The reason you are seeing so much pounding on the Yuan at the moment is a series of research papers showed in the Yuan was correctly valued, it could wipe out the U.S. trade deficit with China by itself, which is pretty amazing actually. ~80% of the non-oil U.S. trade deficit is with China, so that's a huge number and why all of the focus.
They also keep buying U.S. Treasuries to assist in their currency manipulation.
Then, it's because there is legislation in Congress which has broad bi-partisan support to label China a currency manipulator (they are and then some). Because it's so impossible to get this (or past) governments to take any action, I think what you are seeing is political momentum to finally take some.
So, this is not a "blame", it's a by the numbers event. but there are a host of other issues around trade but believe this or not (and I wrote these up about a year ago), it is an astounding event that China's currency manipulation has on the U.S. trade deficit, a very surprising biggest number of them all.
On foreign aid, I completely agree! Right now Geithner is in India, probably trading away U.S. jobs and all that is mentioned is how India needs U.S. investment, $1 trillion.
I am like "Good God"! It's America who needs $1 trillion in U.S. investment! We need our entire infrastructure rebuilt, we need new factories, we need R&D centers, we need jobs, we need modern power grids and on and on!
So, yeah, they have no problems being "socialist" and "Keynesian" in other nations, yet when it comes to doing something about our own...gee wiz, we can't get it.
I just saw the comparison web statistics via Gongol, who tracks the visitors to most of the economics blogs (except those which are really part of the Journalism/media, such as Dealbook) and we've moved up.
What is happening lately on EP is someone finds a post that's unique and it often gets picked up on by other sites and then "goes viral". I'd personally like to see
a. more authors b. more in depth posts which are accurate and unique in content
I try to write up as detailed analysis as I can on all of the macro economic metrics because it gives a good sense on where we are and where we are going. That said, there are so many events and issues not being written about, simply because we need more people to take the time to write up good content, which is hard frankly.
So much of the blogosphere is either regurgitation or plain wrong or someone has a favorite agenda, quite often picked up by via some think tank or media machine and they push that....instead of detailed objective analysis, based on the stats, numbers, theory. No surprise there because to analyze policy effects or economic events is not exactly for the faint of heart!
That said, I believe EP should have more participation, more readers. I think we're doing a great job and the site is unique in that it is "regular folk" speaking out.
So, with that, folks help build up the site. If you see someone who writes good, objective, detailed economic posts, with accurate data and is also "one of us" in that they are strongly interested in the national economic health and esp. the regular working class American stiff...
but given your past track record, I'll assume all of this is true.
Folks, you might hit the "share" button, this is one of those posts that once the Gold bugs pick it up, it will probably go viral, but they need to see it.
To me is a mathematical equation that needs to be optimized as well as integer mathematics need to be used to get a correct result and as Fletcher noted, trade is not a static, time is involved in a trade equation.
But yeah, the people utilizing it should be thinking of the national economy, national interest.
Another point is the mathematics show America will lose the way it's going. Paul Samuelson also proved that in 2004 and it was amazing the blow back he got. But I looked over the mathematics at that time and that's all he did was apply the mathematics and of course (him being the Godfather of Modern Economics and all) it was correct.
The Central Fund of Canada (CFC) is one of the few with some credibility in the world of PM's (unlike SLV (the ETF for silver), which is managed by none other than JP Morgan Chase).
However, it turns out that even CFC is holding just a bunch of paper.
Lenny Organ who was the person to enter the vault of ScotiaMocatta, says "What shocked me was how little gold and silver they actually had." Lenny describes exactly how much (or little as the case may be) silver was available - roughly 60,000 ounces. As for gold - 210 400 oz bars, 4,000 maples, 500 eagles, 10 kilo bars, 10 one kilogram pieces of gold nugget form, which Adrian Douglas calculates as being $100 million worth, which is just one tenth of what the Royal Mint of Canada sold in 2008, or over $1 billion worth of gold.
The game is over when people take physical delivery.
