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

[JenAltArmy]

The link was broken. It was a Bureau of Labor Statistics bar graph showing the decreasing unemployment figures since '09. Even without it I still easily silenced the fake right wing argument that employment numbers aren't improving substantially.

there you go, playing the game. what have you learned Merk? ZERO!

left/right they both are wrong on many subjects. we must DEMAND that they stop spending money!

or are you so broken that you don't see any issues with all of the obama spending? do you think we must have 80% of the USA workforce working for obama and or living on entitlements?

 

[JenAltArmy]

It's just that simple if you're as ignorant about economics and the function of government as you are, yes.

this coming from a person who has never worked in the private sector, or started his own business.

god, you are stuck a government fuc&tard

 

[mercury14]

this coming from a person who has never worked in the private sector, or started his own business.

god, you are stuck a government fuc&tard

Accusing me of not working in the private sector makes as much sense as accusing me of not using a computer when I post.

 

[mercury14]

there you go, playing the game. what have you learned Merk? ZERO!

left/right they both are wrong on many subjects. we must DEMAND that they stop spending money!

or are you so broken that you don't see any issues with all of the obama spending? do you think we must have 80% of the USA workforce working for obama and or living on entitlements?

Which benefits do you want to have cut that will balance the budget? Please name them.

 

[JenAltArmy]

Which benefits do you want to have cut that will balance the budget? Please name them.

everything about government needs to be examine and recreated. example, government overhead runs at 200% per employee while in the private sector employee overhead is 30%.

next, pension plans need to be terminated.

 

[mercury14]

everything about government needs to be examine and recreated. example, government overhead runs at 200% per employee while in the private sector employee overhead is 30%.

No proof though, huh?

I like the idea of reducing overhead. But you need some data.

 

[JenAltArmy]

No proof though, huh?

I like the idea of reducing overhead. But you need some data.

please!

you work for the government what is the end cost for your job?

 

[mercury14]

please!

you work for the government what is the end cost for your job?

I work for a private corporation based in the red state of Texas that contracts with the government. With salary, benefits, and the overhead my company charges in order to make a profit, probably $400,000-$450,000.

Why?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

SAN FRANCISCO — The desire to own your own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression.

Even as the economy began to fitfully recover in the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004. The ownership rate is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier.

Disenchantment with real estate is bound to swell further on Tuesday when the most widely watched housing index is all but guaranteed to show that prices of existing homes sank in March below the lows reached two years ago — until now the bottom of the housing crash. In February, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of 20 large cities slumped for the seventh month in a row.

Housing is locked in a downward spiral, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because even those who are solvent are opting out.

“The emotional scars left by the collapse are changing the American psyche,” said Pete Flint, chief executive of the housing Web site Trulia. “There was a time when owning a home was a symbol you had made it. Now it’s O.K. not to own.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/business/31housing.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Again, this means six months out to durable goods orders.

U_D here's your problem, you're looking percentage increases and since the volume is so low, any improvement looks like big numbers, but when you compare apples to apples, you still need a million more starts just to get back to the Bush years...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management’s emerging markets group, said another financial crisis is inevitable because the causes of the previous one haven’t been resolved.

“There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis,” Mobius said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo today in response to a question about price swings. “Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes.”

The total value of derivatives in the world exceeds total global gross domestic product by a factor of 10, said Mobius, who oversees more than $50 billion. With that volume of bets in different directions, volatility and equity market crises will occur, he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...-around-corner-amid-volatile-derivatives.html
__________________
How can you measure the value of knowing that company books are sounder than they were before? Of no more overnight bankruptcies with the employees and retirees left holding the bag? No more disruption to entire sectors of the economy?
Michael Oxley 2002
Co-Author of Sarbanes-Oxley Law

It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis.
Chris Dodd
Co-Author Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act
Friend of Angelo

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

We are beginning to see the contours of the upcoming 2012 reelection campaign of Barack Obama. Whether always officially sanctioned or not, Obama’s campaign will focus on three general themes: a) the 2008 meltdown of the economy on Bush’s watch; b) conservative heartlessness in gutting cherished entitlement programs; and c) racial bias behind any criticism of Barack Obama.

