in terms of what comes onto the U.S. short by the trade deficit, you're smokin' something.
It's not hostility, it's trying to keep U.S. manufacturers for the U.S. economy. I don't buy that 2.5%, 1.5% profit margins.
If you want to claim U.S. MNCs and financial sectors are playin' both sides of the fence, not only screwing over the U.S. economy and the U.S. worker, but additionally China, I'm sure we could argue that to truth, but in terms of what is tabulated by the BEA and U.S. Customs, this is not so. From reading the China trade reports, that's not so either.
Deal. Ideas are $$, big money and it also takes big $$ to develop those ideas, that innovation.
Hello, there is nothing wrong with this contract language. On what planet makes you think just because some firm manufactures, magically they can benefit beyond deliverables of the finished product? Of course they cannot.
Your attitude is typifying what is wrong. Absolutely Microsoft and Intel would sign something of this nature, if they were manufacturers, but they are not, they are the owners/designers. It's their R&D, which they spent billions in developing. That's the point.
WHY do you think Chinese average export has a 2.5% profit? It is because the Chinese had been ROBBED BLIND with these contracts of adhesion. The normal profit with IP should be 15%. You do the math, on how much the Americans had stolen from the Chinese in IP.
It is indeed 100% true that the trade between America and China is HIGHLY INEQUITABLE. There should definitely be a BALANCE OF PROFITS, by edict if necessary.
By June, 2009, the total number of U.S. investment projects in China had exceeded 57,000 and the value of accumulated U.S. investment in China reached 61 billion dollars. These U.S. companies operating in China REPORT annual profits of at least 80 BILLION U.S. dollars. The actual profits are of course much higher, as they are hidden with transfer pricing moves. According to the American Chamber of Commerce in China’s 2009 White Paper, about 74 percent of American businesses in China made profits and 91 percent chose to stay in China to expand their business. Many of these businesses are enjoying not only whatever industrial policies promulgated by Beijing, but they are also enjoying preferred status, advantaged over the locals.
On the other hand, cumulated Chinese direct investments in the U.S., due to the hostility shown by the American Congress, has been only US$3.1 Billion by June 2009. The $80 Billion in American profits from China is MANY TIMES that of the profits on China’s exports to America ($300 Billion, with profits averaging 1-5%).
One area of outright inequity in the trade between America and China is IP THEFT.
IT IS AN UNEQUAL TREATY IMPOSED ON HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CHINESE EXPORTERS YEAR IN AND YEAR OUT. American behemoths, with the blessings of Washington, TALK protection of IP, yet PRACTICE predatory “what’s mine remains mine, but what’s yours is also mine.”
Just look at the typical TOC (Terms and Conditions) that the major American importers demanded of their vendors, and you will find similar provisions everywhere:
"CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION; NONDISCLOSURE
Supplier shall not at any time, during or after the Term of this Agreement, disclose to others, take or use for its own purposes or the purpose of others, any of Company’s confidential information, knowledge, designs, data, know-how, trade secrets, or any other information considered “confidential” or “proprietary” by Company. Supplier understands, agrees and recognizes that this obligation applies, but is not limited to, technical information, designs, marketing and financial information, and any business information that Company treats as confidential. Any confidential information, knowledge, designs, data, know-how, trade secrets, or any other information considered “confidential” or “proprietary” by Supplier which the Supplier shall have disclosed or may hereafter disclose to the Company and which in any way relates to the goods or services covered by this order, agreement or contract, shall, unless otherwise specifically agreed to in writing by the Company be deemed to be confidential or proprietary information and further shall be acquired by the Company free from any restrictions (other than a claim for patent infringement) as part of the consideration for this order, agreement or contract. No cause of action will arise on Supplier’s behalf for Company’s use of any confidential information disclosed to Company, and no damages whatsoever shall accrue to Supplier for Company’s use thereof. Supplier shall keep confidential any and all technical processes and information, economic and financial information, designs, data, marketing information, and any other business information that Company treats as confidential furnished to Supplier in connection with this order, agreement or contract and Supplier shall not divulge, export or use directly or indirectly, such information for the benefit of any other party without obtaining Company’s written permission. Supplier shall return all items belonging to Company and all copies of documents containing such confidential information in Supplier’s possession or under Supplier’s control upon request by the Company or termination of this Agreement."
