Balance sheets of non-banks are flush with cash as quite never before. It is a bright spot. Any company with too much cash is under pressure from shareholders, and the tax law (punishes Holding Companies) to invest or distribute as dividends.
The question is why there are not more moves like Sam's Club which is reaching out to small businesses.
Business loans are more scarce than ever from banks. Why not more non-bank-banks? There has been some discussion of M3?
On outsourcing, most people are should-to-shoulder with Bob. The hierarchy typified by the WS
Journal, will fight for outsourcing, unemployment and offshoring, so much like the French Aristocracy of the 1780s. Their party goes on and on.
This illiterate on the WSJ never bothered to find out that by the time the Fed has squeezed the byJezus out of the economy from 1929-30, the Depression was already upon us.
HS needs careful examination. There is a weird twist in HS Tariff in no other: petroleum exports got a tariff also. That's right, America's biggest export was taxed on sales around the world. In those times, the US supplied the world with oil.
HS was one of hundreds of tariffs passed by Congress between 1789 to 1929. Guess what? No tariffs were imposed before the 1873 Depression.
The very first bill passed by Congress in 1789 was a Tariff on 69 articles from Britain, and surprise! no depression.
BTW, how well is 35 years of Free Trade starting with the WTO in 1975 working out? Not so good? So compare
the post WWII era with 1975 and after. How did so-called free trade help us? And how do we get so many terrible recessions with so many Free Trade agreements?
I'm all for reinvesting into the economy to get things going. But we need to keep two things in mind here. First a lot of corporations have stated that the primary reason for all the hoarding is because the outlook in their businesses aren't all that rosy. Capital goes where it can make the most money. If at present, capital allocation won't produce a proper return or a return at all, those folks at the top could face rancor from shareholders. Secondly, given the spinelessness of our political leadership, any law mandating redeployment of cash could very well entail new investments overseas. Do you really believe Congress wouldn't include loopholes in any such legislation to not allow this?
You can hunt around but I can tell you on another bank's economic projections I got emailed for copyright violation, i.e. it was not public, so if I cannot find something public, online, available, and if I can find it, I almost always link to that, the press release itself instead of another news outlet overviewing a document,
It might be to clients or it might be I couldn't locate it and it is available.
nations should put job creation as job #1, it's at critical mass the job losses, as I've been screaming about and others, including midtowng's latest piece.
I don't know what you mean on "Comprehensive" immigration reform but from the sound, it's looks identical to the 2006/2007 agenda which is much more about cheap labor or labor arbitrage of all kinds, the "amnesty" is just a mask but the real thing is massive guest worker visas and to flood the U.S. labor supply.
On this site, I'm pretty much determined to stay out of the politics on this, it's such an insane topic and stick to labor econ. I'm also not going to deny that population, immigration does indeed affect labor markets and if you're putting your nation's citizenry first, I'm sorry, you cannot be the globe's labor market and expect good things to happen.
That said, it's not a black and white topic and either is wage repression. It has much to do with substitution effects and displacement, which in turn is dependent upon a host of other economic conditions.
There is a renewed push by Obama to pass CFTA, PFTA and now KFTA. In those agreements are new Kangaroo courts to arbitrate investments into contracts and re-write Article I of the U.S. Constitution, much the way NAFTA did with court supremacy of Amendments XIII, XIV, XV.
If that is not enough, we are soon to get a renewed push on 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform'. I apologize for any naive efforts to suggest that we matriculate, then unionize illegals, with no deal, no amnesty, no sale of citizenship. Apologize because I can see the train wreck ahead which only one side wins and by right, it goes to the Republicans on immigration.
Hello, this is some serious spin coming from the White House. Of course global trade increased by the "trough" of economic Armageddon but exports have actually decreased from the last report.
Ya all may blast paying attention to the actual numbers, graphs and raw reports but here is an example of a good reason to do so. You an quickly ascertain spin on economic claims.
This is incredible. Talk about the inability to even look up the never ending declining tech jobs in the U.S. or our never ending increasing trade deficit in advanced technology. WSJ claims it's "no big deal" to offshore outsource jobs and spits in Andy Grove's face. Uh, WSJ, have YOU ever built up an entire microprocessor industry? I don't think so!
