Recent comments

  • I still see charts in your articles... Your post seems overly harsh to me. I have called FRED to troubleshoot issues with their excel add-in before and they were very helpful to me.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • FRED graph was not free. It was paid for my the population.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Nothing like data hiding through technology. See pretty (not, actually horrific resolution, not even progressive) graph, oh look, it has a slider, bummer it tells you nothing now about the state of the economy in one image, unlike before.

    What can one do here, if someone pays me to write up a system, I could probably do it in six months but FRED was really sophisticated and to put a package like that together, really is a full-time development job.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • It was provided by a quasi government public utility. It arguably ought to be held to public standards of accountability and transparency. And, arguably, is operating with taxpayer funding.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • There are a good 7,000 image links and the reason was it's a cheap CDN and by code I could update/make new graphs in < 1 second. So, either I create our own graphs from data from other sites,say the BLS, Census, or I write my own code to translate Excel data into images.

    If I had know they would have done this, I would have written a script to capture all 7,000 images but it's too late now. Honestly, this is almost malicious.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • quite a betrayal.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • I hope you don't throw in the towel because I appreciate your site.

    In the future, I suggest you post your FRED charts as images loaded to your website instead of as embedded links to FRED. That way your blogs are safe even if the FRED links fail.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Don't really know what it would take, but I this doesn't stop you.

    Reply to: The Federal Reserve Destroyed Our Site   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • From Brookings: Most are high school graduates, men, prime age, white, and single (never married). I guess that blows Paul Ryan's "inner city theory" out of the water.

    http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/bpea-long-term-unemp...

    (There's a link on the page to the full study.)

    Reply to: How to Create 5.8 Million Jobs Pronto - Stop Currency Manipulation   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • The biggest American corporations are reporting record profits, but they are not investing their windfalls in business expansion, which would mean jobs. Nor are they paying profits out to shareholders as dividends. Instead, the biggest companies are putting profits into the corporate equivalent of a mattress. The latest data from the Federal Reserve, the IRS and corporate reports shows that American businesses last year held almost $7.9 trillion of liquid assets worldwide.

    http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/corporations-cashreservesta...

    Reply to: Wall Street and Multinationals Get Theirs While America Suffers   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • i didn't have any kids either...hmm i was married why didn't i? OH one thing, graduated in 1994 with a BSME, let me see ... i have to get this off my chest ....

    my first internship while a senior in college was Pratt & Whitney, North Haven CT, now a demolished structure, jobs gone.

    my second was Vitramon corp. in my hometown of Monroe, CT .... umm today a demolished structure (rumor is WALMART may be moving in)

    My first full time job out of college upon graduation, AMPHENOL Corp. Danbury, CT and once again, a demolished structure. At one time 250+ employees, today maybe 30 at some offices in Danbury.

    All 3 of these facilities have been knocked to the ground and the proud machinists and engineers that worked at these corporations have been outsourced first to Mexico now CHINA, which by the way I hear is still a communist country (hear that Mr. Reagan?)

    So no kids for me. Seems many americans are thinking along the same lines as the birth rate has fallen to the lowest level since the Great Depression.

    Hmm i wonder ....

    Reply to: Global Capitalism Has Written Off The Human Race   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Great article as usual. Keep up the fine work.

    Reply to: Wall Street and Multinationals Get Theirs While America Suffers   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Maybe poor people should just stop reproducing or shouldn't have more than 2 kids.
    Because i saw the grim outlook years ago, I'm doing my part and I have no kids and don't plan to.
    I wouldn't want my kids to spend their lives working for a rich guy, barely making a living until they are too old to work which is even before retirement age or worry about finding, keeping a job.
    if you're poor, you would do a great favor to your children by not bringing them into this world.
    because there is over 99% chance that they'll work at slave wages and live unhappy.

    Current World Population 7,219,612,818 and is increasing by 4 each second.
    370,816 Births today
    27,779,342 Births this year
    217,813 Population growth today
    16,317,252 Population growth this year

    Reply to: Global Capitalism Has Written Off The Human Race   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Amazon is the reason,they undercut local retail and now because these stores are closing, they are raising prices. Prime is now $99, which means you had better be ordering a hell of a lot of stuff to justify paying it.