I think the major flaw with Ricardo's Comparative Advantage is that it fails to take into account the social and cultural interests of a nation state. Let us look at entertainment as an example, an "industry" in which the U.S. has an unambiguous economic and trade advantage. Is it really in the cultural interest of any nation to import music and movies that celebrate nihilism or cynicism, the use of drugs, murder, casual sex outside a relationship, and so on?
Your idea of "Academically pure, bunch of eggheads, sworn to uphold the national interest" points in the general direction of the real, underlying problem - neo-liberal economic policies and prescriptions, including free trade, have swept aside such ideas as "national interest" "general welfare" and "common good" as archaic and "quaint" (to use a word that was infamously applied not many years ago to the international code of conduct for armed conflict). Instead, "market forces" are supposedly the best arbiter of what is in the nation's interest.
Take another example: military hardware, specifically assault rifles. The AK-47 is generally recognized as a more rugged and reliable combat weapon than the M-16. Should the United States have bowed to the concept of Comparative Advantage and ceased producing the M-16, and supplied its military and police forces with Kalishnikovs instead? The question, of course, is absurd, but it speaks directly to why Comparative Advantage may be an elegant theoretical construct, but has limited utility in actually helping decide what is in the national interest.
Is it truly in the national interest to yield to Comparative Advantage and allow U.S. manufacturing to wither, and let millions of jobs be moved to other countries? We have actually conducted that experiment for the past three decades, and it is time to face up to the consequences, and the answers they indicate.
This article dovetails with a comment I posted yesterday (“NDD more arrogant but not different” under “Your Fired then…”) wherein I noted that the “happy talk” about the economy is based on jobs data that does not reflect the reality of the working class. In short, if things are so good in the economy why is the news so bad?
However, I note that this Detroit article, while not mentioning China, has a link to a “China Currency manipulation” piece. I take the implication to be that Detroit’s problem is the China exchange rate. This 'blame China' meme is getting much publicity in an election year that no politician wants to be blamed for our economic mess.
Interestingly, there is no talk about the correlation between the declines of American cities while the Defense Department is building cities all around the world. See for example, Tom Engelhardt’s article “US War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off” over at “Antiwar.com”. One quote that I love:
“…our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a "boardwalk" that typically included a "Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet."
No politician or economic bloggers (especially pro-labor) I know off find militarily budget correlates and the declining US economy significant. Rather, China with a GDP one third of the US and not remotely near us in technological capability (including manufacturing) is the “Big Bad Wolf”. Accordingly, the people of Detroit and other cities will come to hate China and agree to increase the military budget to defend against China. Interestingly, I've seen news reports that China is cutting its defense budget.
I’m no economist, but I know I can’t buy a bridge.
Considering the entire CDS and 105 situation, I don't have a hard time believing any commodity is being manipulated but I sure hope it's not proved with a dDoS attack, that's gonna suck!
directly. Also, remember EP is a community site so anyone can write up a blog post, as long as it's credible, cited, factual, well written and formatted.
Which leads me to your point and I really agree with you and I need to take some time out to see if we can guesstimate better those who are counted as "employed" but in fact lost their career jobs and are now working for $10/hr somewhere.
This has happened significantly in STEM and those are Professional jobs. I know a good 50% of all tech workers in Silicon valley during the dot con bust were wiped out, forever, from that career.
As far as NDD goes, ya know they tried to slander and hurt EP, it really pissed me off and made the whole lot of them "person non grata" on our site.
That said, there is so much missing data frankly from our government on the true state of the economy, I'd like to pull my hair out. If we can have GPS units to locate everyone w/in 3 ft (military), and the ability to turn a car off remotely or real time data track someone as they use their various credit and debit cards and even run real time behavioral profiling and personalized "advertisements" spewn at them, I do believe we could get some more detailed and accurate real time statistics on the economy here.
I think that would assist with the spin so so often we see the spin come from either headlines, incorrectly data analysis, interpretation and missing data itself.