By any standard, the economy has remained mostly dismal for well over two years. Deficits, joblessness, fuel prices, average GDP growth, and housing are far worse than the average during the eight years of Bush’s presidency. Unemployment during almost all of President Obama’s tenure has exceeded 9 percent, despite promises that, because of the stimulus, it would not exceed 8 percent. Gas still averages almost $4 a gallon nationwide, amid a landscape of continual administration resistance to new domestic exploration and leasing. Record numbers of Americans now draw food stamps and unemployment insurance; to suggest that these programs are plagued by abuse and fraud, or that, if they are too easily available, they can discourage initiative, is heresy. Some of the largest states — California, Illinois, New York — are nearly fiscally insolvent. We’ve borrowed $5 trillion since 2009 to “stimulate” the economy — and seen little upsurge in economic growth, but a lot of evidence of a raging inflation to come on the heels of soaring gas and food prices.

Massive debt, record new deficits, high rates of joblessness, out-of-control prices for essentials like fuel and food — a combination like that usually dooms a president’s reelection bid. Similarly weak economies in 1980 and 1992 derailed incumbents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush.

However, Team Obama will make the argument that at least there has not been another Wall Street panic as during September 2008 under Bush, with the general uncertainty that followed. “Bush did it” is now too ironic a charge to evoke any more in matters of foreign policy, given that President Obama has now accepted all the Bush anti-terrorism protocols and wars — and gone well beyond them by joining a third conflict in Libya and quintupling the number of Predator-drone targeted assassinations.

But on the economic front, the “inherited mess” will have to do in the attempt to convince us that the present hard times are still George Bush’s while the signs of a weak recovery are all Barack Obama’s. Similarly, Herbert Hoover was still evoked for nearly a half-century any time FDR, Truman, or LBJ hit a rough patch. And if you did not know about the courageous economic decisions Barack Obama has made on our behalf on the domestic front, you will now, after the heroic killing of bin Laden. In the words of Joe Biden, it was “the boldest undertaking any president has undertaken on a single event in modern history” — an “undertaking” “undertaken” greater than the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, to stop North Korea from obliterating the south, to confront the Soviet Union over its missiles in Cuba, to send troops to recover Kuwait, or to conduct the surge in Iraq?

Victor Davis Hanson
NRO




Note: The SAS took their guy alive in order to get more information...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

...

Recognizing an episode of history threatening to repeat itself, Mr. White began to conduct public lectures on the subject of inflation. In 1876 he addressed a bipartisan panel of representatives and senators at the invitation of Rep. James A. Garfield (20 years later, Mr. White would still be referring to him as General Garfield), whose congressional speeches, read today, make Rep. Ron Paul sound like Alan Greenspan. Garfield was a sworn enemy of the Legal Tender Acts and the Greenback: another one of those 19th-century Republicans who are starting to look pretty good in retrospect.

Mr. White related the monitory French experience to whatever politicians and businessmen would listen, and later published his thoughts in Fiat Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended, a book that I read not long ago on the sage advice of investor Victor Sperandeo, a.k.a. Trader Vic. Sperandeo recently gave a talk on the subject of contemporary inflation dangers at the Union League Club in New York, where Mr. White had delivered his own lecture 135 years earlier.

Some of Mr. White’s chronicle will sound familiar.

It was a new dawn, a day of hope and change, the ancien régime and the theocrats and the plutocracy having been supplanted by fresh new faces dedicated to Reason and promising to fundamentally change France. That turned out to be an expensive proposition, and the new government found itself in a bind: It was unwilling to cut spending or to raise taxes. The country, Mr. White writes, “found itself in deep financial embarrassment: There was a heavy debt and a serious deficit. . . . There was a general want of confidence in business circles; capital had shown its proverbial timidity by retiring out of sight as far as possible; throughout the land was stagnation.” A source of particular annoyance to the Jacobins and the rest of the Left was the fact that businesses and investors were sitting on a great deal of cash but refusing to spend or to invest, and many were sheltering their capital abroad.

The government decided upon a stimulus package — to flood the economy with fresh money in order to encourage new business through the magic of l’effet multiplicateur. The problem was that the Jacobins were, perforce, marginally less irresponsible than, say, the present government of the United States: They could not just go borrow the money. And they faced a real limitation: Their money was made out of gold, not good wishes. It was not a faith-based currency, or even a faith-and-credit-based currency.