[Note how that "what's yours ends up mine" language is craftily hidden in the middle of the passage. Typical American style drafting.]
You think that is bad? Try this "Everything is Mine" clause:
"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Absent a separate express agreement between Supplier and Company and after one year from date of importation of Merchandise into the United States which in any way relates to the goods or services covered by an Order, , Supplier will irrevocably grant to Company a full paid up, royalty free license to make, use, sell and offer for sale any such Merchandise free of any claim of infringement or misappropriation of any intellectual property of Supplier. The aforementioned paid up license will remain in effect until the expiration of any intellectual property relating in any way to the Merchandise."
__________________
Can you imagine clauses like that imposed on Microsoft, or Intel, etc., by any Chinese entity without causing a fire and brimstone response?? Yet this sort of chicanery is imposed by major American companies in contracts of adhesion on hundreds of thousands of Chinese exporters year in and year out. The typical Chinese company simply is not in a position to bargain. As a result, China had been ROBBED of hundreds of billions of dollars of valuable IP over the decades.
What is good must be universal. If IP is to be protected, everyone’s IP should be protected.
Most of the loss of American jobs in manufacturing was due to improvement in productivity - translated, the manufacturers figured out how to use less labor. The balance, was due to the use of lower cost labor offshore, and it was not something unique to China. If those jobs did not go to China, they would have gone somewhere else with low cost labor anyways.
Putting it in perspective, For over 20 years, China had been the biggest benefactor to Americans. Affordable goods of high quality held inflation low and raised the living standards for all American consumers, recycling of trade dollars kept American interest rates next to nothing. As a direct result, American asset prices kept rising steadily. Unemployment was never a real problem for the entire generation (20 years!!), and everyone had extra money to spend. Those were the golden years - until the 2008 meltdown/recession caused by the fraud of the American banksters (which killed 8 million American jobs). Even after the debacle, Beijing stood by America, refused Putin's advances to assault the American financial system, and continued to buy Treasuries and GSEs. thereby propping up the rickety American financial system. China wanted to see a strong and stable America, where folks have jobs and can afford to buy more products from China.
It is really hard to comprehend HOW gifting away goods at low prices is hurtful to the recipients. As Hu pointed out in his visit, Americans annually saved at least $60 Billion due to the well priced Made in China goods.
Today the economic relationship between China and America is grotesquely unbalanced - IN FAVOR of America on almost all counts.
One outrageous trend is that the major U.S. corporations are seeking to legalize theft of IP from Chinese suppliers. It is well known that in the "standard" vendor contracts from major U.S. importers (all the big names), they all contain PREDATORY clauses (a) taking the trade secrets and confidential info of the China exporters without extra compensation while obligating the China exporters to honor the counterpart of the U.S. importer; and (b) clause that says once the vendor supplies the product to the COMPANY for a while (e.g., 1 year), then the COMPANY (the U.S. behemoth) would be granted a PAID UP, ROYALTY FREE license on all the IP of the Chinese exporter, until the end of time (or end of life of the IP).
Given the unequal bargaining positions of U.S. behemoths and the tiny Chinese suppliers, this open theft of Chinese created IP through the use of contracts of adhesion, simply cannot be effectively countered by the small Chinese exporters.
IMAGINE clauses like that being imposed by ANY Chinese company on the likes of American companies - Microsoft, Intel, GE, etc., and see fire and brimstone responses from Washington!! Too bad Beijing has not wised up to this travesty, and has done nothing to help the Chinese exporters yet, leading to the loss of likely hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese IP through this predatory practice by major Western companies.
What is good must be universal. If IP is to be protected, ALL IP should be protected.
There are about 150 Friday Movie Nights and some of them are incredible. Gotta love the Internets when they put these works online for free, although finding them is a real hunt. The Quest for Oil to me is a stand out economics documentary, shame it's not updated to include the BP oil spill.