People who desire to see China continue to under-value their
currency are just people who want to see the bargaining
power of every worker in the World race to the bottom.
They call themselves "market oriented", when, in fact, they
are market-distortion-loving commies.
And China is a right-wing, reverse-robin-hood commie country.
I used to be a programmer of mills and lathes. But that was
before my Cleveland company moved production to China.
So its me vs 12 Chinease slaves on manual knee-mills.
They couldn't beat me if they worked for free!
But thanks to their market-distortions, I'm outta bidness.
These "market-loving" right-wingers are the same people
who think that banks should be allowed to print money,
like a bunch of counterfieters, and lend it out at interest.
They are the epitome of reverse-robin-hood commies.
And they knoow exactly what I'm talking about, too.
Good points. First, I think it is just plain sophomoric and silly to keep saying “I’m Right” and “Your Wrong”. The main problem I have with the jobs data is that it is only ‘quantitative’ and there is no ‘qualitative’ analysis. Thus, a person in a given month loses a full-time 40,000 / year job with benefits shows up as a ‘job lost’ data point. Some months later that person takes a $15,000 / year part-time job with no benefits and shows up as a job gain’ data point. Jobs data appears to be a ‘zero sum game’; but, in terms of ‘standard of living’, clearly its not. More generally, I don’t see much ‘standard of living’ analysis.
Another example of the ‘numbers game’ is “state tax revenues”. Back on 4/1 NDD was boasting about how he predicted they would go up before anyone else did and they did and that’s another sign of ‘happy economic times’. One wonders if revenues are going up why are there so many news stories about states on the verge of bankruptcy and unions being forces to renegotiate contracts and pensions of state workers being criticized, cuts in services,…etc. The problem is that revenues lend themselves to database aggregations and analysis. There is no systematic way to analyze states in “crisis”. Crisis is a qualitative term. Yet it is a real descriptor of economic phenomena. It’s like ‘families in crisis” how does one do systematic statistical analysis of that economic phenomena.
Then, of course, there is the whole business of ‘causality’. Statistics gives us correlations. Correlations are a necessary condition of causality but not sufficient. And, if we don’t know the cause of economic phenomena we can not explain and change the phenomena. So we have the great debate about China exchange rates with eloquent correlations and theories by Nobel Prize economist Krugman. But, I remember eloquent correlations and theories about our national accounts put forth by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman and look where that got us.
In short, it seems to me that NDD is not alone in playing what I call the ‘zero sum number’s game’ (i.e. “lies, damn lies and statistics’) just one of the more arrogant.
and his post is wrong. The U.S. has not added jobs until this month, March, not the other months he is claiming. In March, 74k only were permanent. 445k initial monthly claims might make a case for one month, but for myself, I don't like the initial weekly unemployment claims as a metric at all and the reason is it's revised continually including 5 years of data was revised over a non-published adjustment last week.
Frankly I don't read bonddad and for one they tried to slander this site, severely, which is pretty ridiculous. But the fiction on trade is enough to not read it. Drawing lines with photoshop and trying to claim that's a regression analysis or least squares, as a math head, now that drives me nuts too.
But getting a little more analytical on the above, the U.S. needs anywhere from 84k to 300k (estimates vary) of new jobs each month just to keep up with increasing population.
To wit, unemployment is all relative and is measured against the civilian workforce totals. Those have increased, so taking absolute numbers on anything, not scaled to the workforce, is a statistical mistake in my view. I didn't really read the non-debate debate but off the top of my head, comparing a flat number from 1982, an absolute number to 2010 is a mistake because the population is much larger, hence absolutes would of course be larger, so unless things are scaled, normalized, relative to civilian workforce population size, well, it's an argument I wouldn't enter because I do not believe one is comparing apples to apples.
What's the bottom line here? See my post on unemployment and America needs some damn jobs, lots of jobs, tons of jobs and they need them right now.....and pretty much all economists are predicting they are not going to get them.
