Has anyone seen a work up of the household surveys with a work
up of the numbers based upon ths workforce as a percent of population? There are still the problems of defining who is working
We'll have to wait on CPI. Then part of the blow out in vegetables is Chile Earthquake. Gee, lovely what happens when you force food into a global supply chain for cheap prices.
My concern is oil/energy. I haven't looked at the M1, money supply for some time, last i looked at it, velocity was way down so it wasn't a problem, but yeah, they have to pull that in and it's going to be painful I will assume.
In September of 2008 when the M2/M3 spiked, we could forsee
deflation followed by inflation due to the liquidity trap
and the reserve spike at the same time. EP asked the question
"whenever there is a spike like this in reserves, something something is happening, big time. "
The Chinese model we know is based on Chile and the Chicago School of Friedman at a macro level as seen by the Party. At an enterprise level China is truly the Third Reich as depicted in Schindler's List. There are the compulsory beatings, shootings, harassment of the ordinary worker. Ex-pat Chinese are recruited as industrial spies trained and sent back to the U.S. During the WTO hearings in 1999, many of us blogged the Senate Commerce Committee - Fred Thompson - to expose the !2 Points. These were the pieces of critical U.S. tech the Chines state was working on stealing.
Thompson brought this out in the hearings, but he was attacked publicly by Donahue - Chamber of Commerce. Thompson did not back entirely down but created the watered down retaliation Obama used in the tit-for-tat.
As for tech, I can't see how the shreds of the private sector can fight back against China. At some point, the survivors will develop retaliatory Cyber War. If the U.S private sector cannot mount it's own Cyber defense and offense it will be destroyed. Obama policy is you are on your own fighting the Chinese cyber war
Maybe it's time that public employees worked morre than 20 years for getting forty years of full-time pensions. These unions brought this on themselves by demanding and getting the best of everything. Maybe now they won't complain about working a couple weeks in the summer for merely straight time. It's a joke that's gone bad and now the joke is on the fat state pension leaches.
I am just under-whelmed by this whole situation. I really hope someday we'll have people in office who recognise who they work for - and why they voted for them; it's been too many years since we've had people like that in office. Unfortunately, the American public says "we should replace Congress!", then when asked if they'll re-elect their Congressman, they of course say "Yes!".
Anyway...A few rhetorical questions...
1) Other than light mention occasionally, where is Fannie and Freddie in this whole mess of legislation?
2) While this is a VERY simplified point - why is it that I can't see my own FICO score, but GS and Lehman can buy their own credit rating?
3) How many visits did Wikipedia get from Fed Gov't employees involved in this "legislation", who had to look up words like "derivatives", "CDO", and "Credit Default Swap"?
Who in Congress is working on new stiff tariffs or a VAT to counter foreign wage levels?
Midtowng could win an election running on the principles they laid out. Thats not a joke there I mean that. Who stands for the middle class in the Congress? Maybe a few.
Without some new local taxes or some white knight proposal that makes it through Congress to fund new borrowing local taxes will have to go up substantially to maintain the status quo. Its not just education. We are only seeing that first because it has been spending at a pace where any slowdown is visible.
I don't need to quote sources for that its in all the newspapers all over the country. Googling 'school budget' on Google News brings up nearly 30,000 recent news articles.
None are presenting some Mayberry RFD type story about good times.
If we had 400 or more of Bernie Sanders types in Congress the US would be run by the people for the people. We don't.
Frankly its disheartening. Being against my taxes going up does not make me a Tea Party advocate just someone who pays a lot already for the area. If I say something to disagree with a Tea Party person I am auto labeled a pink hat liberal and if I say something against taxes going up I am a racist neo con. Both sides have the role of the other so well defined that no common ground will ever be found.
and there China is over 80% of the non-oil U.S. trade deficit. I promise to try to pull in some stats as I can get to it, but you're looking at spurious data instead of the damning stuff. Of course you can say pegging the Yuan at an artificially low rate to the U.S. dollar gives an unfair trade advantage. I posted previously a host of economists estimates that literally, unpeg the Yuan and the entire China-US trade deficit can disappear. That was a huge surprise to me frankly.