Its true when the Dems hang with the likes of Rubin, Geithner and Summers you know our choices are limited. Warren seems to be the real deal for consumer protection and thats why they will never let her have any real power. Although our choices are limited there is still a difference. You said it correctly "the GOP is insane". Many people here have spelled out what austerity will do now. An endless downward spiral. They are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy with a fake debt crisis. They stole out of the recovery act with tax cuts and why was the AMT fix included in that package? It was part of the regular budget in tears past. We need to spell out that the GOP way is 30% unemployment for the masses and record profits for the international corporations. Who will pay no taxes and from which our nation will derive no benefit.
Seems to me a whole new wave of firings could be just around the corner.
Everyone bemoans those record profits and why the corporations won't use those profits to hire. But one of the main reasons they even made all those profits was due to all the firings!
Now normally when this happens, aggregate demand shrinks and a new equilibrium established. But demand did not nearly take the hit it would have because of all the stimulus. Five trillion dollars in two years masked that true demand was about to go off a cliff.
For every 10 fired, on average 2 were taken back as benefitless temporary workers to fill gaps and move around as needed, while the companies sucked up huge profits.
But the double whammy of the stimulus ending and higher input costs is now squeezing margins mercilessly. Thus the death spiral of mass firings hence less demand leading to more mass firings has only been kicked down the road.
The mask of trumped up demand i.e 99 weeks of unemployment compared to the usual 26, 150 billion a month in money printing etc. and etc. is getting pulled off at the same time input prices with limited ability to pass on to the consumer is putting the kabosh on profits.
The 2009 Death Spiral that wasn't, may indeed just be a late baby about to make it's entrance in 2011.
Peter DeFazio has a bill to remove health insurance companies as being exempt from anti-trust.
When it comes to individual health policies, what competition? They all are horrific. I wish I could find the raw numbers and percentage declines of actual people covered, on individual health.
I'm positive on these Oregon figures I quote but it would be nice to find the national and regional raw data on numbers as well as premium increases vs. coverage.
You're exactly right about the sham we call private health insurance The individual policy market is the clearest example of all that is wrong with the private health insurance system. Using Books of Business and Death Spiral Pricing they force those who have developed the slightest hint of a possibility of even a minor future claim to have to remain in the current Book (they won't pass
new underwriting) - meanwhile the company makes the rates increasingly unaffordable to drive those people out of the policy (and any potential future claims expense). That way the book gets smaller, they can increase the rates to exorbitant levels based on "projected claims experience" driving out more customers who might likely have future claims (or reduce their benefits to next to nothing in order to try to afford some kind of coverage). At the same time, those in good health with no potential hint of an issue, move to new policies (and low - new so no claims experience - rates) since they will pass new underwriting.
The companies don't care if they move to a competitor because the company in turn will pick up new customers who left the competitor (but of course will pass underwriting).
And the sham starts over.
No wonder the insurance companies can afford lobbying and buying support - it's a license to print money vs fulfill a need
Why I put up that FMN, lifting the veil. That's it, the lesser of two evils. We have a corporate oligarchy and that's why we cannot get any policy to create jobs, grow the real economy and no, that ain't tax cuts.
I think we need to list agenda items that would turn the economy around. Confronting China on currency manipulation has to be the most bi-partisan goal I can think of. Most of Congress claims they want this to happen, yet they do not pass anything and override a veto.
They should and they should have done this years ago. China has become the McDonald's of manufacturing and it's getting so bad, I suspect even if a company wants to manufacture in the U.S. they probably cannot find the chain to even do it.
That needs to change, immediately and should be literally subsidized. They need outsourced manufacturing for a host of smaller products, on shore so companies can "order up" their products here instead of "ordering up" their products in China.
"they simply refuse to enact policies" ... this refusal shows deliberate intent. The data is not hidden. It's right here as you show so thoroughly. There is a deliberate policy decision to do nothing.
You have filled in a gap for me, at least, in thinking about this:
A critical tipping point is approaching. Either the dysfunctional-State brings the
onshore economy to a near halt or enough on-shore intellectual captital is restored to keep the complete collapse at bay.
This is "tradable talent," once it's gone, once people lose incentive to go through the considerable effort to get the education, the field is lost.
In a recent survey of CEO's, they indicated that they had no problem getting engineering talent. We know why. They just import it, it would seem, and make do with what they have.