Very fine article, except that I object to ascribing austerity to just the Republicans.
It is ludicrous to say that only the Republican party benefits/is interested in austerity; Clinton also cut taxes.
The true class war austerity struggle bestrides both parties - the ongoing attempts to pass cap and trade as well as failure to reform health care are indicative of this.
Ya all, the "Must read posts" are also open threads, so if there's something shocking you don't want to make an instapopulist or you just want to say something, this is a good place.
I had been thinking about this subject for weeks. Rolling it around in my head.
I'm going to throw it up on DK tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll gain some traction.
there are various theories of econ, which to me are more philosophies in a lot of ways. I do not see a lot of theory as flawed, like all models, it has assumptions and limitations. Take Stimulus. It's like the entire world refuses to acknowledge the equations require a closed system, i.e. a private economy. So, in 1934, trade was a very small part of the U.S. economy as well as global. But today, it's massive, so of course giving contracts away to outsourcers (yes, right now we give billions of federal dollars to contractors who turn around and offshore outsource the jobs, plus a few incorporated in the Caymans, this is routine, FYI since Gov. spending is supposed to be stimulative). In the ARRA itself, this happened, billions went overseas, funding foreign companies and hiring foreign workers.
But say the supply siders. Be it by me to see any equation that doesn't show wealth inequality rising, the middle classes shrinking, at a certain inflection point of supply/demand. Maybe I go into hallucinations when I read the mathematics, but I do not think so.
I think even people who have graduate degrees in econ forget that every single modal, every single equation has assumptions and limitations to it.
Pretty obvious that offshore outsourcing is not going to help U.S. GDP much and in my view one can see that in even the GDP equation itself. hello, what's that about imports? What's that about exports, about investment? Money overseas you say? Jobs overseas? Raw materials and partially finished goods are imports? Wow really? I'll be that will create a hell of a lot of jobs...uh, in Germany and China. Seriously, I've read the Academic papers trying to justify this crap and all I see as the result in the macro is another country is going to get the jobs, the money and the originating country is going to get screwed for the most part.
Back to this argument and I must be one of the few on this site who see this differently. But I fear, when every day I see so much economic data horror, policy horror, corruption horror, I'm thinking I better get the hell out of the country because it's going to the dogs. I look at a chart and think, @^&($@^, knowing there are going to be good, decent, hard working people, literally living in a box and no one, esp. this government seems to give a shit. The heartbreak is that very American should be working and helping build this nation economically, so literally, every day in these economic indicator reports, which I graph out, I see politicians and this government throwing away the U.S. economic future into the street like disposable diapers. They are totally shitting on the U.S. workforce.
What I see is chartology to fit someone's philosophy. Not raw data, raw equations, facts, raw theory, results of policies crafting one's philosophy. Huge difference. But officially charts are not supposed to be the new religious symbols of the philosophy king to weave a web of lies for King Midas. Supposedly they are there to tell someone what's really happening with the numbers, not try to fit the numbers into one's agenda.
In other words, you've got a lot of economists who graduate, but their teachers are really touting philosophy and many of them are too. Then, there is math and statistics. We just saw an entire meltdown happen and amazingly enough, the fact the damn CDS model being used isn't even mathematically valid still doesn't even get lip service by Congress, "experts" or regulators.
From Econ 1A to graduate level, economics is also about drawing graphs.
The problem is that it becomes more important for projections and statements to fit into those graphs than it is to actually understand the theories that those graphs are made from.
As Steve Keen has pointed out, the theories themselves are flawed. But once you've built an entire skyscraper on top of that flawed foundation, no one wants to tear down the skyscraper. The first instinct is to try to strengthen the foundation. It'll never work, but they'll keep trying until the skyscraper collapses.
In all seriousness, many of the points you amplify are things I try to amplify in the "chart" posts I write up.
So, to me, the "chart worshipers" plain have terrible "analysis". In other words, to me, the fact our nation is literally being destroyed by corrupt politicians, governments and bad policy shows up in almost every single EI report I'm graphing out. It's in every equation, every theory too.