O.K. you seem to imply that there is not a positive correlation between GDP and trade so again using CIA numbers for 2009 Exports:
Total World Exports equal $12 Trillion
European Union 2 trillion or 16%
Germany 1.1 trillion or 9 %
US .9 trillion or 8%
Japan .5 trillion or 4%
Total for just four economies $4.5 trillion or 38% of world exports
China exports 2 trillion or 16% of world exports
So while four economies account for 38% of world exports and China equal to EU at 16% how can one justify saying:
“the world is out of balance and the China Yuan currency peg is a major reason why”
And, again you quote the IMF as though it is ‘gospel truth” and ignore the influence of Western countries in determining its positions. If we stick to FACTS (numbers) and statistical LOGIC we will not be mislead by ideologically determined policies.
Again, I am not arguing or advocating any position on China exchange rate or trade. I’m just saying "…he said, she said, they said… " is not a scientific logical way to made decisions.
So, I appreciate the plain talk and he's right, he's showing just how complicit as if all of this crap is ok, it's all become. I just saw Sen. Durbin on Ratigan claiming they will not break up the big banks. Then he was just absurd, refusing to acknowledge what Ratigan was pointing out, credit ratings agencies are paid, bought by the ones making the products, i.e. the....big financial institutions.
There is zippo in the financial reform bill on credit ratings agencies.
I think we're going to get some token toughness on derivatives and the rest of this crap is going to pass, including increasing the Federal Reserve's power. That's just sick since the Federal Reserve is so much part of the original problem!
I often wonder if embedded into these "executives" brains is just a desire to poop on the U.S. worker in order to feel "superior". Rogers is a case in point. I can't count the number of horror stories coming from that guy towards his employees and workers in general. Stuff like brazen, blatant extreme sexual harassment, discrimination, screaming at people, doing a Schindler's list type of firing, regardless on how much they contributed, working people to the point of collapse, denigrating people, insulting people and so on.
I mean this is an unspoken attitude, esp. in Silicon valley to just treat STEM like shit. Some sort of attitude towards the techies.
The reason he's in China is the slave labor and he's out of his mind to claim China is "business friendly". They require you partner with the state, have all sorts of rule changes and it's about capturing that very once U.S. industry sector. They are targeting high tech, advanced manufacturing to capture it and these blood thirsty glorified sociopaths who somehow are "executives" seem to just love the entire motif of crucifying the U.S. worker.
Nobody talks about this, but there really is a serious attitude going on, a class thing, a power thing in tech. Not all tech corporations but some of them are just notorious and I'd say the stories on Rogers are at the top of the list.
This is the layperson's blog. In other words, we're trying to get some policies to re-open that factory. That's the huge point of EP and we are so friggin' right frankly. If we could get policies to rebuild US manufacturing, and so on, you can see how much screwing the middle class affects the macro economic data. So, not only are we writing about economics for the rest of us, but we're also showing that policies which screw the U.S. workforce also screw the U.S. economy at large.
So, while one can say "it's too late", well, I feel that way on a host of things and believe me, during the primaries, I was screaming as loud as I could that Obama was not going to do anything on trade, offshore outsourcing and so on, for the same reasons as midtowng here. I read the actual white papers, looked at the voting record, dug into the huge money behind his campaign and looked heavily at his economic advisers.
But the point is to fight and fight hard to get that plant re-opened or some other sort of huge industry, businesses opened and started which will provide the kind of income the middle class needs.
It's also about fighting for labor and that's not union labor per say, that's the U.S. workforce, as a whole.
As I just noted, economics, finance is very difficult for the public at large to wrap their head around. The political blogs discount the topic (at their peril frankly), and as we just saw via TPMmuckraker, you can get infiltrated with corporate lobbyists and front groups and all sorts of BS because this is the $$$$ and when money is on the line is when the shit hits the fan.
That's why I suggest all dig deep as best they can, and why I'm so intent on accurate statistics, well cited sources. I personally have read even Academic papers that are full of BS. Either leaving out major data, or burying some faulty assumption upon which they build the "rest of their case" and I've even seen mathematics manipulated to the point of absurdity to make some fictional claim.