But the revolutionary government had heard about paper money — had, in fact, seen in it action recently among its revolutionary comrades in the United States. So they decided to issue some paper currency — just the one time, to get some liquidity into the system and spur aggregate demand. But they did not have a Ben Bernanke to magic money into existence for them. And while they may have been raving radicals who would soon enough be sending a goodly portion of the nation to the guillotine, the idea of creating money based on nothing but confidence and a firm handshake did not occur to them — who could possibly take such a notion seriously?

As students of Edmund Burke will know (which is to say, as conservatives will know), the revolutionary government had already taken beady-eyed note of the fact that about a third of the land in France — some of the best land, at that — was owned by religious institutions. That land was expropriated, and a new kind of currency, called the assignat, was born. It was a cross between a modern paper currency and a government bond: It paid interest (originally 3 percent, about the same as a U.S. Treasury bond today) and was secured by the value of the stolen church lands, for which it could be exchanged as legal tender.

It wasn’t really meant to be a workaday currency at first, and only large notes were to be issued. You didn’t use assignats to buy a loaf of bread; you used them to buy tracts of formerly ecclesiastical land or pay large debts to the state or make big investments. So confident were the French authorities in the effects of this stimulatory pump-priming that M. de la Rochefoucauld predicted all of that gold sitting in businesses’ coffers and offshore enterprises would soon come online and start making business happen. The revolution was shovel-ready.

What followed was a boom — a short one. Maybe it was a vengeful God cheesed off about getting the boot from His real estate like some subprime deity. Maybe it was that those titles were 1,500 years old, and any country — France or Zimbabwe or Cuba — that interferes with legal titles to property is doomed to reap the whirlwind. Monetizing the debt did not help, and the French should have known, because they already had firsthand experience with shady currency.

Some of the graybeards in the investing world of 18th-century France remembered John Law, the Scottish economist/card-sharp/crook who had served as French finance minister under Louis XV and established the Banque Générale, a nominally private bank that administered government assets and issued paper currency — i.e., your basic Federal Reserve–type setup. Law helped fan the irrational exuberance that led to a bubble in the share price of the Mississippi Company, France’s New World government-sponsored enterprise. The bubble was so big and so hot that the Banque Générale had to keep issuing new notes just to keep up with share-buyers’ demands, and did so far in excess of its gold and silver holdings. When the note-holders came to redeem, the cupboard was bare, and in 1720 Law high-tailed it to Belgium, because there wasn’t a Kennedy School of Government in those days.

Decades later, the smart money had an inkling that some of this newfangled paper might depreciate the way John Law’s funny money had, so French investors immediately put that new money into anything and everything they could. There was a building boom, a stock boom, a trade boom. Commodities prices started to rise as investors, suspicious of the weak currency and high levels of government debt, put their money into assets with tangible value. (Did gold prices hit record highs? You bet they did, soon enough.) When it came to non-core inflation — all that food and fuel that economists are committed to ignoring — rising prices were a worrisome development indeed to the revolutionary government; when bread prices rose, they started hearing the words “Let them eat cake” in their sleep. Not good. Bad revolutionary mojo.

The good news was that wages went up, too — until they didn’t. The bubbles started to play out, the real-estate market contracted when everybody discovered that cheap money led to overbuilding, and the French rediscovered Gresham’s law: Bad money drives out good. The paper-money stimulus was supposed to help get the gold flowing again, to get the real stuff back in the game, but it had the opposite effect: Everybody spent their paper money as fast as they could, but held onto their gold. Prices started to diverge — 100 livres of paper money was supposed to be worth the same as 100 livres of gold: That’s what the law said. But the market said otherwise. Foreign trading partners, in particular, weren’t crazy about getting paid in what amounted to government-backed French mortgage derivatives (“papier-terre,” they called it, meaning “land paper”). Precious metals became increasingly scarce. Having stolen the church’s land, the government next stole the church bells and melted them down into small change.

Boom turned to bust, business stagnated, wages dropped — but prices continued to rise.