That is unacceptable and frankly as I noted yesterday in the ISM services report, I think the DOL needs to breath down these businesses neck and enforce labor laws in part at this point for it appears who is left is being worked like a dog and because the unemployment rate is so high, no one dares "whistle blow" at their jobs or quit.
As far as the need to be "right" and call out those who were "wrong", I don't really get what that's all about.
New Deal Democrat over at Bondadd has no humility today. He is really bragging about how he has been right and the rest of “blogisphere” has been wrong about predicting the happy conditions of the economy.
Heaven knows, he always has plenty of numbers and graphs, so I’m wondering what the quantitative bloggers on this site have to say about the current ‘happy times” that he predicted and virtually everyone else like EP was wrong?
This is not a rhetorical question implying that I agree with NDD or criticizing others like EP . Apart from his ego, he is a challenging analyst and should not be ignored by those who disagree.
Simply another reason why it is the height of naivete to imagine that parliamentary remedies should ever be contemplated for such maggots. These folks are on the same level with debt collectors and can you imagine the likelihood of any change in the relative power of these filth to the average person short of wholesale system change? You'll know justice has finally arrived when the people have shut down the operation of every Talx office in the country and its officers and stockholders face public trial in some gigantic football stadium environment.
Not that I want to tout the infamous "tort reform" crud, but it seems proving cases, even when the government pours in billions, they lose. Think Microsoft anti-trust. Then, recently there was a major H-1B fraud case and guess what, the judge threw out (just beyond belief) a host of evidence from the government.
It also seems when it comes to white collar crime or complex crimes, corporate crimes and esp. technical crimes, the courts are like something from the stone age in terms of even understanding what they are looking at. (just my opinion)....
So, to me, they need something here with the legal system to be able to prosecute these cases more easily and stop having judges throw out major portions of a case.
I do think the reason we saw no dollar amounts on KBR is it's trivial.
I haven't kept track with the total theft of the war profiteering/corruption but I thought there was almost a trillion bucks involved? (don't quote me, we need accuracy and I believe Sen. Byron Dorgan has been on this with hearings and evidence?)
Bob, what do you want to bet the prosecution either throws up its hands when KBR drags things out or makes a token offer? These no-bid, cost-plus contracts are riddled with abuses, and I expect the outcome to be KBR losing peanuts on one line item while laughing all the way to the bank on the rest. If AIG is an example of what is possible, what the hell?
Frank T.
As commented by pulpcutter this new reg seems a lightening of the established $10000 regulation, ie it increases the unreported amount one can hold in a foreign bank without being penalised for non reporting.
Or am I too optimistic?
although some of the solutions I've seen have little to do with the U.S. workforce, middle class and a whole lot to do with some globalist agenda thing.
But I agree, FDR's second bill of rights, I mean just basic employment law being enforced would be nice.
Age discrimination is brazen, institutionalized, we see foreign guest workers displacing U.S. workers for over a decade now, they don't do a damn thing about it...there is a host of things and even the sacrosanct must pay the wages for hours worked pay, the DOL is ignoring it...
so people are not even getting paid when they are W-2 (and it is oh so much worse in any other situation of money for work/services exchange).
In start-ups, they would fire people right before they vested, so they did not have to give them stock options. Very common to intimidate people upon firing and deny UI on top of it. (with threats of suing them if they dared do anything). No severance at all and these are professional jobs.
then firing people before they hit a certain level in matching retirement funds (as an example) or even health benefits.
83% of all freelancers are stiffed and that's really bad for there is no safety net, no recourse hardly at all.
But this situation, I mean come on, attorneys are not cheap and can it possibly be cheaper to sick the attorney dogs than pay the increased unemployment insurance premiums?
I keep thinking of the Christians in arena with the lions in Rome.
Which is yet another issue, meritocracy has gone out the window and I compare the work life of most Americans to Schindler's List.