All of that is designed to hoodwink the American people and it's also very useful to divide people, get them on bandwagons, as we see with the far left and the tea party and so on....where they demand some policy and honestly, they really don't even understand what they are demanding or the consequences of it all.
China is business friendly. You hear it from the likes of Rogers(Cypress Semi) and many others. What they mean is an unspoken rule of a 72 Hour Work Week. Production Quotas are regularly enforced by a rubber hose room in the back of the factory. Because so many smoke, when the factory is close to a river, you have to be careful where you toss the butts, because the rivers frequently catch on fire. Mao's Iron Rice bowl is long gone and official line is that China wants to use Chile (as remade by Chicago School boys), as the Chinese Model - officially.
The Germans now talk about Kurzarbeit, a work week shrunk to 28 or 32 hours. The U.S. Average Work Week is officially 32 hours. The difference is that the German Government pays the difference between 40 and 32 hours. The econometric question is what would the unemployment rate be over and above U6 if the lost hours were counted as unemployed workers?
The political point is that no society that wants to be free can compete with unfreedom.
Your 'solutions' would take decades of total progressive control in Congress. Each and every one is worthy and should be made priorities in the national agenda. Now tell me who on the national level in elected politics in this country is pushing any of these things. Run for office on that platform and you could win.
The bills are due this year though.
States, cities and towns do not print money and they spent the bulk (2/3) of the stimulus money last year on guess what, schools. So last year everyone that drank the kool aid believed the economy would be booming right now and they ignored any warning signs that that wasn't true. The ant and the grasshopper has relevance here and in general with how we do things in this country. Laugh if you will but reality is slowly seeping into some borrow and spenders mindsets now isn't it? Gee why don't we just borrow another $2-3 trillion and keep education spending where it is?
If people saw my concerns decades ago as relevant to their apparent fiefdoms some of these things would not be happening now. Instead its a knee jerk reaction to save whats important to them with a wink and a nod towards the rest.
Watch some old movie that has a back drop of a closing steel plant in the 60's and ask yourself whether they laid of some teachers when those plants closed because the community didn't have the tax base anymore.
Those were "if commercial markets couldn't support a debt purchase" on Greek bonds, the non-bail out bail out announced. I'm referring to this, from April 11th.
Then, I see "negotiations" for $56 billion in a joint IMF/EU bail out. It's not clear which are these past loans and which is new.
Then Germany is royally pissed about bailing out Greece. I can understand that. Your own country is in terrible shape, people are losing their homes, people are out of work, lost all retirement....and your government....goes and helps some other nation. Where have we seen that before? Oops...I guess that's us!
Here's what bothers me the most on this story. The power of the credit rating agencies. They literally can send an entire nation, a sovereign entity into the poor house with a credit rating downgrade.
Yet, we know, they were bought and paid fers in the financial securitization ponzi schemes. Nothing has happened to them. Just on a power scale, this stinks to high heaven because we know their ratings were fiction on many a securitized derivative.
I didn't do them. All I'm doing here is letting EP readers know the IMF is one step away from declaring China a currency manipulator. But this is new, they are including other Asia countries with a dollar currency peg AND, they are saying to the U.S. we should devalue our currency.
There are some links in this post, but the big one is probably here and here.
It's not GDP they are looking at, it's the trade deficit. I'd have to check those numbers but it's at the rate of increase, China is slated to become the #1 economy by GDP growth rates of 9%+.
The people who do not want China to re-evaluate it's currency are defenders of offshore outsourcing. They are claiming it will "hurt US companies" because it will put a cog in the wheel on their manipulation of global exchange rates as they offshore outsource U.S. jobs. I kid you not.
When I get around to it, I'll try to put up a "graphs and numbers" post on this issue but to me, defending MNCs and offshore outsourcing has little to do with the American people, jobs and the overall national economy.
But first realize, this is about trade, not how big China's GDP is relative.
Has anyone seen a work up of the household surveys with a work
up of the numbers based upon ths workforce as a percent of population? There are still the problems of defining who is working
We'll have to wait on CPI. Then part of the blow out in vegetables is Chile Earthquake. Gee, lovely what happens when you force food into a global supply chain for cheap prices.