The BLS addresses this and shows that the time window to count as unemployed is too large for this to have any effect.
It's not the weather. Many economic reports (many overviewed in the Instapopulist) show the economy is slowing and we just got the worst ISM manufacturing report in ages.
The services was ok but I've found the ISM generally is a good indicator. Bottom line, they simply refuse to enact policies to do something about trade, invest in America (infrastructure, private plants, etc.) and make it clear the U.S. must be a production economy.
Right now, it's all "China". Make a design, ship it to China to manufacture, make a chip, same deal, new product, off to China it goes....
That will simply not generate economic growth and jobs.
The charts do show improvement. It looks like expensive oil, earthquakes, tsunamis, meltdowns, tornadoes, budget and debt limit grandstanding have slowed the jobs recovery. Hopefully this is temporary. Not a "brick wall" like I saw somewhere today. I think its a blip and we will continue a slow recovery. The charts also show how incredibly far we have fallen employment wise. Good grief what a nightmare.
I added some info about new entrants, re-entrants vs. increases in population too. I went through more in the new post, but to me, it didn't quite add up yet. I hate the fact we have three different employment reports in so many words, because they often "do not jive", three different metrics.
So, it's kind of a poorly worded paragraph, sorry. It's more it can go up because there are simply more people to choose from for jobs. Hires and fires happen every day, but the rate goes up when there are more people being counted, participating than jobs.
So, more people were participating and additionally more people were being fired, because there was an uptick in filings. I don't think magically a bunch of people who were fired, waited a while and then filed for UI or anything, more it's indirect, increased supply.
I should move that paragraph to separate out the two.
Yet those not in the labor force decreased by -105,000. This means more people entered the labor force looking for work. We see this reflected in the uptick in initial unemployment claims.
I don't get how initial unemployment claims go up because of people entering the labor force? I can't seem to grasp it. An initial claim is someone laid off or lost a job right?
in terms of what comes onto the U.S. short by the trade deficit, you're smokin' something.
It's not hostility, it's trying to keep U.S. manufacturers for the U.S. economy. I don't buy that 2.5%, 1.5% profit margins.
If you want to claim U.S. MNCs and financial sectors are playin' both sides of the fence, not only screwing over the U.S. economy and the U.S. worker, but additionally China, I'm sure we could argue that to truth, but in terms of what is tabulated by the BEA and U.S. Customs, this is not so. From reading the China trade reports, that's not so either.
Deal. Ideas are $$, big money and it also takes big $$ to develop those ideas, that innovation.
Hello, there is nothing wrong with this contract language. On what planet makes you think just because some firm manufactures, magically they can benefit beyond deliverables of the finished product? Of course they cannot.
Your attitude is typifying what is wrong. Absolutely Microsoft and Intel would sign something of this nature, if they were manufacturers, but they are not, they are the owners/designers. It's their R&D, which they spent billions in developing. That's the point.
WHY do you think Chinese average export has a 2.5% profit? It is because the Chinese had been ROBBED BLIND with these contracts of adhesion. The normal profit with IP should be 15%. You do the math, on how much the Americans had stolen from the Chinese in IP.
It is indeed 100% true that the trade between America and China is HIGHLY INEQUITABLE. There should definitely be a BALANCE OF PROFITS, by edict if necessary.
By June, 2009, the total number of U.S. investment projects in China had exceeded 57,000 and the value of accumulated U.S. investment in China reached 61 billion dollars. These U.S. companies operating in China REPORT annual profits of at least 80 BILLION U.S. dollars. The actual profits are of course much higher, as they are hidden with transfer pricing moves. According to the American Chamber of Commerce in China’s 2009 White Paper, about 74 percent of American businesses in China made profits and 91 percent chose to stay in China to expand their business. Many of these businesses are enjoying not only whatever industrial policies promulgated by Beijing, but they are also enjoying preferred status, advantaged over the locals.
On the other hand, cumulated Chinese direct investments in the U.S., due to the hostility shown by the American Congress, has been only US$3.1 Billion by June 2009. The $80 Billion in American profits from China is MANY TIMES that of the profits on China’s exports to America ($300 Billion, with profits averaging 1-5%).
