That is OK. I will repeat: TARP only helped the financial oligarchy. TARP was a limiting factor on the real stimulus for the economy. Financial conglomerates are still not lending and are contributing very little to this economy and possibly being a drag on it.
Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. Without question, the latter would be more difficult, more contentious and probably more expensive. But it would also have more lasting value.
For instance, there is no mention of regulating the discredited rating agencies. There is also to mention of breaking up the banks that are "too big to fail", and the plans on derivatives are very weak.
Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul. The new bank supervisor, for instance, is really nothing more than two smaller agencies combined into one. The plans calls for new regulations aimed at the ratings agencies, but offers nothing that would suggest radical revamping.
I also don't like the idea of giving more power to the Fed. They've already proven they aren't up to the job.
It's my belief, however, that we're 13 days away from seeing the back side of the deflationary spiral. We've had unemployment, yes. We've seen YoY deflation, yes. But we're about to get hit with the 8th largest national or state economy being forced to lay off government workers July 1. 40 other states in the union will be hitting the same wall the same day.
That shock, WILL push things worse, and Obama's stimulus is too little, too late.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
And you'll see deflation. Craigslist is becoming simply amazing- especially in the luxury yacht market for some reason, with short sales or people trying to get out of marina fees pushing the price down below $8000, but banks using Craigslist also to try to recover money from similar but newer yachts at $75,000+.
You can tell people are getting desperate for the shortage of money- and that's going to hit retail eventually.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I am an executive recruiter in her 50s. Since I do most of my work over the telephone, many of the clients and candidates speaking with me are unaware of my age. I gather that I sound like I am in my 30s.
The advice given to older job seekers is generally unhelpful because the system (applying for jobs online) makes it so easy for employers to follow their prejudices. 50-something candidates are ruled out by folks who barely read their resumes or cover letters.
What is needed is a very public EEOC ad campaign that has executives calling their HR people in and asking if the company is a risk for age discrimination law suits. If this were done in a large national campaign it would work. I saw a miracle happen in the 80s when companies got religion about sex discrimination--and it was all about money and losing law suits. The EEOC scares companies because it costs the victim nothing to file the complaint.
The amount of blantant age discrimination that I see going on is incredible. IMO most of it is about the fact that managers in their 30s are literally afraid to manage people older than themselves. The method they use to get around the law is by sticking to the number of years of experience--not age. So many clients will rule out candidates with 'too much experience," and claim that age is not the problem. Many times the reasons given for not wanting to hire someone in their 50s, make no sense. "We want someone who will stay around," says an HR Manager. Does she really think that a 28 year old is going to stay around longer than a 58 year old? People in their 50s are far less apt to move than people in their 20s. This explanation is nothing more than an excuse.
This is illegal but HR people and senior managers are not feeling threatened about age discrimination suits the way they are about race and sex discrimination. Few realize that "diversity" is about age as much as anything else.
and look at their chart. Food, recreation, housing, and a few other items have been coming down in price over the last 3-6 months. And yes, coming down from a spike does count as deflation.
The graphs I have used above are year-over-year. Energy costs are the biggest, but not the only, change.
There is not one thing that is part of my daily living experience that is going down in price. Oh, eggs did come back down from a spike during last years gas increase. Is coming back down from a spike counted as deflation?
These continue to rise.............
My electric
My phone
My natural gas
My gasoline
Almost all food
Water
Etc.
Hm water? Opened up my financial application and see that on 1/11/1992 my water invoice was $13.11. In May 2009 that same water company invoice was $37.00. That is a three hundred percent increase. I was in my forties in 1992 and sadly my income has not increased by 300%.
It is the same for most all of the daily living needs.
So I am looking for the deflation but just don't see it. I have seen wage deflation.
middle calculated his own projections, so quite the validation I'd say for middle here. (not that it's thrilling to be right about impeding economic Armageddon!)
Here's the first projections for job losses because of California's budget problems.
Deep cuts in state spending in the past two years will translate to the loss of more than 60,000 public-sector jobs by the middle of 2010, a UCLA economist estimated in a report released today.
...
In the quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast to be released today, Nickelsburg said the job losses would add four-tenths of a percentage point of unemployment and is a key reason that California unemployment will remain in double digits through 2011.
Statewide unemployment was 11 percent in April, with the May numbers due to be released Friday.
What this report doesn't say is how many private sector jobs will be lost because of all the public sector jobs getting cut?
That is a real problem, but I can't help the feeling at least a lot of it is self inflicted. Going into the Great Crash, Germany led the world in value of exports, basically all high value finished goods. Japan is a manufacturing powerhouse, crippled somewhat by spectacularly bad judgment on the finance side. France and Scandinavia hold their own. All of them have high standards of living, generous social services, advanced public infrastructure. By the American line of reasoning they should have been dead meat for China, India, Vietnam. But they chose to place a high value on the productive side of the economy, they chose to place a high value on labor.