My concern is oil/energy. I haven't looked at the M1, money supply for some time, last i looked at it, velocity was way down so it wasn't a problem, but yeah, they have to pull that in and it's going to be painful I will assume.
Folks, this is going to make the Sunday Morning Comics, absolutely. Zero Hedge.
In September of 2008 when the M2/M3 spiked, we could forsee
deflation followed by inflation due to the liquidity trap
and the reserve spike at the same time. EP asked the question
"whenever there is a spike like this in reserves, something something is happening, big time. "
I do not believe the inflation is over.
The Chinese model we know is based on Chile and the Chicago School of Friedman at a macro level as seen by the Party. At an enterprise level China is truly the Third Reich as depicted in Schindler's List. There are the compulsory beatings, shootings, harassment of the ordinary worker. Ex-pat Chinese are recruited as industrial spies trained and sent back to the U.S. During the WTO hearings in 1999, many of us blogged the Senate Commerce Committee - Fred Thompson - to expose the !2 Points. These were the pieces of critical U.S. tech the Chines state was working on stealing.
Thompson brought this out in the hearings, but he was attacked publicly by Donahue - Chamber of Commerce. Thompson did not back entirely down but created the watered down retaliation Obama used in the tit-for-tat.
As for tech, I can't see how the shreds of the private sector can fight back against China. At some point, the survivors will develop retaliatory Cyber War. If the U.S private sector cannot mount it's own Cyber defense and offense it will be destroyed. Obama policy is you are on your own fighting the Chinese cyber war
Next? The Martial Art of Cyber Warfare.
Maybe it's time that public employees worked morre than 20 years for getting forty years of full-time pensions. These unions brought this on themselves by demanding and getting the best of everything. Maybe now they won't complain about working a couple weeks in the summer for merely straight time. It's a joke that's gone bad and now the joke is on the fat state pension leaches.
From memory I remember him stating that one of the big differences between this situation and the other one is that no one is going to jail today.
He represents the best among us who when given a job does it and then is honest about things down the road.
He probably should wear a suit jacket that says 'not for sale', something few if any in Washington could wear with a straight face.
I also remember him being asked why he wasn't involved in todays investigations and I believe his answer was 'no one has asked me'.
I am just under-whelmed by this whole situation. I really hope someday we'll have people in office who recognise who they work for - and why they voted for them; it's been too many years since we've had people like that in office. Unfortunately, the American public says "we should replace Congress!", then when asked if they'll re-elect their Congressman, they of course say "Yes!".
Anyway...A few rhetorical questions...
1) Other than light mention occasionally, where is Fannie and Freddie in this whole mess of legislation?
2) While this is a VERY simplified point - why is it that I can't see my own FICO score, but GS and Lehman can buy their own credit rating?
3) How many visits did Wikipedia get from Fed Gov't employees involved in this "legislation", who had to look up words like "derivatives", "CDO", and "Credit Default Swap"?
Who in Congress is working on new stiff tariffs or a VAT to counter foreign wage levels?
Midtowng could win an election running on the principles they laid out. Thats not a joke there I mean that. Who stands for the middle class in the Congress? Maybe a few.
Without some new local taxes or some white knight proposal that makes it through Congress to fund new borrowing local taxes will have to go up substantially to maintain the status quo. Its not just education. We are only seeing that first because it has been spending at a pace where any slowdown is visible.
I don't need to quote sources for that its in all the newspapers all over the country. Googling 'school budget' on Google News brings up nearly 30,000 recent news articles.
None are presenting some Mayberry RFD type story about good times.
If we had 400 or more of Bernie Sanders types in Congress the US would be run by the people for the people. We don't.
Frankly its disheartening. Being against my taxes going up does not make me a Tea Party advocate just someone who pays a lot already for the area. If I say something to disagree with a Tea Party person I am auto labeled a pink hat liberal and if I say something against taxes going up I am a racist neo con. Both sides have the role of the other so well defined that no common ground will ever be found.
and there China is over 80% of the non-oil U.S. trade deficit. I promise to try to pull in some stats as I can get to it, but you're looking at spurious data instead of the damning stuff. Of course you can say pegging the Yuan at an artificially low rate to the U.S. dollar gives an unfair trade advantage. I posted previously a host of economists estimates that literally, unpeg the Yuan and the entire China-US trade deficit can disappear. That was a huge surprise to me frankly.