As I understand this new law, only dollars (FRNs) sent to overseas banks are subject. FRNs sent to an entity such as goldmoney.com is not subject to the law, as it is not a bank. Is this correct?
The reason you are seeing so much pounding on the Yuan at the moment is a series of research papers showed in the Yuan was correctly valued, it could wipe out the U.S. trade deficit with China by itself, which is pretty amazing actually. ~80% of the non-oil U.S. trade deficit is with China, so that's a huge number and why all of the focus.
They also keep buying U.S. Treasuries to assist in their currency manipulation.
Then, it's because there is legislation in Congress which has broad bi-partisan support to label China a currency manipulator (they are and then some). Because it's so impossible to get this (or past) governments to take any action, I think what you are seeing is political momentum to finally take some.
So, this is not a "blame", it's a by the numbers event. but there are a host of other issues around trade but believe this or not (and I wrote these up about a year ago), it is an astounding event that China's currency manipulation has on the U.S. trade deficit, a very surprising biggest number of them all.
On foreign aid, I completely agree! Right now Geithner is in India, probably trading away U.S. jobs and all that is mentioned is how India needs U.S. investment, $1 trillion.
I am like "Good God"! It's America who needs $1 trillion in U.S. investment! We need our entire infrastructure rebuilt, we need new factories, we need R&D centers, we need jobs, we need modern power grids and on and on!
So, yeah, they have no problems being "socialist" and "Keynesian" in other nations, yet when it comes to doing something about our own...gee wiz, we can't get it.
I just saw the comparison web statistics via Gongol, who tracks the visitors to most of the economics blogs (except those which are really part of the Journalism/media, such as Dealbook) and we've moved up.
What is happening lately on EP is someone finds a post that's unique and it often gets picked up on by other sites and then "goes viral". I'd personally like to see
a. more authors b. more in depth posts which are accurate and unique in content
I try to write up as detailed analysis as I can on all of the macro economic metrics because it gives a good sense on where we are and where we are going. That said, there are so many events and issues not being written about, simply because we need more people to take the time to write up good content, which is hard frankly.
So much of the blogosphere is either regurgitation or plain wrong or someone has a favorite agenda, quite often picked up by via some think tank or media machine and they push that....instead of detailed objective analysis, based on the stats, numbers, theory. No surprise there because to analyze policy effects or economic events is not exactly for the faint of heart!
That said, I believe EP should have more participation, more readers. I think we're doing a great job and the site is unique in that it is "regular folk" speaking out.
So, with that, folks help build up the site. If you see someone who writes good, objective, detailed economic posts, with accurate data and is also "one of us" in that they are strongly interested in the national economic health and esp. the regular working class American stiff...
invite them over to EP.
but given your past track record, I'll assume all of this is true.
Folks, you might hit the "share" button, this is one of those posts that once the Gold bugs pick it up, it will probably go viral, but they need to see it.
To me is a mathematical equation that needs to be optimized as well as integer mathematics need to be used to get a correct result and as Fletcher noted, trade is not a static, time is involved in a trade equation.
But yeah, the people utilizing it should be thinking of the national economy, national interest.
Another point is the mathematics show America will lose the way it's going. Paul Samuelson also proved that in 2004 and it was amazing the blow back he got. But I looked over the mathematics at that time and that's all he did was apply the mathematics and of course (him being the Godfather of Modern Economics and all) it was correct.
The Central Fund of Canada (CFC) is one of the few with some credibility in the world of PM's (unlike SLV (the ETF for silver), which is managed by none other than JP Morgan Chase).
However, it turns out that even CFC is holding just a bunch of paper.
The game is over when people take physical delivery.
I think the major flaw with Ricardo's Comparative Advantage is that it fails to take into account the social and cultural interests of a nation state. Let us look at entertainment as an example, an "industry" in which the U.S. has an unambiguous economic and trade advantage. Is it really in the cultural interest of any nation to import music and movies that celebrate nihilism or cynicism, the use of drugs, murder, casual sex outside a relationship, and so on?