So the government embarked on QE2: another dose of paper money injected into the economy. This was especially attractive to the French government in 1790, inasmuch as it had already spent all of the money it had raised from QE1, and it wanted to raise more without paying market rates to lenders. (Did I mention this would sound familiar?) The first assignat issue hadn’t accounted for all of the value of the seized church lands, and the government eventually set about seizing other lands, too: from the aristocracy, emigrants, and sundry political enemies. In the newspapers, the Matt Taibbis of the day began to call — in all seriousness — for the hanging of shopkeepers, while the Paul Krugmans complained that the first round of stimulus hadn’t been big enough.

Talleyrand was the first to see the flaw in the assignat system: “You can, indeed, arrange it so that the people shall be forced to take a thousand livres in paper for a thousand livres in specie; but you can never arrange it so that a man shall be obliged to give a thousand livres in specie for a thousand livres in paper,—in that fact is embedded the entire question; and on account of that fact the whole system fails.” He was accused of being in the pocket of the financiers and Big Specie. The Left said that the only people who would be hurt by QE2 were bankers and speculators, while people who worked hard and played by the rules, and businesses that kept French manufacturing jobs in France, would benefit. So QE2 passed, 508–423. (The French got to vote on their currency devaluation: liberté, égalité, faire faillite.)

As Burke irritably put it:

These gentlemen perhaps do not believe a great deal in the miracles of piety; but it cannot be questioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege. Is there a debt which presses them? Issue assignats. Are compensations to be made or a maintenance decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold in their office or expelled from their profession? Assignats. Is a fleet to be fitted out? Assignats. If sixteen millions sterling of these assignats forced on the people leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever, Issue, says one, thirty millions sterling of assignats,—says another, Issue fourscore millions more of assignats. The only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance. They are all professors of assignats. Even those whose natural good sense and knowledge of commerce, not obliterated by philosophy, furnish decisive arguments against this delusion, conclude their arguments by proposing the emission of assignats. I suppose they must talk of assignats, as no other language would be understood. All experience of their inefficacy does not in the least discourage them. Are the old assignats depreciated at market? What is the remedy? Issue new assignats.

The first issue of paper money was for 400 million livres. There came a second issue, and after the second issue came a third, a fourth, a fifth, with the government promising each time that one more round of stimulus would do the trick. When prices shot up, the government started whispering darkly about gougers and profiteers. When food subsequently disappeared from the marketplace, the army was dispatched to the farms and fields to bring produce to market. That worked — for one harvest. The next year’s harvest was too small even to feed Paris, much less all of France: Gaul went Galt.

Refusing to sell products at the same price whether the payer was offering paper or gold became a criminal offense — punished first with a fine, then with decades in irons, and finally with death. By the time the inflation was at its worst, it became a capital offense even to ask whether a buyer was offering paper or gold. The altar vessels were taken from the churches and melted into money; as with Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 6102, private gold holdings were seized by the government (the old patrician FDR offered a jewelry exemption; the French did not). The penalty for hiding assets: death. (FDR handed down only ten years in prison.)

Still, the overstimulated economy acted terribly understimulated. Bread was scarce, so the Jacobins called for a new tax on the rich to fund bread subsidies. Prices continued to climb, and the assignats continued to depreciate. Public finances were a mess, too: The government pumped up its balance sheet by including enormous tribute payments that France believed it would receive after defeating all its international rivals in future wars — they actually put “Win the Future” on the ledger as if it were an asset. (“As patriotism, it was sublime,” Mr. White writes. “As finance it was deadly.”) The only new jobs were the 400 positions added at the presses where the money was printed. Being French, those workers staged a strike in 1793, demanding higher pay and benefits. (They won.)

The newspapers began to denounce “monarchical commerce which only sought wealth,” as opposed to “republican commerce — a commerce of moderate profits.” Price-fixing laws were duly enacted, and a domestic espionage system set up for enforcing them. The penalty for breaking the price-fixing rules: death. The penalty for making foreign investments: death. The penalty for criticizing the mandats, the new currency created to replace the assignats: death. And still the paper currencies continued to decline, in the face of death itself; soon they had lost 97 percent of their original value. Eventually, they would lose even the 3 percent that remained.