So, I don't see the conflict here between looking at the data, charts and so on, what I see is bad math, bad analysis and a hell of a lot of denial.
I mean trade, it's positively nuts and without calling some certain famous bloggers out...it's as plain as the trade deficit data and comparative advantage equations on your face that we've gone past a tipping point.
Watch out on Minsky, there are some who twist his words for different agendas.
Just a FYI, the NBER has not called that date you see quoted everywhere and even in the Fed "Recession bar" graphs. I suspect, strongly, they are going to not call the recession over, i.e. the "great recession", which I believe technically would be long enough to be a depression.
Anywho, it sucks for U.S. workers. Where do we go from here? I mean we cannot get good policy legislation passed on financial reform, on stimulus, on jobs programs...the administration has a lot of power to execute existing law and that's not happening either.
...but it also indicates that the conventional wisdom about the recession having ended around July 2009 is a stretch. What I think we've seen so far is a recoveryless recovery. Where we go from here is, of course, anybody's prediction. But if we retreat on the slight advances that have been made, I don't think we will have experienced a double dip, but rather one hellaciously long single disaster that really will deserve the name Great Recession.
yes all workers are getting screwed and obviously I do not believe the real number of people looking for a job is the unemployment rate, which is why I pour over raw data so much, amplifying the "not in the workforce" continually.
That said, I'm a numbers person, I'm a theory person and a mathematics head and I've yet to find anything better to examine. You hear me whine in almost every post about the labor market about the lack of enough statistics, accurate statistics....
Balance sheets of non-banks are flush with cash as quite never before. It is a bright spot. Any company with too much cash is under pressure from shareholders, and the tax law (punishes Holding Companies) to invest or distribute as dividends.
The question is why there are not more moves like Sam's Club which is reaching out to small businesses.
Business loans are more scarce than ever from banks. Why not more non-bank-banks? There has been some discussion of M3?
On outsourcing, most people are should-to-shoulder with Bob. The hierarchy typified by the WS
Journal, will fight for outsourcing, unemployment and offshoring, so much like the French Aristocracy of the 1780s. Their party goes on and on.
We are way overdue for a Revolution.
This illiterate on the WSJ never bothered to find out that by the time the Fed has squeezed the byJezus out of the economy from 1929-30, the Depression was already upon us.
HS needs careful examination. There is a weird twist in HS Tariff in no other: petroleum exports got a tariff also. That's right, America's biggest export was taxed on sales around the world. In those times, the US supplied the world with oil.
HS was one of hundreds of tariffs passed by Congress between 1789 to 1929. Guess what? No tariffs were imposed before the 1873 Depression.
The very first bill passed by Congress in 1789 was a Tariff on 69 articles from Britain, and surprise! no depression.
BTW, how well is 35 years of Free Trade starting with the WTO in 1975 working out? Not so good? So compare
the post WWII era with 1975 and after. How did so-called free trade help us? And how do we get so many terrible recessions with so many Free Trade agreements?
I'm all for reinvesting into the economy to get things going. But we need to keep two things in mind here. First a lot of corporations have stated that the primary reason for all the hoarding is because the outlook in their businesses aren't all that rosy. Capital goes where it can make the most money. If at present, capital allocation won't produce a proper return or a return at all, those folks at the top could face rancor from shareholders. Secondly, given the spinelessness of our political leadership, any law mandating redeployment of cash could very well entail new investments overseas. Do you really believe Congress wouldn't include loopholes in any such legislation to not allow this?
You can hunt around but I can tell you on another bank's economic projections I got emailed for copyright violation, i.e. it was not public, so if I cannot find something public, online, available, and if I can find it, I almost always link to that, the press release itself instead of another news outlet overviewing a document,
It might be to clients or it might be I couldn't locate it and it is available.
nations should put job creation as job #1, it's at critical mass the job losses, as I've been screaming about and others, including midtowng's latest piece.
