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Productivity - Wage Gap Grows
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The Equation Defined
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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Universal Living Wage
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Krugman Defines a New Economic State - Purgatory
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Productivity - Wage Gap Grows
- 42488 reads
Jobs For U.S. Workers Stripped Out of Stimulus Bill Behind Closed Doors - Update It Lives!
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The Equation Defined
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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Universal Living Wage
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Krugman Defines a New Economic State - Purgatory
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The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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It's been on a conservative move upwards. BTW, have you seen copper? Wow.
and our lovely "elected" officials have basically handed China our standard of living and our livelihoods too.
Roubini is claiming Asia is "hype" and will not grow to the levels currently projected.
But I disagree, although I doubt China would be as stupid as the U.S., at least immediately in terms of depending on their citizens going into massive debt to "buy things".
What if this is a new type of stagflation? Where the deflation is in demand and assets, and inflation in the cost of capital (given that it is now global, and in the form of interest rates) and commodities?
it was the episode where they were pitching General Dynamics (the NASA pitch). There was a particular scene, where all these engineers were sitting in this room and the young Pete Cambell is doing his pitch. In the background you saw all the stuff they were making. You saw all those engineers sitting there and execs talking about the stuff they were making. Then in several episodes they had these folks from various product companies.
It struck me, here was an era where we were MAKING things, and we were respected. This was pre-Vietnam, so please take that into account. We had AMERICAN engineers, not offshored ones. We were making televisions and other consumer electronics. We were feeling hope, growth, well you get it.
So yes commongood, with regards to your last paragraph, maybe...just maybe, this could be our second chance. We rested on our laurels, our competitors destroyed after a world war, we were top dog. Then we coasted off that success. Sure we had some good new technological expansions, but in the end did that result in a new manufacturing base? No. I'm hoping everything doesn't fall apart before we can get things going again. We need a manufacturing base, period!
Here's a twist. Morgan Stanley, as noted in this Washpo article, says that consumers in China will over take America by 2018. You cannot tell me that the multinationals aren't aware that this was possible, be it 2018 or what ever date. Even if it only the urban middle class or upper elites, the numbers alone are staggering. The multinationals stopped caring about our market a long time ago, witness the expansion of GM and Intel in China.
Perhaps China could be the ultimate last bubble, who knows. But the fact remains, the consumption wave has moved East. Everything now is slowly being geared towards an Eastern market. Alcoa's latest earnings report says that China is their big growth market. The question begs, if China doesn't need to sell us their oodles of crap, will they need to keep our government crap?
I don't think we'd pull out of NATO. But I think the world should realize that we will be "downsizing" our military when this big shift happens. And they should realize that we won't be everywhere anymore, which to me is a good thing. This also means when there is a disaster somewhere, that the local powers should take care of their neighborhood. World War 2 has been ended 60+ years ago, the Cold War has been over since '89. No reason to keep the bases in Europe or Asia. We have a military for a world that no longer exists, let alone a budget to go along with such a history.
BS numbers. The change in treasury debt held by the public between Sept 30 last year and Sept 30 this year is 1.74 trillion or roughly 340 billion more than the "budget deficit". That puts the real deficit well over 10% of GDP, and that assumes that the GDP numbers are accurate (not massaged to look better than it is). As you note, this doesn't count debt held in that complete mess over at Fannie and Freddie where the fiction continues that these are somehow still private entities. It sort of reminds me of Dick Cheney's argument that the Office of the Vice-President is both Executive and Legislative and therefore answerable to no one. And then there's the Federal Reserve...
It's much like the unemployment numbers. The number of people self-reporting as unemployed increases by 785,000 in September, which is the fourth highest monthly loss recorded during this entire recession. The government conveniently removes 550,000 from the labor force, and presto the heavily manipulated employer survey (and headline report) of "greater than estimated" 265,000 jobs lost bears some resemblance to the household survey and the unemployment rate rises to a mere 9.8% instead of the 10.2% number that would have panicked the markets. Can't have that can we.
