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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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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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The Yuan is Undervalued
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The war on the middle class
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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
- 185307 reads
New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
- 950829 reads
The Yuan is Undervalued
- 19497 reads
The war on the middle class
- 315746 reads
The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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This isn't meant in anyway as a criticism of this post, it's a good catch, but a serious critique of a very old re-hash of an old story by a second-rater, Palley (as are most, if not all, of those individuals at the New America Foundation).
I've read this exact same thing again and again, beginning around 15 years ago. So what?
It's obvious now, as many others far more astute than myself have pointed out, that we are in one giant bubble of bubbles, namely the SECURITIZATION BUBBLE.
More bubbles bursting are to come - maybe over the next twenty years, certainly over the next ten years. With the excellent post of that NY Times story of the BLS study: effectively there has been no new job creation in the private sector over the preceding ten years.
This is EXACTLY what took place during the Great Depression. Not sort of like, not similarly, but EXACTLY!
Also, we are treated to planted stories that the "recession is over" due to excellent quarterly reports from the banks (or rather banksters). This too is EXACTLY what happened during the Great Depression.
Between 1928 to 1933 Wall Street brokerage businesses reported record earnings. Today, the banks are the brokerage businesses and speculators (thanks to that Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000).
The only question is, how much longer can the plutocrats continue to convince the Ameritards that the securitization bubble won't finally burst - which will profit a very select few.
(And with regard to those planted stories, just review the history of Representative LaGuardia's investigation of PR hack, Newton Plummer and his payments to a variety of reporters during the 1920s and the Great Depression; as well as Carl Bernstein's excellent column on "The Four Hundred" back in 1977 or '78 in the Rolling Stone.)
They should be negotiating with them at all. Who runs the country? Lobbyists or the government?
Strategy is "divide and conquer". If you can get one of the big opponents to agree with you - great. The problem is, as with all the rest of the policies and "negotiations", they didn't get a good deal.
$80 billion over ten years is not enough. A congressional report says that made $8 billion after the last big giveaway to Big Pharma. I wonder if that was the basis for the agreement.
Obama Administration was giving up a lot including a lot of credibility and political capital with this move but they failed to exact an equally high price from Big Pharma.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
I did go through the hazing ritual, though not in econ, but I'm not sure how much good that did me. When you see how many economists are just using math to please their employers and clients -- enough said on education. I learned more since grad school than I ever learned in it -- finally have time to read and think.
Frank T.
You can see this in Post Doc salaries (unreal, sometimes in the 20k's for research) due to unlimited H-1B, J-1, F-4 (or is it F-1) etc. Visas...
And recently U.S. corporations literally offshore outsourced massive advanced R&D in chemical and pharmaceutical research.
So, expertise is seemingly becoming a disposable commodity these days.
and then frankly, don't jump on some candidate in some bizarre feeding frenzy during the primaries and claim he has policy positions and a voting record that does not exist.
I'm sorry but the elections in general were like that...
if someone doesn't have a good voting record, very obvious DLC connections, lobbyist connections...and is putting out corporate written policy agendas...
pretending that candidate is somehow a Populist and anyone who says differently is just some troll who needs to be attacked and repressed....
I mean what a waste....that Obamamania machine in the primaries was just unbelievable...
imagine what would have happened if they demanded actual policy positions to match the enthusiasm.
;)
(there was no viable Progressive/Populist candidate during the primaries, I will note, although Clinton in position statements and votes was slightly better than Obama in this regard, from an economics view point).
but, hey, that's why we're all econ, all of the time, nonpartisan...to get the focus on actual policy, legislation, economic statistics...
I mean the day we had a well crafted bill, that actually was based on real statistics, data...say on trade...
and it actually got passed...now that day would be a miracle...
That's what i see, even on the Stimulus, it was simply not well crafted...it seems getting any bill based on expert analysis, real statistics, with a set of objectives
instead of loaded up with some corporate lobbyists' latest wet dream....
is impossible.
Good deal, glad you're here and yeah, no formal education required on EP. There are many people, highly intelligent, coming from all sorts of backgrounds who can go onto the Internets and realize something is structurally askew without having made it through the dissertation/oral exam hazing ritual.
regardless if is the programmer/programmed/not programmed nothing will change while this neoliberal economic ideology has so much influence in Washington.
The question is how do we discredit this terribly flawed ideology?
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
It isn't just manufacturing. There is no shortage of talent globally. While McDonald's can't outsource burger-flipping in Detroit, globalization has reached far into the service sector. I just finished organizing a scientific review panel and was impressed by the large numbers of productive physicists, geneticists, engineers, and computer scientists who have their PhDs from University of Beijing, and much international collaboration was taking place. I keep reminding my school-resistant nephew that someone in China or India wants his place at the table. This is serious business, and it's not going to stop.
