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

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

Is this the Colonel, the doctor, or the Indian Chief?

This is what, the fifty-seventh time I've caught you not reading the very article you're using? I haven't been to Lit in like two months and it took me all of 30 seconds to do it again.

*Quick, change the subject before you lose any more credit!*

 

[unregistered]

 

[koalabear]

Signs point to tepid consumer spending for 2012
High levels of debt make rapid growth unlikely

American consumers are running out of tricks.

As the weak economy has trudged on, they have leaned on credit cards to pay for holiday gifts, many bought at discounts. They are dipping into savings to cover spikes in gas, food and rent. They are substituting domestic vacations for international trips, squeezing more life out of their washing machines and refrigerators and switching to alternatives as meat prices have risen.

That leaves little room for a big increase in spending in 2012, economists say, a shaky foundation for the most important pillar of the American economy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45852507/ns/business-us_business/#.TwKWPUqyxIs

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Good economic news!

According to the FBI, over 1.5 million background checks on customers were requested by gun dealers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in

December. Nearly 500,000 of those were in the six days before Christmas.

It was the highest number ever in a single month, surpassing the previous record set in November.

On Dec 23 alone there were 102,222 background checks, making it the second busiest single day for buying guns in history.

The actual number of guns bought may have been even higher if individual customers took home more than one each.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...buy-record-numbers-of-guns-for-Christmas.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

More good news!

Governments of the world’s leading economies have more than $7.6 trillion of debt maturing this year, with most facing a rise in borrowing costs.

Led by Japan’s $3 trillion and the U.S.’s $2.8 trillion, the amount coming due for the Group of Seven nations and Brazil, Russia, India and China is up from $7.4 trillion at this time last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ten-year bond yields will be higher by year-end for at least seven of the countries, forecasts show.

Investors may demand higher compensation to lend to countries that struggle to finance increasing debt burdens as the global economy slows, surveys show. The International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for growth this year to 4 percent from a prior estimate of 4.5 percent as Europe’s debt crisis spreads, the U.S. struggles to reduce a budget deficit exceeding $1 trillion and China’s property market cools

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...6-trillion-bond-tab-as-rally-seen-fading.html

You know warms the cockles of my heart and eases my fears?

Being on the same page with Japan...

The Federal Reserve has said it will keep its target rate for overnight loans between banks between zero and 0.25 percent through mid-2013, and is now selling $400 billion of its short- term Treasuries and reinvesting the proceeds into longer-term government debt in a program traders dubbed Operation Twist.

The Bank of Japan has kept its key rate at or below 0.5 percent since 1995, and expanded the asset-purchase program last year to 20 trillion yen ($260 billion). The Bank of England kept its main rate at a record low 0.5 percent last month, and left its asset-buying target at 275 billion pounds ($426 billion).

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Oh good lord, it just gets too funny to be true!

Keynes, Krugman, and Austerity
By William Voegeli, NRO
January 3, 2012

‘The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” Paul Krugman quoted this assertion, made by John Maynard Keynes in 1937, to frame “Keynes Was Right,” his final New York Times column for 2011. The master’s adage, reworked by Krugman, is, “Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.”

This is not a fresh theme for Krugman. He has filled too many columns to remember with complaints that President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill wasn’t nearly big enough to catalyze a true economic recovery. In October 2010, for example, Krugman lamented that the “key problem” with the Obama economic policy was that “we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.”

Any column in this continuing series could be titled, “If Only They’d Listened to Me.” In the most recent, Krugman writes that “those of us who did the math” knew all along that the Obama stimulus was “much too small given the depth of the slump.” They also foresaw that it would engender a political backlash in favor of reducing federal deficits, even as continuing economic frailty signaled to those who did the math the necessity of increasing them.