And now that we are entering third quarter earnings season, I fully expect Corporate America to be just as candid as the US government. In an unbelievable display of corporate group-think,reported writedowns for the S&P 500 in the second quarter were an aggregate $.02/share. You need to go all the way back to the second quarter of 1993 to find a quarter with a similarly trivial level of writedowns. I guess they must have taken all their writedowns in the 4th quarter of 2008. Sure. What an astounding feat of clairvoyance. And all the massive layoffs and plant closings at Caterpillar and Alcoa and others in the second quarter were virtually cost free. And now that Alcoa is reporting positive earnings, with massive top line losses, the markets should be very happy. Too bad there's almost no one left with money to purchase products anymore. Of course, it doesn't really need to be said here that any correlation between the action of the markets and the real economy are purely co-incidental.
The real issue here is that with everyone gaming their numbers (i.e. lying to make things look better than they are), the government and its corporate masters are (or should be) losing the public trust. Nothing good will come of that.
The only good thing about this is that maybe it signals an end to the era starting in the 80's of debt and finical biased economic growth. Maybe we'll return to the 60's where economic growth was based on decent wages, and demand based investments.
The Conservative path of growth failed horribly though that is irrelevant to Americans who on average are dumber then shit.
Defense was $636B, but it doesn't break it down.
Notice that $199B is paying down the debt (interest).
$149 billion for FY 2009 for two wars.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
We're too big to fail. Aren't we?
Frank T.
We still have a way to go. This is a great way to stick it to financial conglomerates/financial oligarchy. Now, if more people would move their accounts from the big financial conglomerates over to credit unions.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
That's just unreal. And to talk about the trade deficit???? While the US signed those trade agreements (which are corporate, multinational written) who has completely unfair trade practices to create the massive trade deficit in the first place! China! 83% of the non-oil trade deficit is with China...
so to me, obviously China is doing this and it's all about their massive derivative and U.S. Treasury holdings.
So, China does unfair trade practices, manipulates their currency and now blames the U.S....all the while the WTO rules against the U.S. in almost every complaint!
What an interesting coincidence.
It certainly seems that everyone is working towards the same goal. The question is if they will find a solution.
On a related note, Zerohedge has an entirely different take on the subject.
As I have posted here before, the States have the solution to their budget problems within their grasp, but States do not appear to see the solution.
State policy makers need to understand that their paradigm of dependance on the Uncle Sam handout teet only further's the Keynesian self destruct debt syndrome destroying this country.
States can stand on their own feet. They gave the federal government it's power (not the other way around) and that power lies in their remaining assets and dwindling revenues. They should take advantage of the opportunity to harness that power while they still can.
http://letthemfail.us/archives/1478
But I think the horse left the barn on this one a long time ago. Several years ago I was lamenting the weakening dollar and a golfing buddy responded that a weak dollar was good because it would increase our exports. The problem with that logic is that we stopped being a manufacturing country 25 years ago or so, and replaced it with financialization. To that, I have my own experience to relate.
My first real job, folllowing a 3 yr stint in the Army, was in 1969 with Carrier Air Conditioning. Carrier was ALWAYS, from its inception, an ENGINEERING driven company. Product design and development and manufacturing engineering were it's reputation and it was considered the "cadillac" of air conditioning. In 1979/1980, a hostile takeover was initiated by United Technologies Corp. which lasted into 1981. Eventually it happened and Carrier was transformed into a divisional "profit center".
Mind you, from 1969 until that time I was part of an international group that annually exceeded sales and margin targets. Every single year we exceeded budgeted expectations! But once we became a "profit center", all that mattered was cost and sales. There was no more innovation; it was just find out what you can sell and get it from the cheapest source, wherever it is. All sourcing and sales activities were decentralized and the large domestic manufacturing sites were de-emphasized and/or abandoned. Along with them went the generations of engineering commitment and the skilled laborers that made it work. They are long gone and the tool and die makers now reside in Germany, Brazil, China or wherever.
IMO, losing dollar hegemony would probably result in a fairly rapid collapse of American influence in the world and catastrophic damage to American society. But re-establishing America's dominance in the development of capital goods would require something like reinventing the wheel. We stopped being that country a long time ago. And like it or not, the only innovation that exists in America now is financial innovation enabled by government chicanery.
