What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

Ulaven_Demorte said:

I know, the truth sounds funny to the benighted blindly partisan mind.

The simple fact that the NBER hasn't declared the recession over means pretty much nothing at this point. They are notoriously slow to make ANY announcement, good or bad.

But you know this, as does Firetroll.

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vetteman said:

Here's what happens when you put a ten percent tax on hiring young people. Obummer, thank you:

Bad statistics for summer employment for youth


By Diane Stafford | Kansas City Star

The share of young people aged 16 to 24 who were employed this summer fell to 48.9 percent -- the lowest rate on record since 1948.

Meanwhile, the raw number of youth who held jobs in July 2010 actually rose by 1.8 million from July 2009 to 18.6 million.

But as a percentage of the population, the share of workers in that age group fell, according to annual data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released today.

The youth employment rate always rises in the summer -- and it went up this year by 571,000 from April. But that was half as much as in each of the two previous summers, the bureau said.

For the summer of 2010, the youth labor force totaled 22.9 million workers in July, an 11.5 percent growth from April youth payrolls.

Knowledge of the recession and bad job market may have kept young people from even looking for work. Also, many in that age group could have been enrolled in summer classes and not seeking employment.

For whatever reason, the proportion of the 16-24 age group that was working or looking for work also dropped this summer to its lowest percentage on record -- 60.6 percent. That was 2.5 percentage points below the rate recorded in Juy 2009 and 17 percentage points below the peak of labor force participation for that age group in July 1989.

About 4.4 million youth were actively searching for work and considered unemployed in July this year. That produced a youth unemployment rate of 19.1 percent, the highest rate on record for the month.



Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/08/27/99763/bad-statistics-for-summer-employment.html#ixzz0xrCzXQZn

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vetteman said:

Let's raise it to 15 bucks an hour and UD will be out of work.

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jeninflorida said:

....and obama belives in the Constitution?

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mercury14 said:

Yes, don't you remember conservatives bitching last week at him when he said Muslim Americans have the Constitutional right to build a mosque? You morons attacked him - and are still attacking him - because he pointed your fearmongering asses to the Constitution.

Oh and right before that the righties got their panties all up in a bunch about what a load of crap the 14th Amendment is. We had to tell you to stop fucking with the Constitution there as well.

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Ham Murabi said:

Name one prominent conservative who said the Muslims didn't have a right to build the mosque.

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mercury14 said:

My point is that they attacked Obama for pointing out a basic Constitutional right. Acknowledging that Muslim Americans have Constitutional rights is simply not okay in the warped right wing world.

(In fact, for a whole lot of you morons, it caused you to think that Obama is Muslim himself)

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Slowlane said:

It is a very controversial subject. One that was handling itself quite well. In my opinion, Obama said nothing wrong. But, much like the oil spill, he shouldn't have said anything at all. It was all starting to quiet down until he shook the tree.

However, where the oil spill might actually be some of his concern, the building is not. It was a mistake to stick his nose into something he could have avoided.

He should have ended his statement by making it plain that it's not a federal issue and is up to the laws and the people of New York. Whatever opinion the president has caries no more weight than that of any other citizen.

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Slowlane said:

It is a very controversial subject. One that was handling itself quite well. In my opinion, Obama said nothing wrong. But, much like the oil spill, he shouldn't have said anything at all. It was all starting to quiet down until he shook the tree.

However, where the oil spill might actually be some of his concern, the building is not. It was a mistake to stick his nose into something he could have avoided.

He should have ended his statement by making it plain that it's not a federal issue and is up to the laws and the people of New York. Whatever opinion the president has caries no more weight than that of any other citizen.

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mercury14 said:

A political mistake maybe, since acknowldging that Muslim Americans have Constitutional rights pisses off conservatives. Internationally it played extremely well, since the world heard that America is still a nation of tolerance and inclusion despite conservatives being loudly intolerant and xenophobic.

But politics aside, how was it "wrong"?

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Ham Murabi said:

I trust everyone is aware that Harry Reid, like a lot of conservatives, doesn't think it's a smart move on the part of the Muslims to put a Cordoba Mosque slow close to ground zero.
BTW, what is a Cordoba Mosque? You looked into that, Merc?

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mercury14 said:

A political mistake maybe, since acknowldging that Muslim Americans have Constitutional rights pisses off conservatives. Internationally it played extremely well, since the world heard that America is still a nation of tolerance and inclusion despite conservatives being loudly intolerant and xenophobic.

But politics aside, how was it "wrong"?

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Slowlane said:

I though I covered that. It was a bad move politically. He didn't say anything wrong. At least nothing that I'm aware if, I haven't heard the whole thing.

I have nothing to fault him for on this, except politicians are almost always better off keeping their mouths shut on issues that don't concern them. I usually furnishes the other guy with grist for his mill.

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IrezumiKiss said:

I don't know what a Cordoba Mosque is, neither.

I know about the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center, but not the Cordoba Mosque. You looked into that, Ham?