Of course, choices have consequences, some things have to give. Taxes are higher, finance is relatively less important, CEO and other top compensation is lower, income inequality is lower, they are not the world's policeman (Germany got a break here, since many people, especially Germans, still freak out at the idea of a remilitarized Germany; similar for Japan). But those are the choices they made. Surely they have many issues of their own, but so do we.
We too made choices. And if we can blame wage stagnation on cheap offshore labor, that was the choice we made. Maybe now would be a good time to revisit those choices.
do this, it's their one big schtick in keeping growth, actually the same could be said for all of Asia. So long as their wages are relatively cheaper to the West, more employment will come their way, and that keeps the powers that be there in their jobs. How would you get the Peoples Republic of China or Singapore or South Korea or Vietnam or others to go along with essentially eliminating their one biggest competitive advantage?
If you tell me "well, then we won't buy their stuff", you better hope we have trade representatives with that kind of assertiveness. And you better hope that our European and South American friends would go along with us on that. Hate to say it, but we simply do not have that leverage anymore. The time to have done this was in the 1990s, when the original framework for the current system of globalization was being implemented. Trust me, it would be nice to have a setup that says X shall trade with Y if they are both part of the WTO, but in a WTO that mandates a global minimal wage that is an average of say Western standards. But it isn't there.
there needs to be a movement to end sanctuary city laws and other similar nonsense. That is one of the biggest pillars in this artificial increase of labor.
and then thinking about my own experience. Everything around me has increased in price and it's bad, esp. health insurance.
If I didn't read EIs and the indexes you couldn't prove deflationary anything to me!
On the industrial production side, I also noticed that raw metals, i.e. mining was way down in capacity. I believe that should have affected a few commodities in terms of price, correct?
If I recall my history, it was Roosevelt (Franklin Delano) who proposed - as part of the even Newer Deal legislation - the Universal Living Wage (among a number of other great ideas!). I believe his first attempt to get it through failed, and his administration was working on another attempt when he died.
Also, quite a few studies indicate that the minimum wage should be around $22.50 per hour, but George H.W. Bush disconnected the minimum wage from the national productivity levels, as it used to be traditionally connected, back in his term as president.
That is OK. I will repeat: TARP only helped the financial oligarchy. TARP was a limiting factor on the real stimulus for the economy. Financial conglomerates are still not lending and are contributing very little to this economy and possibly being a drag on it.
The reviews are coming in, and they are generally bad.
For instance, there is no mention of regulating the discredited rating agencies. There is also to mention of breaking up the banks that are "too big to fail", and the plans on derivatives are very weak.
I also don't like the idea of giving more power to the Fed. They've already proven they aren't up to the job.
ya know are we gonna have to say that bail out worked?
I just ain't gonna. ;)
I wonder what would have happened with another proposal and not TARP.
The idea of saying that worked, what a precedent.
It's my belief, however, that we're 13 days away from seeing the back side of the deflationary spiral. We've had unemployment, yes. We've seen YoY deflation, yes. But we're about to get hit with the 8th largest national or state economy being forced to lay off government workers July 1. 40 other states in the union will be hitting the same wall the same day.
That shock, WILL push things worse, and Obama's stimulus is too little, too late.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
And you'll see deflation. Craigslist is becoming simply amazing- especially in the luxury yacht market for some reason, with short sales or people trying to get out of marina fees pushing the price down below $8000, but banks using Craigslist also to try to recover money from similar but newer yachts at $75,000+.
You can tell people are getting desperate for the shortage of money- and that's going to hit retail eventually.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I am an executive recruiter in her 50s. Since I do most of my work over the telephone, many of the clients and candidates speaking with me are unaware of my age. I gather that I sound like I am in my 30s.
The advice given to older job seekers is generally unhelpful because the system (applying for jobs online) makes it so easy for employers to follow their prejudices. 50-something candidates are ruled out by folks who barely read their resumes or cover letters.
What is needed is a very public EEOC ad campaign that has executives calling their HR people in and asking if the company is a risk for age discrimination law suits. If this were done in a large national campaign it would work. I saw a miracle happen in the 80s when companies got religion about sex discrimination--and it was all about money and losing law suits. The EEOC scares companies because it costs the victim nothing to file the complaint.
The amount of blantant age discrimination that I see going on is incredible. IMO most of it is about the fact that managers in their 30s are literally afraid to manage people older than themselves. The method they use to get around the law is by sticking to the number of years of experience--not age. So many clients will rule out candidates with 'too much experience," and claim that age is not the problem. Many times the reasons given for not wanting to hire someone in their 50s, make no sense. "We want someone who will stay around," says an HR Manager. Does she really think that a 28 year old is going to stay around longer than a 58 year old? People in their 50s are far less apt to move than people in their 20s. This explanation is nothing more than an excuse.