But in the U.S. Helicopter Ben has put the money supply on steroids, so it appears that the velocity of money dropped like a stone, but we have "gobs" of money supply....to counteract deflation, so I don't think it's quite the same.
Didn't Argentina plain default?
I agree doing a series on Argentina, S. Korea, Thailand and Russia would be awesome intel. I also went digging around and posted what I could find on it but not enough detail to really understand what was the primary cause of those collapses.
I'm also wondering with so many believing the dollar is plain going to collapse if we're getting a lot of fear behavior vs. metrics and reality.
Hey, Roubini today said the "O" word on why jobs aren't coming back and why unemployment is permanently screwed.
He mentioned offshore outsourcing of manufacturing and services.
It's just unreal how you cannot get economists to even breath that word, yet at this point I do not believe there is a single person in America who doesn't know someone who's job was offshore outsourced or they were displaced by a foreign guest worker (same thing, they use guest workers to often transfer technology, projects and skills....offshore).
Deflation doesn't preclude a falling dollar. Everyone likes to point to Japan as a comparison, and there is certainly a lot in common.
But Japan could fund its own debt, unlike America.
What I point towards is Argentina. A lot of people don't know this about the Argentina collapse of 2001, but they had deflation - the classic definition of deflation. The monetary supply in Argentina collapsed, meaning there were fewer pesos around. This is sort of what is happening in America on a smaller scale.
Normally the laws of supply and demand would make the peso increase in value if there are fewer of them. However, Argentina didn't fund its own debts. It relied on outside creditors.
Thus while the Argentina monetary supply collapsed, and people had less access to money to live on, their currency collapsed by 70% against all other currencies. So the purchasing power of the peso fell faster than the deflation of the shrinking monetary supply. This is also what is happening in America on a smaller scale.
I've been thinking about doing an article about this, but haven't found all the resources I want yet.
As for gold, the ads you see are for you to sell your gold to them. Gold won't be in a mania until you see ads for you to buy their gold.
Also, gold isn't moving like a bubble. It isn't jumping 20% a month (like Nasdaq in 1999, or housing in 2005 in some places). It's moving at a very slow and consistent pace as its fundamentals improve (more consumers, less official sales).
Right now gold is in Stage 2 of a bull market, where the smart money moves in. Stage 3, which hasn't hit yet is when the public moves in. When neighbors start to brag about their bullion purchases and gold mining stocks the same way that they were talking about their "investment homes" in 2005, or dot-com stocks in 1999, then it will be time to get out of gold.
I caught a Glenn Beck rant on the dollar collapsing and comparing it to Russia, 1998.
Frankly he made some sense, which scared me.
I do not see inflation, I see deflation, which is why I"m not running out and buying Gold, but I must wonder if Gold is going to be a bubble because so many TV ads plus talking heads are talking about the collapse of the U.S./dollar.
or our debt is no longer price in dollars.
Think about it though, we already have volatility because of the instability of the dollar. Look at the per barrel price of crude in euros and dollars. Guess what, the "oil" price increase was in large part produced by the fall of the dollar relative to other currencies.
We don't have a huge amount of trade with oil-producing states, they are supplied with capital and consumer goods from Europe and Asia. Latin America is the exception.
A drop in dollar value would mean that the cost of oil and other imports would go up quite a bit, however it would also make American manufacturing more competitive. Particularly on the high end products where are competitors are in Europe, Japan, and Korea, not China and India. Cost competitivity in capital goods, machines that make finished products, would allow the machine tools industry to be rebuilt in the US. That would help make the rest of manufacturing much more competitive.
That said, dropping English system and going metric would make it even more dramatic. We lose a considerable amount of trade because we have either have two sets of measurements, or don't have compatibility with the rest of the planet because we have a 1/8 inch bit instead a 4 mm one. They aren't interchangeable. It you have a top of the line bike, it's a pain to fix because the Italian and Japanese parts are in mm. Which means that if you try to use customary based tools it doesn't work......
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