Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

Small Business Owners Using Pawnshops to Make Payroll

One of the reasons the economy continues to be mired in high unemployment is the lack of hiring by small businesses, which have been the engine of job growth in the US for the last decade. In the last expansion, the largest companies shed jobs, and that trend has gotten only worse as a result of the crisis. Not only are giants like Cisco cutting headcounts, but the heretofore-insulated-from-bad-things-by-your-tax-dollars big banks are following suit. And not surprisingly, recent surveys of new businesses show they remain cautious about hiring.

Needless to say, if companies can’t afford to hang on to the staff they have, that certainly isn’t a plus for the economy. The use of pawn shops by small enterprises to make ends meet is likely to be one step before the end of the rope.

“Is Too Much Significance Given to U.S. Credit Rating?”

A useful discussion with Marshall Auerback on Fox News on the debt ceiling deal and the implications of a possible downgrade of US Treasuries. Enjoy!

Randy Wray: The Budget Compromise – Congress Creates a Rube Goldberg Doomsday Machine

By Randy Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from EconoMonitor

Don’t you feel relieved? After weeks of threats, hostage-taking, and other forms of deficit terrorism, our two political parties have finally “compromised” on what was always a foregone conclusion. (As I write, we still await the Senate vote—but it looks like a done deal.)

Washington got what it wanted—a down payment on destruction of the last remnants of progressive policy. Soon, it will be 1929 all over again. We can make believe that the New Deal and Great Society programs never existed, and go back to the good old days when it was every “man” for himself.

“Europe plans its next crisis”

By Delusional Economics, who is unhappy with the current dumbed-down vested interest economic reporting. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

With the economic world firmly focussed on the US debt debacle this week it is likely that Europe will slip off the radar a little. I suspect, as many people do, that for the US there will be an eleventh hour resolution followed by a short lived bounce in the world markets. Once that bounce heads back to earth again it is likely that the world’s eyes will turn back to Europe. There is much to see.

“Is Standard and Poor’s Manipulating US Debt Rating to Escape Liability for the Mortgage Crisis?”

By Scarecrow and Jane Hamsher. Cross posted from FireDogLake

The Politico headline says it all: U.S. credit downgrade worries Obama, Congress more than default

It’s not the default that strikes the most fear in the White House and Congress these days. It’s the downgrade

As Robert Reich notes, Standard and Poors is the “biggest driver in the deficit battle.” Why would anyone care what the corrupt and disgraced organizations who quite nearly brought down the world economy think about anything at this point? And yet, that is where elite opinion is focused right now:

[W]hat really haunts the administration is the very real prospect, stoked two weeks ago by Standard & Poor’s, that Barack Obama could go down in history as the president who presided over his country’s loss of its gold-plated, triple-A bond rating.

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Financial analysts say such a move would hit Americans with more than $100 billion a year in higher borrowing costs, but it’s not just that. It would be a psychic blow to a nation that already looks over its shoulder at rising economic powers like China and wonders, what’s gone wrong? And it would give the president’s Republican rivals a ready-made line of attack that he’s dragging the country in the wrong direction.

This rumbling has been coming from Capitol Hill for a while, which made us start asking questions about what was really going on with Standard and Poors. It felt like there’s a story-behind-the-story driving S&P’s actions in the debt ceiling debate, which appear inexplicable at face value and go way beyond what Moody’s or Fitch have done. And the more we looked at the timeline of events, the more we wondered how the intertwining dramas of a) S&P downgrade threats, b) the liability that the ratings agencies may have for their role in the 2008 financial meltdown, and c) the GOP’s attempts to insulate the ratings agencies from b) are all impacting each other.

Pro-cyclical fiscal policy

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Looking up the term procyclical on the Internet, I see the Wikipedia entry defines it as: Procyclical is a term used in economics to describe how an economic quantity is related to economic fluctuations. It is the opposite of countercyclical… In business cycle theory and finance, any economic quantity that is […]

GDP numbers make double dip threat real

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns I have stopped reporting the quarterly GDP numbers but this last reading bears mentioning. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported the following at 830AM ET: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an […]

Third Way Document Proves Democratic Party Supports Institutionalized Looting by Banks

It is one thing to suspect that something is rotten in Denmark, quite another to have proof. Ever since Obama appointed his Rubinite economics team, it was blindingly obvious that he was aligning himself with Wall Street. The strength of the connection became even more evident in March 2009, when Team Obama embarked on its “stress test” charade and bank stock cheerleading. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff.

But now we see evidence in a new paper by the think tank Third Way of an even deeper commitment to pro-financier policies. The Democratic party has made clear that it supports institutionalized looting by banks, via the innocuous-seemeing device of rejecting the idea of writedowns on bonds they hold.

ECRI expects ‘double dip scare’

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Below is a video of Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder and chief operations officer of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), talking about the economic outlook for the US. I profiled Achuthan’s views on a broad US slowdown when I wrote in May about why a global slowdown will hit by summer. Now […]

We Discuss the Manufactured US Debt Crisis at The Real News Network

Hope you enjoy this chat. I’m pretty sure I corrected saying “House” rather than “Senate” at the time but that appeared not to have made the edits. The peril of this medium is low/no tolerance for flubs.

Alexander Gloy: Greece – Two Bail-outs and a Funeral

Yves here. Quite a few readers in comments expressed confusion over the announcement of the latest Greek bailout, and some of the details were admittedly a bit murky. This piece will hopefully help clear matters up.

By Alexander Gloy of Lighthouse Investment Management

Here we go again. Another bail-out. [Sigh.]

I’ll try to make this as entertaining and easily readable as possible – but first the details of the bail-out agreed on July 21st:

More Shades of TARP: Latest Deficit Ceiling Plan to Establish Extra-Constitutional Legislative Process

We commented last night on the parallels between the pressure tactics used to railroad the passage of the TARP and our current contrived debt ceiling crisis. The similarities have increased in a predictably bad way. Even worse than the economic toll radical budget cutting will impose on ordinary Americans is the continued undermining of basic democratic processes.

Get Ready for TARP 2.0

Washington DC appears to be readying itself for a repeat of the TARP, namely, the passage of unpopular legislation to appease the Market Gods (and transfer even more income from ordinary Americans to the Masters of the Universe). It isn’t yet clear whether this drama will be played out via generating bona fide financial market upheaval or mere threat-mongering (the Treasury market seems pretty confident that well-trained Congresscritters will fall into line). But unlike the TARP, which was a classic example of well-placed interests finding opportunity in the midst of upheaval, this reprise is a far more calculated affair.