Your idea of "Academically pure, bunch of eggheads, sworn to uphold the national interest" points in the general direction of the real, underlying problem - neo-liberal economic policies and prescriptions, including free trade, have swept aside such ideas as "national interest" "general welfare" and "common good" as archaic and "quaint" (to use a word that was infamously applied not many years ago to the international code of conduct for armed conflict). Instead, "market forces" are supposedly the best arbiter of what is in the nation's interest.
Take another example: military hardware, specifically assault rifles. The AK-47 is generally recognized as a more rugged and reliable combat weapon than the M-16. Should the United States have bowed to the concept of Comparative Advantage and ceased producing the M-16, and supplied its military and police forces with Kalishnikovs instead? The question, of course, is absurd, but it speaks directly to why Comparative Advantage may be an elegant theoretical construct, but has limited utility in actually helping decide what is in the national interest.
Is it truly in the national interest to yield to Comparative Advantage and allow U.S. manufacturing to wither, and let millions of jobs be moved to other countries? We have actually conducted that experiment for the past three decades, and it is time to face up to the consequences, and the answers they indicate.
This article dovetails with a comment I posted yesterday (“NDD more arrogant but not different” under “Your Fired then…”) wherein I noted that the “happy talk” about the economy is based on jobs data that does not reflect the reality of the working class. In short, if things are so good in the economy why is the news so bad?
However, I note that this Detroit article, while not mentioning China, has a link to a “China Currency manipulation” piece. I take the implication to be that Detroit’s problem is the China exchange rate. This 'blame China' meme is getting much publicity in an election year that no politician wants to be blamed for our economic mess.
Interestingly, there is no talk about the correlation between the declines of American cities while the Defense Department is building cities all around the world. See for example, Tom Engelhardt’s article “US War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off” over at “Antiwar.com”. One quote that I love:
“…our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a "boardwalk" that typically included a "Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet."
No politician or economic bloggers (especially pro-labor) I know off find militarily budget correlates and the declining US economy significant. Rather, China with a GDP one third of the US and not remotely near us in technological capability (including manufacturing) is the “Big Bad Wolf”. Accordingly, the people of Detroit and other cities will come to hate China and agree to increase the military budget to defend against China. Interestingly, I've seen news reports that China is cutting its defense budget.
I’m no economist, but I know I can’t buy a bridge.
Considering the entire CDS and 105 situation, I don't have a hard time believing any commodity is being manipulated but I sure hope it's not proved with a dDoS attack, that's gonna suck!
For some reason I keep twisting the numbers when referring to 105 repo scheme used by Lehman Brothers and others to hide massive debt and losses.
I need the editing police, that's you EP readers, to tell me if I do something like that, or any sort of typo or problem.
Thanks. I have no idea why I keep doing that on this particular number, but ugh!
directly. Also, remember EP is a community site so anyone can write up a blog post, as long as it's credible, cited, factual, well written and formatted.
Which leads me to your point and I really agree with you and I need to take some time out to see if we can guesstimate better those who are counted as "employed" but in fact lost their career jobs and are now working for $10/hr somewhere.
This has happened significantly in STEM and those are Professional jobs. I know a good 50% of all tech workers in Silicon valley during the dot con bust were wiped out, forever, from that career.
As far as NDD goes, ya know they tried to slander and hurt EP, it really pissed me off and made the whole lot of them "person non grata" on our site.
That said, there is so much missing data frankly from our government on the true state of the economy, I'd like to pull my hair out. If we can have GPS units to locate everyone w/in 3 ft (military), and the ability to turn a car off remotely or real time data track someone as they use their various credit and debit cards and even run real time behavioral profiling and personalized "advertisements" spewn at them, I do believe we could get some more detailed and accurate real time statistics on the economy here.
I think that would assist with the spin so so often we see the spin come from either headlines, incorrectly data analysis, interpretation and missing data itself.
People who desire to see China continue to under-value their
currency are just people who want to see the bargaining
power of every worker in the World race to the bottom.
