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Latest Articles: Economy
Payrolls in U.S. Climb 200,000; Unemployment Rate Falls to 8.5% GOP In Mourning On The Good News
Post Date: 2012-01-06 08:33:46 by war
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Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. employers added more workers to payrolls than forecast in December and the jobless rate declined to an almost three-year low, showing that the labor market gained momentum heading into 2012. The 200,000 increase last month followed a revised 100,000 gain in November that was smaller than initially estimated, Labor Department figures showed in Washington. The median projection in a Bloomberg News survey called for a December gain of 155,000. The unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 8.5 percent, the lowest since February 2009, while hours worked and earnings climbed. Sustained payroll gains are needed to chip away at joblessness and support household spending, ...
Barack Obama Announces Two Nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Post Date: 2012-01-01 12:47:45 by We The People
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WASHINGTON, PC – Pres. Barack Obama Announced His Intentions Today to nominate Jerome Powell, And Jeremy C. Stein to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system. In his statement president Obama said, "I am grateful that these individuals have agreed to serve their nation at this important time for our economy. There distinguished backgrounds and experience coupled with their impressive knowledge of the economic and monetary policy make them tremendously qualified to serve in these important roles." Jerome H. Powell, is presently a visiting scholar at the bipartisan policy Center in Washington DC. There, his work focuses on federal and state fiscal actions. ...
The Failure of Keynesian Economics
Post Date: 2011-12-30 16:05:33 by We The People
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How Can Anyone Still Believe Keynes's General Theory? That anyone can still believe Keynes’s General Theory holds any answers to the world’s economic problems is one of those sad facts that make one realize just how difficult it is to gain headway in the dismal science. An article on John Maynard Keynes in the Washington Post late last year, which argued that “Keynes’s work on the Great Depression was remarkably relevant to the dilemma Bush and Greenspan face now,” is a reminder of just why our economic difficulties seem to multiply rather than diminish. That Alan Greenspan thinks of the General Theory as his font of economic knowledge only adds to the ...
Public Money for Public Purpose: Toward the End of Plutocracy and the Triumph of Democracy
Post Date: 2011-12-25 13:07:00 by lucysmom
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A new year is upon us. And even before its first hour has been rung in, 2012 is already taking shape before us as a pivotal year in global politics. We can all feel the awakening under way. A revived longing for equality, shared prosperity and democratic solidarity is inspiring a vibrant new politics around the world. This new activist spirit is quickened by the keen apprehension of young people on every continent that something is very, very wrong with the present economic and political order. The rising generation, heirs to sick and damaged societies that have been unbalanced by decades of plutocratic rule and antisocial cupidity, have now begun to rouse themselves – and in the ...
Philip Mirowski: The Seekers, or How Mainstream Economists Have Defended Their Discipline Since 2008 – Part IV
Post Date: 2011-12-22 09:15:02 by lucysmom
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Edited and with an introduction by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland The previous parts of the series can be found here, here, and here while a bibliography can be found here The debates surrounding the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium [DSGE] models are perhaps some of the most interesting and important to have surfaced in the wake of the crisis. Of course, they, too many debates within the economics profession after the crisis, are deployed in order to insulate the research program from any fundamental criticism. But it is in the nature of the material that the critical observer can see something more interesting going on. And that is the ...
End welfare for the wealthy
Post Date: 2011-12-09 18:13:51 by jwpegler
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The debate in Congress this week about whether to pay for extending the payroll tax cut by imposing a new tax on millionaires will have nothing to do with solving our nation's economic challenges and everything to do with election-year politics. Senate Democratic leaders have already signaled they will use the debate as a purely partisan exercise designed to embarrass Republicans into opposing tax cuts for the poor while defending tax cuts for the rich. I intend to offer an alternative. Instead of punishing the rich with higher taxes, I will give Congress the option of helping pay for extending the payroll tax cut by ending welfare to the wealthy. Read Sen. Coburn's report, ...
A Banker Speaks, With Regret
Post Date: 2011-12-01 09:48:16 by lucysmom
6 Comments
If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess. As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages. “On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.” “If you had some old bag lady walking down the ...