I don't know what you mean on "Comprehensive" immigration reform but from the sound, it's looks identical to the 2006/2007 agenda which is much more about cheap labor or labor arbitrage of all kinds, the "amnesty" is just a mask but the real thing is massive guest worker visas and to flood the U.S. labor supply.
On this site, I'm pretty much determined to stay out of the politics on this, it's such an insane topic and stick to labor econ. I'm also not going to deny that population, immigration does indeed affect labor markets and if you're putting your nation's citizenry first, I'm sorry, you cannot be the globe's labor market and expect good things to happen.
That said, it's not a black and white topic and either is wage repression. It has much to do with substitution effects and displacement, which in turn is dependent upon a host of other economic conditions.
There is a renewed push by Obama to pass CFTA, PFTA and now KFTA. In those agreements are new Kangaroo courts to arbitrate investments into contracts and re-write Article I of the U.S. Constitution, much the way NAFTA did with court supremacy of Amendments XIII, XIV, XV.
If that is not enough, we are soon to get a renewed push on 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform'. I apologize for any naive efforts to suggest that we matriculate, then unionize illegals, with no deal, no amnesty, no sale of citizenship. Apologize because I can see the train wreck ahead which only one side wins and by right, it goes to the Republicans on immigration.
Is the Goldman Sachs economic outlook an actual document that we can review somewhere? Is it publicly accessible?
Hello, this is some serious spin coming from the White House. Of course global trade increased by the "trough" of economic Armageddon but exports have actually decreased from the last report.
Ya all may blast paying attention to the actual numbers, graphs and raw reports but here is an example of a good reason to do so. You an quickly ascertain spin on economic claims.
This is incredible. Talk about the inability to even look up the never ending declining tech jobs in the U.S. or our never ending increasing trade deficit in advanced technology. WSJ claims it's "no big deal" to offshore outsource jobs and spits in Andy Grove's face. Uh, WSJ, have YOU ever built up an entire microprocessor industry? I don't think so!
Very fine article, except that I object to ascribing austerity to just the Republicans.
It is ludicrous to say that only the Republican party benefits/is interested in austerity; Clinton also cut taxes.
The true class war austerity struggle bestrides both parties - the ongoing attempts to pass cap and trade as well as failure to reform health care are indicative of this.
midtowng I changed your post to a blog entry so it's top lined (unfortunately now duped) but also goes out onto your blog RSS feed here.
You got a double entry as a result, but that's ok, this is a much needed post.
On the other hand, if the economics/financial press did their jobs, a whole bunch of blogs would be hurting, including this one!
I'll leave one exception to that on EIs, which is MarketWatch. They do a pretty reasonable, accurate job on EI reports.
This is scary, AP is reporting there are 27,000 abandoned oil wells in the gulf that no one is checking for leaking.
Ya all, the "Must read posts" are also open threads, so if there's something shocking you don't want to make an instapopulist or you just want to say something, this is a good place.
I had been thinking about this subject for weeks. Rolling it around in my head.
I'm going to throw it up on DK tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll gain some traction.
...piece, which is saying a lot in your case. Thanks for telling us what others ought to be telling us.
Which skyscraper? Which school, which theory?
there are various theories of econ, which to me are more philosophies in a lot of ways. I do not see a lot of theory as flawed, like all models, it has assumptions and limitations. Take Stimulus. It's like the entire world refuses to acknowledge the equations require a closed system, i.e. a private economy. So, in 1934, trade was a very small part of the U.S. economy as well as global. But today, it's massive, so of course giving contracts away to outsourcers (yes, right now we give billions of federal dollars to contractors who turn around and offshore outsource the jobs, plus a few incorporated in the Caymans, this is routine, FYI since Gov. spending is supposed to be stimulative). In the ARRA itself, this happened, billions went overseas, funding foreign companies and hiring foreign workers.
But say the supply siders. Be it by me to see any equation that doesn't show wealth inequality rising, the middle classes shrinking, at a certain inflection point of supply/demand. Maybe I go into hallucinations when I read the mathematics, but I do not think so.
I think even people who have graduate degrees in econ forget that every single modal, every single equation has assumptions and limitations to it.