They call themselves "market oriented", when, in fact, they
are market-distortion-loving commies.
And China is a right-wing, reverse-robin-hood commie country.
I used to be a programmer of mills and lathes. But that was
before my Cleveland company moved production to China.
So its me vs 12 Chinease slaves on manual knee-mills.
They couldn't beat me if they worked for free!
But thanks to their market-distortions, I'm outta bidness.
These "market-loving" right-wingers are the same people
who think that banks should be allowed to print money,
like a bunch of counterfieters, and lend it out at interest.
They are the epitome of reverse-robin-hood commies.
And they knoow exactly what I'm talking about, too.
Good points. First, I think it is just plain sophomoric and silly to keep saying “I’m Right” and “Your Wrong”. The main problem I have with the jobs data is that it is only ‘quantitative’ and there is no ‘qualitative’ analysis. Thus, a person in a given month loses a full-time 40,000 / year job with benefits shows up as a ‘job lost’ data point. Some months later that person takes a $15,000 / year part-time job with no benefits and shows up as a job gain’ data point. Jobs data appears to be a ‘zero sum game’; but, in terms of ‘standard of living’, clearly its not. More generally, I don’t see much ‘standard of living’ analysis.
Another example of the ‘numbers game’ is “state tax revenues”. Back on 4/1 NDD was boasting about how he predicted they would go up before anyone else did and they did and that’s another sign of ‘happy economic times’. One wonders if revenues are going up why are there so many news stories about states on the verge of bankruptcy and unions being forces to renegotiate contracts and pensions of state workers being criticized, cuts in services,…etc. The problem is that revenues lend themselves to database aggregations and analysis. There is no systematic way to analyze states in “crisis”. Crisis is a qualitative term. Yet it is a real descriptor of economic phenomena. It’s like ‘families in crisis” how does one do systematic statistical analysis of that economic phenomena.
Then, of course, there is the whole business of ‘causality’. Statistics gives us correlations. Correlations are a necessary condition of causality but not sufficient. And, if we don’t know the cause of economic phenomena we can not explain and change the phenomena. So we have the great debate about China exchange rates with eloquent correlations and theories by Nobel Prize economist Krugman. But, I remember eloquent correlations and theories about our national accounts put forth by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman and look where that got us.
In short, it seems to me that NDD is not alone in playing what I call the ‘zero sum number’s game’ (i.e. “lies, damn lies and statistics’) just one of the more arrogant.
and his post is wrong. The U.S. has not added jobs until this month, March, not the other months he is claiming. In March, 74k only were permanent. 445k initial monthly claims might make a case for one month, but for myself, I don't like the initial weekly unemployment claims as a metric at all and the reason is it's revised continually including 5 years of data was revised over a non-published adjustment last week.
Frankly I don't read bonddad and for one they tried to slander this site, severely, which is pretty ridiculous. But the fiction on trade is enough to not read it. Drawing lines with photoshop and trying to claim that's a regression analysis or least squares, as a math head, now that drives me nuts too.
But getting a little more analytical on the above, the U.S. needs anywhere from 84k to 300k (estimates vary) of new jobs each month just to keep up with increasing population.
To wit, unemployment is all relative and is measured against the civilian workforce totals. Those have increased, so taking absolute numbers on anything, not scaled to the workforce, is a statistical mistake in my view. I didn't really read the non-debate debate but off the top of my head, comparing a flat number from 1982, an absolute number to 2010 is a mistake because the population is much larger, hence absolutes would of course be larger, so unless things are scaled, normalized, relative to civilian workforce population size, well, it's an argument I wouldn't enter because I do not believe one is comparing apples to apples.
What's the bottom line here? See my post on unemployment and America needs some damn jobs, lots of jobs, tons of jobs and they need them right now.....and pretty much all economists are predicting they are not going to get them.