As Layoffs Rise, Stock Buybacks Consume Cash
Post Date: 2011-11-28 00:29:56 by lucysmom
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When Pfizer cut its research budget this year and laid off 1,100 employees, it was not because the company needed to save money. In fact, the drug maker had so much cash left over, it decided to buy back an additional $5 billion worth of stock on top of the $4 billion already earmarked for repurchases in 2011 and beyond. The moves, announced on the same day, might seem at odds with each other, but they represent an increasingly common pattern among American corporations, which are sitting on record amounts of cash but insist that growth opportunities are hard to find. The result is that at a time when the nation is looking for ways to battle unemployment, big companies are creating fewer ...
Roubini: Gold standard is for “lunatics and hacks”
Post Date: 2011-11-26 09:32:45 by CZ82
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Roubini: Gold standard is for “lunatics and hacks” by Joel McDurmon on Nov 26, 2011 Popular New York University professor Nouriel Roubini has made a name for himself with a few accurate economic predictions like the end of the housing bubble. He is now, however, lashing out at sound money solutions to such banking failures. In the process, he calls proponents of honest money “lunatic and hacks.” In this interview, he repeated the mythical assertion that the gold standard “caused” the Great Depression. As he put it, One of the major causes of the Great Depression was the existence of the gold standard and the return to the gold standard after World War I ...
Family-Friendly Europe; Decent wages and generous social supports to reconcile work and parenting add up to a family policy that's smarter than marriage promotion.
Post Date: 2011-11-25 12:05:41 by lucysmom
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The belief that motherhood is the preeminent cause of poverty in America has become a bipartisan cliché. The welfare reform enacted in 1996 was designed, among other things, to discourage single parenthood and to promote marriage. Yet a look at the experiences and policies of other nations suggests a more complex story behind the causes of and cure for poverty. Evidence from Europe shows that the remedy is to increase the economic resources available to low-income families-through better-paying jobs that relieve poverty directly and social supports that reconcile paid employment with reliable parenting. U.S. women, men, and children experience significantly higher levels of economic ...
Spending Wars
Post Date: 2011-11-25 08:33:55 by CZ82
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Spending Wars By Randall Hoven The ideas that federal spending exploded under George W. Bush, that "Bush's wars" account for our spending explosion, that Reaganism died with Reagan, and that we are on a spending binge that started decades ago are all nonsense. Our current spending binge is a very recent phenomenon with a very specific starting point: the year Democrats started writing budgets (or continuing resolutions), compounded by Barack Obama's inauguration. Look at the chart below. If you were to cover up the last four years on the right, 2008-11, would you say spending was getting out of hand? In 2007, total spending was 19.6% of GDP, a level nearly matching ...
A radical redistribution of income undermined US entrepreneurship
Post Date: 2011-11-22 09:49:01 by lucysmom
8 Comments
There was an Bloomberg Op Ed today (November 22, 2011) – Protesters Ignore American Love of Entrepreneurs – by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. It is an attack on the OWS movement and an appeal to how great American entrepreneurship is. The ideas resonate with some recent work I have been doing on the impacts of national income redistribution under neo-liberalism on aggregate demand and the role of the financial sector. The link is that entrepreneurship in the US is not what it was and it is an illusion to think that the past two decades or so bears much similarity to the heyday of US entrepreneurship, whatever your view of the latter is. The entrepreneurs are disappearing in ...
Warning From Wall Street Broker: “The Entire System Has Been Utterly Destroyed”; Recommends “ALL customers Withdraw From All of the Markets”
Post Date: 2011-11-19 09:33:43 by Capitalist Eric
1 Comments
Editor’s Note: You will rarely, if ever again, see a brokerage firm close their doors not as a result of losing all of their customers’ money, but rather, preemptively in order to prevent them from being wiped out. That’s exactly what Ann Barnhardt of Barnhardt Capital Management did Thursday morning when she advised clients that her firm was liquidating all customer brokerage and options accounts. In a series of letters published on her web site, disseminated by Zero Hedge, and brought to us by The Daily Crux, Ms. Barnhardt takes the unprecedented step of shutting down her firm in order to prevent losses in what she says is a system that “is no longer functioning with ...
