"Do you know how to make God laugh? You tell him your plans." Hari Sheldon – Foudation's Fear
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 19th, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money Now this would be a change I could believe in: Bill Gross, who runs Pacific Investment Management Co.’s $239 billion Total Return Fund, said that policymakers “should quickly re-engineer” a plan that would refinance all non-delinquent mortgages backed by the federal government. The rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 2nd, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money FT.com / Reportage – The crisis of middle-class America. When the Financial Times thinks that income distribution and middle class wage stagnation are a problem, I’d say that means it’s a long standing crisis: The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 29th, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money Op-Ed Columnist – The Third Depression – NYTimes.com. Krugman notes that what are effectively austerity policies will cause the current economic malaise to remain, dragging the economy down. Failure to support local and state governments who lack the means to maintain spending levels will in essence reverse the recovery [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 6th, 2010
Calculated Risk: Weekly Summary and a Look Ahead. This is really depressing. The stimulus package passed early in the Obama administration helped a bit, but not enough. It was scaled back in size and watered down by turning 40% of it to tax cuts, the least effective means of stimulus. This was done in an [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Apr 18th, 2010
Corporate America took the recession as an excuse to “increase productivity”, which is to say Pay workers less to do more. Despite robust profits, they’re unwilling to resume hiring. Ezra Klein – The jobless recovery, explained. Annie Lowrey brings the data: Wondering what’s behind those recent jobless recovery numbers? 1. Fortune 500 companies tripled their [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 12th, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner : The New Yorker. Tim Geithner did manage to hold the financial system together for the most part through the worst financial crisis in modern times. Yet he seems reviled on both the left and the right. The media ignores the successes and plays up the failure, as the media so [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 20th, 2010
The New Poor – Despite Signs of Recovery, Long-Term Unemployment Rises – Series – NYTimes.com. Brother can you spare a dime? – Tom Waits version. No one can give voice to the pain of a working man without a job like Tom. I guess the song is making a come back…
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 19th, 2010
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 18th, 2010
Here’s a very cogent observation from the comments at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution econoblog: It seems to me that the American political system is simply broken. Canada could reduce the size of government and keep health care spending in check because in a parliamentary system with strong party loyalty, individual politicans are given “cover” by [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 17th, 2010
Foreigners cut Treasury stakes; rates could rise – washingtonpost.com. The Wapo notes that the Japanese have overtaken the Chinese as the number one purchasers of American government debt. Apparently we’ve gotten to 88 mph in the Delorean and the flux capacitor has taken us back to 1985… Fear the Japanese Overlords! h/t Ezra Klein The [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 1st, 2010
Matthew Yglesias » Judd Gregg, When Left to His Own Devices, Is an Orthodox Conservative Who Doesn’t Care About the Deficit. h/t to Ezra Klein who points out that no one who voted for the programs that drive the deficit (Bush Era tax cuts, Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, financial bail out and the [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 1st, 2010
My personal favorite Nobel Prize winning economist has a take on why Canada came out of the recent banking disaster relatively unscathed, while the US economy and financial institutions took a major beat down. It all comes back to the regulatory environment. The US decided, or rather the captains of industry in banking and a [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jan 14th, 2010
Obama announces a “financial responsibility tax” to impact large financial firms that benefited from TARP*. This is to remain in place until all TARP money is re-paid and internal practices regarding risk taking and ridiculous compensation and bonuses are changed. That may strikes the right note of populist anger. I’m not sure that it will [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jan 13th, 2010
This is galling. Getting your wealth from daddy: capitalist. Getting your Congressional seat from daddy: capitalist. Being a VP at Merrill Lynch and benefiting from billions in government bailout money: capitalist. Paying bloated bailouts because they did so well: capitalist. Suggesting that executive bonuses and pay be limited in companies that brought us to the [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Dec 4th, 2009
Mark Thoma passes along an article that points to a third way of dealing with stimulating the economy and doesn’t raise the deficit: As the latest job figures demonstrate, the economies of the United States, the euro area, Japan, and the United Kingdom are suffering from historically high rates of unemployment. In all four economies, [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Nov 3rd, 2009
Krugman is right more often than his colleagues in economics. There’s a reason he’s a Nobel prize winner in economics. The good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But that’s also the bad news [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Oct 29th, 2009
Sadly, for fat fools like Rush Limbaugh cheering for the President’s polices to fail, comes this bit of terrible news: GDP Expanded 3.5% in 3rd Quarter, WSJ: The economy expanded in the third quarter after shrinking for four consecutive quarters, likely marking an end to the worst recession since World War II. But the recovery [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 17th, 2009
I’m not sure what the answer is, but what we’ve been doing doesn’t seem to work for anyone, except maybe Goldman Sachs. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007. Such growth would [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 2nd, 2009
Florida ranks 48th in state GDP growth. In case anyone around here didn’t know, Florida has really been hard hit by the recession. Only Alaska and Delaware fared worse last year.
Posted in Blog Post on May 5th, 2009
via A View From Your Recession | The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan. One of Sullivan’s readers captures the angst of many in the middle class: …We’ve also been helping out my wife’s parents quite a bit. Her father’s contracting work completely dried up a year ago and they are facing destitution having used [...]
Date: 09/23/2005