More equitable trade means equal profits.
One area of outright inequity in the trade between America and China is IP THEFT.
IT IS AN UNEQUAL TREATY IMPOSED ON HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CHINESE EXPORTERS YEAR IN AND YEAR OUT. American behemoths, with the blessings of Washington, TALK protection of IP, yet PRACTICE predatory “what’s mine remains mine, but what’s yours is also mine.”
Just look at the typical TOC (Terms and Conditions) that the major American importers demanded of their vendors, and you will find similar provisions everywhere:
"CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION; NONDISCLOSURE
Supplier shall not at any time, during or after the Term of this Agreement, disclose to others, take or use for its own purposes or the purpose of others, any of Company’s confidential information, knowledge, designs, data, know-how, trade secrets, or any other information considered “confidential” or “proprietary” by Company. Supplier understands, agrees and recognizes that this obligation applies, but is not limited to, technical information, designs, marketing and financial information, and any business information that Company treats as confidential. Any confidential information, knowledge, designs, data, know-how, trade secrets, or any other information considered “confidential” or “proprietary” by Supplier which the Supplier shall have disclosed or may hereafter disclose to the Company and which in any way relates to the goods or services covered by this order, agreement or contract, shall, unless otherwise specifically agreed to in writing by the Company be deemed to be confidential or proprietary information and further shall be acquired by the Company free from any restrictions (other than a claim for patent infringement) as part of the consideration for this order, agreement or contract. No cause of action will arise on Supplier’s behalf for Company’s use of any confidential information disclosed to Company, and no damages whatsoever shall accrue to Supplier for Company’s use thereof. Supplier shall keep confidential any and all technical processes and information, economic and financial information, designs, data, marketing information, and any other business information that Company treats as confidential furnished to Supplier in connection with this order, agreement or contract and Supplier shall not divulge, export or use directly or indirectly, such information for the benefit of any other party without obtaining Company’s written permission. Supplier shall return all items belonging to Company and all copies of documents containing such confidential information in Supplier’s possession or under Supplier’s control upon request by the Company or termination of this Agreement."
[Note how that "what's yours ends up mine" language is craftily hidden in the middle of the passage. Typical American style drafting.]
You think that is bad? Try this "Everything is Mine" clause:
"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Absent a separate express agreement between Supplier and Company and after one year from date of importation of Merchandise into the United States which in any way relates to the goods or services covered by an Order, , Supplier will irrevocably grant to Company a full paid up, royalty free license to make, use, sell and offer for sale any such Merchandise free of any claim of infringement or misappropriation of any intellectual property of Supplier. The aforementioned paid up license will remain in effect until the expiration of any intellectual property relating in any way to the Merchandise."
__________________
Can you imagine clauses like that imposed on Microsoft, or Intel, etc., by any Chinese entity without causing a fire and brimstone response?? Yet this sort of chicanery is imposed by major American companies in contracts of adhesion on hundreds of thousands of Chinese exporters year in and year out. The typical Chinese company simply is not in a position to bargain. As a result, China had been ROBBED of hundreds of billions of dollars of valuable IP over the decades.
What is good must be universal. If IP is to be protected, everyone’s IP should be protected.
Most of the loss of American jobs in manufacturing was due to improvement in productivity - translated, the manufacturers figured out how to use less labor. The balance, was due to the use of lower cost labor offshore, and it was not something unique to China. If those jobs did not go to China, they would have gone somewhere else with low cost labor anyways.
Putting it in perspective, For over 20 years, China had been the biggest benefactor to Americans. Affordable goods of high quality held inflation low and raised the living standards for all American consumers, recycling of trade dollars kept American interest rates next to nothing. As a direct result, American asset prices kept rising steadily. Unemployment was never a real problem for the entire generation (20 years!!), and everyone had extra money to spend. Those were the golden years - until the 2008 meltdown/recession caused by the fraud of the American banksters (which killed 8 million American jobs). Even after the debacle, Beijing stood by America, refused Putin's advances to assault the American financial system, and continued to buy Treasuries and GSEs. thereby propping up the rickety American financial system. China wanted to see a strong and stable America, where folks have jobs and can afford to buy more products from China.