Pretty obvious that offshore outsourcing is not going to help U.S. GDP much and in my view one can see that in even the GDP equation itself. hello, what's that about imports? What's that about exports, about investment? Money overseas you say? Jobs overseas? Raw materials and partially finished goods are imports? Wow really? I'll be that will create a hell of a lot of jobs...uh, in Germany and China. Seriously, I've read the Academic papers trying to justify this crap and all I see as the result in the macro is another country is going to get the jobs, the money and the originating country is going to get screwed for the most part.
Back to this argument and I must be one of the few on this site who see this differently. But I fear, when every day I see so much economic data horror, policy horror, corruption horror, I'm thinking I better get the hell out of the country because it's going to the dogs. I look at a chart and think, @^&($@^, knowing there are going to be good, decent, hard working people, literally living in a box and no one, esp. this government seems to give a shit. The heartbreak is that very American should be working and helping build this nation economically, so literally, every day in these economic indicator reports, which I graph out, I see politicians and this government throwing away the U.S. economic future into the street like disposable diapers. They are totally shitting on the U.S. workforce.
What I see is chartology to fit someone's philosophy. Not raw data, raw equations, facts, raw theory, results of policies crafting one's philosophy. Huge difference. But officially charts are not supposed to be the new religious symbols of the philosophy king to weave a web of lies for King Midas. Supposedly they are there to tell someone what's really happening with the numbers, not try to fit the numbers into one's agenda.
In other words, you've got a lot of economists who graduate, but their teachers are really touting philosophy and many of them are too. Then, there is math and statistics. We just saw an entire meltdown happen and amazingly enough, the fact the damn CDS model being used isn't even mathematically valid still doesn't even get lip service by Congress, "experts" or regulators.
From Econ 1A to graduate level, economics is also about drawing graphs.
The problem is that it becomes more important for projections and statements to fit into those graphs than it is to actually understand the theories that those graphs are made from.
As Steve Keen has pointed out, the theories themselves are flawed. But once you've built an entire skyscraper on top of that flawed foundation, no one wants to tear down the skyscraper. The first instinct is to try to strengthen the foundation. It'll never work, but they'll keep trying until the skyscraper collapses.
I heartily recommend this post! ;)
In all seriousness, many of the points you amplify are things I try to amplify in the "chart" posts I write up.
So, to me, the "chart worshipers" plain have terrible "analysis". In other words, to me, the fact our nation is literally being destroyed by corrupt politicians, governments and bad policy shows up in almost every single EI report I'm graphing out. It's in every equation, every theory too.
So, I don't see the conflict here between looking at the data, charts and so on, what I see is bad math, bad analysis and a hell of a lot of denial.
I mean trade, it's positively nuts and without calling some certain famous bloggers out...it's as plain as the trade deficit data and comparative advantage equations on your face that we've gone past a tipping point.
Watch out on Minsky, there are some who twist his words for different agendas.
Just a FYI, the NBER has not called that date you see quoted everywhere and even in the Fed "Recession bar" graphs. I suspect, strongly, they are going to not call the recession over, i.e. the "great recession", which I believe technically would be long enough to be a depression.
Anywho, it sucks for U.S. workers. Where do we go from here? I mean we cannot get good policy legislation passed on financial reform, on stimulus, on jobs programs...the administration has a lot of power to execute existing law and that's not happening either.
...but it also indicates that the conventional wisdom about the recession having ended around July 2009 is a stretch. What I think we've seen so far is a recoveryless recovery. Where we go from here is, of course, anybody's prediction. But if we retreat on the slight advances that have been made, I don't think we will have experienced a double dip, but rather one hellaciously long single disaster that really will deserve the name Great Recession.
yes all workers are getting screwed and obviously I do not believe the real number of people looking for a job is the unemployment rate, which is why I pour over raw data so much, amplifying the "not in the workforce" continually.
That said, I'm a numbers person, I'm a theory person and a mathematics head and I've yet to find anything better to examine. You hear me whine in almost every post about the labor market about the lack of enough statistics, accurate statistics....
Gez, you're hostile, I'm on your side.
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