The more intriguing part of the latest column is Krugman’s broad hint that there is a “right time” for austerity, and maybe even for “slashing government spending.” As it happens, the late 1990s saw not only an economic boom but the beginning of Professor Krugman’s moonlighting career as a Times columnist. The economy is “flourishing,” he wrote for the paper in 1999, with “unemployment at a 25-year low” while inflation is “quiescent.” A year later he stated the economy “has been practically wallowing in good news for the last few years: productivity has been soaring, allowing the economy to grow far faster than seemed possible without running out of labor…”

One might expect that Krugman’s columns during those years of economic exuberance were as relentlessly single-minded in demanding counter-cyclical government austerity as the ones since 2008 have been in demanding counter-cyclical government spending. Manifestations of that principled symmetry, however, are somewhere between slight and negligible. In August 2000, for example, he proclaimed the truth, apparently inviolable, “that demands for government services grow with the economy: more air traffic to control, more homes to protect from forest fires.” Later, in a column just before the 2000 election, Krugman argued that because the future might bring unhappy surprises, the “responsible, sensible thing for the U.S. government to do is to run very big surpluses right now.” Without explicitly endorsing their view, he noted that “budget analysts who take the long view” believe that “if anything we should be raising taxes and cutting spending.”

That oblique reference to reducing outlays was as close as the boom-year Krugman columns got to endorsing austerity that entails reducing government spending, widely understood to be its defining feature. The more common tone, voiced by many Democrats during the Clinton years, was dour resignation to the political infeasibility of launching the next New Deal. Krugman numbered Vice President Al Gore among those New Democrats who have “clearly renounced the party’s old big-government, big-spending tendencies” in favor of the “penny-ante activism” of “handing out a few baby carrots here and there.” These timorous Democrats were opposed by Reagan revolutionaries who “didn’t want a scaled-back welfare state, they wanted a repudiation of the whole idea of a social safety net.”

At one point after the 2000 election Krugman labeled Larry Summers, President Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, “austerity-minded,” which meant only that Summers was, like Krugman, opposed to what the latter called the “big, irresponsible tax cuts” George W. Bush had campaigned on all that year. When Dick Cheney urged the enactment of those tax cuts as a way to stimulate an economy that was slowing down at the end of 2000, Krugman dismissed him as a “vulgar Keynesian,” peddling the “now-discredited doctrine that taxes and spending should be routinely twiddled in an attempt to ‘fine-tune’ the economy.”

Refined Keynesians, by contrast, understand that “when governments try to fight garden-variety recessions by cutting taxes or increasing spending they almost always get it wrong. By the time Congress has finished negotiating who gets what, and puts the new law into effect, the recession is usually past — and the fiscal stimulus arrives just when it is least needed.” Stimulus spending is “appropriate in the face of deep and persistent slumps. But otherwise we should make budgets for the long run, and let the Fed deal with short-run problems by adjusting interest rates.”

Awkwardly, a Keynesian more vulgar than even Dick Cheney turns out to be… John Maynard Keynes. The sentence Krugman recently quoted about booms, slumps, and austerity appeared in a series of three articles Keynes wrote for the Times of London on “How to Avoid a Slump.” It’s full of advice on fine-tuning an economy. Anticipating 1937 to be a year of economic vigor, for example, Keynes urges authorities to postpone planned infrastructure projects so that they’ll be “available for quick release at the right moment.”

Discerning that right moment is tricky. It’s “much easier to check a recession if we intervene at its earliest stages,” but Keynes never makes clear who constitutes this “we.” It does not appear to be a democratically representative or accountable group: “If we are to be successful we must intervene with moderate measures of expansion before the decline has become visible to the general public.”

Of course, as Mises points out, if you can time it, then business will beat you to it and defeat your purpose...

 

[koalabear]

http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?Symbol=$us:INDU&width=300&height=200&E1=0&D4=1&Legend=0&AF=2&Banner=5&palette=2&C1=3&E8=1​

Stocks surge on strong US economic data
The Dow jumps more than 200 points on gains in manufacturing and construction spending. Investors await minutes from the Fed's December meeting. Gold and oil rise.