    Reply to: Retail Sales February Sign of Life Squashed by Harsh Winter Sales   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • most of last year, when retail sales were at least increasing monthly, we were seeing 20, 30 or 40 thousand retail jobs being added each month...now, with retail sales in the dumper, that employment has fallen for two months consecutively...there's a very good correlation between those store types where sales are falling, especially YoY. and those who've had the largest layoffs..

    ie, specialty shops, such as sporting goods, book and music stores, with sales down 5.2% YoY, cut 8,600 jobs in the last payrolls report; department stores cut 6,600; and electronic and appliance stores, which have seen sales decline 2.4% from last year, lost another 12,000 jobs in February..

    http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

     

    Reply to: Retail Sales February Sign of Life Squashed by Harsh Winter Sales   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • need customers. That's not how they think. They need income, funding, cash flow, financing. They don't give people a passing thought.

    And if they kill off 2 of every 3, they will find a way to extort the rest out of the remainder.

    Which, like you said, is unsustainable. But if we don't stop it before they can no longer do that, we will all be dead. Because that's likely the only thing that will ever stop them.

    Reply to: Global Capitalism Has Written Off The Human Race   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • It would appear that your top two examples are the same, single event:

    1) AOL acquires Time Warner, 2000, $186.2 billion.

    2) Time Warner bought AOL for $164 billion, renamed AOL Time Warner

    Reply to: American Exceptionalism is Dead   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Are the currencies manipulated or are the wages just too low in asian manufacturing countries?

    Tariffs tied to wage differences should create a new stability in world currencies. This would remove the incentive for devaluing of currencies. Much like when currencies were tied to gold, it causes all currencies to seek the highest value. The higher the value of your currency, the higher the value of your wages, and therefore the lower your tariffs. The only value that gold ever had is that every country wanted more of it and they were all striving in the same direction.

    If the United States would apply tariffs to all imports it would stabilize would economies and set the stage for real growth. The trick is to apply the tariff based upon the difference in wages between trading partners. Countries paying $5 a day
would pay considerably higher tariffs, while countries paying wages comparable
to the US would pay no tariffs.
    By using the market power of the United States, we would create an incentive for increasing wages and standard of living in third world countries. We would reverse the incentive to devalue currencies, and we would protect the productivity in advanced
 economies. Countries could not compete by devaluing their currencies to make their wages cheaper. Instead they would want to increase their wages and currencies to decrease the tariffs they pay. Their populations would benefit from better wages leading to more domestic spending and less reliance on
mercantilism.

    Reply to: How to Create 5.8 Million Jobs Pronto - Stop Currency Manipulation   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • I agree with the argument made, but banks and corporations need customers. They may talk of reducing populations, but in reality, when the replacement birthrate drops, they import immigrants, both for cheap labor and for consumption.

    Capitalism demands growth, and growth demands more people. It's unsustainable, but that's the logic.

    Reply to: Global Capitalism Has Written Off The Human Race   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Excellent, thorough and accurate description of the current job market — thanks.

    According to Labor Secretary Perez: "For four years uninterrupted now — 48 consecutive months — private-sector employment has grown, to the tune of 8.7 million new jobs."

    According to the Economic Policy Institute, we are now DEAD EVEN, because over the last four years the labor market has gained back all of the 8.7 million jobs we lost during the Great Recession.

    Now if only the population had not grown, and we had no new graduates attempting to enter the labor force, or we didn't have any new questworkers imported here on visas, or we didn't have any more offshoring of jobs—maybe every single person who was laid off during the Great Recession would have been rehired (re-entrants) — and we'd have 0% unemployment.

    When you mention discouraged workers, "These people aren't job hunting now because they believe there are no jobs out there"— I would say it's because they can't find something if it doesn't exist—and to continue searching for non-existent jobs only proves Einstein definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

    Reply to: Winter Polar Vortex Didn't Freeze The Unemployment Report   10 years 8 months ago
    EPer:

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