Let's get real about poverty in America
Post Date: 2011-11-16 08:02:54 by Happy Quanzaa
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According to CBS News, "the number of people in the U.S. living in poverty in 2010 rose for the fourth year in a row, representing the largest number of Americans in poverty in the 52 years since such estimates have been published by the U.S. Census Bureau." And MSNBC said, "the U.S. poverty rate remains among the highest in the developed world." Let's look at a few poverty facts, shall we? Heritage Foundation researchers Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield laid out some facts about the poor in their report "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor." Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. ...
The right's smoke and mirrors scam about Social Security--it ain't broke (unless China is too)
Post Date: 2011-11-13 09:11:13 by lucysmom
28 Comments
The right's smoke and mirrors scam about Social Security--it ain't broke (unless China is too) We've noted in these postings the growing inequality between rich and the rest of us in America, and that is the appropriate backdrop against which to investigate further the right's smoke-and-mirrors scams about tax policy and earned benefits. Let me remind you with Kevin Drum's Mother Jones article on The Price of Plutocracy: "For all practical purposes, every year about $700 billion in income is being sucked directly out of the hands of the poor and the middle class and shoveled into the hands of the rich." (That sentence is illustrated with a great chart, with ...
John Maynard Keynes Knew What Occupy Wall Street Tells Us Today: "Banks and bankers are by nature blind."
Post Date: 2011-11-12 17:40:49 by lucysmom
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Friedrich August von Hayek was a charming and gracious man who accepted my invitation to lunch in Salzburg when I was 23 years old. But even Milton Friedman called his price theory “very flawed” and his capital theory “unreadable.” He was denied a post in economics at the University of Chicago, and his reputation today rests largely on The Road to Serfdom, a warning against Soviet-style central planning with which Keynes felt free to declare “deeply moved agreement.” On policy matters Hayek was no extremist and often aligned with Keynes. As Professor Walter Block points out in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, he agreed that central banks should fight ...
Hopey-Changey happens: Dozens of Jobs Cut at CNN; New York, Atlanta, Washington, DC, Miami, LA Staffers Pink-Slipped
Post Date: 2011-11-12 07:46:06 by Happy Quanzaa
2 Comments
Breaking: Layoff notices are being handed out across CNN/U.S. today. Photographers, editors and other staffers in Atlanta, New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles and Miami are being let go. In all, at least 50 positions are being eliminated. As many as 12 staffers in the Washington, DC bureau alone, four of whom are longtime photojournalists. CNN Senior VP Jack Womack writes in a note to staff that the cuts come after a 3-year analysis of the company’s work processes. The CNN Library, which houses CNN’s archives, is centralizing in Atlanta. The library in CNN New York is closing, while there will be cuts in staff at the library in Washington, DC. New positions will be added to ...
Public sector jobs keep shrinking
Post Date: 2011-11-09 10:38:20 by lucysmom
23 Comments
As politicians in Washington, D.C., debate how to shrink the size of government, their counterparts in statehouses have actually been doing it. Public-sector jobs now account for the smallest share of the nation's employment since the 2008 financial crisis, according to new data released yesterday. In October, the public sector cut 24,000 jobs while private industry continued adding jobs at a steady clip, the Labor Department said yesterday. The nation's unemployment rate fell slightly to 9 percent, but it would have been 8.7 percent had state and local governments not contracted the past two years. Amid lower tax revenue due to the recession, state and local governments have cut ...
Big Banks Lose Billions on ‘Bank Transfer Day’ – But This Might Be in Their Favor
Post Date: 2011-11-09 07:45:52 by CZ82
2 Comments
Big Banks Lose Billions on ‘Bank Transfer Day’ – But This Might Be in Their Favor Posted on November 7, 2011 at 5:57pm by Becket Adams Bank Transfer Day, the movement that urged bank customers to close their accounts and instead deposit funds in credit unions on or before November 5, led to at least 650,000 new credit union members and a total of $4.5 billion in new deposits, according to the Credit Union National Association. About 80 percent of credit unions in the U.S. saw an increase in accounts in October, with membership increases of 10,000 or more in 21 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia in the past month. California credit unions saw the biggest ...