 

[koalabear]

Starbucks raising menu prices again
The coffee shop isn't alone as food inflation drives up costs at every restaurant and grocery store.

What! There is no inflation!

 

[JohnnySavage]

Starbucks raising menu prices again
The coffee shop isn't alone as food inflation drives up costs at every restaurant and grocery store.

What! There is no inflation!

Coffee is my one vice and it'd have to hit $10 a cup before I'd consider giving it up!

 

[unregistered]

 

[patrick1]

Oh good lord, it just gets too funny to be true!

Keynes, Krugman, and Austerity
By William Voegeli, NRO
January 3, 2012

[article quoted]

Of course, as Mises points out, if you can time it, then business will beat you to it and defeat your purpose...

I think if you understand your macro-economics you will find that Mr Voegeli has misunderstood what Krugman meant by vulgar Keynesianism; that Voegeli has not read the explanations by many neo-Keynesians that by general consensus what Keynes himself wrote in 1937 has not turned out to be quite right; and that there is a fundamental difference between attempting to tweak the economic cycle in 2000 by giving tax cuts to the rich (which would probably be counterbalanced by Greenspan adjusting interest rates), and trying to revive an economy in serious danger of slump in 2010/11 (when monetary policy has pretty much run out of options).

Patrick

 

[koalabear]

http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?Symbol=$us:INDU&width=300&height=200&E1=0&D4=1&Legend=0&AF=2&Banner=5&palette=2&C1=3&E8=1​

Stocks surge on strong US economic data
The Dow jumps more than 200 points on gains in manufacturing and construction spending. Investors await minutes from the Fed's December meeting. Gold and oil rise.

Stocks fall as European debt fears dampen optimism
Spain seeks additional funds to restructure its banks. Investors eye upcoming European bond auctions for signs of confidence in the region's fiscal stability. US factory orders rise. Yahoo taps a new CEO.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I think if you understand your macro-economics you will find that Mr Voegeli has misunderstood what Krugman meant by vulgar Keynesianism; that Voegeli has not read the explanations by many neo-Keynesians that by general consensus what Keynes himself wrote in 1937 has not turned out to be quite right; and that there is a fundamental difference between attempting to tweak the economic cycle in 2000 by giving tax cuts to the rich (which would probably be counterbalanced by Greenspan adjusting interest rates), and trying to revive an economy in serious danger of slump in 2010/11 (when monetary policy has pretty much run out of options).

Patrick

It's all based on the same fallacies the Keynes regurgitated almost wholesale the school of inflationary economics. The problem being, and as pointed out, that once engaged, the government never wants to pul back because it simply produces what they tried to avoid in the first place, bear markets and corrections.

What Krugman is trying to do is to say, we've gotten smarter when it comes to such Socialist policies and if you listen to me, then this time they will work.

They've been trying to make them work since the mid- to late-19th Century to know avail, not even their attempts at a safer, controlled Capitalism.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Obama’s Reelection Strategy: Bypass Congress
By Phil Kerpen On January 5, 2012

In a recent interview, President Obama reiterated his intention to bypass Congress to pursue his extreme policy agenda. That’s not in itself news; it’s been going on in every area of federal policy (as I discuss in detail in Democracy Denied [1]) and the president has been boasting about it for months in his country-wide “we can’t wait” campaign. The notable thing this time around is that Obama offered his plan to bypass our elected representatives in Congress as an explicit re-election strategy.

The interviewer, Rob Quirk of KOAA-TV, asked Obama what it would take to win reelection. Obama’s reponse [2]: “Well, what we’re going to have to do is continue to make progress on the economy over the next several months. And where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.”

In other words, the Obama election strategy for election 2012 is to act as if election 2010 never happened, disregard the Republicans in Congress, and put the full force of the federal executive apparatus to work towards his reelection.