What that all means is this: Between 1790 and 1795, the price of a pound of sugar in France went from the equivalent of $2.28 in modern U.S. dollars to $158.16. Wages stayed the same. A bag of flour went from two francs to 225 francs. The original 400 million in quantitative easing became 45 billion over the course of six years.

According to Cambridge Modern History: French Revolution, the compte rendu of 1788, the final budget presented to Louis XVI — the one that sparked the crisis that ultimately unleashed the revolution and all that came after — featured a deficit of about 30 percent of government spending. Barack Obama’s last one was 46 percent. In May, Paul Krugman began calling for QE3 — “both larger and broader-based than QE2.” Napoleon put France back on gold and vowed that he’d die before he saw paper money being issued again, but he also wore funny hats and wasn’t nearly as enlightened as us.

Kevin D. Williamson
NRO

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

If you are part of the growing percentage of Americans who choose to live outside the state of California, you probably haven’t heard of Little Hoover. But this oversight agency is the closest the Golden State comes to gray eminence. Created in 1962, the commission makes measured and judicious suggestions on the governance of the state. The panel’s 13 members are chosen by a scrupulous process, described over four pages of the California code, that limits overt partisanship and emphasizes separation of powers. The commission’s judgments are generally considered as reliable as a Moffat & Company gold coin.

So Little Hoover’s February report, Public Pensions for Retirement Security, came as a shock. Even the most far-reaching state governors have focused their plans for reduced pension benefits mostly on new hires. While a few (such as New Jersey’s Christie) have imposed later retirement dates, all have stayed within currently accepted legal practice for the ways existing government employees accrue retirement benefits. Broadly speaking, this means the reform proposals are confined to asking current workers to contribute more to their plans, not tampering with final payouts or accrual rates.

Little Hoover, by contrast, concludes that another two-tiered system—in which new hires come in with a less generous retirement package—will be inadequate. The report argues repeatedly that the state must find a way to pare back existing contracts. “The state and local governments need…to restructure future, unearned retirement benefits for their employees,” it states. “The Legislature must pass legislation giving this explicit authority to state and local government agencies.” The commission acknowledges that any such law “may entail the courts having to revisit prior court decisions.”

And where many Republicans—including Wisconsin’s Walker and California 2010 gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman—have made a point of excluding cops and firefighters from their pension reform plans, Little Hoover states: “Public safety pensions cannot be exempted from the discussion because of political inconvenience.”

The things Little Hoover suggests are not just too extreme for conservative Republicans. They’re unacceptable even to some libertarians. In a post on the Wisconsin union standoff at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Georgia State philosopher Andrew Jason Cohen warns against making it “permissible to unilaterally change the contracts of state employees.”

http://reason.com/archives/2011/05/31/big-trouble-in-little-hoover

 

[busybody..]

excellent news

if NOT for Obama

it woulda been

minus .09

U.S. home prices in double-dip recession after 0.8% March drop: Case-Shiller

 

[koalabear]

excellent news

if NOT for Obama

it woulda been

minus .09

U.S. home prices in double-dip recession after 0.8% March drop: Case-Shiller

That's just a rumor.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43222187

 

[koalabear]

Oil and gold climb on a weaker dollar. Home prices fell more than 4% during the first quarter. Consumer confidence dips in May.

 

[Ham Murabi]

Oil and gold climb on a weaker dollar. Home prices fell more than 4% during the first quarter. Consumer confidence dips in May.

Print more money!

 

[koalabear]

Food prices set to double by 2030, aid group says
925 million people go hungry every day, according to Oxfam report


That should help cutback on carbon emissions.

 

[mercury14]

Oil and gold climb on a weaker dollar. Home prices fell more than 4% during the first quarter. Consumer confidence dips in May.

Or you could look at the longer term trend. Which is more meaningful?

 

[koalabear]

Or you could look at the longer term trend. Which is more meaningful?

Reality.

 

[Luk]

Reality.

You should try it one day.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Beco]

Or you could look at the longer term trend. Which is more meaningful?

come on guy....

 

[Beco]

Food prices set to double by 2030, aid group says
925 million people go hungry every day, according to Oxfam report


That should help cutback on carbon emissions.

But all the rotting corpses will produce carbon emissions....

 

[koalabear]

But all the rotting corpses will produce carbon emissions....

negated by the much lower methane releases.