This is illegal but HR people and senior managers are not feeling threatened about age discrimination suits the way they are about race and sex discrimination. Few realize that "diversity" is about age as much as anything else.
and my friends and neighbors have not seen it. My friend that owns a mid-size market tells me her accounts payable on inventory have not gone down.
At this moment in time, I could use a bit of lower prices.
and look at their chart. Food, recreation, housing, and a few other items have been coming down in price over the last 3-6 months. And yes, coming down from a spike does count as deflation.
The graphs I have used above are year-over-year. Energy costs are the biggest, but not the only, change.
There is not one thing that is part of my daily living experience that is going down in price. Oh, eggs did come back down from a spike during last years gas increase. Is coming back down from a spike counted as deflation?
These continue to rise.............
My electric
My phone
My natural gas
My gasoline
Almost all food
Water
Etc.
Hm water? Opened up my financial application and see that on 1/11/1992 my water invoice was $13.11. In May 2009 that same water company invoice was $37.00. That is a three hundred percent increase. I was in my forties in 1992 and sadly my income has not increased by 300%.
It is the same for most all of the daily living needs.
So I am looking for the deflation but just don't see it. I have seen wage deflation.
middle calculated his own projections, so quite the validation I'd say for middle here. (not that it's thrilling to be right about impeding economic Armageddon!)
Here's the first projections for job losses because of California's budget problems.
What this report doesn't say is how many private sector jobs will be lost because of all the public sector jobs getting cut?
That is a real problem, but I can't help the feeling at least a lot of it is self inflicted. Going into the Great Crash, Germany led the world in value of exports, basically all high value finished goods. Japan is a manufacturing powerhouse, crippled somewhat by spectacularly bad judgment on the finance side. France and Scandinavia hold their own. All of them have high standards of living, generous social services, advanced public infrastructure. By the American line of reasoning they should have been dead meat for China, India, Vietnam. But they chose to place a high value on the productive side of the economy, they chose to place a high value on labor.
Of course, choices have consequences, some things have to give. Taxes are higher, finance is relatively less important, CEO and other top compensation is lower, income inequality is lower, they are not the world's policeman (Germany got a break here, since many people, especially Germans, still freak out at the idea of a remilitarized Germany; similar for Japan). But those are the choices they made. Surely they have many issues of their own, but so do we.
We too made choices. And if we can blame wage stagnation on cheap offshore labor, that was the choice we made. Maybe now would be a good time to revisit those choices.
do this, it's their one big schtick in keeping growth, actually the same could be said for all of Asia. So long as their wages are relatively cheaper to the West, more employment will come their way, and that keeps the powers that be there in their jobs. How would you get the Peoples Republic of China or Singapore or South Korea or Vietnam or others to go along with essentially eliminating their one biggest competitive advantage?
If you tell me "well, then we won't buy their stuff", you better hope we have trade representatives with that kind of assertiveness. And you better hope that our European and South American friends would go along with us on that. Hate to say it, but we simply do not have that leverage anymore. The time to have done this was in the 1990s, when the original framework for the current system of globalization was being implemented. Trust me, it would be nice to have a setup that says X shall trade with Y if they are both part of the WTO, but in a WTO that mandates a global minimal wage that is an average of say Western standards. But it isn't there.
--------------------------------------------
www.venomopolis.com
there needs to be a movement to end sanctuary city laws and other similar nonsense. That is one of the biggest pillars in this artificial increase of labor.
--------------------------------------------
www.venomopolis.com
and then thinking about my own experience. Everything around me has increased in price and it's bad, esp. health insurance.
If I didn't read EIs and the indexes you couldn't prove deflationary anything to me!
On the industrial production side, I also noticed that raw metals, i.e. mining was way down in capacity. I believe that should have affected a few commodities in terms of price, correct?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175079
;) I'm just one of many on EP.
First scan I would call that policy more than economics. Econ is more "what is" and policy is more "what we want it to be".
This class clown isn't very idealistic though.
Your poll is missing an option for "Heayyyyyylllll no"
I forget if I've mentioned this before, but you should really check out J.W. Smith's site if you aren't familiar with him.
His economic beliefs are the most enlightened and intelligent I've yet to come across.
If I recall my history, it was Roosevelt (Franklin Delano) who proposed - as part of the even Newer Deal legislation - the Universal Living Wage (among a number of other great ideas!). I believe his first attempt to get it through failed, and his administration was working on another attempt when he died.
Also, quite a few studies indicate that the minimum wage should be around $22.50 per hour, but George H.W. Bush disconnected the minimum wage from the national productivity levels, as it used to be traditionally connected, back in his term as president.
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