For months Obama has been out on the stump campaigning on the taxpayer dime [3], a trend that is almost certain to accelerate. He hits the ground running in 2012 with a statewide tele-townhall in Iowa and a major campaign-style event in Ohio. Ironically, these events are presented as pushing a legislative agenda in Congress, the very same Congress the president has already declared irrelevant. Their real purpose is entirely political.

Obama is also abusing the appointments process to install ideologically radical nominees to advance his bypass-Congress reelection strategy. Although Congress has remained in pro forma session to prevent recess appointments since the 2010 election, Obama recently announced that he would dispense with over a hundred years of precedent and declare Congress to be in recess; that’s right, the president now believes he can rewrite Senate rules. On January 4, Obama unilaterally rewrote Senate rules and installed Richard Cordray as the head of the vast new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau can now begin regulating every aspect of our financial lives without any congressional oversight (unless courts invalidate the “recess appointment.”)

Obama may also use his newly created power to “recess appoint” when Congress is not in recess to install radical union lawyers in a court-packing scheme at the National Labor Relations Board, allowing it to continue rewarding the unions with a bureaucratic rewrite of the nation’s labor laws. Shortly before the end of last year the Board – before the term expired for Obama’s previous recess appointee, union lawyer Craig Becker – voted to allow unions to ambush employers with organizing elections with as little as seven days notice.

Obama may make dozens of other controversial appointments in this manner, making a mockery of the Constitution’s advice and consent requirement to fill the federal courts and agencies with radicals who could never withstand Senate scrutiny, even with his own party controlling the Senate.

[ http://www.americanthinker.com/2012..._know_him_obamas_subversive_appointments.html ]

Regardless of how many more radicals Obama can slip into key positions, Obama knows that to win reelection he needs to recapture the sense of historical excitement that surrounded the 2008 campaign. So he will put the full weight of the federal executive branch into advancing the key policy objectives of the constituencies that will provide him boots on the ground: unions, environmentalists, social justice street organizers, identity politics groups, and class warriors.

Key rewards and inducements for the environmental groups include a head-spinning array of expensive regulations from EPA, an all-out government-wide assault on hydraulic fracturing, and continued slowdowns in permitting and leasing from the EPA and the Interior Department. Also worth watching is a proposed Endangered Species Act listing of the so-called Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, which until recently was just an ordinary lizard, but may now become a “unique subspecies” whose listing would devastate oil production in West Texas.

Obama’s executive decisions will continue to display his choice of a rigid far-left ideology over practical considerations. He will again block the Keystone XL pipeline, a decision he is required to re-issue within 60 days under the terms of the payroll tax holiday extension bill that passed before the end of the year. That privileges a radical anti-development ideology above job creation, in the hopes of inspiring the green groups and the campus protest crowd to come out and volunteer again for Obama with some of the passion they brought in 2008. The Energy Department will continue funding green jobs boondoggles like Solyndra.

Similarly, the administration successfully torpedoed the AT&T merger with T-Mobile, which had major concessions to the unions with respect to job creation that earned their support and promised to unleash tens of billions of dollars in private investment. That was a sop to the extreme left so-called media reform movement, which was also rewarded with the FCC’s so-called net neutrality order to begin – unlawfully, courts will likely find – to regulate broadband Internet access. The FCC is now considering a proposal that amounts to the DISCLOSE Act via backdoor means, requiring all political ad buys to disclose their donors to stations who would in turn make the information public.

The Justice Department will continue attempts to demonize and hamper state-level voter ID requirements to inspire and facilitate the ACORN-successor entities that are carrying the Obama campaign’s voter registration and turnout efforts.

ObamaCare implementation will move forward in the same arbitrary and politicized fashion that abuses regulations and guidance documents from the IRS and HHS to punish political enemies with expensive interpretations that have no statutory basis and reward political allies with waivers.

And the costs associated with all the expensive, politically-motivated executive action will be used as a pretext to attack affected companies for raising prices, further stoking the president’s class warfare campaign theme that inspires the fringe elements of the Occupy Wall Street movement to fold their efforts into the campaign.