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Ham Murabi said:

http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/aug/20/new-yorkers-split-over-islamic-cultural-center/


There ya go. You'll note the photo caption includes information on the Cordoba Mosque.

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IrezumiKiss said:

Ah. The photo caption.

You do know it's no longer being called the "Cordoba" anything, yes? They scrapped that name a while back. And that it's not a mosque to begin with?

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Ham Murabi said:

I trust everyone is aware that Harry Reid, like a lot of conservatives, doesn't think it's a smart move on the part of the Muslims to put a Cordoba Mosque slow close to ground zero.
BTW, what is a Cordoba Mosque? You looked into that, Merc?

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American enthusiasts of more stimulus have been urging this country to look to China for guidance on how to beat a recession. As they see it, while our politicians debated and dithered and fell short, China's wise autocrats moved quickly to inject a massive stimulus and restore robust growth.

Despite the global downturn, China's economic growth rate remains above 10 percent. But there is mounting evidence that Beijing has misallocated vast amounts of capital, touching off a real-estate crisis that could yet drag the world's second-largest economy down to earth.

When the global marketplace went into meltdown mode two years ago and Chinese exports dropped off, Beijing mounted a stimulus several times bigger relative to the size of its economy than in this country. It announced a four trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus for infrastructure projects and housing developments. Some of the stimulus was used to encourage local governments to lend money to state-owned companies to develop housing complexes, roads and bridges, on the theory that these are big employment generators because they boost heavy manufacturing—steel, cement—and other sectors of the economy.

Beijing also lowered capital reserve requirements for its state-owned banks ordering them to dole out loans to "support growth." Though official data are unreliable, in 2009 Beijing apparently handed out somewhere close to 10 trillion yuan in new loans—more than twice the year before—and expanded the country's total loan portfolio and money supply by one-third, according to Patrick Chovanec, associate professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing.

Prominent progressives in this country hailed the moves. Paul Krugman wrote: "China is doing what I'm constantly urging the Obama Administration to do, which is to reverse the economic decline by a large-scale stimulus." Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote in TalkingPoints Memo last year: "If only we could export our Blue Dogs and deficit hawks to China, we might be able to compete."

But that ignores the nasty side effects. Fueled in part by this massive injection of liquidity, housing prices that had started dropping due to the recession began to soar again. Over the past year they increased nearly 12 percent, according to the latest figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics. So many middle-class Chinese (especially young couples wishing to move out of their parents' home) are being priced out of the market that their travails became the subject of a popular TV series called Dwelling Narrowness. Beijing banned the show, fearing it would cause unrest.

The problem is that government money is going to build homes not for occupancy but for ownership. Speculation, if you will. Andy Xie, a Shanghai-based economist formerly with Morgan Stanley, believes almost 25 percent to 30 percent of private commercial and housing stock in China is vacant. Entire cities, such as Ordos in inner-Mongolia, erected literally from scratch, stand empty.

"Chinese treat homes like gold bars buying multiple units as a store of value," notes Chovanec. Chinese avoid the stock market because it is still volatile and risky, and banks and bonds offer a low yield. Hence, Chinese are content to buy homes and let them sit because, thanks to the absence of property taxes, holding costs are negligible. Having never experienced a housing slump since China privatized its housing market in the 1990s, they believe that home prices only rise.

This can't last, but backers of China's stimulus believe there won't be any serious economic downside when the bubble bursts. Homeowners won't be thrown on the street because Chinese buy their first homes outright through their savings—not loans. And when house prices drop, the excess stock will quickly get scooped up—not boarded up.
While Chinese homeowners are not generally leveraged, those who buy second homes do finance them. And developers, including local governments and state-owned companies, are massively leveraged. This poses a big problem—Shen Minggao, Citigroup's Hong Kong-based China economist, estimates in Bloomberg Businessweek that at least 2.4 trillion yuan of the stimulus is already in nonperforming loans.

China's autocrats understand that they have a bubble on their hands. They've mandated minimum down payments of 50 percent on second homes and are considering property taxes to rein in speculative purchases. However, this will mean that the houses put on the market will find fewer buyers.

Beijing is in a dilemma. It can cut spending and rein in its monetary expansion, releasing over time capital for more productive endeavors (especially if it opens up hitherto closed investment options) and putting the economy on a healthier footing. However, that would mean slower growth, lower home values, rising unemployment and potential political unrest. Alternatively, it can buy a few more years of faux-growth and stability by propping up the real-estate market—and risk making the day of reckoning far worse when it arrives.

Either way, Beijing's mandarins haven't discovered some magical formula to spend and inflate their way out of a recession. Pouring liquidity into real estate is the Keynesian equivalent of digging ditches and filling them with stones. Unfortunately, the Chinese economy has fallen into one—a ditch, that is. The U.S. might have endured a bad recession. But so long as it avoids the second stimulus that China enthusiasts are advocating, it might be up and running while China is still digging itself out.

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Ulaven_Demorte said:

I imagine Ham is trying to seize on the whole "Cordoba is a super secret Muslim codeword for conquer" thing which has been blasted into a billion pieces already..

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