O.K. you seem to imply that there is not a positive correlation between GDP and trade so again using CIA numbers for 2009 Exports:
Total World Exports equal $12 Trillion
European Union 2 trillion or 16%
Germany 1.1 trillion or 9 %
US .9 trillion or 8%
Japan .5 trillion or 4%
Total for just four economies $4.5 trillion or 38% of world exports
China exports 2 trillion or 16% of world exports
So while four economies account for 38% of world exports and China equal to EU at 16% how can one justify saying:
“the world is out of balance and the China Yuan currency peg is a major reason why”
And, again you quote the IMF as though it is ‘gospel truth” and ignore the influence of Western countries in determining its positions. If we stick to FACTS (numbers) and statistical LOGIC we will not be mislead by ideologically determined policies.
Again, I am not arguing or advocating any position on China exchange rate or trade. I’m just saying "…he said, she said, they said… " is not a scientific logical way to made decisions.
So, I appreciate the plain talk and he's right, he's showing just how complicit as if all of this crap is ok, it's all become. I just saw Sen. Durbin on Ratigan claiming they will not break up the big banks. Then he was just absurd, refusing to acknowledge what Ratigan was pointing out, credit ratings agencies are paid, bought by the ones making the products, i.e. the....big financial institutions.
There is zippo in the financial reform bill on credit ratings agencies.
I think we're going to get some token toughness on derivatives and the rest of this crap is going to pass, including increasing the Federal Reserve's power. That's just sick since the Federal Reserve is so much part of the original problem!
William Black is the best and speaks the truth as I know it.
I often wonder if embedded into these "executives" brains is just a desire to poop on the U.S. worker in order to feel "superior". Rogers is a case in point. I can't count the number of horror stories coming from that guy towards his employees and workers in general. Stuff like brazen, blatant extreme sexual harassment, discrimination, screaming at people, doing a Schindler's list type of firing, regardless on how much they contributed, working people to the point of collapse, denigrating people, insulting people and so on.
I mean this is an unspoken attitude, esp. in Silicon valley to just treat STEM like shit. Some sort of attitude towards the techies.
The reason he's in China is the slave labor and he's out of his mind to claim China is "business friendly". They require you partner with the state, have all sorts of rule changes and it's about capturing that very once U.S. industry sector. They are targeting high tech, advanced manufacturing to capture it and these blood thirsty glorified sociopaths who somehow are "executives" seem to just love the entire motif of crucifying the U.S. worker.
Nobody talks about this, but there really is a serious attitude going on, a class thing, a power thing in tech. Not all tech corporations but some of them are just notorious and I'd say the stories on Rogers are at the top of the list.
This is the layperson's blog. In other words, we're trying to get some policies to re-open that factory. That's the huge point of EP and we are so friggin' right frankly. If we could get policies to rebuild US manufacturing, and so on, you can see how much screwing the middle class affects the macro economic data. So, not only are we writing about economics for the rest of us, but we're also showing that policies which screw the U.S. workforce also screw the U.S. economy at large.
So, while one can say "it's too late", well, I feel that way on a host of things and believe me, during the primaries, I was screaming as loud as I could that Obama was not going to do anything on trade, offshore outsourcing and so on, for the same reasons as midtowng here. I read the actual white papers, looked at the voting record, dug into the huge money behind his campaign and looked heavily at his economic advisers.
But the point is to fight and fight hard to get that plant re-opened or some other sort of huge industry, businesses opened and started which will provide the kind of income the middle class needs.
It's also about fighting for labor and that's not union labor per say, that's the U.S. workforce, as a whole.
As I just noted, economics, finance is very difficult for the public at large to wrap their head around. The political blogs discount the topic (at their peril frankly), and as we just saw via TPMmuckraker, you can get infiltrated with corporate lobbyists and front groups and all sorts of BS because this is the $$$$ and when money is on the line is when the shit hits the fan.