In brief, the entire multi-trillion dollar bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government will be directed towards Obama’s reelection. Unfortunately, these executive actions will have serious negative economic consequences in terms of compliance costs and the broad uncertainty and anxiety that comes from not knowing what arbitrary decisions will come next. That’s terrible news for our economic recovery, and it may also mean that the Obama strategy will backfire politically with an electorate that’s desperate for job creation and economic growth.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamas-reelection-strategy-bypass-congress/

 

[busybody..]

stop with the negative shit

as I told you

the economy is roaring back

and NIGGER will win re-election

so dont make yourself look bad

 

[unregistered]

 

[busybody..]

JOHN PODHORETZ: All these debates were a disaster for the GOP.“The debates were worse than a waste of time. They were a self-destructive exercise.”

But there’s a bright-side: “So the race may be coming down to a one-term Massachusetts governor who can’t close the sale with more than a quarter of Republicans after running nonstop since 2007 and a two-term Pennsylvania senator who lost his last election by 18 points. And you know what? If things are pretty much as they are today come Election Day in November, either one of those guys will beat Obama handily. At least they will have had a lot of debate experience.”

 

[busybody..]

JOHN PODHORETZ: All these debates were a disaster for the GOP.“The debates were worse than a waste of time. They were a self-destructive exercise.”

But there’s a bright-side: “So the race may be coming down to a one-term Massachusetts governor who can’t close the sale with more than a quarter of Republicans after running nonstop since 2007 and a two-term Pennsylvania senator who lost his last election by 18 points. And you know what? If things are pretty much as they are today come Election Day in November, either one of those guys will beat Obama handily. At least they will have had a lot of debate experience.”

I dont believe ANYONE will beat NIGGER

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Obama understands what GEORGE III didnt get. Revolutions ignite at the top NOT the bottom, the peasants are too dum and disorganized to do anything substantive. And Obama/Washington has spent the last 3 years taking care of America's perfumed princes.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

stop with the negative shit

as I told you

the economy is roaring back

and NIGGER will win re-election

so dont make yourself look bad

One way or another, I'm voting for Obama. No one has learned their lesson, but I know one thing economically when it comes to inflating the money supply for temporary gain; I don't know when it will all come crashing down, but I do know it will come crashing down...

So far all the upticks just seem to match the natural growing demand for the necessities and the delayed, not the boom of an economy roaring to life. You can only defer certain purchases for so long (unless you were smart enough to purchase a Chevy truck). Now, in the post Holiday season fueled by pent-up desire, it remains to be seen if most homes will have to go into austerity mode to cover their new debt since they cannot call in for a ceiling increase or print million-dollar bills...

 

[RobDownSouth]

Obama understands what GEORGE III didnt get. Revolutions ignite at the top NOT the bottom, the peasants are too dum and disorganized to do anything substantive. And Obama/Washington has spent the last 3 years taking care of America's perfumed princes.

Wait....I thought President Barack Obama spent the last 3 year coddlin' the 47% of Americans who didn't pay federal income taxes?

Conservative talkin' points are soooooo confusin' sometimes.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Obama understands what GEORGE III didnt get. Revolutions ignite at the top NOT the bottom, the peasants are too dum and disorganized to do anything substantive. And Obama/Washington has spent the last 3 years taking care of America's perfumed princes.

Revolutions start with the youth of the Middle Class if they feel their future rise to the top has been stymied by the elite in charge.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Wait....I thought President Barack Obama spent the last 3 year coddlin' the 47% of Americans who didn't pay federal income taxes?

Conservative talkin' points are soooooo confusin' sometimes.

You confuse me with the ignorant neocons. Pay attention.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Revolutions start with the youth of the Middle Class if they feel their future rise to the top has been stymied by the elite in charge.

No. The Middle Class never start nuthin, theyre genetically predisposed to be nice.