It is really hard to comprehend HOW gifting away goods at low prices is hurtful to the recipients. As Hu pointed out in his visit, Americans annually saved at least $60 Billion due to the well priced Made in China goods.
Today the economic relationship between China and America is grotesquely unbalanced - IN FAVOR of America on almost all counts.
One outrageous trend is that the major U.S. corporations are seeking to legalize theft of IP from Chinese suppliers. It is well known that in the "standard" vendor contracts from major U.S. importers (all the big names), they all contain PREDATORY clauses (a) taking the trade secrets and confidential info of the China exporters without extra compensation while obligating the China exporters to honor the counterpart of the U.S. importer; and (b) clause that says once the vendor supplies the product to the COMPANY for a while (e.g., 1 year), then the COMPANY (the U.S. behemoth) would be granted a PAID UP, ROYALTY FREE license on all the IP of the Chinese exporter, until the end of time (or end of life of the IP).
Given the unequal bargaining positions of U.S. behemoths and the tiny Chinese suppliers, this open theft of Chinese created IP through the use of contracts of adhesion, simply cannot be effectively countered by the small Chinese exporters.
IMAGINE clauses like that being imposed by ANY Chinese company on the likes of American companies - Microsoft, Intel, GE, etc., and see fire and brimstone responses from Washington!! Too bad Beijing has not wised up to this travesty, and has done nothing to help the Chinese exporters yet, leading to the loss of likely hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese IP through this predatory practice by major Western companies.
What is good must be universal. If IP is to be protected, ALL IP should be protected.
There are about 150 Friday Movie Nights and some of them are incredible. Gotta love the Internets when they put these works online for free, although finding them is a real hunt. The Quest for Oil to me is a stand out economics documentary, shame it's not updated to include the BP oil spill.
Its true when the Dems hang with the likes of Rubin, Geithner and Summers you know our choices are limited. Warren seems to be the real deal for consumer protection and thats why they will never let her have any real power. Although our choices are limited there is still a difference. You said it correctly "the GOP is insane". Many people here have spelled out what austerity will do now. An endless downward spiral. They are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy with a fake debt crisis. They stole out of the recovery act with tax cuts and why was the AMT fix included in that package? It was part of the regular budget in tears past. We need to spell out that the GOP way is 30% unemployment for the masses and record profits for the international corporations. Who will pay no taxes and from which our nation will derive no benefit.
Seems to me a whole new wave of firings could be just around the corner.
Everyone bemoans those record profits and why the corporations won't use those profits to hire. But one of the main reasons they even made all those profits was due to all the firings!
Now normally when this happens, aggregate demand shrinks and a new equilibrium established. But demand did not nearly take the hit it would have because of all the stimulus. Five trillion dollars in two years masked that true demand was about to go off a cliff.
For every 10 fired, on average 2 were taken back as benefitless temporary workers to fill gaps and move around as needed, while the companies sucked up huge profits.
But the double whammy of the stimulus ending and higher input costs is now squeezing margins mercilessly. Thus the death spiral of mass firings hence less demand leading to more mass firings has only been kicked down the road.
The mask of trumped up demand i.e 99 weeks of unemployment compared to the usual 26, 150 billion a month in money printing etc. and etc. is getting pulled off at the same time input prices with limited ability to pass on to the consumer is putting the kabosh on profits.
The 2009 Death Spiral that wasn't, may indeed just be a late baby about to make it's entrance in 2011.
Peter DeFazio has a bill to remove health insurance companies as being exempt from anti-trust.
When it comes to individual health policies, what competition? They all are horrific. I wish I could find the raw numbers and percentage declines of actual people covered, on individual health.
I'm positive on these Oregon figures I quote but it would be nice to find the national and regional raw data on numbers as well as premium increases vs. coverage.
