chase down the deeds in this absurd rat maze of bundled RMBSes? (residential mortgage backed securities).
I don't know where else to put this, but during a townhall some crazy murdered Gabriele Giffords, D, Congress rep. for AZ along with at least 6 other people.
Something about a public meeting around a Safeway grocery store.
This is pretty shocking, although the rage out there is increasing. I don't know really where to put this until we find out more details, but you might turn on your cable noise for the latest.
Well there! I guess I must have had that coming. I am not disagreeing with your point regarding the difference between the mean and the median, or the significance thereof of the skewed distribution. The point I made was trying to make was with respect to jargon, terminology, and mathematical symbolism. These things ARE important, and do make a difference, especially in these times of the blogoshere, with so many self-proclaimed experts prattling on about matters in which they actually have no expertise, and are not qualified to discuss, let alone teach.
The fact remains that you are absolutely correct. We do have a problem, a huge problem, which most likely will only be addressed when it materially affects the people who are causing the problem. When or if that happens is way beyond my ability to speculate upon.
Even worse, as you have already pointed out, the data collected by the Department of labor is limited at best, missing a huge number of former participants in the labor force who are, for all intents and purposes, thrown overboard.
So the real question remains: What do we do about it? I had entertained expectations that the Obama administration might have moved the country in a positive direction in solving this dilemma, but with the recent gathering of Wall Street fat cats into the inner circle of Obama advisors, and especially the departure of Paul Volcker from that group, those hopes are dimmed, if not gone. I can only hope that he knows what he is doing, and truly has the interests of the people who are hurting in his heart, as opposed to pandering to the new pharaos.
Glad to see you clarified your original presentation. I'm giving you a thumbs up on your last reply. Thanks for the food for thought. These truly are desperate times.
Steve
I assumed the "jerry-rig" would be the "solution". Now I think it may be up to the Attorney Generals to solve the problem mortgages in each state. I read last week that the AG's were in negotiations to receive money from some financial companies perhaps to allow them to hire staff to work on these non-loans. It is hard to imagine a truly legal solution to at least a decade of greed in the "biggest bank heist in history". There will be a decade of court cases. Thanks for this.
While prices will certainly continue to drop, the bottom hasn't hit, I don't see how foreclosuregate will cause a collapse.
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