That's why I suggest all dig deep as best they can, and why I'm so intent on accurate statistics, well cited sources. I personally have read even Academic papers that are full of BS. Either leaving out major data, or burying some faulty assumption upon which they build the "rest of their case" and I've even seen mathematics manipulated to the point of absurdity to make some fictional claim.
All of that is designed to hoodwink the American people and it's also very useful to divide people, get them on bandwagons, as we see with the far left and the tea party and so on....where they demand some policy and honestly, they really don't even understand what they are demanding or the consequences of it all.
China is business friendly. You hear it from the likes of Rogers(Cypress Semi) and many others. What they mean is an unspoken rule of a 72 Hour Work Week. Production Quotas are regularly enforced by a rubber hose room in the back of the factory. Because so many smoke, when the factory is close to a river, you have to be careful where you toss the butts, because the rivers frequently catch on fire. Mao's Iron Rice bowl is long gone and official line is that China wants to use Chile (as remade by Chicago School boys), as the Chinese Model - officially.
The Germans now talk about Kurzarbeit, a work week shrunk to 28 or 32 hours. The U.S. Average Work Week is officially 32 hours. The difference is that the German Government pays the difference between 40 and 32 hours. The econometric question is what would the unemployment rate be over and above U6 if the lost hours were counted as unemployed workers?
The political point is that no society that wants to be free can compete with unfreedom.
Your 'solutions' would take decades of total progressive control in Congress. Each and every one is worthy and should be made priorities in the national agenda. Now tell me who on the national level in elected politics in this country is pushing any of these things. Run for office on that platform and you could win.
The bills are due this year though.
States, cities and towns do not print money and they spent the bulk (2/3) of the stimulus money last year on guess what, schools. So last year everyone that drank the kool aid believed the economy would be booming right now and they ignored any warning signs that that wasn't true. The ant and the grasshopper has relevance here and in general with how we do things in this country. Laugh if you will but reality is slowly seeping into some borrow and spenders mindsets now isn't it? Gee why don't we just borrow another $2-3 trillion and keep education spending where it is?
If people saw my concerns decades ago as relevant to their apparent fiefdoms some of these things would not be happening now. Instead its a knee jerk reaction to save whats important to them with a wink and a nod towards the rest.
Watch some old movie that has a back drop of a closing steel plant in the 60's and ask yourself whether they laid of some teachers when those plants closed because the community didn't have the tax base anymore.
Those were "if commercial markets couldn't support a debt purchase" on Greek bonds, the non-bail out bail out announced. I'm referring to this, from April 11th.
Then, I see "negotiations" for $56 billion in a joint IMF/EU bail out. It's not clear which are these past loans and which is new.
Then Germany is royally pissed about bailing out Greece. I can understand that. Your own country is in terrible shape, people are losing their homes, people are out of work, lost all retirement....and your government....goes and helps some other nation. Where have we seen that before? Oops...I guess that's us!
Here's what bothers me the most on this story. The power of the credit rating agencies. They literally can send an entire nation, a sovereign entity into the poor house with a credit rating downgrade.
Yet, we know, they were bought and paid fers in the financial securitization ponzi schemes. Nothing has happened to them. Just on a power scale, this stinks to high heaven because we know their ratings were fiction on many a securitized derivative.
He's like the face plate of a nasty CEO. There are a bunch of 'em. (Cypress, Rogers).
I didn't do them. All I'm doing here is letting EP readers know the IMF is one step away from declaring China a currency manipulator. But this is new, they are including other Asia countries with a dollar currency peg AND, they are saying to the U.S. we should devalue our currency.
There are some links in this post, but the big one is probably here and here.
It's not GDP they are looking at, it's the trade deficit. I'd have to check those numbers but it's at the rate of increase, China is slated to become the #1 economy by GDP growth rates of 9%+.
The people who do not want China to re-evaluate it's currency are defenders of offshore outsourcing. They are claiming it will "hurt US companies" because it will put a cog in the wheel on their manipulation of global exchange rates as they offshore outsource U.S. jobs. I kid you not.
When I get around to it, I'll try to put up a "graphs and numbers" post on this issue but to me, defending MNCs and offshore outsourcing has little to do with the American people, jobs and the overall national economy.
But first realize, this is about trade, not how big China's GDP is relative.
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