You're exactly right about the sham we call private health insurance The individual policy market is the clearest example of all that is wrong with the private health insurance system. Using Books of Business and Death Spiral Pricing they force those who have developed the slightest hint of a possibility of even a minor future claim to have to remain in the current Book (they won't pass
new underwriting) - meanwhile the company makes the rates increasingly unaffordable to drive those people out of the policy (and any potential future claims expense). That way the book gets smaller, they can increase the rates to exorbitant levels based on "projected claims experience" driving out more customers who might likely have future claims (or reduce their benefits to next to nothing in order to try to afford some kind of coverage). At the same time, those in good health with no potential hint of an issue, move to new policies (and low - new so no claims experience - rates) since they will pass new underwriting.
The companies don't care if they move to a competitor because the company in turn will pick up new customers who left the competitor (but of course will pass underwriting).
And the sham starts over.
No wonder the insurance companies can afford lobbying and buying support - it's a license to print money vs fulfill a need
Why I put up that FMN, lifting the veil. That's it, the lesser of two evils. We have a corporate oligarchy and that's why we cannot get any policy to create jobs, grow the real economy and no, that ain't tax cuts.
I think we need to list agenda items that would turn the economy around. Confronting China on currency manipulation has to be the most bi-partisan goal I can think of. Most of Congress claims they want this to happen, yet they do not pass anything and override a veto.
They should and they should have done this years ago. China has become the McDonald's of manufacturing and it's getting so bad, I suspect even if a company wants to manufacture in the U.S. they probably cannot find the chain to even do it.
That needs to change, immediately and should be literally subsidized. They need outsourced manufacturing for a host of smaller products, on shore so companies can "order up" their products here instead of "ordering up" their products in China.
"they simply refuse to enact policies" ... this refusal shows deliberate intent. The data is not hidden. It's right here as you show so thoroughly. There is a deliberate policy decision to do nothing.
Mark Provost said it well in Why the Rich Love High Unemployment and Numerian nailed it in a response to Robert's post on Jobs being the #1 issue, Corporations are not really interested in your plan. They benefit from this in some perverse way and they're in no hurry to fix it. What a massive betrayal of the citizens.
You have filled in a gap for me, at least, in thinking about this:
This is "tradable talent," once it's gone, once people lose incentive to go through the considerable effort to get the education, the field is lost.
In a recent survey of CEO's, they indicated that they had no problem getting engineering talent. We know why. They just import it, it would seem, and make do with what they have.
Great points.
The BLS addresses this and shows that the time window to count as unemployed is too large for this to have any effect.
It's not the weather. Many economic reports (many overviewed in the Instapopulist) show the economy is slowing and we just got the worst ISM manufacturing report in ages.
The services was ok but I've found the ISM generally is a good indicator. Bottom line, they simply refuse to enact policies to do something about trade, invest in America (infrastructure, private plants, etc.) and make it clear the U.S. must be a production economy.
Right now, it's all "China". Make a design, ship it to China to manufacture, make a chip, same deal, new product, off to China it goes....
That will simply not generate economic growth and jobs.
The charts do show improvement. It looks like expensive oil, earthquakes, tsunamis, meltdowns, tornadoes, budget and debt limit grandstanding have slowed the jobs recovery. Hopefully this is temporary. Not a "brick wall" like I saw somewhere today. I think its a blip and we will continue a slow recovery. The charts also show how incredibly far we have fallen employment wise. Good grief what a nightmare.
That's wishful thinking.
What on Earth the people in charge think the unemployed are supposed to do is anybody's guess.
I suppose they will continue their best not to think about us.
I added some info about new entrants, re-entrants vs. increases in population too. I went through more in the new post, but to me, it didn't quite add up yet. I hate the fact we have three different employment reports in so many words, because they often "do not jive", three different metrics.
So, it's kind of a poorly worded paragraph, sorry. It's more it can go up because there are simply more people to choose from for jobs. Hires and fires happen every day, but the rate goes up when there are more people being counted, participating than jobs.
So, more people were participating and additionally more people were being fired, because there was an uptick in filings. I don't think magically a bunch of people who were fired, waited a while and then filed for UI or anything, more it's indirect, increased supply.
I should move that paragraph to separate out the two.
Yet those not in the labor force decreased by -105,000. This means more people entered the labor force looking for work. We see this reflected in the uptick in initial unemployment claims.
I don't get how initial unemployment claims go up because of people entering the labor force? I can't seem to grasp it. An initial claim is someone laid off or lost a job right?