That is unacceptable and frankly as I noted yesterday in the ISM services report, I think the DOL needs to breath down these businesses neck and enforce labor laws in part at this point for it appears who is left is being worked like a dog and because the unemployment rate is so high, no one dares "whistle blow" at their jobs or quit.
As far as the need to be "right" and call out those who were "wrong", I don't really get what that's all about.
New Deal Democrat over at Bondadd has no humility today. He is really bragging about how he has been right and the rest of “blogisphere” has been wrong about predicting the happy conditions of the economy.
Heaven knows, he always has plenty of numbers and graphs, so I’m wondering what the quantitative bloggers on this site have to say about the current ‘happy times” that he predicted and virtually everyone else like EP was wrong?
This is not a rhetorical question implying that I agree with NDD or criticizing others like EP . Apart from his ego, he is a challenging analyst and should not be ignored by those who disagree.
Simply another reason why it is the height of naivete to imagine that parliamentary remedies should ever be contemplated for such maggots. These folks are on the same level with debt collectors and can you imagine the likelihood of any change in the relative power of these filth to the average person short of wholesale system change? You'll know justice has finally arrived when the people have shut down the operation of every Talx office in the country and its officers and stockholders face public trial in some gigantic football stadium environment.
Not that I want to tout the infamous "tort reform" crud, but it seems proving cases, even when the government pours in billions, they lose. Think Microsoft anti-trust. Then, recently there was a major H-1B fraud case and guess what, the judge threw out (just beyond belief) a host of evidence from the government.
It also seems when it comes to white collar crime or complex crimes, corporate crimes and esp. technical crimes, the courts are like something from the stone age in terms of even understanding what they are looking at. (just my opinion)....
So, to me, they need something here with the legal system to be able to prosecute these cases more easily and stop having judges throw out major portions of a case.
I do think the reason we saw no dollar amounts on KBR is it's trivial.
I haven't kept track with the total theft of the war profiteering/corruption but I thought there was almost a trillion bucks involved? (don't quote me, we need accuracy and I believe Sen. Byron Dorgan has been on this with hearings and evidence?)
Bob, what do you want to bet the prosecution either throws up its hands when KBR drags things out or makes a token offer? These no-bid, cost-plus contracts are riddled with abuses, and I expect the outcome to be KBR losing peanuts on one line item while laughing all the way to the bank on the rest. If AIG is an example of what is possible, what the hell?
Frank T.
As commented by pulpcutter this new reg seems a lightening of the established $10000 regulation, ie it increases the unreported amount one can hold in a foreign bank without being penalised for non reporting.
Or am I too optimistic?
although some of the solutions I've seen have little to do with the U.S. workforce, middle class and a whole lot to do with some globalist agenda thing.
But I agree, FDR's second bill of rights, I mean just basic employment law being enforced would be nice.
Age discrimination is brazen, institutionalized, we see foreign guest workers displacing U.S. workers for over a decade now, they don't do a damn thing about it...there is a host of things and even the sacrosanct must pay the wages for hours worked pay, the DOL is ignoring it...
so people are not even getting paid when they are W-2 (and it is oh so much worse in any other situation of money for work/services exchange).
In start-ups, they would fire people right before they vested, so they did not have to give them stock options. Very common to intimidate people upon firing and deny UI on top of it. (with threats of suing them if they dared do anything). No severance at all and these are professional jobs.
then firing people before they hit a certain level in matching retirement funds (as an example) or even health benefits.
83% of all freelancers are stiffed and that's really bad for there is no safety net, no recourse hardly at all.
But this situation, I mean come on, attorneys are not cheap and can it possibly be cheaper to sick the attorney dogs than pay the increased unemployment insurance premiums?
I keep thinking of the Christians in arena with the lions in Rome.
Which is yet another issue, meritocracy has gone out the window and I compare the work life of most Americans to Schindler's List.
As I understand this new law, only dollars (FRNs) sent to overseas banks are subject. FRNs sent to an entity such as goldmoney.com is not subject to the law, as it is not a bank. Is this correct?
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