GOP Sucks At Economics And Routinely Lies About The Economy: Ex-Reagan Economist Says
Post Date: 2011-11-01 14:39:43 by war
4 Comments
Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. Republicans have a problem. People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but Republicans have nothing to offer them. The G.O.P. opposes additional government spending for jobs programs and, in fact, favors big cuts in spending that would be likely to lead to further layoffs at all levels of government. Today’s Economist Perspectives from expert contributors. Republicans favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but these had no stimulative effect during the George W. Bush administration and there is no reason ...
Home prices heading for triple-dip
Post Date: 2011-11-01 11:28:19 by Happy Quanzaa
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The besieged housing market has even further to fall before home prices really hit rock bottom. According to Fiserv (FISV), a financial analytics company, home values are expected to fall another 3.6% by next June, pushing them to a new low of 35% below the peak reached in early 2006 and marking a triple dip in prices. Several factors will be working against the housing market in the upcoming months, including an increase in foreclosure activity and sustained high unemployment, explained David Stiff, Fiserv's chief economist. Should home values meet Fiserv's expectations, it would make it the third (and lowest) trough for home prices since the housing ...
A new Physical GOLD based Currency (And There IS Enough Gold for this One.)
Post Date: 2011-10-30 06:23:07 by Coral Snake
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A new Physical GOLD based Currency (And There IS Enough Gold for this One.) By Coral Snake This is one of the revisions I’m making to the Corps of Discovery platform of basics. I have been studying the issue of money and currency extensively over the past few weeks and now feel that the Corps of Discovery should go on record as advocating a GOLD BASED private competitive currency rather than the debt free fiat currency plan originally advocated. One of the arguments I originally had against a gold based currency was that there was not enough gold for a physical coin standard for every one who would want to participate in such a currency when the current Debt / Usury based dollar ...
Is Canadian Oil Bound for China Via Pipeline to Texas? (Yes it is! GOP suckers!!!)
Post Date: 2011-10-25 11:36:23 by Godwinson
19 Comments
Is Canadian Oil Bound for China Via Pipeline to Texas? David LaGesse For National Geographic News Published August 19, 2011 The proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would ship oil from Northwest Canada south through Mid- America to the Texas Gulf Coast has drawn sharp opposition from environmentalists worried about Canadian forests, greenhouse gases, and potential leaks. But one line of attack is more about economics and geopolitics than land and water. And it strikes at pipeline proponents' central argument that Keystone XL would buttress U.S. energy security. Opponents contend instead that the pipeline's petroleum could largely bypass the American markets and be shipped to ...
Corporatism Is NOT Capitalism: 7 Things About The Monolithic Predator Corporations That Dominate Our Economy That Every American Should Know
Post Date: 2011-10-23 14:51:55 by Capitalist Eric
16 Comments
Right now, there is a lot of talk about the evils of "capitalism". But it is not really accurate to say that we live in a capitalist system. Rather, what we have in the United States today, and what most of the world is living under, is much more accurately described as "corporatism". Under corporatism, most wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of giant corporations and big government is used as a tool by these corporations to consolidate wealth and power even further. In a corporatist system, the wealth and power of individuals and small businesses is dwarfed by the overwhelming dominance of the corporations. Eventually, the corporations end up owning almost ...
U.S. NOT in Top 10 Countries for Starting a Business
Post Date: 2011-10-22 15:26:58 by jwpegler
8 Comments
The World Bank... Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business, from 1 – 183. A high ranking on the ease of doing business index means the regulatory environment is more conducive to the starting and operation of a local firm. This index averages the country's percentile rankings on 10 topics, made up of a variety of indicators, giving equal weight to each topic. The rankings for all economies are benchmarked to June 2011. Country Starting a Business New Zealand 1 Australia 2 Canada 3 Singapore 4 Hong Kong SAR, China 5 Macedonia, FYR 6 Georgia 7 Rwanda 8 Belarus 9 Saudi Arabia 10 Armenia 10 Puerto Rico (U.S.) 12 United States 13 It is ...
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