Frank T.
I'd have to take issue with the fundamental premise of Lind's article (disclaimer: never been a Lind fan). I can give a bunch of reasons why Prez Obama has never been a true believer to begin with:
Diana Farrell (McKinsey Global Institute, Goldman Sachs), Laura Tyson (Morgan Stanley, NAFTA), Henry Kissinger (no need to for explanation here), Roger Altman (Blackstone Group), Robert Hormats (PetroChina, Goldman Sachs), Richard Holbrooke (Perseus), Robert Rubin, Summers, Geithner, Rahm Emanuel (Wassterstein Perella), and on and on and on.
Really like this site which I just joined. I am not an economist but am bothered by the Fed-Administration cabal and their meta-theory that ignores the real issues in favor of their client interests.
Frank T.
I don't get why people think Obama is somehow captured by others and programmed. He is one of the programmers.
Seriously, look at his background, he's straight from Harvard and then went to the University of Chicago....
This is a neoliberal (read corporate generated thought speak) hub....
So he has been immersed with these sorts of Corpocrats most of his adult life.
It reminds me of Bush, people thought he was some Texas working class guy when in fact he was a Yale/Harvard MBA super elite, ruling families product.
Can Obama be deprogrammed?
It talks about how he has fallen capture to the cult of neoliberalism. Actually, not just him.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Honestly I don't really care who calls the recession bottom and when it happens...
precisely because the entire nation is defocusing on such the types of things like above.
Remember all of the fraud, scandals, ripoffs of the dot con era? Corporations got a slap on the wrist and then they all went and moved onto the real estate sector.
If there was ever evidence the U.S. needs dramatic regulatory and policy changes I'd say handing over $800 Billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Zombie banks and an "verge of Economic Armageddon" would be it.
But instead it's like they are trying to erase these events from memory....and want to continue with business as usual.
At least Bloomberg wrote about it, abet after the fact...I'll bet you won't see such a report on CNBC.
Would you believe the piss-poor earnings reports so far this year are actually fictional?
The article gives several examples. For example:
You would think that after all the Wall Street scandals, they would be a little more sensitive to BS accounting. But you would be wrong. The game continues.
Three possible drivers for the the Poor Laws of the 1500s were:
1 losses due to early enclosures of common land, ie of commoners'rights over common land in some areas - common land provided food and fuels;
2 the loss of the monasteries, ie Henry VIII's policy - hitherto they had provided some charitable relief for the sick and poor in earlier centuries;
3 the decline and or movements of the population due to plagues.
I agree with you and probably what is worse, before this financial meltdown/recession even happened, I think the focus was more on the structural problems and the shrinking middle class than now.
I also agree Cash for Clunkers is insane...we are giving taxpayer dollars to foreign corporations so Americans can take on more car payments...what?
(Not that GM, Ford, Chrysler are truly American cars either)...
Yet all of the news are these two topics and it's like the pretty bad numbers before all of this now are "good"..
I hate to say this but if we have + GDP in Q3, we've got a major problem going on that will stop all of the major restructuring, from regulation to trade to labor that a lot of people thought they were voting for and want.
Now what about the sixteen major bullet holes in my body leaking more blood? Now I hate to be the guy taking a lawn mower to these green shoots, but 9.4 or 9.5, it's still crap. I will say this, there was talk in the report of wages rising. That remains to be seen in upcoming reports on wages, labor unit costs, etc. Still, the economy could be "improving", but I say improving like I say we stopped a patient in an emergency room from bleeding to death, they're still in the e-room.
This is why I can't understand the big deal over cash for clunkers? The stupidest thing I've seen. Please spare me the arguments for it like the recycling bit or "hey they can open up idle plants now!" I've heard just about all of them, and I still think the scheme stinks. You cannot run an auto industry on taxpayer subsidy. Auto sales were rising, you didn't need this. But I'm wondering if these sales are merely a reflection of the scrappage rate, replacements and such. Yet even here, there is no guarantee of sales increase in the next quarter. If it takes a clunker deal to actually make the sale, now, then the automakers are still in trouble.
How do you get companies to re-employ? I was watching CNBC and MSNBC, and some talking heads (note, not one news channel had a business executive head on today, just the pundits). There was talk about how in California there was a firm in the solar industry. Indeed, CNBC at times today were more bearish than this site! They highlighted how only just yesterday and the week before they cited how "growth" in companies were coming from cost management (i.e. layoffs and firings). There was no prospect of top line growth for many companies.
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www.venomopolis.com
this is related to labor arbitrage, which has been ongoing, he couldn't get a job before the recession.
Remember all of that stuff about outsourcing, trade, displacing workers, age discrimination?
All of that is BR - before recession.
Well this is a recession, I'm sure this guy will bounce right back once the economy turns around, especially with a resume like his.
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